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

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

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

Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. 
I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system. 
First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. 
It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet. 
Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. 
I must admit, I used to be one of them. 
I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day. 
What I discovered was this is not true. 
I began to look into this stuff on the Internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. 
I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. 
First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. 
That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature -- like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. 
Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. 
(Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown. 
The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s. 
And most folks don't even know they exist. 
Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? 
These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. 
Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way. 
And let me tell you, corn is in everything. 
And don't even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS. 
(Laughter) Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow. 
They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. 
Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. 
When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too. 
Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets. 
So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? 
This is what I found out. 
I discovered that there's a movement for a better way. 
Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. 
I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
And that way I can have a greater impact on the world. 
This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system. 
Since I'm home-schooled, I went to go hear him speak one day. 
This man, this "lunatic farmer," doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds. 
And so for that, he's called crazy by the system. 
I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life. 
Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really? 
With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital. 
(Applause) Now I know definitely which one I would choose. 
I want you to know that there are farms out there -- like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee -- whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. 
Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. 
I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from. 
I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community popping up. 
I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. 
I try to share this everywhere I go. 
Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal. 
He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes -- you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front. 
My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. 
And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time. 
So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. 
We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. 
And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. 
But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. 
And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. 
The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 
190 heads of state -- nine are women. 
Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. 
In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats -- tops out at 15, 16 percent. 
The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. 
And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent. 
We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. 
A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. 
A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. 
And I'm in the meeting -- it's about a three-hour meeting -- and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. 
And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. 
So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. 
And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?" 
And he said, "No, we've been here about a year." 
And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?" 
And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom." 
(Laughter) So the question is, how are we going to fix this? 
How do we change these numbers at the top? 
How do we make this different? 
I want to start out by saying, I talk about this -- about keeping women in the workforce -- because I really think that's the answer. 
In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top -- Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries -- the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. 
Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. 
I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. 
Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. 
What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? 
What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? 
What are the messages we tell our daughters? 
Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. 
I don't have the right answer. 
I don't even have it for myself. 
I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. 
And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing. 
This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. 
I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. 
So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone. 
My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. 
One, sit at the table. 
Two, make your partner a real partner. 
And three, don't leave before you leave. 
Number one: sit at the table. 
Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. 
And everyone kind of sat at the table. 
He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. 
When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. 
Don't you love that kind of thing from college? 
I wish I could do that now. 
And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student -- and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar -- and my brother -- smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore. 
The three of us take this class together. 
And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. 
I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. 
My brother is kind of busy. 
He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. 
The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. 
And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old. 
We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" 
And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." 
And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." 
And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class." 
(Laughter) "You got the top grade in the class? 
You don't know anything." 
(Laughter) The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. 
If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. 
Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. 
A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. 
And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. 
If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome. 
Obviously. Why are you even asking?" 
If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. 
Why does this matter? 
Boy, it matters a lot. 
Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success. 
I wish the answer were easy. 
I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, "Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. 
Own your own success." 
I wish I could tell that to my daughter. 
But it's not that simple. 
Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. 
And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true. 
There's a really good study that shows this really well. 
There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. 
And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. 
In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. 
And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. 
He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." 
But that one word made a really big difference. 
He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. 
The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. 
He's a great guy. You want to work for him. 
You want to spend the day fishing with him. 
But Heidi? Not so sure. 
She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. 
You're not sure you'd want to work for her. 
This is the complication. 
We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. 
The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. 
And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. 
I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. 
I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. 
And she said, "I learned something today. 
I learned that I need to keep my hand up." 
She said, "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. 
I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. 
I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." 
And I thought to myself, "Wow, if it's me -- who cares about this, obviously -- giving this talk -- and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women?" 
We've got to get women to sit at the table. 
(Cheers) (Applause) Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. 
I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. 
The data shows this very clearly. 
If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. 
So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. 
Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? 
The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. 
And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause. 
I think the cause is more complicated. 
I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. 
I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard. 
When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. 
And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. 
(Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. 
And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more -- how shall I say this on this stage? 
They know each other more in the biblical sense as well. 
(Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. 
I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. 
Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. 
And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. 
"How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" 
And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that." 
She starts leaning back. 
The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- Fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. 
She looked a little young. 
And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" 
And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married." 
She didn't even have a boyfriend. 
(Laughter) I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early." 
But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? 
Everyone who's been through this -- and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home. 
Your job needs to be challenging. 
You need to feel like you're making a difference. 
And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. 
Don't leave before you leave. 
Stay in. 
Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child -- and then make your decisions. 
Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making. 
My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. 
They're just not moving. 
We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. 
But I'm hopeful that future generations can. 
I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. 
It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful. 
I think it would be a better world. 
I have two children. 
I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My big idea is a very, very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us. 
And my little idea that will do that is sleep. 
(Laughter) (Applause) This is a room of type A women. 
This is a room of sleep-deprived women. 
And I learned the hard way the value of sleep. 
Two-and-a-half years ago, I fainted from exhaustion. 
I hit my head on my desk. 
I broke my cheekbone, I got five stitches on my right eye. 
And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep. 
And in the course of that, I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep. 
(Applause) And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution, this new feminist issue. 
We are literally going to sleep our way to the top -- literally -- (Laughter) (Applause) because unfortunately, for men, sleep deprivation has become a virility symbol. 
I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before. 
And I felt like saying to him -- but I didn't say -- I felt like saying, "You know what? if you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting." 
(Laughter) There is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship. 
Especially here in Washington, if you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, "How about eight o'clock?" 
they're likely to tell you, "Eight o'clock is too late for me, but that's OK, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight." 
And they think that means they are so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is, they're not, because we, at the moment, have had brilliant leaders in business, in finance, in politics, making terrible decisions. 
So a high IQ does not mean that you're a good leader, because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic. 
(Laughter) And we've had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics. 
In fact, I have a feeling that if Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters, they might still be around. 
(Laughter) (Applause) While all the brothers were busy just being hyper-connected 24/7, maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg, because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep, and have been able to see the big picture. 
So as we are facing all the multiple crises in our world at the moment, what is good for us on a personal level, what's going to bring more joy, gratitude, effectiveness in our lives and be the best for our own careers, is also what is best for the world. 
So I urge you to shut your eyes, and discover the great ideas that lie inside us; to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

You know who I'm envious of? 
People who work in a job that has to do with their college major. 
(Laughter) Journalists who studied journalism, engineers who studied engineering. 
The truth is, these folks are no longer the rule, but the exception. 
A 2010 study found that only a quarter of college graduates work in a field that relates to their degree. 
I graduated with not one but two degrees in biology. 
To my parents' dismay, I am neither a doctor nor a scientist. 
(Laughter) Years of studying DNA replication and photosynthesis did little to prepare me for a career in technology. 
I had to teach myself everything from sales, marketing, strategy, even a little programming, on my own. 
I had never held the title of Product Manager before I sent my resume in to Etsy. 
I had already been turned down by Google and several other firms and was getting frustrated. 
The company had recently gone public, so as part of my job application, I read the IPO filings from cover to cover and built a website from scratch which included my analysis of the business and four ideas for new features. 
It turned out the team was actively working on two of those ideas and had seriously considered a third. 
I got the job. 
We all know people who were ignored or overlooked at first but went on to prove their critics wrong. 
My favorite story? 
Brian Acton, an engineering manager who was rejected by both Twitter and Facebook before cofounding WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform that would sell for 19 billion dollars. 
The hiring systems we built in the 20th century are failing us and causing us to miss out on people with incredible potential. 
The advances in robotics and machine learning and transforming the way we work, automating routine tasks in many occupations while augmenting and amplifying human labor in others. 
At this rate, we should all be expecting to do jobs we've never done before for the rest of our careers. 
So what are the tools and strategies we need to identify tomorrow's high performers? 
In search for answers, I've consulted with leaders across many sectors, read dozens of reports and research papers and conducted some of my own talent experiments. 
My quest is far from over, but here are three ideas to take forward. 
One: expand your search. 
If we only look for talent in the same places we always do -- gifted child programs, Ivy League schools, prestigious organizations -- we're going to get the same results we always have. 
Baseball was transformed when the cash-strapped Oakland Athletics started recruiting players who didn't score highly on traditionally valued metrics, like runs batted in, but who had the ability to help the team score points and win games. 
This idea is taking hold outside of sports. 
The Head of Design and Research at Pinterest told me that they've built one of the most diverse and high-performing teams in Silicon Valley because they believe that no one type of person holds a monopoly on talent. 
They've worked hard to look beyond major tech hubs and focus on designers' portfolios, not their pedigrees. 
Two: hire for performance. 
Inspired by my own job experience, I cofounded a hiring platform called Headlight, which gives candidates an opportunity to shine. 
Just as teams have tryouts and plays have auditions, candidates should be asked to demonstrate their skills before they're hired. 
Our clients are benefiting from 85 years of employment research, which shows that work samples are one of the best predictors of success on the job. 
If you're hiring a data analyst, give them a spreadsheet of historical data and ask them for their key insights. 
If you're hiring a marketing manager, have them plan a launch campaign for a new product. 
And if you're a candidate, don't wait for an employer to ask. 
Seek out ways to showcase your unique skills and abilities outside of just the standard resume and cover letter. 
Three: get the bigger picture. 
I've heard about recruiters who are quick to label a candidate a job-hopper based on a single short stint on their resume; read about professors who are more likely to ignore identical messages from students because their name was black or Asian instead of white. 
I was almost put on a special needs track as a child. 
A month into kindergarten, my teacher wrote a page-long memo noting that I was impulsive, had a short attention span, and despite my wonderful curiosity, I was exhausting to work with. 
(Laughter) The principal asked my parents into a meeting, asked my mother if there had been complications at birth and suggested I meet with a school psychologist. 
My father saw what was happening and quickly explained our family situation. 
As recent immigrants, we lived in the attic of a home that cared for adults with mental disabilities. 
My parents worked nights to make ends meet, and I had little opportunity to spend time with kids my own age. 
Is it really a surprise that an understimulated five-year-old boy might be a little excited in a kindergarten classroom after an entire summer by himself? 
Until we get a holistic view of someone, our judgment of them will always be flawed. 
Let's stop equating experience with ability, credentials with competence. 
Let's stop settling for the safe, familiar choice and leave the door open for someone who could be amazing. 
We need employers to let go of outdated hiring practices and embrace new ways of identifying and cultivating talent, and candidates can help by learning to tell their story in powerful and compelling ways. 
We could live in a world where people are seen for what they're truly capable of and have the opportunity to realize their full potential. 
So let's go out and build it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Laughter) I was afraid of womanhood. 
Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend. 
I've learned to be flexible. 
In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear. 
Let me explain. 
Back in the '50s and '60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft, and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy -- really not quite clear what we were supposed to be. 
(Laughter) There were plenty of role models all around us. 
We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be. 
Now my mother was different. 
She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together, and she didn't buy me pink outfits. 
Instead, she knew what I needed, and she bought me a book of cartoons. 
And I just ate it up. 
I drew, and I drew, and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family, I could draw, do what I wanted to do, and not have to perform, not have to speak -- I was very shy -- and I could still get approval. 
I was launched as a cartoonist. 
Now when we're young, we don't always know. We know there are rules out there, but we don't always know -- we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is. 
We're told what shape we're supposed to be in. 
(Laughter) We're told what to wear -- (Laughter) -- and how to do our hair -- (Laughter) -- and how to behave. 
Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture. 
We're being corrected, and the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition. 
We pass it down from generation to generation. 
Not only that -- we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us. 
And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing. 
(Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position. 
(Laughter) Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't -- I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them -- what better way than to change them [than] with humor? 
Humor relies on the traditions of a society. 
It takes what we know, and it twists it. 
It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress, and it makes it unexpected, and that's what elicits a laugh. 
Now what if you put together women and humor? 
I think you can get change. 
Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table. 
Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos. 
I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C. 
during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations, the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement, and I think I was drawing, trying to figure out what was going on. 
And then also my family was in chaos, and I drew to try to bring my family together -- (Laughter) -- try to bring my family together with laughter. 
It didn't work. 
My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested. 
But I found my place. 
I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in. 
Now when I was a little older, in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning. 
And I thought, "Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning," and so I did. I became a cartoonist. 
And then I thought -- in my 40s I started thinking, "Well, why don't I do something? 
I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh?" 
Now my perspective is a particularly -- (Laughter) -- my perspective is a particularly American perspective. 
I can't help it. I live here. 
Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman. 
But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course -- that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S. 
Consequently, we have. 
Women, because we're on the ground, we know the tradition. 
We have amazing antennae. 
Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists, which I so enjoy, and it's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth, to get at the issues quickly and succinctly. 
And not only that, it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect, but through the heart. 
My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world -- countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, France -- and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties. 
And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances. 
But I feel blessed to be able to work with them. 
And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents. 
And I think, I truly believe, that we can change this thing one laugh at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"What I Will" I will not dance to your war drum. 
I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. 
I will not dance to that beating. 
I know that beat. 
It is lifeless. 
I know intimately that skin you are hitting. 
It was alive once, hunted, stolen, stretched. 
I will not dance to your drummed-up war. 
I will not pop, spin, break for you. 
I will not hate for you or even hate you. 
I will not kill for you. 
Especially I will not die for you. 
I will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide. 
I will not side with you or dance to bombs because everyone is dancing. 
Everyone can be wrong. 
Life is a right, not collateral or casual. 
I will not forget where I come from. 
I will craft my own drum. 
Gather my beloved near, and our chanting will be dancing. 
Our humming will be drumming. 
I will not be played. 
I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat. 
I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. 
This heartbeat is louder than death. 
Your war drum ain't louder than this breath. Haaa. 
What's up TED people? Let me hear you make some noise. 
(Applause) A bunch of pacifists. 
Confused, aspiring pacifists. 
I understand. 
I've been wrong a lot lately. 
Like a lot. 
So I couldn't figure out what to read today. 
I mean, I've been saying I've been prepping. 
What that means is prepping my outfit, (Laughter) prepping options, trying to figure out what I'm coming behind and going in front of. 
Poetry does that. 
It preps you. It aims you. 
So I am going to read a poem that was chosen just now. 
But I'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here. 
Hold her now with you. 
You don't need to say her name out loud, you can just hold her. 
Are you holding her? 
This is "Break Clustered." 
All holy history banned. 
Unwritten books predicted the future, projected the past. 
But my head unwraps around what appears limitless, man's creative violence. 
Whose son shall it be? 
Which male child will perish a new day? 
Our boys' deaths galvanize. 
We cherish corpses. 
We mourn women, complicated. 
Bitches get beat daily. 
Profits made, prophets ignored. 
War and tooth, enameled salted lemon childhoods. 
All colors run, none of us solid. 
Don't look for shadow behind me. I carry it within. 
I live cycles of light and darkness. 
Rhythm is half silence. 
I see now, I never was one and not the other. 
Sickness, health, tender violence. 
I think now I never was pure. 
Before form I was storm, blind, ign'ant -- still am. 
Human contracted itself blind, malignant. 
I never was pure. 
Girl spoiled before ripened. 
Language can't math me. 
I experience exponentially. 
Everything is everything. 
One woman loses 15, maybe 20, members of her family. 
One woman loses six. 
One woman loses her head. 
One woman searches rubble. One woman feeds on trash. 
One woman shoots her face. One woman shoots her husband. 
One woman straps herself. 
One woman gives birth to a baby. 
One woman gives birth to borders. 
One woman no longer believes love will ever find her. 
One woman never did. 
Where do refugee hearts go? 
Broken, dissed, placed where they're not from, don't want to be missed. 
Faced with absence. 
We mourn each one or we mean nothing at all. 
My spine curves spiral. 
Precipice running to and running from human beings. 
Cluster bombs left behind. 
De facto landmines. 
A smoldering grief. 
Harvest contaminated tobacco. 
Harvest bombs. 
Harvest baby teeth. 
Harvest palms, smoke. 
Harvest witness, smoke. 
Resolutions, smoke. 
Salvation, smoke. 
Redemption, smoke. 
Breathe. 
Do not fear what has blown up. 
If you must, fear the unexploded. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may know this feeling: you wake up to multiple unread notifications on your mobile phone. 
Your calendar is already packed with meetings, sometimes double- or triple-booked. 
You feel engaged, you feel busy. 
In fact, you feel productive. 
But at the end of it all, something still feels missing. 
You try to figure out what it is. 
But before you do, the next day starts all over again. 
That was how I felt two years ago. 
I felt stressed; I felt anxious. 
I felt a bit trapped. 
The world around me was moving very quickly. 
And I didn't know what to do. 
I started wondering to myself: How do I keep up with all this? 
How do we find fulfillment in a world that's literally changing as fast as we can think, or maybe even faster? 
I started looking for answers. 
I spoke to many people, I spoke to my friends, I spoke to my family. 
I even read many self-help books. 
But I couldn't find anything satisfactory. 
In fact, the more self-help books I read, the more stressed and anxious I became. 
(Laughter) It was like I was feeding my mind with junk food, and I was becoming mentally obese. 
(Laughter) I was about to give up, until one day, I found this. 
"The Tao Te Ching: The Book of the Way and Its Virtue." 
This is an ancient Chinese philosophy classic that was written more than 2,600 years ago. 
And it was by far the thinnest and the smallest book on the bookshelf. 
It only had 81 pages. 
And each page had a short poem. 
I remember I flipped to one particular poem. 
Here it is. 
It's beautiful, isn't it? 
(Laughter) Let me read it out to you. 
"The supreme goodness is like water. 
It benefits all things without contention. 
In dwelling, it stays grounded. 
In being, it flows to depths. 
In expression, it is honest. 
In confrontation, it stays gentle. 
In governance, it does not control. 
In action, it aligns to timing. 
It is content with its nature and therefore cannot be faulted." 
Wow! I remember when I first read this passage. 
I felt the biggest chills down my spine. 
I still feel that today, reading it to you guys. 
My anxiety and stress just suddenly disappeared. 
Ever since that day, I've been trying to apply the concepts in this passage to my day-to-day life. 
And today, I'd like to share with you three lessons I learned so far from this philosophy of water -- three lessons that I believe have helped me find greater fulfillment in almost everything that I do. 
The first lesson is about humility. 
If we think about water flowing in a river, it is always staying low. 
It helps all the plants grow and keeps all the animals alive. 
It doesn't actually draw any attention to itself, nor does it need any reward or recognition. 
It is humble. 
But without water's humble contribution, life as we know it may not exist. 
Water's humility taught me a few important things. 
It taught me that instead of acting like I know what I'm doing or I have all the answers, it's perfectly OK to say, "I don't know. 
I want to learn more, and I need your help." 
It also taught me that, instead of promoting my glory and success, it is so much more satisfying to promote the success and glory of others. 
It taught me that, instead of doing things where I can get ahead, it so much more fulfilling and meaningful to help other people overcome their challenges so they can succeed. 
With a humble mindset, I was able to form a lot richer connections with the people around me. 
I became genuinely interested in the stories and experiences that make them unique and magical. 
Life became a lot more fun, because every day I'd discover new quirks, new ideas and new solutions to problems I didn't know before, all thanks to the ideas and help from others. 
All streams eventually flow to the ocean because it is lower than them. 
Humility gives water its power. 
But I think it gives us the capacity to remain grounded, to be present, to learn from and be transformed by the stories of the people around us. 
The second lesson I learned is about harmony. 
If we think about water flowing towards a rock, it will just flow around it. 
It doesn't get upset, it doesn't get angry, it doesn't get agitated. 
In fact, it doesn't feel much at all. 
When faced with an obstacle, somehow water finds a solution, without force, without conflict. 
When I was thinking through this, I began to understand why I was feeling stressed out in the first place. 
Instead of working in harmony with my environment, I was working against it. 
I was forcing things to change because I was consumed by the need to succeed or to prove myself. 
In the end, nothing did. 
And I got more frustrated. 
By simply shifting my focus from trying to achieve more success to trying to achieve more harmony, I was immediately able to feel calm and focused again. 
I started asking questions like: Will this action bring me greater harmony and bring more harmony to my environment? 
Does this align with my nature? 
I became more comfortable simply being who I am, rather than who I'm supposed to be or expected to be. 
Work actually became easier, because I stopped focusing on things that I cannot control and only on the things that I can. 
I stopped fighting with myself, and I learned to work with my environment to solve its problems. 
Nature does not hurry. 
Yet, everything is accomplished. 
That's Tao Te Ching's way of describing the power of harmony. 
Just as water is able to find a solution without force or conflict, I believe we can find a greater sense of fulfillment in our endeavors by shifting focus from achieving more success to achieving more harmony. 
The third lesson I learned from the philosophy of water is about openness. 
Water is open to change. 
Depending on the temperature, it can be a liquid, solid or gas. 
Depending on the medium it's in, it can be a teapot, a cup or a flower vase. 
In fact, it's water's ability to adapt and change and remain flexible that made it so enduring through the ages, despite all the changes in the environment. 
We also live in a world today of constant change. 
We can no longer expect to work to a static job description or follow a single career path. 
We, too, are expected to constantly reinvent and refresh our skills to stay relevant. 
In our organization, we host a lot of hackathons, where small groups or individuals come together to solve a business problem in a compressed time frame. 
And what's interesting to me is that the teams that usually win are not the ones with the most experienced team members, but the ones with members who are open to learn, who are open to unlearn and who are open to helping each other navigate through the changing circumstances. 
Life is like a hackathon in some way. 
It's calling to each and every one of us to step up, to open up and cause a ripple effect. 
Now, we can stay behind closed doors and continue to be paralyzed by our self-limiting beliefs, such as: "I will never be able to talk about Chinese philosophy in front of a huge audience." 
(Laughter) Or we can just open up and enjoy the ride. 
It can only be an amazing experience. 
So humility, harmony and openness. 
Those are the three lessons I learned from the philosophy of water so far. 
They nicely abbreviate to H-H-O, or H2O. 
(Laughter) And they have become my guiding principles in life. 
So nowadays, whenever I feel stressed, unfulfilled, anxious or just not sure what to do, I simply ask the question: What would water do? 
(Laughter) This simple and powerful question inspired by a book written long before the days of bitcoin, fintech and digital technology has changed my life for the better. 
Try it, and let me know how it works for you. 
I would love to hear from you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. 
That was a great day for my mother. 
My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. 
(Laughter) And Grandma was even more excited. 
Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand-washed laundry for seven children. 
And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work. 
My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. 
And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, "No, no, no, no! 
Let me! Let me push the button!" 
(Laughter) And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, "Oh, fantastic! 
I want to see this! Give me a chair! Give me a chair! I want to see it," and she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program. 
(Laughter) She was mesmerized. 
To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle. 
Today, in Sweden and other rich countries, people are using so many different machines. 
Look -- the homes are full of machines. 
I can't even name them all. 
And they also, when they want to travel, they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations. 
And yet, in the world, there are so many people who still heat the water on fire, and they cook their food on fire. 
Sometimes they don't even have enough food. 
And they live below the poverty line. 
There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day. 
And the richest people over there -- there's one billion people, and they live above what I call the "air line" -- (Laughter) because they spend more than 80 dollars a day on their consumption. 
But this is just one, two, three billion people, and obviously, there are seven billion people in the world, so there must be one, two, three, four billion people more who live in between the poverty and the air line. 
They have electricity, but the question is: How many have washing machines? 
I've done the scrutiny of market data, and I've found that, indeed, the washing machine has penetrated below the air line, and today, there's an additional one billion people out there who live above the "wash line." 
(Laughter) And they consume for more than 40 dollars per day. 
So two billion have access to washing machines. 
And the remaining five billion -- how do they wash? 
Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash? 
Because it remains the hard work for women to wash. 
They wash like this: by hand. 
It's hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week. 
And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home, or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off. 
And they want the washing machine. 
They don't want to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so relatively low productivity. 
And there's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma. 
Look here, two generations ago in Sweden -- picking water from the stream, heating with firewood and washing like that. 
They want the washing machine in exactly the same way. 
But when I lecture to environmentally concerned students, they tell me, "No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines." 
How can we tell this woman that she isn't going to have a washing machine? 
And then I ask my students -- over the last two years, I've asked -- "How many of you don't use a car?" 
And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, "I don't use a car." 
And then I put the really tough question: "How many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bedsheets?" 
And no one raised their hand. 
Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines. 
(Laughter) So how come [this is] something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it? 
What is special with this? 
Here we are. 
Look here. You see the seven billion people up there? 
The air people, the wash people, the bulb people and the fire people. 
One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel -- oil, coal or gas. 
That's what most of the electricity and the energy in the world is. 
And it's 12 units used in the entire world, and the richest one billion, they use six of them. 
Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world population. 
And these ones, who have washing machines but not a house full of other machines, they use two. 
This group uses three, one each. 
And they also have electricity. 
That makes 12 of them. 
But the main concern for the environmentally interested students -- and they are right -- is about the future. 
What are the trends? 
If we just prolong the trends, without any real advanced analysis, to 2050, there are two things that can increase the energy use: first, population growth; second, economic growth. 
Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here, because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman. 
And that will get you two extra, but that won't change the energy use very much. 
The best of here in the emerging economies -- I call them "the New East" -- they will jump the air line. 
"Wopp!" they will say. 
And they will start to use as much as the Old West are doing already. 
(Laughter) And these people, they want the washing machine. 
I told you. They'll go there. 
And they will double their energy use. 
And we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light. 
And they'll get a two-child family without a stop in population growth. 
But the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units. 
And these 22 units -- still, the richest people use most of them. 
So what needs to be done? 
Because the risk, the high probability of climate change is real. 
It's real. 
Of course, they must be more energy efficient. 
They must change their behavior in some way. 
They must also start to produce green energy, much more green energy. 
But until they have the same energy consumption per person, they shouldn't give advice to others -- what to do and what not to do. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Here, we can get more green energy all over. 
This is what we hope might happen. 
But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine. 
She's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone -- so happy that she even voted for her. 
And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world, moving from minister of energy to president. 
If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. 
They love them! 
(Laughter) And what's the magic with them? 
My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. 
She said, "Now, Hans. 
We have loaded the laundry. 
And now we can go to the library." 
Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? 
You get books out of the machines, children's books. 
And mother got time to read for me. 
She loved this. 
I got the "ABC's" -- this is why I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. 
And she also got books for herself. 
She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. 
And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. 
And we really, we really loved this machine. 
(Laughter) And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you, industrialization. 
Thank you, steel mill. 
Thank you, power station. 
And thank you, chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books." 
Thank you very much. 

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

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

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

First, a video. 
Yes, it is a scrambled egg. 
But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. 
Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. 
And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. 
And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. 
And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. 
A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it's mush. 
An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. 
And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. 
In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. 
What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure -- in fact, to mush. 
And that's why that video feels a bit strange. 
And yet, look around us. 
What we see around us is staggering complexity. 
Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. 
That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. 
And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity. 
So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? 
Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. 
In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls "Goldilocks conditions" -- not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. 
And slightly more complex things appear. 
And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. 
And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. 
Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. 
We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. 
And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. 
The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity. 
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. 
And that's the story that we tell in big history. 
But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. 
You have to survey the whole history of the universe. 
So let's do it. 
(Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time. 
Around us, there's nothing. 
There's not even time or space. 
Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. 
And then suddenly, bang! 
A universe appears, an entire universe. 
And we've crossed our first threshold. 
The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. 
It's incredibly hot. 
It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. 
And it's expanding at incredible speed. 
And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. 
Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. 
And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. 
And all of that happens in the first second. 
Now we move forward 380,000 years. 
That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. 
And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. 
Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. 
We know above all that it was extremely simple. 
It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. 
They're really a sort of cosmic mush. 
But that's not completely true. 
Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. 
What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. 
These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity. 
And this is how it works. 
Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. 
So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. 
So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. 
And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and -- bam! 
We have our first stars. 
From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. 
And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex. 
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. 
When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. 
If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. 
So now the universe is chemically more complex. 
And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. 
And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. 
And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. 
Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. 
So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity. 
Now, the going gets tougher. 
The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. 
I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. 
Living organisms are created by chemistry. 
We are huge packages of chemicals. 
So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. 
That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. 
Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? 
What are the Goldilocks conditions? 
Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. 
In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. 
But not too little. 
In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. 
What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close. 
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquids, such as water. 
Why? 
Well, in gases, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. 
In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. 
In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. 
Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? 
Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. 
It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of liquid water. 
And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. 
So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations. 
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. 
How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? 
Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. 
You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. 
And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. 
You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. 
Each rung contains information. 
So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. 
And DNA also copies itself. 
So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. 
So the information spreads. 
Notice that information has become part of our story. 
The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. 
As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. 
And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. 
It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. 
So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. 
And we can see this happening over the last four billion years. 
For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells. 
But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. 
Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. 
You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. 
And occasionally, there are disasters. 
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. 
Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. 
And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid. 
Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. 
And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. 
Let me explain why. 
We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. 
But it is so slow. 
DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. 
But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. 
They accumulate information, they learn. 
The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. 
Now what makes humans different is human language. 
We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. 
And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. 
And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. 
We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift. 
I call this ability collective learning. 
It's what makes us different. 
We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. 
We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the Ice Age tundra of Siberia -- tough, tough environment -- into the Americas, into Australasia. 
Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings. 
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. 
Farming was an energy bonanza. 
And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. 
Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. 
And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. 
And that brain is learning at warp speed. 
And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. 
We've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. 
So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us. 
So -- Here we are, back at the convention center. 
We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. 
I hope you agree this is a powerful story. 
And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. 
But it also contains warnings. 
Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. 
I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. 
For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. 
And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. 
If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. 
We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. 
So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning. 
And now, finally -- this is what I want. 
I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. 
And that's why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high-school students throughout the world. 
We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet. 
I thank you for your attention. 
(Applause) 

How often do we hear that people just don't care? 
How many times have you been told that real, substantial change isn't possible because most people are too selfish, too stupid or too lazy to try to make a difference in their community? 
I propose to you today that apathy as we think we know it doesn't actually exist; but rather, that people do care, but that we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way. 
I'll give you some examples of what I mean. 
Let's start with city hall. 
You ever see one of these before? 
It's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what's happening. 
As you can see, it's impossible to read. 
You need to get halfway down to even find out which address they're talking about, and then further down, in tiny 10-point font, to find out how to actually get involved. 
Imagine if the private sector advertised in the same way -- if Nike wanted to sell a pair of shoes -- (Laughter) And put an ad in the paper like that. 
(Applause) Now, that would never happen. 
You'll never see an ad like that, because Nike actually wants you to buy their shoes, whereas the city of Toronto clearly doesn't want you involved with the planning process, otherwise their ads would look something like this, with all the information laid out clearly. 
As long as the city's putting out notices like this to try to get people engaged, then of course people aren't going to be engaged. 
But that's not apathy; that's intentional exclusion. 
Public space. 
(Applause) The manner in which we mistreat our public spaces is a huge obstacle towards any type of progressive political change, because we've essentially put a price tag on freedom of expression. 
Whoever has the most money gets the loudest voice, dominating the visual and mental environment. 
The problem with this model is there are some amazing messages that need to be said, that aren't profitable to say. 
So you're never going to see them on a billboard. 
The media plays an important role in developing our relationship with political change, mainly by ignoring politics and focusing on celebrities and scandals, but even when they do talk about important political issues, they do it in a way that I feel discourages engagement. 
I'll give you an example. 
The "Now" magazine from last week: progressive, downtown weekly in Toronto. 
This is the cover story. 
It's an article about a theater performance, and it starts with basic information about where it is, in case you actually want to go and see it after you've read the article -- where, the time, the website. 
Same with this -- it's a movie review. 
An art review. 
A book review -- where the reading is in case you want to go. 
A restaurant -- you might not want to just read about it, maybe you want to go there. 
So they tell you where it is, the prices, the address, the phone number, etc. 
Then you get to their political articles. 
Here's a great article about an important election race that's happening. 
It talks about the candidates, written very well, but no information, no follow-up, no websites for the campaigns, no information about when the debates are, where the campaign offices are. 
Here's another good article, about a new campaign opposing privatization of transit, without any contact information for the campaign. 
The message seems to be that the readers are most likely to want to eat, maybe read a book, maybe see a movie, but not be engaged in their community. 
You might think this is a small thing, but I think it's important, because it sets a tone and it reinforces the dangerous idea that politics is a spectator sport. 
Heroes: How do we view leadership? 
Look at these 10 movies. What do they have in common? 
Anyone? 
They all have heroes who were chosen. 
There's a prophecy. You have to save the world." 
And then they go off and save the world because they've been told to, with a few people tagging along. 
This helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders -- because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about. 
A heroic effort is a collective effort, number one. 
Number two, it's imperfect; it's not very glamorous, and doesn't suddenly start and suddenly end. 
It's an ongoing process your whole life. 
It's voluntary. 
As long as we're teaching our kids that heroism starts when someone scratches a mark on your forehead, or someone tells you you're part of a prophecy, they're missing the most important characteristic of leadership, which is that it comes from within. 
It's about following your own dreams, uninvited, and then working with others to make those dreams come true. 
Political parties: oh, boy. 
Political parties could and should be one of the basic entry points for people to get engaged in politics. 
Instead, they've become, sadly, uninspiring and uncreative organizations that rely so heavily on market research and polling and focus groups that they end up all saying the same thing, pretty much regurgitating back to us what we already want to hear at the expense of putting forward bold and creative ideas. 
And people can smell that, and it feeds cynicism. 
(Applause) Charitable status. 
Groups who have charitable status in Canada aren't allowed to do advocacy. 
This is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change, because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced, especially during election time. 
Which leads us to the last one, which is: our elections. 
As you may have noticed, our elections in Canada are a complete joke. 
We use out-of-date systems that are unfair and create random results. 
Canada's currently led by a party that most Canadians didn't actually want. 
How can we honestly and genuinely encourage more people to vote when votes don't count in Canada? 
You add all this up together, and of course people are apathetic. 
It's like trying to run into a brick wall. 
Now, I'm not trying to be negative by throwing all these obstacles out and explaining what's in our way. 
Quite the opposite -- I actually think people are amazing and smart and that they do care, but that, as I said, we live in this environment where all these obstacles are being put in our way. 
As long as we believe that people, our own neighbors, are selfish, stupid or lazy, then there's no hope. 
But we can change all those things I mentioned. 
We can open up city hall. 
We can reform our electoral systems. 
My main message is: if we can redefine apathy, not as some kind of internal syndrome, but as a complex web of cultural barriers that reinforces disengagement, and if we can clearly define, clearly identify what those obstacles are, and then if we can work together collectively to dismantle those obstacles, then anything is possible. 
(Applause) 

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

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

My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a toymaker. 
I've been making toys for the last 30 years. 
The early '70s, I was in college. 
It was a very revolutionary time. 
It was a political ferment, so to say -- students out in the streets of Paris, revolting against authority. 
America was jolted by the anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement. 
In India, we had the Naxalite movement, the [unclear] movement. 
But you know, when there is a political churning of society, it unleashes a lot of energy. 
The National Movement of India was testimony to that. 
Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National Movement. 
Now in the early '70s, one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village schools. 
There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR. 
At 31, he was not able to relate the kind of [unclear] research, which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people. 
So he designed and went and started a village science program. 
Many people were inspired by this. 
The slogan of the early '70s was "Go to the people. 
Live with them; love them. 
Start from what they know. Build on what they have." 
This was kind of the defining slogan. 
Well I took one year. 
I joined Telco, made TATA trucks, pretty close to Pune. 
I worked there for two years, and I realized that I was not born to make trucks. 
Often one doesn't know what one wants to do, but it's good enough to know what you don't want to do. 
So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program. 
And it was a turning point. 
It was a very small village -- a weekly bazaar where people, just once in a week, they put in all the vats. 
So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here." 
So I just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside. 
And one thing which I found was this black rubber. 
This is called a cycle valve tube. 
When you pump in air in a bicycle, you use a bit of this. 
And some of these models -- so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube, you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible joint. 
It's a joint of tubes. You start by teaching angles -- an acute angle, a right angle, an obtuse angle, a straight angle. 
It's like its own little coupling. 
If you have three of them, and you loop them together, well you make a triangle. 
With four, you make a square, you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon, you make all these kind of polygons. 
And they have some wonderful properties. 
If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile. 
You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle. 
You give it a push, this becomes a parallelogram. 
But this is very shaky. 
Look at the pentagon, for instance, pull this out -- it becomes a boat shape trapezium. 
Push it and it becomes house shaped. 
This becomes an isosceles triangle -- again, very shaky. 
This square might look very square and prim. 
Give it a little push -- this becomes a rhombus. 
It becomes kite-shaped. 
But give a child a triangle, he can't do a thing to it. 
Why use triangles? 
Because triangles are the only rigid structures. 
We can't make a bridge with squares because the train would come, it would start doing a jig. 
Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in India, they might not have gone to engineering college, but no one makes a roof placed like this. 
Because if they put tiles on top, it's just going to crash. 
They always make a triangular roof. 
Now this is people science. 
And if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick, you'll get a T joint. 
And if I were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle, I would make a tetrahedron. 
So you make all these 3D shapes. 
You make a tetrahedron like this. 
And once you make these, you make a little house. 
Put this on top. 
You can make a joint of four. You can make a joint of six. 
You just need a ton. 
Now this was -- you make a joint of six, you make an icosahedron. 
You can play around with it. 
This makes an igloo. 
Now this is in 1978. 
I was a 24-year-old young engineer. 
And I thought this was so much better than making trucks. 
(Applause) If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4. 
Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom. 
Well since then, I just thought that I've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country -- village schools, government schools, municipal schools, Ivy League schools -- I've been invited by most of them. 
And every time I go to a school, I see a gleam in the eyes of the children. 
I see hope. I see happiness in their faces. 
Children want to make things. Children want to do things. 
Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps. 
Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon. 
It's a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon. 
And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it. 
So all you do is -- it's a very kind of provocative statement -- this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [unclear] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube. 
And this is how you make a valve. 
You put a little sticky tape. 
This is one-way traffic. 
Well we make lots and lots of pumps. 
And this is the other one -- that you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts. 
Now this is what you do, is you bend both these legs into a triangle, and you just wrap some tape around. 
And this is the pump. 
And now, if you have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler. 
It's like a centrifuge. 
If you spin something, it tends to fly out. 
(Applause) Well in terms of -- if you were in Andhra Pradesh, you would make this with the palmyra leaf. 
Many of our folk toys have great science principles. 
If you spin-top something, it tends to fly out. 
If I do it with both hands, you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man. 
Right. 
This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing. 
There are four pictures. 
You see insects, you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies, frogs, snakes, eagles. 
Here's a paper which you could [unclear] -- designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928, Arthur Stone, documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books. 
But this is great fun for children. 
They all study about the food chain. 
The insects are eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes; the snakes are eaten by the eagles. 
And this can be, if you had a whole photocopy paper -- A4 size paper -- you could be in a municipal school, you could be in a government school -- a paper, a scale and a pencil -- no glue, no scissors. 
In three minutes, you just fold this up. 
And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination. 
If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon. 
With a bigger one, you make a bigger one. 
Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here. 
And you put a little fan here. 
And this is a hundred-year-old toy. 
There have been six major research papers on this. 
There's some grooves over here, you can see. 
And if I take a reed -- if I rub this, something very amazing happens. 
Six major research papers on this. 
As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this. 
He wrote a paper on this. 
And you don't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause) This is there for every child, and every child can enjoy this. 
If you want to put a colored disk, well all these seven colors coalesce. 
And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around. 
This is a straw. 
What we've done, we've just sealed both the ends with tape, nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner, so there's holes in the opposite corners, there's a little hole over here. 
This is a kind of a blowing straw. 
I just put this inside this. 
There's a hole here, and I shut this. 
And this costs very little money to make -- great fun for children to do. 
What we do is make a very simple electric motor. 
Now this is the simplest motor on Earth. 
The most expensive thing is the battery inside this. 
If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it. 
This is an old bicycle tube, which gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins. 
This is a permanent magnet. 
Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet. 
It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin. 
We made 30,000. 
Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it out. 
When teachers make it, children make it. 
You can see a gleam in their eye. 
They get a thrill of what science is all about. 
And this science is not a rich man's game. 
In a democratic country, science must reach to our most oppressed, to the most marginalized children. 
This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools. 
Over 100,000 children learn science this way. 
And we're just trying to see possibilities. 
Look, this is the tetrapak -- awful materials from the point of view of the environment. 
There are six layers -- three layers of plastic, aluminum -- which are are sealed together. 
They are fused together, so you can't separate them. 
Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron. 
So something which is trash, which is choking all the seabirds, you could just recycle this into a very, very joyous -- all the platonic solids can be made with things like this. 
This is a little straw, and what you do is you just nip two corners here, and this becomes like a baby crocodile's mouth. 
You put this in your mouth, and you blow. 
(Honk) It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they say. 
You're not able to see how the sound is produced, because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth. 
I'm going to keep this outside, to blow out. I'm going to suck in air. 
(Honk) So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations. 
The other is that you keep blowing at it, keep making the sound, and you keep cutting it. 
And something very, very nice happens. 
(Honk) (Applause) And when you get a very small one -- (Honk) This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this. 
Well before I go any further, this is something worth sharing. 
This is a touching slate meant for blind children. 
This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate, and this is my drawing pen, which is basically a film box. 
It's basically like a fisherman's line, a fishing line. 
And this is wool over here. 
If I crank the handle, all the wool goes inside. 
And what a blind child can do is to just draw this. 
Wool sticks on Velcro. 
There are 12 million blind children in our country -- (Applause) who live in a world of darkness. 
And this has come as a great boon to them. 
There's a factory out there making our children blind, not able to provide them with food, not able to provide them with vitamin A. 
But this has come as a great boon for them. 
There are no patents. Anyone can make it. 
This is very, very simple. 
You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator. 
These are two magnets. 
This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs. 
Small pulley and two strong magnets. 
And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED. 
If I spin this pulley, the small one's going to spin much faster. 
There will be a spinning magnetic field. 
Lines, of course, would be cut, the force will be generated. 
And you can see, this LED is going to glow. 
So this is a small crank generator. 
Well, this is, again, it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts. 
And what you can do is just, if you give it a twirl, well they just keep going on. 
And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on. 
And they'd be absolutely joyous playing with this. 
Well in the end, what we can also do: we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps. 
This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar. 
It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause) When first you see Nehru and Gandhi, this is the Nehru cap -- just half a newspaper. 
We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them. 
And this is -- you can see -- this is a flapping bird. 
All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares. 
And if you have one of these birds -- children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years. 
And you can see, this is a little fantail bird. 
Well in the end, I'll just end with a story. 
This is called "The Captain's Hat Story." 
The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship. 
It goes very slowly. 
And there were lots of passengers on the ship, and they were getting bored, so the captain invited them on the deck. 
"Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance, and I'll provide you with good food and drinks." 
And the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia. 
The first day, it was a huge umbrella cap, like a captain's cap. 
That night, when the passengers would be sleeping, he would give it one more fold, and the second day, he would be wearing a fireman's cap -- with a little shoot just like a designer cap, because it protects the spinal cord. 
And the second night, he would take the same cap and give it another fold. 
And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap -- just like an adventurer's cap. 
And the third night, he would give it two more folds -- and this is a very, very famous cap. 
If you've seen any of our Bollywood films, this is what the policeman wears, it's called a zapalu cap. 
It's been catapulted to international glory. 
And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship. 
So that's a ship. 
And now the end: everyone was enjoying the journey very much. 
They were singing and dancing. 
Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves. 
And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves. 
A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down. 
And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down. 
And there's a third one over here. 
This swallows the bridge and knocks it down. 
And the ship sinks, and the captain has lost everything, but for a life jacket. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. 
I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy. 
But I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. 
So I used to embark on these imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton, which was a lot of fun, but didn't yield much result. 
When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth. 
I started my journey in California, with a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook, and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. 
By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be, (Laughter) how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others. 
In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. 
When I first saw his picture, I thought that his superpowers came from his super collar. 
(Laughter) But now I know it was all in his smile. 
Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. 
The researchers found that the span of a player's smile could actually predict the span of his life. 
Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years. 
(Laughter) The good news is that we're actually born smiling. 
Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb. 
When they're born, babies continue to smile -- initially, mostly in their sleep. 
And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. 
Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans. 
In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals, (Laughter) attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. 
So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction. 
How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? 
Raise your hand if you do. 
Oh, wow. 
Outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. 
In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day. 
Have you ever wondered why being around children, who smile so frequently, makes you smile very often? 
A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. 
You ask why? 
Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. 
Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically helps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler. 
In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. 
Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth -- when they could not mimic the smile they saw -- their judgment was impaired. 
(Laughter) In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. 
His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better, rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. 
In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. 
Please, don't try this at home. 
(Laughter) In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. 
The finding supported Darwin's theory, by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain, in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. 
Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate -- a well-regarded pleasure inducer -- cannot match. 
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate. 
(Laughter) Wait -- The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds sterling in cash. 
(Laughter) That's like 25 grand a smile. 
It's not bad. 
And think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day. 
(Laughter) And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. 
Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure. 
And if that's not enough, smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others. 
A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent. 
So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality chocolate without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you found 25 grand in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile. 

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

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

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

I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. 
But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. 
I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. 
But I don't buy anything new. 
I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. 
Aww, thank you. 
Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. 
I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. 
I mean, what am I going to find today? 
Is it going to be my size? 
Will I like the color? 
Will it be under $20? 
If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won. 
I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. 
I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? 
So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought. 
I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. 
Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. 
I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. 
And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear -- (Laughter) that means I found a few things. 
And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. 
Does that sound good? 
(Applause) So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new. 
So let's start with Sunday. 
I call this "Shiny Tiger." 
You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. 
You can almost always look phenomenal for under $50. 
This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week. 
Monday: Color is powerful. 
It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. 
(Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. 
Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. 
I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. 
Just be who you are. 
If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it. 
Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. 
Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. 
I like to smile and say, "Thank you." 
Thursday: Confidence is key. 
If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. 
And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. 
I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. 
But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. 
And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. 
If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. 
So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience. 
We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Friday: A universal truth -- five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything. 
And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. 
It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations. 
So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. 
So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. 
Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. 
I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

The two places where I feel most free aren't actually places. 
They're moments. 
The first is inside of dance. 
Somewhere between rising up against gravity and the feeling that the air beneath me is falling in love with my body's weight. 
I'm dancing and the air is carrying me like I might never come down. 
The second place that I feel free is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch. 
My body floods with the chemical that they put inside of EpiPens to revive the dead, and I am weightless, raceless. 
My story is this: I'm a curator at a contemporary arts center, but I don't really believe in art that doesn't bleed or sweat or cry. 
I imagine that my kids are going to live in a time when the most valuable commodities are fresh water and empathy. 
I love pretty dances and majestic sculpture as much as the next guy, but give me something else to go with it. 
Lift me up with the aesthetic sublime and give me a practice or some tools to turn that inspiration into understanding and action. 
For instance, I'm a theater maker who loves sports. 
When I was making my latest piece /peh-LO-tah/ I thought a lot about how soccer was a means for my own immigrant family to foster a sense of continuity and normality and community within the new context of the US. 
In this heightened moment of xenophobia and assault on immigrant identity, I wanted to think through how the game could serve as an affirmational tool for first-generation Americans and immigrant kids, to ask them to consider movement patterns on the field as kin to migratory patterns across social and political borders. 
Whether footballers or not, immigrants in the US play on endangered ground. 
I wanted to help the kids understand that the same muscle that they use to plan the next goal can also be used to navigate the next block. 
For me, freedom exists in the body. 
We talk about it abstractly and even divisively, like "protect our freedom," "build this wall," "they hate us because of our freedom." 
We have all these systems that are beautifully designed to incarcerate us or deport us, but how do we design freedom? 
For these kids, I wanted to track the idea back to something that exists inside that no one could take away, so I developed this curriculum that's part poli-sci class, part soccer tournament, inside of an arts festival. 
It accesses /peh-LO-tah/'s field of inquiry to create a sports-based political action for young people. 
The project is called "Moving and Passing." 
It intersects curriculum development, site-specific performance and the politics of joy, while using soccer as a metaphor for the urgent question of enfranchisement among immigrant youth. 
Imagine that you are a 15-year-old kid from Honduras now living in Harlem, or you're a 13-year-old girl born in DC to two Nigerian immigrants. 
You love the game. 
You're on the field with your folks. 
You've just been practicing dribbling through cones for, like, 15 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, a marching band comes down the field. 
I want to associate the joy of the game with the exuberance of culture, to locate the site of joy in the game at the same physical coordinate as being politically informed by art, a grass-laden theater for liberation. 
We spend a week looking at how the midfielder would explain Black Lives Matter, or how the goalkeeper would explain gun control, or how a defender's style is the perfect metaphor for the limits of American exceptionalism. 
As we study positions on the field, we also name and imagine our own freedoms. 
I don't know, man, soccer is, like, the only thing on this planet that we can all agree to do together. 
You know? It's like the official sport of this spinning ball. 
I want to be able to connect the joy of the game to the ever-moving footballer, to connect that moving footballer to immigrants who also moved in sight of a better position. 
Among these kids, I want to connect their families' histories to the bliss of a goal-scorer's run, family like that feeling after the ball beats the goalie, the closest thing going to freedom. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. 
The idea is actually pretty simple. 
Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. 
It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life. 
There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges. 
The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. 
This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month. 
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. 
I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. 
I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. 
For fun! 
(Laughter) Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. 
I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges. 
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. 
Have you ever wanted to write a novel? 
Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. 
It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. 
So I did. 
By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. 
You might be sleep-deprived, but you'll finish your novel. 
Now is my book the next great American novel? 
No. I wrote it in a month. 
It's awful. 
(Laughter) But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say, "I'm a computer scientist." 
No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist." 
(Laughter) So here's one last thing I'd like to mention. 
I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. 
There's nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges. 
In fact, they're a ton of fun. 
But they're less likely to stick. 
When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this. 
(Laughter) So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for? 
I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot! 
For the next 30 days. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

As an elementary school teacher, my mom did everything she could to ensure I had good reading skills. 
This usually consisted of weekend reading lessons at our kitchen table while my friends played outside. 
My reading ability improved, but these forced reading lessons didn't exactly inspire a love of reading. 
High school changed everything. 
In 10th grade, my regular English class read short stories and did spelling tests. 
Out of sheer boredom, I asked to be switched into another class. 
The next semester, I joined advanced English. 
(Laughter) We read two novels and wrote two book reports that semester. 
The drastic difference and rigor between these two English classes angered me and spurred questions like, "Where did all these white people come from?" 
(Laughter) My high school was over 70 percent black and Latino, but this advanced English class had white students everywhere. 
This personal encounter with institutionalized racism altered my relationship with reading forever. 
I learned that I couldn't depend on a school, a teacher or curriculum to teach me what I needed to know. 
And more out of like, rebellion, than being intellectual, I decided I would no longer allow other people to dictate when and what I read. 
And without realizing it, I had stumbled upon a key to helping children read. 
Identity. 
Instead of fixating on skills and moving students from one reading level to another, or forcing struggling readers to memorize lists of unfamiliar words, we should be asking ourselves this question: How can we inspire children to identify as readers? 
DeSean, a brilliant first-grader I taught in the Bronx, he helped me understand how identity shapes learning. 
One day during math, I walk up to DeSean, and I say, "DeSean, you're a great mathematician." 
He looks at me and responds, "I'm not a mathematician, I'm a math genius!" 
(Laughter) OK DeSean, right? 
Reading? 
Completely different story. 
"Mr. Irby, I can't read. 
I'm never going to learn to read," he would say. 
I taught DeSean to read, but there are countless black boys who remain trapped in illiteracy. 
According to the US Department of Education, more than 85 percent of black male fourth graders are not proficient in reading. 
85 percent! 
The more challenges to reading children face, the more culturally competent educators need to be. 
Moonlighting as a stand-up comedian for the past eight years, I understand the importance of cultural competency, which I define as the ability to translate what you want someone else to know or be able to do into communication or experiences that they find relevant and engaging. 
Before going on stage, I assess an audience. 
Are they white, are they Latino? 
Are they old, young, professional, conservative? 
Then I curate and modify my jokes based on what I think would generate the most laughter. 
While performing in a church, I could tell bar jokes. 
But that might not result in laughter. 
(Laughter) As a society, we're creating reading experiences for children that are the equivalent of telling bar jokes in a church. 
And then we wonder why so many children don't read. 
Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire believed that teaching and learning should be two-way. 
Students shouldn't be viewed as empty buckets to be filled with facts but as cocreators of knowledge. 
Cookie-cutter curriculums and school policies that require students to sit statue-still or to work in complete silence -- these environments often exclude the individual learning needs, the interest and expertise of children. 
Especially black boys. 
Many of the children's books promoted to black boys focus on serious topics, like slavery, civil rights and biographies. 
Less than two percent of teachers in the United States are black males. 
And a majority of black boys are raised by single mothers. 
There are literally young black boys who have never seen a black man reading. 
Or never had a black man encourage him to read. 
What cultural factors, what social cues are present that would lead a young black boy to conclude that reading is even something he should do? 
This is why I created Barbershop Books. 
It's a literacy nonprofit that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barber shops. 
The mission is simple: to help young black boys identify as readers. 
Lots of black boys go to the barber shop once or twice a month. 
Some see their barbers more than they see their fathers. 
Barbershop Books connects reading to a male-centered space and involves black men and boys' early reading experiences. 
This identity-based reading program uses a curated list of children's books recommended by black boys. 
These are the books that they actually want to read. 
Scholastic's 2016 Kids and Family Report found that the number one thing children look for when choosing a book is a book that will make them laugh. 
So if we're serious about helping black boys and other children to read when it's not required, we need to incorporate relevant male reading models into early literacy and exchange some of the children's books that adults love so much for funny, silly or even gross books, like "Gross Greg". 
(Laughter) "You call them boogers. Greg calls them delicious little sugars." 
(Laughter) That laugh, that positive reaction or gross reaction some of you just had, (Laughter) black boys deserve and desperately need more of that. 
Dismantling the savage inequalities that plague American education requires us to create reading experiences that inspire all children to say three words: I'm a reader. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It is a dream of mankind to fly like a bird. 
Birds are very agile. 
They fly, not with rotating components, so they fly only by flapping their wings. 
So we looked at the birds, and we tried to make a model that is powerful, ultralight, and it must have excellent aerodynamic qualities that would fly by its own and only by flapping its wings. 
So what would be better than to use the herring gull, in its freedom, circling and swooping over the sea, and to use this as a role model? 
So we bring a team together. 
There are generalists and also specialists in the field of aerodynamics, in the field of building gliders. 
And the task was to build an ultralight indoor-flying model that is able to fly over your heads. 
So be careful later on. 
(Laughter) And this was one issue: to build it that lightweight that no one would be hurt if it fell down. 
So why do we do all this? 
We are a company in the field of automation, and we'd like to do very lightweight structures because that's energy efficient, and we'd like to learn more about pneumatics and air flow phenomena. 
So I now would like you to put your seat belts on and put your hats on. 
So maybe we'll try it once -- to fly a SmartBird. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Applause) So we can now look at the SmartBird. 
So here is one without a skin. 
We have a wingspan of about two meters. 
The length is one meter and six, and the weight is only 450 grams. 
And it is all out of carbon fiber. 
In the middle we have a motor, and we also have a gear in it, and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor. 
So within the motor, we have three Hall sensors, so we know exactly where the wing is. 
And if we now beat up and down -- (Mechanical sounds) We have the possibility to fly like a bird. 
So if you go down, you have the large area of propulsion, and if you go up, the wings are not that large, and it is easier to get up. 
So, the next thing we did, or the challenges we did, was to coordinate this movement. 
We have to turn it, go up and go down. 
We have a split wing. 
With the split wing, we get the lift at the upper wing, and we get the propulsion at the lower wing. 
Also, we see how we measure the aerodynamic efficiency. 
We had knowledge about the electromechanical efficiency and then we can calculate the aerodynamic efficiency. 
So therefore, it rises up from passive torsion to active torsion, from 30 percent up to 80 percent. 
Next thing we have to do, we have to control and regulate the whole structure. 
Only if you control and regulate it, you will get that aerodynamic efficiency. 
So the overall consumption of energy is about 25 watts at takeoff and 16 to 18 watts in flight. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Markus, we should fly it once more. 
Markus Fischer: Yeah, sure. 
(Audience) Yeah! 
(Laughter) (Gasps) (Cheers) (Applause) 

I'm a writer-director who tells social-change stories, because I believe stories touch and move us. 
Stories humanize and teach us to empathize. 
Stories change us. 
When I write and direct plays, I'm amplifying voices of disadvantaged groups, I'm fighting the self-censorship that has kept many Ugandan artists away from social, political theater since the persecution of artists by former Ugandan president, Idi Amin. 
And most importantly, I am breaking the silence and provoking meaningful conversations on taboo issues, where often "Silence is golden" is the rule of thumb. 
Conversations are important because they inform and challenge our minds to think, and change starts with thinking. 
One of my struggles with activism is its often one-sided nature that blinds us to alternative view, that numbs our empathy, that makes us view those who see issues differently as ignorant, self-hating, brainwashed, sellout or plain stupid. 
I believe no one is ignorant. 
We are all experts, only in different fields. 
And this is why, for me, the saying "stay in your truth" is misleading. 
Because if you're staying in your truth, isn't it logical that the person you believe is wrong is also staying in their truth? 
So, what you have is two extremes that shut out all possible avenues of conversations. 
I create provocative theater and film to touch, humanize and move disagreeing parties to the conversation table to bridge misunderstandings. 
I know that listening to one another will not magically solve all problems. 
But it will give a chance to create avenues to start to work together to solve many of humanity's problems. 
With my first play, "Silent Voices," based on interviews with victims of the Northern Uganda war between the government and Joseph Kony's LRA rebel group, I brought together victims, political leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders, the Amnesty Commission and transitional justice leadership for critical conversations on issues of justice for war crime victims -- the first of its kind in the history of Uganda. 
And so many powerful things happened, that I can't even cover them all right now. 
Victims were given the opportunity to sit at the table with Amnesty Commission leadership, and they expressed the big injustice they suffered when the Commission ignored them and instead facilitated the resettlement of the war perpetrators. 
And the Amnesty Commission acknowledged the victims' pain and explained the thinking behind their flawed approaches. 
But one of the things that has stayed with me is when, during my Northern Uganda tour of the play, a man approached me and introduced himself as a former rebel soldier of Joseph Kony. 
He told me that he didn't want me to leave feeling disappointed, due to some of what I considered inappropriate laughter. 
He explained that his was a laughter of embarrassment and a recognition of his own embarrassment. 
He saw himself in the actors onstage and saw the meaninglessness of his past actions. 
So I say: share your truths. 
Listen to one another's truths. 
You will discover a more powerfully uniting truth in the middle ground. 
When I lived in the USA, many of my American friends would be shocked at my ignorance at fancy Western dishes like lasagna, for instance. 
(Laughter) And my question to them would be, "Well, do you know malakwang?" 
And then I would tell them about malakwang, a fancy vegetable dish from my culture. 
And they would tell me about lasagna. 
And we would leave richer and fuller individuals. 
Therefore, share your recipe truth. 
It makes for a better meal. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. 
The one thing that all of them have in common is that they're going to die. 
While that might be a somewhat morbid thought, I think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring. 
What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer. 
And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died. 
Here's what he wrote in starting that out. 
He said, "Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. 
In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote -- the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive." 
Now, while as a journalist, Miller's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most, the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that's something completely different than anything that's been created by any previous generation. 
Consider a few stats for a moment. 
Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. 
There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day. 
And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month. 
So when you think about your parents or your grandparents, at best they may have created some photos or home videos, or a diary that lives in a box somewhere. 
But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely, years after we're gone. 
And I think that's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists. 
Now to be clear, I'm a journalist and not a technologist, so what I'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like. 
Now we're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die. 
One of them actually, fittingly enough, found me when I checked into a deli at a restaurant in New York on foursquare. 
(Recording) Adam Ostrow: Hello. 
Death: Adam? 
AO: Yeah. 
Death: Death can catch you anywhere, anytime, even at the Organic. 
AO: Who is this? 
Death: Go to ifidie.net before it's too late. 
(Laughter) Adam Ostrow: Kind of creepy, right? 
So what that service does, quite simply, is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die. 
Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories. 
And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones, complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die. 
But what I think comes next is far more interesting. 
Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy who, back in March, demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video. 
I think as machines' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve, it's going to become possible to analyze an entire life's worth of content -- the Tweets, the photos, the videos, the blog posts -- that we're producing in such massive numbers. 
And I think as that happens, it's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we're creating and technology's ability to make sense of it all. 
Now we're already starting to see some experiments here. 
One service called My Next Tweet analyzes your entire Twitter stream, everything you've posted onto Twitter, to make some predictions as to what you might say next. 
Well right now, as you can see, the results can be somewhat comical. 
You can imagine what something like this might look like five, 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve. 
Taking it a step further, MIT's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans. 
But what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime? 
Finally, think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States, where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper. 
What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms -- interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive? 
I think that's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we're producing and technology's ability to understand it both expand exponentially. 
Now in closing, I think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality -- and if so, what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Consider the following statement: human beings only use 10 percent of their brain capacity. 
Well, as a neuroscientist, I can tell you that while Morgan Freeman delivered this line with the gravitas that makes him a great actor, this statement is entirely false. 
(Laughter) The truth is, human beings use 100 percent of their brain capacity. 
The brain is a highly efficient, energy-demanding organ that gets fully utilized and even though it is at full capacity being used, it suffers from a problem of information overload. 
There's far too much in the environment than it can fully process. 
So to solve this problem of overload, evolution devised a solution, which is the brain's attention system. 
Attention allows us to notice, select and direct the brain's computational resources to a subset of all that's available. 
We can think of attention as the leader of the brain. 
Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain follows. 
In some sense, it's your brain's boss. 
And over the last 15 years, I've been studying the human brain's attention system. 
In all of our studies, I've been very interested in one question. 
If it is indeed the case that our attention is the brain's boss, is it a good boss? 
Does it actually guide us well? 
And to dig in on this big question, I wanted to know three things. 
First, how does attention control our perception? 
Second, why does it fail us, often leaving us feeling foggy and distracted? 
And third, can we do anything about this fogginess, can we train our brain to pay better attention? 
To have more strong and stable attention in the work that we do in our lives. 
So I wanted to give you a brief glimpse into how we're going to look at this. 
A very poignant example of how our attention ends up getting utilized. 
And I want to do it using the example of somebody that I know quite well. 
He ends up being part of a very large group of people that we work with, for whom attention is a matter of life and death. 
Think of medical professionals or firefighters or soldiers or marines. 
This is the story of a marine captain, Captain Jeff Davis. 
And the scene that I'm going to share with you, as you can see, is not about his time in the battlefield. 
He was actually on a bridge, in Florida. 
But instead of looking at the scenery around him, seeing the beautiful vistas and noticing the cool ocean breezes, he was driving fast and contemplating driving off that bridge. 
And he would later tell me that it took all of everything he had not to do so. 
You see, he'd just returned from Iraq. 
And while his body was on that bridge, his mind, his attention, was thousands of miles away. 
He was gripped with suffering. 
His mind was worried and preoccupied and had stressful memories and, really, dread for his future. 
And I'm really glad that he didn't take his life. 
Because he, as a leader, knew that he wasn't the only one that was probably suffering; many of his fellow marines probably were, too. 
And in the year 2008, he partnered with me in the first-of-its-kind project that actually allowed us to test and offer something called mindfulness training to active-duty military personnel. 
But before I tell you about what mindfulness training is, or the results of that study, I think it's important to understand how attention works in the brain. 
So what we do in the laboratory is that many of our studies of attention involve brain-wave recordings. 
In these brain wave recordings, people wear funny-looking caps that are sort of like swimming caps, that have electrodes embedded in them. 
These electrodes pick up the ongoing brain electrical activity. 
And they do it with millisecond temporal precision. 
So we can see these small yet detectable voltage fluctuations over time. 
And doing this, we can very precisely plot the timing of the brain's activity. 
About 170 milliseconds after we show our research participants a face on the screen, we see a very reliable, detectable brain signature. 
It happens right at the back of the scalp, above the regions of the brain that are involved in face processing. 
Now, this happens so reliably and so on cue, as the brain's face detector, that we've even given this brain-wave component a name. 
We call it the N170 component. 
And we use this component in many of our studies. 
It allows us to see the impact that attention may have on our perception. 
I'm going to give you a sense of the kind of experiments that we actually do in the lab. 
We would show participants images like this one. 
You should see a face and a scene overlaid on each other. 
And what we do is we ask our participants as they're viewing a series of these types of overlaid images, to do something with their attention. 
On some trials, we'll ask them to pay attention to the face. 
And to make sure they're doing that, we ask them to tell us, by pressing a button, if the face appeared to be male or female. 
On other trials, we ask them to tell what the scene was -- was it indoor or outdoor? 
And in this way, we can manipulate attention and confirm that the participants were actually doing what we said. 
Our hypotheses about attention were as follows: if attention is indeed doing its job and affecting perception, maybe it works like an amplifier. 
And what I mean by this is that when we direct attention to the face, it becomes clearer and more salient, it's easier to see. 
But when we direct it to the scene, the face becomes barely perceptible as we process the scene information. 
So what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave component of face detection, the N170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participants were paying attention -- to the scene or the face. 
And here's what we found. 
We found that when they paid attention to the face, the N170 was larger. 
And when they paid attention to the scene, as you can see in red, it was smaller. 
And that gap you see between the blue and red lines is pretty powerful. 
What it tells us is that attention, which is really the only thing that changed, since the images they viewed were identical in both cases -- attention changes perception. 
And it does so very fast. 
Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face. 
In our follow-up studies, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we perturb or diminish this effect. 
And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence -- sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately -- that doing this might actually affect their attention. 
And that's indeed what we found. 
If we present stressful images while they're doing this experiment, this gap of attention shrinks, its power diminishes. 
So in some of our other studies, we wanted to see, OK, great -- not great, actually, bad news that stress does this to the brain -- but if it is the case that stress has this powerful influence on attention through external distraction, what if we don't need external distraction, what if we distract ourselves? 
And to do this, we had to basically come up with an experiment in which we could have people generate their own mind-wandering. 
This is having off-task thoughts while we're engaged in an ongoing task of some sort. 
And the trick to mind-wandering is that essentially, you bore people. 
So hopefully there's not a lot of mind-wandering happening right now. 
When we bore people, people happily generate all kinds of internal content to occupy themselves. 
So we devised what might be considered one of the world's most boring experiments. 
All the participants saw were a series of faces on the screen, one after another. 
They pressed the button every time they saw the face. 
That was pretty much it. 
Well, one trick was that sometimes, the face would be upside down, and it would happen very infrequently. 
On those trials they were told just to withhold the response. 
Pretty soon, we could tell that they were successfully mind-wandering, because they pressed the button when that face was upside down. 
Even though it's quite plain to see that it was upside down. 
So we wanted to know what happens when people have mind-wandering. 
And what we found was that, very similar to external stress and external distraction in the environment, internal distraction, our own mind wandering, also shrinks the gap of attention. 
It diminishes attention's power. 
So what do all of these studies tell us? 
They tell us that attention is very powerful in terms of affecting our perception. 
Even though it's so powerful, it's also fragile and vulnerable. 
And things like stress and mind-wandering diminish its power. 
But that's all in the context of these very controlled laboratory settings. 
What about in the real world? 
What about in our actual day-to-day life? 
What about now? 
Where is your attention right now? 
To kind of bring it back, I'd like to make a prediction about your attention for the remainder of my talk. 
Are you up for it? 
Here's the prediction. 
You will be unaware of what I'm saying for four out of the next eight minutes. 
(Laughter) It's a challenge, so pay attention, please. 
Now, why am I saying this? 
I'm surely going to assume that you're going to remain seated and, you know, graciously keep your eyes on me as I speak. 
But a growing body of literature suggests that we mind-wander, we take our mind away from the task at hand, about 50 percent of our waking moments. 
These might be small, little trips that we take away, private thoughts that we have. 
And when this mind-wandering happens, it can be problematic. 
Now I don't think there will be any dire consequences with you all sitting here today, but imagine a military leader missing four minutes of a military briefing, or a judge missing four minutes of testimony. 
Or a surgeon or firefighter missing any time. 
The consequences in those cases could be dire. 
So we might ask why do we do this? 
Why do we mind-wander so much? 
Well, part of the answer is that our mind is an exquisite time-traveling master. 
It can actually time travel very easily. 
If we think of the mind as the metaphor of the music player, we see this. 
We can rewind the mind to the past to reflect on events that have already happened, right? 
Or we can go and fast-future, to plan for the next thing that we want to do. 
And we land in this mental time-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently. 
And we land there often without our awareness, most times without our awareness, even if we want to be paying attention. 
Think of just the last time you were trying to read a book, got to the bottom of the page with no idea what the words were saying. 
This happens to us. 
And when this happens, when we mind-wander without an awareness that we're doing it, there are consequences. 
We make errors. 
We miss critical information, sometimes. 
And we have difficulty making decisions. 
What's worse is when we experience stress. 
When we're in a moment of overwhelm. 
We don't just reflect on the past when we rewind, we end up being in the past ruminating, reliving or regretting events that have already happened. 
Or under stress, we fast-forward the mind. 
Not just to productively plan. 
But we end up catastrophizing or worrying about events that haven't happened yet and frankly may never happen. 
So at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, OK, mind-wandering's happening a lot. 
Often, it happens without our awareness. 
And under stress, it's even worse -- we mind-wander more powerfully and more often. 
Is there anything we can possibly do about this? 
And I'm happy to say the answer is yes. 
From our work, we're learning that the opposite of a stressed and wandering mind is a mindful one. 
Mindfulness has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness. 
And without any kind of emotional reactivity of what's happening. 
It's about keeping that button right on play to experience the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives. 
And mindfulness is not just a concept. 
It's more like practice, you have to embody this mindful mode of being to have any benefits. 
And a lot of the work that we're doing, we're offering people programs that give our participants a suite of exercises that they should do daily in order to cultivate more moments of mindfulness in their life. 
And for many of the groups that we work with, high-stress groups, like I said -- soldiers, medical professionals -- for them, as we know, mind-wandering can be really dire. 
So we want to make sure we offer them very accessible, low time constraints to optimize the training, so they can benefit from it. 
And when we do this, what we can do is track to see what happens, not just in their regular lives but in the most demanding circumstances that they may have. 
Why do we want to do this? 
Well, we want to, for example, give it to students right around finals season. 
Or we want to give the training to accountants during tax season. 
Or soldiers and marines while they're deploying. 
Why is that? 
Because those are the moments in which their attention is most likely to be vulnerable, because of stress and mind-wandering. 
And those are also the moments in which we want their attention to be in peak shape so they can perform well. 
So what we do in our research is we have them take a series of attention tests. 
We track their attention at the beginning of some kind of high-stress interval, and then two months later, we track them again, and we want to see if there's a difference. 
Is there any benefit of offering them mindfulness training? 
Can we protect against the lapses in attention that might arise over high stress? 
So here's what we find. 
Over a high-stress interval, unfortunately, the reality is if we don't do anything at all, attention declines, people are worse at the end of this high-stress interval than before. 
But if we offer mindfulness training, we can protect against this. 
They stay stable, even though just like the other groups, they were experiencing high stress. 
And perhaps even more impressive is that if people take our training programs over, let's say, eight weeks, and they fully commit to doing the daily mindfulness exercises that allow them to learn how to be in the present moment, well, they actually get better over time, even though they're in high stress. 
And this last point is actually important to realize, because of what it suggests to us is that mindfulness exercises are very much like physical exercise: if you don't do it, you don't benefit. 
But if you do engage in mindfulness practice, the more you do, the more you benefit. 
And I want to just bring it back to Captain Jeff Davis. 
As I mentioned to you at the beginning, his marines were involved in the very first project that we ever did, offering mindfulness training. 
And they showed this exact pattern, which was very heartening. 
We had offered them the mindfulness training right before they were deployed to Iraq. 
And upon their return, Captain Davis shared with us what he was feeling was the benefit of this program. 
He said that unlike last time, after this deployment, they were much more present. 
They were discerning. 
They were not as reactive. 
And in some cases, they were really more compassionate with the people they were engaging with and each other. 
He said in many ways, he felt that the mindfulness training program we offered gave them a really important tool to protect against developing post-traumatic stress disorder and even allowing it to turn into post-traumatic growth. 
To us, this was very compelling. 
And it ended up that Captain Davis and I -- you know, this was about a decade ago, in 2008 -- we've kept in touch all these years. 
And he himself has gone on to continue practicing mindfulness in a daily way. 
He was promoted to major, he actually then ended up retiring from the Marine Corps. 
He went on to get a divorce, to get remarried, to have a child, to get an MBA. 
And through all of these challenges and transitions and joys of his life, he kept up with his mindfulness practice. 
And as fate would have it, just a few months ago, Captain Davis suffered a massive heart attack, at the age of 46. 
And he ended up calling me a few weeks ago. 
And he said, "I want to tell you something. 
I know that the doctors who worked on me, they saved my heart, but mindfulness saved my life. 
The presence of mind I had to stop the ambulance that ended up taking me to the hospital," -- himself, the clarity of mind he had to notice when there was fear and anxiety happening but not be gripped by it -- he said, "For me, these were the gifts of mindfulness." 
And I was so relieved to hear that he was OK. 
But really heartened to see that he had transformed his own attention. 
He went from having a really bad boss -- an attention system that nearly drove him off a bridge -- to one that was an exquisite leader and guide, and saved his life. 
So I want to actually end by sharing my call to action to all of you. 
And here it is. 
Pay attention to your attention. 
Alright? 
Pay attention to your attention and incorporate mindfulness training as part of your daily wellness toolkit, in order to tame your own wandering mind and to allow your attention to be a trusted guide in your own life. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Basically, there's a major demographic event going on. 
And it may be that passing the 50 percent urban point is an economic tipping point. So the world now is a map of connectivity. 
It used to be that Paris and London and New York were the largest cities. 
What we have now is the end of the rise of the West. That's over. 
The aggregate numbers are overwhelming. 
So what's really going on? Well, villages of the world are emptying out. 
The question is, why? 
And here's the unromantic truth -- and the city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany. So some people go to places like Shanghai but most go to the squatter cities where aesthetics rule. 
And these are not really a people oppressed by poverty. 
They're people getting out of poverty as fast as they can. 
They're the dominant builders and to a large extent, the dominant designers. 
They have home-brewed infrastructure and vibrant urban life. 
One-sixth of the GDP in India is coming out of Mumbai. 
They are constantly upgrading, and in a few cases, the government helps. 
Education is the main event that can happen in cities. 
What's going on in the street in Mumbai? 
Al Gore knows. It's basically everything. 
There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. 
One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that. 
So here's the first punch line: cities have defused the population bomb. 
And here's the second punch line. 
That's the news from downtown. Here it is in perspective. 
Stars have shined down on earth's life for billions of years. 
Now we're shining right back up. 
Thank you. 

So I just want to tell you my story. 
I spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace. 
And naturally, I encounter a lot of resistance, because it's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning. 
But I have a problem with that belief, because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems. 
So I was curious about why there was a disconnect between the way our society perceives doodling and the way that the reality is. 
So I discovered some very interesting things. 
For example, there's no such thing as a flattering definition of a doodle. 
In the 17th century, a doodle was a simpleton or a fool -- as in Yankee Doodle. 
In the 18th century, it became a verb, and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone. 
In the 19th century, it was a corrupt politician. 
And today, we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition, at least to me, which is the following: To doodle officially means to dawdle, to dilly dally, to monkey around, to make meaningless marks, to do something of little value, substance or import, and -- my personal favorite -- to do nothing. 
No wonder people are averse to doodling at work. 
Doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work; it's totally inappropriate. 
(Laughter) Additionally, I've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them, of course, for doodling in classrooms. 
And they have bosses who scold them for doodling in the boardroom. 
There is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something. 
And unfortunately, the press tends to reinforce this norm when they're reporting on a doodling scene -- of an important person at a confirmation hearing and the like -- they typically use words like "discovered" or "caught" or "found out," as if there's some sort of criminal act being committed. 
And additionally, there is a psychological aversion to doodling -- thank you, Freud. 
In the 1930s, Freud told us all that you could analyze people's psyches based on their doodles. 
This is not accurate, but it did happen to Tony Blair at the Davos Forum in 2005, when his doodles were, of course, "discovered" and he was labeled the following things. 
Now it turned out to be Bill Gates' doodle. 
(Laughter) And Bill, if you're here, nobody thinks you're megalomaniacal. 
But that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles. 
And here is the real deal. Here's what I believe. 
I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we're almost blinded to the value of doodling. 
And I'm not comfortable with that. 
And so because of that belief that I think needs to be burst, I'm here to send us all hurtling back to the truth. 
And here's the truth: doodling is an incredibly powerful tool, and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn. 
So here's a new definition for doodling. 
And I hope there's someone in here from The Oxford English Dictionary, because I want to talk to you later. 
Here's the real definition: Doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. 
That is why millions of people doodle. 
Here's another interesting truth about the doodle: People who doodle when they're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. 
We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but in reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus. 
Additionally, it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing. 
There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions. 
They are visual, auditory, reading and writing and kinesthetic. 
Now in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it, we have to engage at least two of those modalities, or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience. 
The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience. 
That is a pretty solid contribution for a behavior equated with doing nothing. 
This is so nerdy, but this made me cry when I discovered this. 
So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children, and they found that, across space and time, all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow. 
In other words, they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order. 
And I think that is incredible. 
I think that means doodling is native to us and we simply are denying ourselves that instinct. 
And finally, a lot a people aren't privy to this, but the doodle is a precursor to some of our greatest cultural assets. 
This is but one: this is Frank Gehry the architect's precursor to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. 
So here is my point: Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room. 
On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high. 
And I will go you one further. 
Because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form, it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy. 
My friends, the doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought. 
In reality, it is one of its greatest allies. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I grew up white, secular and middle class in 1950s America. 
That meant watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, trick-or-treating on Halloween and putting presents under a tree at Christmas. 
But by the time those traditions got to me, they were hollow, commercial enterprises, which just left me feeling empty. 
So from a relatively young age, I found myself looking to fill an existential hole, to connect with something bigger than myself. 
There hadn't been a bar mitzvah in my family in over a century, so I thought I'd take a shot at that -- (Laughter) only to be devastated when my one encounter with the rabbi, a really tall, godlike figure with flowing white hair, consisted of him asking me for my middle name so we could fill out a form. 
Yep, that was it. 
(Laughter) So I got the fountain pen, but I didn't get the sense of belonging and confidence I was searching for. 
Many years later, I couldn't bear the thought of my son turning 13 without some kind of rite of passage. 
So I came up with the idea of a 13th birthday trip, and I offered to take Murphy anywhere in the world that had meaning for him. 
A budding young naturalist who loved turtles, he immediately settled on the Galapagos. 
And when my daughter, Katie, turned 13, she and I spent two weeks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where Katie learned for the first time that she was powerful and brave. 
Since then, my partner, Ashton, and lots of our friends and relatives have taken their kids on 13th birthday trips, with everyone finding it transformative for both the child and the parent. 
I wasn't brought up saying grace. 
But for the last 20 years, we've been holding hands before every meal. 
It's a beautiful bit of shared silence that brings us all together in the moment. 
Ashton tells everyone to "pass the squeeze," while she assures them it's not religious. 
(Laughter) So recently, when my family asked me if I could please do something with the more than 250 boxes of stuff that I've collected over a lifetime, my ritual-making impulse kicked in. 
I started wondering if I could go further than simple death cleaning. 
"Death cleaning" is the Swedish term for clearing out your closets, your basement and your attic before you die, so your kids don't have to do it later. 
(Laughter) I pictured my children opening up box after box and wondering why I'd kept any of that stuff. 
(Laughter) And then I imagined them looking at a specific picture of me with a beautiful young woman, and asking, "Who on earth is that with Dad?" 
(Laughter) And that was the aha moment. 
It wasn't the things I'd saved that were important; it was the stories that went with them that gave them meaning. 
Could using the objects to tell the stories be the seed of a new ritual, a rite of passage -- not for a 13-year-old, but for someone much further down the road? 
So I started experimenting. 
I got a few dozen things out of the boxes, I put them about in a room, and I invited people to come in and ask me about anything that they found interesting. 
The results were terrific. 
A good story became a launching pad for a much deeper discussion, in which my visitors made meaningful connections to their own lives. 
Derrius [Quarles] asked me about a Leonard Peltier T-shirt that I'd worn a lot in the '80s, that, sadly, is still relevant today. 
Our conversation moved quickly, from a large number of political prisoners in American jails, to Derrius wondering about the legacy of the Black Liberation Movement of the '60s, and how his life might be different if he'd come of age then, instead of 30-odd years later. 
At the end of our conversation, Derrius asked me if he could have the T-shirt. 
And giving it to him felt just about perfect. 
As these conversations established common ground, especially across generations, I realized I was opening a space for people to talk about things that really mattered to them. 
And I started seeing myself with a renewed sense of purpose -- not as the old guy on the way out, but as someone with a role to play going forward. 
When I was growing up, life ended for most people in their 70s. 
People are living far longer now, and for the first time in human history, it's common for four generations to be living side by side. 
I'm 71, and with a bit of luck, I've got 20 or 30 more years ahead of me. 
Giving away my stuff now and sharing it with friends, family, and I hope strangers, too, seems like the perfect way to enter this next stage of my life. 
Turns out to be just what I was looking for: a ritual that's less about dying and more about opening the door to whatever comes next. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Onward! 
(Applause) 

The hoodie is an amazing object. 
It's one of those timeless objects that we hardly think of, because they work so well that they're part of our lives. 
We call them "humble masterpieces." 
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Paola Antonelli on the Hoodie] The hoodie has been -- even if it was not called so -- it's been an icon throughout history for good and for bad reasons. 
The earliest ones that we can trace are from ancient Greece and ancient Rome. 
The Middle Ages, you see a lot of monks that were wearing garments that were cape-like, with hoods attached, so therefore, "hoodies." 
Ladies in the 17th century would wear hoodies to kind of hide themselves when they were going to meet their lovers. 
And then, of course, there's the legend, there's fantasy. 
There's the image of the hoodie connected to the grim reaper. 
There's the image of the hoodie connected to the executioner. 
So there's the dark side of the hoodie. 
The modern incarnation of the hoodie -- a garment that's made usually of cotton jersey, that has a hood attached with a drawstring; sometimes it has a marsupial pocket -- was introduced in the 1930s by Knickerbocker Knitting Company. 
Now it's called Champion. 
It was meant to keep athletes warm. 
Of course, though, it was such a functional, comfortable garment that it was very rapidly adopted by workmen everywhere. 
And then, around the 1980s, it also gets adopted by hip-hop and B-boys, skateboarders, and it takes on this kind of youth street culture. 
It was, at the same time, super-comfortable, perfect for the streets and also had that added value of anonymity when you needed it. 
And then we have Mark Zuckerberg, who defies convention of respectable attire for businesspeople. 
But interestingly, it's also a way to show how power has changed. 
If you're wearing a two-piece suit, you might be the bodyguard. 
The real powerful person is wearing a hoodie with a T-shirt and jeans. 
It's easy to think of the physical aspects of the hoodie. 
You can immediately think of wearing the hood up, and you feel this warmth and this protection, but at the same time, you can also feel the psychological aspects of it. 
I mean, think of donning a hoodie, all of a sudden, you feel more protected, you feel that you are in your own shell. 
We know very well what the hoodie has come to signify in the past few years in the United States. 
When Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American kid, was shot by a neighborhood vigilante, and Million Hoodie Marches happened all over the United States, in which people wore hoodies with the hood up and marched in the streets against this kind of prejudice. 
It doesn't happen that often for a garment to have so much symbolism and history and that encompasses so many different universes as the hoodie. 
So, like all garments, especially all truly utilitarian garments, it is very basic in its design. 
But at the same time, it has a whole universe of possibilities attached. 

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

If you do it right, it should sound like: TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat, TICK-tat. 
If you do it wrong, it sounds like: Tick-TAT, tick-TAT, tick-TAT. 
[Small thing. Big idea.] [Kyra Gaunt on the Jump Rope] The jump rope is such a simple object. 
It can be made out of rope, a clothesline, twine. 
It has, like, a twirl on it. (Laughs) I'm not sure how to describe that. 
What's important is that it has a certain weight, and that they have that kind of whip sound. 
It's not clear what the origin of the jump rope is. 
There's some evidence that it began in ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, and then it most likely traveled to North America with Dutch settlers. 
The rope became a big thing when women's clothes became more fitted and the pantaloon came into being. 
And so, girls were able to jump rope because their skirts wouldn't catch the ropes. 
Governesses used it to train their wards to jump rope. 
Even formerly enslaved African children in the antebellum South jumped rope, too. 
In the 1950s, in Harlem, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, you could see on the sidewalk, lots of girls playing with ropes. 
Sometimes they would take two ropes and turn them as a single rope together, but you could separate them and turn them in like an eggbeater on each other. 
The skipping rope was like a steady timeline -- tick, tick, tick, tick -- upon which you can add rhymes and rhythms and chants. 
Those ropes created a space where we were able to contribute to something that was far greater than the neighborhood. 
Double Dutch jump rope remains a powerful symbol of culture and identity for black women. 
Back from the 1950s to the 1970s, girls weren't supposed to play sports. 
Boys played baseball, basketball and football, and girls weren't allowed. 
A lot has changed, but in that era, girls would rule the playground. 
They'd make sure that boys weren't a part of that. 
It's their space, it's a girl-power space. 
It's where they get to shine. 
But I also think it's for boys, because boys overheard those, which is why, I think, so many hip-hop artists sampled from things that they heard in black girls' game songs. 
(Chanting) ... cold, thick shake, act like you know how to flip, Filet-O-Fish, Quarter Pounder, french fries, ice cold, thick shake, act like you know how to jump. 
Why "Country Grammar" by Nelly became a Grammy Award-winning single was because people already knew "We're going down down baby your street in a Range Rover ... " That's the beginning of "Down down, baby, down down the roller coaster, sweet, sweet baby, I'll never let you go." 
All people who grew up in any black urban community would know that music. 
And so, it was a ready-made hit. 
The Double Dutch rope playing helped maintain these songs and helped maintain the chants and the gestures that go along with it, which is very natural to what I call "kinetic orality" -- word of mouth and word of body. 
It's the thing that gets passed down over generations. 
In some ways, the rope is the thing that helps carry it. 
You need some object to carry memory through. 
So, a jump rope, you can use it for all different kinds of things. 
It crosses cultures. 
And I think it lasted because people need to move. 
And I think sometimes the simplest objects can make the most creative uses. 

I remember thinking to myself, "This is going to change everything about how we communicate." 
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Margaret Gould Stewart on the Hyperlink] A hyperlink is an interface element, and what I mean by that is, when you're using software on your phone or your computer, there's a lot of code behind the interface that's giving all the instructions for the computer on how to manage it, but that interface is the thing that humans interact with: when we press on this, then something happens. 
When they first came around, they were pretty simple and not particularly glamorous. 
Designers today have a huge range of options. 
The hyperlink uses what's called a markup language -- HTML. 
There's a little string of code. 
And then you put the address of where you want to send the person. 
It's actually remarkably easy to learn how to do. 
And so, the whole range of references to information elsewhere on the internet is the domain of the hyperlink. 
Back when I was in school -- this is before people had wide access to the internet -- if I was going to do a research paper, I would have to physically walk to the library, and if they had the book that you needed, great. 
You sometimes had to send out for it, so the process could take weeks. 
And it's kind of crazy to think about that now, because, like all great innovations, it's not long after we get access to something that we start to take it for granted. 
Back in 1945, there was this guy, Vannevar Bush. 
He was working for the US government, and one of the ideas that he put forth was, "Wow, humans are creating so much information, and we can't keep track of all the books that we've read or the connections between important ideas." 
And he had this idea called the "memex," where you could put together a personal library of all of the books and articles that you have access to. 
And that idea of connecting sources captured people's imaginations. 
Later, in the 1960s, Ted Nelson launches Project Xanadu, and he said, "Well, what if it wasn't just limited to the things that I have? 
What if I could connect ideas across a larger body of work?" 
In 1982, researchers at the University of Maryland developed a system they called HyperTIES. 
They were the first to use text itself as a link marker. 
They figured out that this blue link on a gray background was going to work really well in terms of contrast, and people would be able to see it. 
Apple invented HyperCard in 1987. 
You had these stacks of cards, and you could create links in between the cards. 
HyperCard actually created the ability to jump around in a story. 
These kinds of notions of nonlinear storytelling got a huge boost when the hyperlink came along, because it gave people the opportunity to influence the narrative. 
These ideas and inventions, among others, inspired Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. 
The hyperlink almost feels like a LEGO block, this very basic building block to a very complex web of connections that exists all around the world. 
Because of the way that hyperlinks were first constructed, they were intended to be not only used by many people, but created by many people. 
To me, it's one of the most democratic designs ever created. 

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

(Guitar music starts) I've been looking Several days now Where did they go? 
Where did they go? 
My mama told me long ago I've lost so many precious things, I know They won't be back Where did they go? 
My mama told me long ago Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my old friend Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my good memories at all I've seen so many pretty things They don't mean a thing now Listen to the song My mama told me long ago Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to doubt my good old days Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Happy days, walking on the shore Ain't nobody's ever gonna tell me to abandon my good memories at all Abandon my good memories at all Abandon my good memories at all (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you for giving me the opportunity to perform tonight at TED New York. 
I've been a dedicated TED fan and viewer, and also, I actually used to live in Manhattan when I was younger, so New York is like a second home to me, and it's great to be back. 
The song I just performed was called "my mama," and the next song I'm going to perform is another original song of mine called "BLACK BANANA." 
This song I wrote about the importance of being patient with your dreams. 
Because I think commitment will always be rewarded. 
Just like fruit ripens when the time is right. 
So it's my interpretation of building the future. 
(Guitar music starts) Clap your hands. 
One! 
Two! 
One, two, one, two, three, four. 
Sitting here, killing time, I've been doing it all day I've been always smart when it comes to gettin' away Got a soda pop fizzin' hard in my empty brain When the time is right I'll move alright so don't get too uptight Silly girls in bathing suits cleaning cars on Sundays They're living a lie don't make as fool of yourself too soon Lining my bananas on the window sill to ripen When the time is right I'll move alright so don't get too uptight Bananananana sekasanaide Bananananana-ri yuki makase Bananananana mō ato chotto dake jukusu made Black Banana Black Banana Banananananana Remember last December when we went to get some pizza Was a brat, was running fast to get home by my curfew Silly me, tripping quick, I was almost killed by a honker When the time is right I'll move alright so don't get too uptight Bananananana isoganaide Bananananana-ri yuki makase Bananananana mō ato chotto dake jukusu made Black Banana Black Banana Banananananana Bananananana Don't push me baby Bananananana All I want is leeway Bananananana You gotta be patient for the fruit to ripen Black Banana Black Banana Banananana Bananananana isoganaide Bananananana-naru yoni nare Bananananana wagamamana mi ga jukusu made Black Banana Black Banana Bananananana Bananananana Banananananana (Music ends) Thank you. 
(Applause) (Guitar music) (Music ends) (Applause) 

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

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

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

So, I'll be speaking to you using language ... 
because I can. 
This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. 
We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. 
So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling. 
I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. 
Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. 
I hope. 
(Laughter) I hope that's happening. 
So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. 
We're able to transmit knowledge across minds. 
I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. 
I could say, "Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics." 
(Laughter) Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before. 
(Laughter) But now I've just made you think it, through language. 
Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. 
And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. 
Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures -- very importantly, different structures. 
That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? 
Now, this is an ancient question. 
People have been speculating about this question forever. 
Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" -- strong statement that language crafts reality. 
But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, "What's in a name? 
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." 
Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality. 
These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. 
But until recently, there hasn't been any data to help us decide either way. 
Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question. 
So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. 
I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. 
These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. 
They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. 
What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. 
And when I say everything, I really mean everything. 
You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." 
Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." 
In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" 
And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. 
How about you?" 
So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction. 
(Laughter) But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? 
Because you literally couldn't get past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. 
In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. 
They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. 
We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." 
No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. 
There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well. 
And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast. 
(Laughter) Keep your eyes closed. Point. 
OK, so you can open your eyes. 
I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... 
I don't know which way it is myself -- (Laughter) You have not been a lot of help. 
(Laughter) So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. 
This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? 
Where one group -- very distinguished group like you guys -- doesn't know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know. 
(Laughter) There are also really big differences in how people think about time. 
So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. 
And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. 
This has to do with writing direction. 
If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left. 
But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? 
They don't use words like "left" and "right." 
Let me give you hint. 
When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. 
When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. 
When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. 
What's the pattern? 
East to west, right? 
So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. 
So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. 
I'm facing this way, time goes this way -- very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. 
For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. 
It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time. 
Here's another really smart human trick. 
Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. 
Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it. 
You went, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." 
You counted them. 
You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. 
This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. 
You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. 
A little linguistic trick. 
Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exact number words. 
They're languages that don't have a word like "seven" or a word like "eight." 
In fact, people who speak these languages don't count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. 
So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. 
But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that. 
Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum -- the visual world. 
Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark." 
And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. 
So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word. 
Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy." 
So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. 
When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. 
They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue. 
And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors -- say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue -- the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, "Ooh, something has categorically changed," whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don't make this categorical distinction, don't give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing. 
Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. 
This is one of my favorites. 
Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. 
And these genders differ across languages. 
So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. 
Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? 
Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? 
Actually, it turns out that's the case. 
So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here -- "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. 
Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words. 
(Laughter) Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? 
You take an event like this, an accident. 
In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase." 
In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself." 
If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. 
In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, "I broke my arm." 
Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm -- (Laughter) and you succeeded. 
If it was an accident, you would use a different construction. 
Now, this has consequences. 
So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. 
So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase." 
Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident. 
They're more likely to remember the intention. 
So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. 
This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. 
It also has implications for blame and punishment. 
So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke," even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it," as opposed to, "It broke." 
The language guides our reasoning about events. 
Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. 
So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. 
Language can also have really deep effects -- that's what we saw with the case of number. 
Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. 
Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? 
This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm. 
Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. 
These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. 
We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. 
Language can have really broad effects. 
So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. 
That means language can shape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. 
That's a lot of stuff. 
And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us -- ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. 
These are important things in our daily lives. 
Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. 
Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 -- there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. 
And we can create many more -- languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. 
The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. 
We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years. 
And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. 
That excludes almost all humans. Right? 
So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better. 
I want to leave you with this final thought. 
I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think. 
It's about how you think. 
It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. 
And that gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do?" 
"How could I think differently?" 
And also, "What thoughts do I wish to create?" 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. 
And there are days -- I don't know about the rest of you -- but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. 
And some days, that can even be a little scary. 
But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration. 
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan, in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. 
Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. 
So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. 
But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article -- it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system. 
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. 
And that you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. 
Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. 
But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control. 
Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. 
And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there's no dirt involved. 
Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically. 
Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. 
And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. 
So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of codevelopers. 
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. 
We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. 
And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. 
But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. 
(Laughter) So to bring on more codevelopers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. 
And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. 
So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. 
And we have window farms all over the world. 
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. 
But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or "research and develop it yourself." 
(Laughter) So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. 
It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. 
Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. 
And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project. 
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. 
And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concerns. 
So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. 
And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers. 
So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. 
And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. 
And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems. 
Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. 
In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. 
What we get out of this project is support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. 
But I think that Eleen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. 
So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. 
If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff. 
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. 
And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. 
And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. 
And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. 
So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers. 
(Applause) 

If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? 
That's the question that changed my life forever. 
Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. 
I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell. 
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. 
With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. 
For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. 
That is, until my life took a detour. 
I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living. 
It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection. 
Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee. 
When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced back together like a patchwork doll. 
I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time. 
The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. 
I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that. 
With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped on these chunky legs and I stood up. 
They were so painful and so confining that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? 
How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted? 
And how was I going to snowboard again? 
That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. 
I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken. 
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. 
And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore. 
I could be as tall as I wanted! 
(Laughter) (Applause) Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. 
(Laughter) And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold. 
(Laughter) And best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales rack. (Laughter) And I did! 
So there were benefits here. 
It was this moment that I asked myself that life-defining question: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go? 
And I began to daydream. 
I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again. 
And I didn't just see myself carving down a mountain of powder, I could actually feel it. 
I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment. 
And that is when a new chapter in my life began. 
Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn't go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn't bend and at one point I traumatized all the skiers on the chair lift when I fell and my legs, still attached to my snowboard — (Laughter) — went flying down the mountain, and I was on top of the mountain still. 
I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again. 
And this is when I learned that our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: one, stop us in our tracks or two, force us to get creative. 
I did a year of research, still couldn't figure out what kind of legs to use, couldn't find any resources that could help me. 
So I decided to make a pair myself. 
My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in. 
As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink duct tape. 
And yes, I can change my toenail polish. 
It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive — a new kidney from my dad — that allowed me to follow my dreams again. 
I started snowboarding, then I went back to work, then I went back to school. 
Then in 2005 I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth and young adults with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports. 
From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school. 
And just this past February, I won two back-to-back World Cup gold medals — (Applause) — which made me the highest ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world. 
Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. 
But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no. 
Because my legs haven't disabled me, if anything they've enabled me. 
They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything. 
It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits. 
And although today is about innovation without borders, I have to say that in my life, innovation has only been possible because of my borders. 
I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins. 
So the thought that I would like to challenge you with today is that maybe instead of looking at our challenges and our limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go. 
It's not about breaking down borders. 
It's about pushing off of them and seeing what amazing places they might bring us. 
Thank you. 

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

(Singing) I see the moon. The moon sees me. 
The moon sees somebody that I don't see. 
God bless the moon, and God bless me. 
And God bless the somebody that I don't see. 
If I get to heaven, before you do, I'll make a hole and pull you through. 
And I'll write your name on every star, and that way the world won't seem so far. 
The astronaut will not be at work today. 
He has called in sick. 
He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock. 
There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, raindrops against the window and not even the hint of coffee in the kitchen air. 
Everybody is in a tizzy. 
The engineers on the 15th floor have stopped working on their particle machine. 
The anti-gravity room is leaking, and even the freckled kid with glasses, whose only job is to take out the trash, is nervous, fumbles the bag, spills a banana peel and a paper cup. 
Nobody notices. 
They are too busy recalculating what this all mean for lost time. 
How many galaxies are we losing per second? 
How long before next rocket can be launched? 
Somewhere an electron flies off its energy cloud. 
A black hole has erupted. 
A mother finishes setting the table for dinner. 
A Law & Order marathon is starting. 
The astronaut is asleep. 
He has forgotten to turn off his watch, which ticks, like a metal pulse against his wrist. 
He does not hear it. 
He dreams of coral reefs and plankton. 
His fingers find the pillowcase's sailing masts. 
He turns on his side, opens his eyes at once. 
He thinks that scuba divers must have the most wonderful job in the world. 
So much water to glide through! 
(Applause) Thank you. 
When I was little, I could not understand the concept that you could only live one life. 
I don't mean this metaphorically. 
I mean, I literally thought that I was going to get to do everything there was to do and be everything there was to be. 
It was only a matter of time. 
And there was no limitation based on age or gender or race or even appropriate time period. 
I was sure that I was going to actually experience what it felt like to be a leader of the civil rights movement or a ten-year old boy living on a farm during the dust bowl or an emperor of the Tang dynasty in China. 
My mom says that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my typical response was: princess-ballerina-astronaut. 
And what she doesn't understand is that I wasn't trying to invent some combined super profession. 
I was listing things I thought I was gonna get to be: a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut. 
and I'm pretty sure the list probably went on from there. 
I usually just got cut off. 
It was never a question of if I was gonna get to do something so much of a question of when. 
And I was sure that if I was going to do everything, that it probably meant I had to move pretty quickly, because there was a lot of stuff I needed to do. 
So my life was constantly in a state of rushing. 
I was always scared that I was falling behind. 
And since I grew up in New York City, as far as I could tell, rushing was pretty normal. 
But, as I grew up, I had this sinking realization, that I wasn't gonna get to live any more than one life. 
I only knew what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York City, not a teenage boy in New Zealand, not a prom queen in Kansas. 
I only got to see through my lens. 
And it was around this time that I became obsessed with stories, because it was through stories that I was able to see through someone else's lens, however briefly or imperfectly. 
And I started craving hearing other people's experiences because I was so jealous that there were entire lives that I was never gonna get to live, and I wanted to hear about everything that I was missing. 
And by transitive property, I realized that some people were never gonna get to experience what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York city. 
Which meant that they weren't gonna know what the subway ride after your first kiss feels like, or how quiet it gets when its snows. 
And I wanted them to know, I wanted to tell them. 
And this became the focus of my obsession. 
I busied myself telling stories and sharing stories and collecting them. 
And it's not until recently that I realized that I can't always rush poetry. 
In April for National Poetry Month, there's this challenge that many poets in the poetry community participate in, and its called the 30/30 Challenge. 
The idea is you write a new poem every single day for the entire month of April. 
And last year, I tried it for the first time and was thrilled by the efficiency at which I was able to produce poetry. 
But at the end of the month, I looked back at these 30 poems I had written and discovered that they were all trying to tell the same story, it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out the way that it wanted to be told. 
And I realized that this is probably true of other stories on an even larger scale. 
I have stories that I have tried to tell for years, rewriting and rewriting and constantly searching for the right words. 
There's a French poet and essayist by the name of Paul Valéry who said a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. 
And this terrifies me because it implies that I could keep re-editing and rewriting forever and its up to me to decide when a poem is finished and when I can walk away from it. 
And this goes directly against my very obsessive nature to try to find the right answer and the perfect words and the right form. 
And I use poetry in my life, as a way to help me navigate and work through things. 
But just because I end the poem, doesn't mean that I've solved what it was I was puzzling through. 
I like to revisit old poetry because it shows me exactly where I was at that moment and what it was I was trying to navigate and the words that I chose to help me. 
Now, I have a story that I've been stumbling over for years and years and I'm not sure if I've found the perfect form, or whether this is just one attempt and I will try to rewrite it later in search of a better way to tell it. 
But I do know that later, when I look back I will be able to know that this is where I was at this moment and this is what I was trying to navigate, with these words, here, in this room, with you. 
So -- Smile. 
It didn't always work this way. 
There's a time you had to get your hands dirty. 
When you were in the dark, for most of it, fumbling was a given. 
If you needed more contrast, more saturation, darker darks and brighter brights, they called it extended development. 
It meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals, longer up to your wrist. 
It wasn't always easy. 
Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer. 
Young, red-faced with his sleeves rolled up, fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins, he looked like Popeye the sailor man come to life. 
Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair, he showed up to World War II, with a smirk and a hobby. 
When they asked him if he knew much about photography, he lied, learned to read Europe like a map, upside down, from the height of a fighter plane, camera snapping, eyelids flapping the darkest darks and brightest brights. 
He learned war like he could read his way home. 
When other men returned, they would put their weapons out to rest, but he brought the lenses and the cameras home with him. 
Opened a shop, turned it into a family affair. 
My father was born into this world of black and white. 
His basketball hands learned the tiny clicks and slides of lens into frame, film into camera, chemical into plastic bin. 
His father knew the equipment but not the art. 
He knew the darks but not the brights. 
My father learned the magic, spent his time following light. 
Once he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire, hunted it with his camera for a week. 
"Follow the light," he said. 
"Follow the light." 
There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs. 
The loft on Wooster Street with the creaky hallways, the twelve-foot ceilings, white walls and cold floors. 
This was my mother's home, before she was mother. 
Before she was wife, she was artist. 
And the only two rooms in the house, with walls that reached all the way up to the ceiling, and doors that opened and closed, were the bathroom and the darkroom. 
The darkroom she built herself, with custom-made stainless steel sinks, an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved up and down by a giant hand crank, a bank of color-balanced lights, a white glass wall for viewing prints, a drying rack that moved in and out from the wall. 
My mother built herself a darkroom. 
Made it her home. 
Fell in love with a man with basketball hands, with the way he looked at light. 
They got married. Had a baby. 
Moved to a house near a park. 
But they kept the loft on Wooster Street for birthday parties and treasure hunts. 
The baby tipped the grayscale, filled her parents' photo albums with red balloons and yellow icing. 
The baby grew into a girl without freckles, with a crooked smile, who didn’t understand why her friends did not have darkrooms in their houses, who never saw her parents kiss, who never saw them hold hands. 
But one day, another baby showed up. 
This one with perfect straight hair and bubble gum cheeks. 
They named him sweet potato. 
When he laughed, he laughed so loudly he scared the pigeons on the fire escape And the four of them lived in that house near the park. 
The girl with no freckles, the sweet potato boy, the basketball father and darkroom mother and they lit their candles and said their prayers, and the corners of the photographs curled. 
One day, some towers fell. 
And the house near the park became a house under ash, so they escaped in backpacks, on bicycles to darkrooms But the loft of Wooster Street was built for an artist, not a family of pigeons, and walls that do not reach the ceiling do not hold in the yelling and the man with basketball hands put his weapons out to rest. 
He could not fight this war, and no maps pointed home. 
His hands no longer fit his camera, no longer fit his wife's, no longer fit his body. 
The sweet potato boy mashed his fists into his mouth until he had nothing more to say. 
So, the girl without freckles went treasure hunting on her own. 
And on Wooster Street, in a building with the creaky hallways and the loft with the 12-foot ceilings and the darkroom with too many sinks under the color-balanced lights, she found a note, tacked to the wall with a thumb-tack, left over from a time before towers, from the time before babies. 
And the note said: "A guy sure loves the girl who works in the darkroom." 
It was a year before my father picked up a camera again. 
His first time out, he followed the Christmas lights, dotting their way through New York City's trees, tiny dots of light, blinking out at him from out of the darkest darks. 
A year later he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire stayed for a week hunting it with his camera, it was ravaging the West Coast eating 18-wheeler trucks in its stride. 
On the other side of the country, I went to class and wrote a poem in the margins of my notebook. 
We have both learned the art of capture. 
Maybe we are learning the art of embracing. 
Maybe we are learning the art of letting go. 
(Applause) 

Don't you love a good nap? 
(Laughter) Just stealing away that small block of time to curl up on your couch for that sweet moment of escape. 
It's one of my favorite things, but something I took for granted before I began experiencing homelessness as a teenager. 
The ability to take a nap is only reserved for stability and sureness, something you can't find when you're carrying everything you own in your book bag and carefully counting the amount of time you're allowed to sit in any given place before being asked to leave. 
I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, bouncing from house to house with a loving, close-knit family as we struggled to find stability in our finances. 
But when my mom temporarily lost herself to mania and when that mania chose me as its primary scapegoat through both emotional and physical abuse, I fled for my safety. 
I had come to the conclusion that homelessness was safer for me than being at home. 
I was 16. 
During my homelessness, I joined Atlanta's 3,300 homeless youth in feeling uncared for, left out and invisible each night. 
There wasn't and still is not any place for a homeless minor to walk off the street to access a bed. 
I realized that most people thought of homelessness as some kind of lazy, drug-induced squalor and inconvenience, but that didn't represent my book bag full of clothes and schoolbooks, or my A+ grade point average. 
I would sit on my favorite bench downtown and watch as the hours passed by until I could sneak in a few hours of sleep on couches, in cars, in buildings or in storage units. 
I, like thousands of other homeless youth, disappeared into the shadows of the city while the whole world kept spinning as if nothing at all had gone terribly wrong. 
The invisibility alone almost completely broke my spirit. 
But when I had nothing else, I had the arts, something that didn't demand material wealth from me in exchange for refuge. 
A few hours of singing, writing poetry or saving up enough money to disappear into another world at a play kept me going and jolting me back to life when I felt at my lowest. 
I would go to church services on Wednesday evenings and, desperate for the relief the arts gave me, I would go a few hours early, slip downstairs and into a part of the world where the only thing that mattered was whether or not I could hit the right note in the song I was perfecting that week. 
I would sing for hours. 
It gave me so much strength to give myself permission to just block it all out and sing. 
Five years later, I started my organization, ChopArt, which is a multidisciplinary arts organization for homeless minors. 
ChopArt uses the arts as a tool for trauma recovery by taking what we know about building community and restoring dignity and applying that to the creative process. 
ChopArt is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with additional programs in Hyderabad, India, and Accra, Ghana, and since our start in 2010, we've served over 40,000 teens worldwide. 
Our teens take refuge in the transformative elements of the arts, and they depend on the safe space ChopArt provides for them to do that. 
An often invisible population uses the arts to step into their light, but that journey out of invisibility is not an easy one. 
We have a sibling pair, Jeremy and Kelly, who have been with our program for over three years. 
They come to the ChopArt classes every Wednesday evening. 
But about a year ago, Jeremy and Kelly witnessed their mom seize and die right in front of them. 
They watched as the paramedics failed to revive her. 
They cried as their father signed over temporary custody to their ChopArt mentor, Erin, without even allowing them to take an extra pair of clothes on their way out. 
This series of events broke my heart, but Jeremy and Kelly's faith and resolve in ChopArt is what keeps me grounded in this work. 
Kelly calling Erin in her lowest moment, knowing that Erin would do whatever she could to make them feel loved and cared for, is proof to me that by using the arts as the entry point, we can heal and build our homeless youth population. 
And we continue to build. 
We build with Devin, who became homeless with his family when his mom had to choose between medical bills or the rent. 
He discovered his love of painting through ChopArt. 
We build with Liz, who has been on the streets most of her teenage years but turns to music to return to herself when her traumas feel too heavy for her young shoulders. 
We build for Maria, who uses poetry to heal after her grandfather died in the van she's living in with the rest of her family. 
And so to the youth out there experiencing homelessness, let me tell you, you have the power to build within you. 
You have a voice through the arts that doesn't judge what you've been through. 
So never stop fighting to stand in your light because even in your darkest times, we see you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"Will the blight end the chestnut? 
The farmers rather guess not. 
It keeps smouldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another parasite Shall come to end the blight." 
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eastern American chestnut population, counting nearly four billion trees, was completely decimated by a fungal infection. 
Fungi are the most destructive pathogens of plants, including crops of major economic importance. 
Can you imagine that today, crop losses associated with fungal infection are estimated at billions of dollars per year, worldwide? 
That represents enough food calories to feed half a billion people. 
And this leads to severe repercussions, including episodes of famine in developing countries, large reduction of income for farmers and distributors, high prices for consumers and risk of exposure to mycotoxin, poison produced by fungi. 
The problems that we face is that the current method used to prevent and treat those dreadful diseases, such as genetic control, exploiting natural sources of resistance, crop rotation or seed treatment, among others, are still limited or ephemeral. 
They have to be constantly renewed. 
Therefore, we urgently need to develop more efficient strategies and for this, research is required to identify biological mechanisms that can be targeted by novel antifungal treatments. 
One feature of fungi is that they cannot move and only grow by extension to form a sophisticated network, the mycelium. 
In 1884, Anton de Bary, the father of plant pathology, was the first to presume that fungi are guided by signals sent out from the host plant, meaning a plant upon which it can lodge and subsist, so signals act as a lighthouse for fungi to locate, grow toward, reach and finally invade and colonize a plant. 
He knew that the identification of such signals would unlock a great knowledge that then serves to elaborate strategy to block the interaction between the fungus and the plant. 
However, the lack of an appropriate method at that moment prevented him from identifying this mechanism at the molecular level. 
Using purification and mutational genomic approaches, as well as a technique allowing the measurement of directed hyphal growth, today I'm glad to tell you that after 130 years, my former team and I could finally identify such plant signals by studying the interaction between a pathogenic fungus called Fusarium oxysporum and one of its host plants, the tomato plant. 
As well, we could characterize the fungal receptor receiving those signals and part of the underlying reaction occurring within the fungus and leading to its direct growth toward the plant. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) The understanding of such molecular processes offers a panel of potential molecules that can be used to create novel antifungal treatments. 
And those treatments would disrupt the interaction between the fungus and the plant either by blocking the plant signal or the fungal reception system which receives those signals. 
Fungal infections have devastated agriculture crops. 
Moreover, we are now in an era where the demand of crop production is increasing significantly. 
And this is due to population growth, economic development, climate change and demand for bio fuels. 
Our understanding of the molecular mechanism of interaction between a fungus and its host plant, such as the tomato plant, potentially represents a major step towards developing more efficient strategy to combat plant fungal diseases and therefore solving of problems that affect people's lives, food security and economic growth. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There have been many revolutions over the last century, but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution. 
We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did -- think about that. 
That's an entire second adult lifetime that's been added to our lifespan. 
And yet, for the most part, our culture has not come to terms with what this means. 
We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. 
That's the metaphor, the old metaphor. 
You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude. 
(Laughter) Age as pathology. 
But many people today -- philosophers, artists, doctors, scientists -- are taking a new look at what I call "the third act" -- the last three decades of life. 
They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance, as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood. 
And they are asking -- we should all be asking: How do we use this time? 
How do we live it successfully? 
What is the appropriate new metaphor for aging? 
I've spent the last year researching and writing about this subject. 
And I have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase -- the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness, and authenticity. 
Age not at all as pathology. 
Age as potential. 
And guess what? 
This potential is not for the lucky few. 
It turns out, most people over 50 feel better, are less stressed, less hostile, less anxious. 
We tend to see commonalities more than differences. 
Some of the studies even say we're happier. 
(Laughter) This is not what I expected, trust me. 
As I was approaching my late 40s, when I would wake up in the morning, my first six thoughts would all be negative. 
And I got scared. 
I thought, "Oh my gosh. I'm going to become a crotchety old lady." 
But now that I am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act, I realize I've never been happier. 
I have such a powerful feeling of well-being. 
And I've discovered that when you're inside oldness, as opposed to looking at it from the outside, fear subsides. 
You realize you're still yourself -- maybe even more so. 
Picasso once said, "It takes a long time to become young." 
(Laughter) I don't want to romanticize aging. 
Obviously, there's no guarantee that it can be a time of fruition and growth. 
Some of it is a matter of luck. 
One third of it, in fact, is genetic. 
And there isn't much we can do about that. 
But that means that two-thirds of how well we do in the third act, we can do something about. 
We're going to discuss what we can do to make these added years really successful, and use them to make a difference. 
Now, let me say something about the staircase, which may seem like an odd metaphor for seniors, given the fact that many seniors are challenged by stairs. 
(Laughter) Myself included. 
As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. 
Entropy means that everything in the world -- everything -- is in a state of decline and decay -- the arch. 
There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards, the staircase, bringing us into wholeness, authenticity, and wisdom. 
And here's an example of what I mean. 
This upward ascension can happen even in the face of extreme physical challenges. 
About three years ago, I read an article in the New York Times. 
It was about a man named Neil Selinger -- 57 years old, a retired lawyer, who had joined the writers' group at Sarah Lawrence, where he found his writer's voice. 
Two years later, he was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. 
It's a terrible disease. It's fatal. 
It wastes the body, but the mind remains intact. 
In this article, Mr. Selinger wrote the following to describe what was happening to him. 
And I quote: "As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. 
As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. 
As I diminished, I grew. 
As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself." 
Neil Selinger, to me, is the embodiment of mounting the staircase in his third act. 
Now we're all born with spirit, all of us, but sometimes it gets tamped down beneath the challenges of life, violence, abuse, neglect. 
Perhaps our parents suffered from depression. 
Perhaps they weren't able to love us beyond how we performed in the world. 
Perhaps we still suffer from a psychic pain, a wound. 
Perhaps we feel that many of our relationships have not had closure. 
Perhaps the task of the third act is to finish up the task of finishing ourselves. 
For me, it began as I was approaching my third act, my 60th birthday. 
How was I supposed to live it? 
What was I supposed to accomplish in this final act? 
And I realized that, in order to know where I was going, I had to know where I'd been. 
And so I went back and I studied my first two acts, trying to see who I was then, who I really was, not who my parents or other people told me I was, or treated me like I was. 
Who were my parents -- not as parents, but as people? 
Who were my grandparents? 
How did they treat my parents? 
These kinds of things. 
I discovered, a couple of years later, that this process that I had gone through is called by psychologists "doing a life review." 
And they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person's life. 
You may discover, as I did, that a lot of things that you used to think were your fault, a lot of things you used to think about yourself, really had nothing to do with you. 
It wasn't your fault; you're just fine. 
And you're able to go back and forgive them. 
And forgive yourself. 
You're able to free yourself from your past. 
You can work to change your relationship to your past. 
Now while I was writing about this, I came upon a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. 
Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who'd spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. 
And he wrote that, while he was in the camp, he could tell, should they ever be released, which of the people would be OK, and which would not. 
And he wrote this: "Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. 
This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived -- not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. 
What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger." 
Perhaps the central purpose of the third act is to go back and to try, if appropriate, to change our relationship to the past. 
It turns out that cognitive research shows when we are able to do this, it manifests neurologically -- neural pathways are created in the brain. 
You see, if you have, over time, reacted negatively to past events and people, neural pathways are laid down by chemical and electrical signals that are sent through the brain. 
And over time, these neural pathways become hardwired. 
They become the norm -- even if it's bad for us, because it causes us stress and anxiety. 
If, however, we can go back and alter our relationship, re-vision our relationship to past people and events, neural pathways can change. 
And if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past, that becomes the new norm. 
It's like resetting a thermostat. 
It's not having experiences that makes us wise. 
It's reflecting on the experiences that we've had that makes us wise and that helps us become whole, brings wisdom and authenticity. 
It helps us become what we might have been. 
Women start off whole, don't we? 
I mean, as girls, we're feisty -- "Yeah? Who says?" 
(Laughter) We have agency. 
We are the subjects of our own lives. 
But very often, many, if not most of us, when we hit puberty, we start worrying about fitting in and being popular. 
And we become the subjects and objects of other people's lives. 
But now, in our third acts, it may be possible for us to circle back to where we started, and know it for the first time. 
And if we can do that, it will not just be for ourselves. 
Older women are the largest demographic in the world. 
If we can go back and redefine ourselves and become whole, this will create a cultural shift in the world, and it will give an example to younger generations so that they can reconceive their own lifespan. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

This is an equipment graveyard. 
It's a typical final resting place for medical equipment from hospitals in Africa. 
Now, why is this? 
Most of the medical devices used in Africa are imported, and quite often, they're not suitable for local conditions. 
They may require trained staff that aren't available to operate and maintain and repair them; they may not be able to withstand high temperatures and humidity; and they usually require a constant and reliable supply of electricity. 
An example of a medical device that may have ended up in an equipment graveyard at some point is an ultrasound monitor to track the heart rate of unborn babies. 
This is the standard of care in rich countries. 
In low-resource settings, the standard of care is often a midwife listening to the baby's heart rate through a horn. 
Now, this approach has been around for more than a century. 
It's very much dependent on the skill and the experience of the midwife. 
Two young inventors from Uganda visited an antenatal clinic at a local hospital a few years ago, when they were students in information technology. 
They noticed that quite often, the midwife was not able to hear any heart rate when trying to listen to it through this horn. 
So they invented their own fetal heart rate monitor. 
They adapted the horn and connected it to a smartphone. 
An app on the smartphone records the heart rate, analyzes it and provides the midwife with a range of information on the status of the baby. 
These inventors -- (Applause) are called Aaron Tushabe and Joshua Okello. 
Another inventor, Tendekayi Katsiga, was working for an NGO in Botswana that manufactured hearing aids. 
Now, he noticed that these hearing aids needed batteries that needed replacement, very often at a cost that was not affordable for most of the users that he knew. 
In response, and being an engineer, Tendekayi invented a solar-powered battery charger with rechargeable batteries, that could be used in these hearing aids. 
He cofounded a company called Deaftronics, which now manufactures the Solar Ear, which is a hearing aid powered by his invention. 
My colleague, Sudesh Sivarasu, invented a smart glove for people who have suffered from leprosy. 
Even though their disease may have been cured, the resulting nerve damage will have left many of them without a sense of touch in their hands. 
This puts them at risk of injury. 
The glove has sensors to detect temperature and pressure and warn the user. 
It effectively serves as an artificial sense of touch and prevents injury. 
Sudesh invented this glove after observing former leprosy patients as they carried out their day-to-day activities, and he learned about the risks and the hazards in their environment. 
Now, the inventors that I've mentioned integrated engineering with healthcare. 
This is what biomedical engineers do. 
At the University of Cape Town, we run a course called Health Innovation and Design. 
It's taken by many of our graduate students in biomedical engineering. 
The aim of the course is to introduce these students to the philosophy of the design world. 
The students are encouraged to engage with communities as they search for solutions to health-related problems. 
One of the communities that we work with is a group of elderly people in Cape Town. 
A recent class project had the task of addressing hearing loss in these elderly people. 
The students, many of them being engineers, set out believing that they would design a better hearing aid. 
They spent time with the elderly, chatted to their healthcare providers and their caregivers. 
They soon realized that, actually, adequate hearing aids already existed, but many of the elderly who needed them and had access to them didn't have them. 
And many of those who had hearing aids wouldn't wear them. 
The students realized that many of these elderly people were in denial of their hearing loss. 
There's a stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid. 
They also discovered that the environment in which these elderly people lived did not accommodate their hearing loss. 
For example, their homes and their community center were filled with echoes that interfered with their hearing. 
So instead of developing and designing a new and better hearing aid, the students did an audit of the environment, with a view to improving the acoustics. 
They also devised a campaign to raise awareness of hearing loss and to counter the stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid. 
Now, this often happens when one pays attention to the user -- in this case, the elderly -- and their needs and their context. 
One often has to move away from the focus of technology and reformulate the problem. 
This approach to understanding a problem through listening and engaging is not new, but it often isn't followed by engineers, who are intent on developing technology. 
One of our students has a background in software engineering. 
He had often created products for clients that the client ultimately did not like. 
When a client would reject a product, it was common at his company to proclaim that the client just didn't know what they wanted. 
Having completed the course, the student fed back to us that he now realized that it was he who hadn't understood what the client wanted. 
Another student gave us feedback that she had learned to design with empathy, as opposed to designing for functionality, which is what her engineering education had taught her. 
So what all of this illustrates is that we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology. 
But we need technology. 
We need hearing aids. We need fetal heart rate monitors. 
So how do we create more medical device success stories from Africa? 
How do we create more inventors, rather than relying on a few exceptional individuals who are able to perceive real needs and respond in ways that work? 
"But this is obvious," you might say, "Of course context is important." 
But Africa is a diverse continent, with vast disparities in health and wealth and income and education. 
If we assume that our engineers and inventors already know enough about the different African contexts to be able to solve the problems of our different communities and our most marginalized communities, then we might get it wrong. 
But then, if we on the African continent don't necessarily know enough about it, then perhaps anybody with the right level of skill and commitment could fly in, spend some time listening and engaging and fly out knowing enough to invent for Africa. 
But understanding context is not about a superficial interaction. 
It's about deep engagement and an immersion in the realities and the complexities of our context. 
And we in Africa are already immersed. 
We already have a strong and rich base of knowledge from which to start finding solutions to our own problems. 
So let's not rely too much on others when we live on a continent that is filled with untapped talent. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. 
I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean, I'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. 
So we were up on top of our bunk beds. 
And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. 
And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge. 
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story -- (Laughter) which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. 
Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. 
I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground. 
I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. 
And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before -- (Laughter) (Laughter ends) heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn't even see it coming -- I was trying hard to be on my best behavior. 
And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. 
So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. 
And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times. 
I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? 
No human lands on all fours like that. 
Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn." 
(Laughter) Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. 
Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past. 
And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. 
And the latter won. 
Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn -- (Laughter) with one broken leg. 
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. 
We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning. 
When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. 
The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. 
This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. 
And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. 
What we found is -- (Laughter) If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. 
There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are, I saw you earlier -- that's no problem. 
That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. 
I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. 
And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data. 
(Laughter) So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. 
How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? 
Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking -- two. 
But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. 
If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" 
scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" 
and we tailor the class towards the average. 
If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both. 
We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. 
We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. 
But normal is merely average. 
And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. 
Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? 
Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? 
Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. 
Because maybe we can glean information, not just how to move people up to the average, but move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide. 
The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive. 
in fact it's negative. 
Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. 
And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. 
This creates "the medical school syndrome." 
During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them. 
(Laughter) I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story. 
Bobo married Amy the unicorn. 
Bobo called me on the phone -- (Laughter) from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy." 
(Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. 
But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause. 
(Laughter) We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. 
And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time. 
I applied to Harvard on a dare. 
I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. 
When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go. 
Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. 
I assumed everyone there would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. 
Even in a classroom full of people smarter than you, I felt you'd be happy just to be in that classroom. 
But what I found is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy. 
(Laughter) I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. 
And in my research and my teaching, I found that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on the competition, the workload, the hassles, stresses, complaints. 
When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up -- I know some of you know this. 
When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, "This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's." 
It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard. 
And when they see this, they say, "Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? 
What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?" 
Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. 
Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 
90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. 
And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. 
What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat. 
I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, "We already know that. 
So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. 
And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. 
Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. 
Wednesday night is eating disorders. 
Thursday night is illicit drug use. 
And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness." 
(Laughter) I said, "That's most people's Friday nights." 
(Laughter) (Applause) Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. 
Silence on the phone. 
And into the silence, I said, "I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. 
You've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive." 
The absence of disease is not health. 
Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. 
In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. 
And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. 
And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. 
That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior. 
And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. 
Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. 
You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. 
And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. 
We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. 
And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier. 
But our brains work in the opposite order. 
If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. 
Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. 
In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. 
Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. 
You're 37% better at sales. 
Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. 
Which means we can reverse the formula. 
If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. 
We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. 
Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. 
Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way. 
We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. 
In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. 
We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. 
And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first. 
Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. 
Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. 
We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. 
And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. 
We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network. 
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader? 
I've asked that question all across the country, and everywhere I ask it, no matter where, there's a huge portion of the audience that won't put up their hand. 
And I've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us. 
We've made it about changing the world. 
We've taken this title of "leader" and treat it as something that one day we're going to deserve. 
But to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we're not comfortable with. 
And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we've convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating. 
We start to devalue the things we can do every day, We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don't let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it. 
I've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with amazing people who've helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier. 
With my short time today, I want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition. 
I went to a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. 
And on my last day there, a girl came up to me and said, "I remember the first time I met you." 
And she told me a story that had happened four years earlier. 
She said, "On the day before I started university, I was in the hotel room with my mom and dad, and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this, that I wasn't ready for university, that I just burst into tears. 
My mom and dad were amazing. 
They were like, "We know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow, go to the first day, and if at any point you feel as if you can't do this, that's fine; tell us, and we'll take you home. 
We love you no matter what.'" She says, "So I went the next day. 
I was in line for registration, and I looked around and just knew I couldn't do it; I wasn't ready. 
I made that decision and as soon as I made it, an incredible feeling of peace came over me. 
I turned to my mom and dad to tell them we needed to go home, and at that moment, you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat I've ever seen in my life." 
(Laughter) "It was awesome. 
And you had a big sign promoting Shinerama," -- which is Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis, a charity I've worked with for years -- "And you had a bucketful of lollipops. 
You were handing the lollipops out to people in line, and talking about Shinerama. 
All of the sudden, you got to me, and you just stopped. 
And you stared. It was creepy." 
(Laughter) This girl knows what I'm talking about. 
(Laughter) "Then you looked at the guy next to me, smiled, reached into your bucket, pulled out a lollipop, held it out to him and said, 'You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman next to you.'" She said, "I've never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life. 
He turned beet red, he wouldn't even look at me. 
He just kind of held the lollipop out like this." 
(Laughter) "I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop. 
As soon as I did, you got this incredibly severe look on your face, looked at my mom and dad and said, 'Look at that! Look at that! 
First day away from home, and already she's taking candy from a stranger?'" (Laughter) She said, "Everybody lost it. 
Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl. 
I know this is cheesy, and I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in that moment when everyone was laughing, I knew I shouldn't quit. 
I knew I was where I was supposed to be; I knew I was home. 
And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day. 
But I heard that you were leaving, and I had to come and tell you you've been an incredibly important person in my life. 
And she walks away, and I'm flattened. 
She gets six feet away, turns around, smiles and goes, "You should probably know this, too: I'm still dating that guy, four years later." 
(Laughter) A year and a half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding. 
(Laughter) Here's the kicker: I don't remember that. 
I have no recollection of that moment. 
I've searched my memory banks, because that is funny and I should remember doing it and I don't. 
That was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me, to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life, a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say, "You've been an important person in my life," was a moment that I didn't even remember. 
How many of you guys have a lollipop moment, a moment where someone said or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better? 
See, why not? 
We celebrate birthdays, where all you have to do is not die for 365 days -- (Laughter) Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it. 
Every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment. 
You've made someone's life better by something you said or did. 
If you think you haven't, think of all the hands that didn't go up when I asked. 
You're just one of the people who hasn't been told. 
It's scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, frightening to think we can matter that much to other people. 
As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other. 
Marianne Williamson said, "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. 
[It] is that we are powerful beyond measure. 
It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us." 
My call to action today is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other's lives. 
We need to get over it so we can move beyond it, and our little brothers and sisters and one day our kids -- or our kids right now -- can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other's lives, more than money and power and titles and influence. 
We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments -- how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for. 
Because we've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. 
And if you change one person's understanding of it, understanding of what they're capable of, understanding of how much people care about them, understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing. 
And if we can understand leadership like that, I think if we can redefine leadership like that, I think we can change everything. 
And it's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one. 
I want to thank you so much for letting me share it with you today. 

Every year in the United States alone, 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together -- (Laughter) And not to have sex with anyone else. 
Ever. 
He buys a ring, she buys a dress. 
They go shopping for all sorts of things. 
She takes him to Arthur Murray for ballroom-dancing lessons. 
And the big day comes. 
And they'll stand before God and family and some guy her dad once did business with, and they'll vow that nothing -- not abject poverty, not life-threatening illness, not complete and utter misery -- will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion. 
(Laughter) These optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and midlife crises and a cumulative 50-pound weight gain, until that far-off day, when one of them is finally able to rest in peace. 
(Laughter) You know, because they can't hear the snoring anymore. 
And then they'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each other's faces and do the Macarena. 
And we'll be there, showering them with towels and toasters and drinking their free booze and throwing birdseed at them every single time ... 
even though we know, statistically, half of them will be divorced within a decade. 
(Laughter) Of course, the other half won't, right? 
They'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating -- (Laughter) Which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll. 
And some of them will even still be enjoying each other's company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore. 
And researchers want to know why. 
I mean, look -- it doesn't take a double-blind, placebo-controlled study to figure out what makes a marriage not work: disrespect, boredom, too much time on Facebook, having sex with other people. 
But you can have the exact opposite of all of those things -- respect, excitement, a broken Internet connection, mind-numbing monogamy -- and the thing still can go to hell in a handbasket. 
So, what's going on when it doesn't? 
What do the folks who make it all the way to side-by-side burial plots have in common? 
What can we learn from them? 
And if you're still happily sleeping solo, why should you stop what you're doing and make it your life's work to find that one special person that you can annoy for the rest of your life? 
Well, researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out. 
They stalk blissful couples and study their every move and mannerism. 
And they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends. 
And it turns out, the success stories share a few similarities, beyond that they don't have sex with other people. 
For instance, in the happiest marriages, the wife is thinner and better-looking than the husband. 
(Laughter) Obvious. Right? 
It's obvious that this leads to marital bliss, because women -- we care a great deal about being thin and good-looking, whereas men mostly care about sex, ideally, with women who are thinner and better looking than they are. 
The beauty of this research, though, is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy. 
We just have to be thinner than our partners. 
So instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising, we just need to wait for them to get fat -- (Laughter) Maybe bake a few pies. 
This is good information to have, and it's not that complicated. 
(Laughter) Research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives. 
For example: the happy wife. 
Instead of pointing out her husband's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run, she might say, "Wow, honey, thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner." 
(Laughter) These are couples who can find good in any situation. 
"Yeah, it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire. 
But it's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars. 
And it's a good thing you've got all that body fat to keep us warm." 
(Laughter) One of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do housework, the more attractive his wife will find him. 
Because we needed a study to tell us this. 
(Laughter) But here's what's going on here. 
The more attractive she finds him, the more sex they have; the more sex they have, the nicer he is to her; the nicer he is to her, the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed, and ultimately, they live happily ever after. 
In other words, men, you might want to pick it up a notch in the domestic department. 
Here's an interesting one. 
One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce. 
This is an actual study, and let me clarify: the researchers were not looking at documented self-reports of childhood happiness, or even studying old journals. 
The data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures. 
Now, I don't know how old all of you are, but when I was a kid, your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called "film." 
And, by God, film was expensive. 
They didn't take 300 shots of you in that rapid-fire digital video mode and then pick out the nicest, smiliest one for the Christmas card. 
Oh, no. 
They dressed you up, they lined you up, and you smiled for the fucking camera like they told you to or you could kiss your birthday party goodbye. 
But still, I have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and I'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce. 
So, what else can you do to safeguard your marriage? 
Do not win an Oscar for best actress. 
(Laughter) I'm serious. 
Bettie Davis, Joan Crawford, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon -- all of them single, soon after taking home that statue. 
They actually call it the Oscar curse. 
It is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided. 
And it's not just successfully starring in films that's dangerous. 
It turns out, merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet. 
(Laughter) Apparently, the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us, but it obviously hasn't and it probably never will, makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison. 
And theoretically, I suppose if we opt for a film where someone gets brutally murdered or dies in a fiery car crash, we are more likely to walk out of that theater feeling like we've got it pretty good. 
(Laughter) Drinking alcohol, it seems, is bad for your marriage. 
Yeah. 
I can't tell you anymore about that one because I stopped reading it at the headline. 
But here's a scary one: divorce is contagious. 
That's right, when you have a close couple friend split up, it increases your chances of getting a divorce by 75 percent. 
Now, I have to say, I don't get this one at all. 
My husband and I have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and Viagra and eHarmony. 
And I'm thinking they've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could. 
So now you may be wondering: Why does anyone get married ever? 
Well, the US federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone's spouse. 
A list that includes visitation rights in jail, but hopefully, you'll never need that one. 
But beyond the profound federal perks, married people make more money. 
We're healthier, physically and emotionally. 
We produce happier, more stable and more successful kids. 
We have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends, believe it or not. 
We even live longer, which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place. 
(Laughter) Now, if you're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return, I can't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness, who prefers horror movies and doesn't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce, but I can only encourage you to try, because the benefits, as I've pointed out, are significant. 
The bottom line is: whether you're in it or you're searching for it, I believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting. 
So I hope you'll use the information I've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors. 
For instance, in my marriage, I'd say I'm doing OK. 
One the one hand, I have a husband who's annoyingly lean and incredibly handsome. 
So I'm obviously going to need fatten him up. 
And like I said, we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up. 
So we have to keep an eye on that. 
And we do like a cocktail or two. 
On the other hand, I have the fake happy picture thing. 
And also, my husband does a lot around the house, and would happily never see another romantic comedy as long as he lives. 
But just in case, I plan to work extra hard to not win an Oscar anytime soon. 
And for the good of your relationships, I would encourage you to do the same. 
I'll see you at the bar. 

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. 
And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. 
Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. 
And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. 
You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. 
And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. 
(Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. 
(Laughter) Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. 
And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. 
And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. 
Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." 
(Laughter) Yeah. 
So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. 
(Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. 
I did my best. 
And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. 
But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. 
And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing. 
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. 
And I felt kind of guilty about this. 
I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. 
But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. 
Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. 
I could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. 
And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. 
But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. 
And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. 
And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. 
Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. 
And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. 
Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. 
A third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. 
So that's one out of every two or three people you know. 
So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. 
We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing. 
Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. 
It's different from being shy. 
Shyness is about fear of social judgment. 
Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. 
So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. 
Not all the time -- these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. 
So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. 
But now here's where the bias comes in. 
Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. 
And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. 
So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. 
We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. 
But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. 
And kids are working in countless group assignments. 
Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. 
And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. 
And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. 
(Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. 
Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. 
And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we might all favor nowadays. 
And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. 
Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. 
I'll give you some examples. 
Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these people described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. 
And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. 
And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right. 
Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. 
I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. 
And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. 
Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. 
He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. 
And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. 
And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. 
But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other. 
And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. 
We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. 
This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. 
And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. 
So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. 
Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. 
And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. 
Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. 
And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up. 
Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. 
And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. 
It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. 
If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. 
So, no wilderness, no revelations. 
This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. 
It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. 
Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. 
And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- I mean zero. 
So -- (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. 
And do you really want to leave it up to chance? 
Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. 
Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? 
Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? 
And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? 
One answer lies deep in our cultural history. 
Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the "man" of contemplation. 
But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. 
And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." 
And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." 
But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. 
What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. 
And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. 
And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. 
So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. 
And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People." 
And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. 
So that's the world we're living in today. 
That's our cultural inheritance. 
Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. 
The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. 
And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. 
But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems. 
So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. 
Guess what? 
Books. 
I have a suitcase full of books. 
Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye." 
Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. 
And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides. 
But these are not exactly my books. 
I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. 
My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. 
I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. 
Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. 
But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. 
He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. 
And people would come from all over to hear him speak. 
But here's the thing about my grandfather. 
Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. 
And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. 
But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. 
And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way. 
So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. 
And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. 
It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. 
But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. 
(Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. 
So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. 
I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. 
And I call this my "year of speaking dangerously." 
(Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. 
But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. 
I mean, we are. 
And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. 
Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. 
Just stop it. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. 
That is great. 
It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. 
But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. 
School, same thing. 
We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. 
This is especially important for extroverted children too. 
They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part. 
Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. 
Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. 
I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. 
Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. 
So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. 
Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. 
Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. 
But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. 
And that's okay. 
But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. 
So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries. 
Now I work in the solar technology industry. 
And my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ... 
... paying attention to crowd-sourcing. 
It's just a quick video of what we do. 
Huh. Hang on a moment. 
It might take a moment to load. 
(Laughter) We'll just -- we can just skip -- I'll just skip through the video instead ... 
(Laughter) No. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Music) This is not ... 
(Laughter) Okay. 
(Laughter) Solar technology is ... 
Oh, that's all my time? 
Okay. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When I tell people that I'm trying to develop a contraceptive pill for men, the response usually varies along gender lines. 
Women say something like, "Fantastic. It's about time. When?" 
(Laughter) Men have one of two responses. 
They either love the idea, or they look at me a little warily and wonder what exactly I have in store for their testicles. 
(Laughter) So why does the world need a male pill? 
Well, what if I told you that of the six million pregnancies annually in the United States, three million of them are unintended? 
That's half. 
That's a really surprising number. 
And those three million unintended pregnancies account for the vast majority of the more than one million abortions annually performed in the United States. 
Happily, the rate of unintended pregnancy has fallen in the last few years by about 10 percent. 
This is because more women are using effective, long-acting, reversible forms of contraception. 
But we still have a long way to go. 
One approach that's finally becoming a real possibility is better contraceptive options for men. 
Think about it. 
We have over a dozen methods of contraception for women: pills, patches, IUDs, shots, sponges, rings, etc. 
For men, we've had the same two options for more than a hundred years: condoms and vasectomy. 
Despite having only two options, both of which have significant drawbacks, men currently account for 30 percent of all contraceptive use, with 10 percent of couples relying on vasectomy and 20 percent of couples using condoms. 
Why are 20 percent of couples relying on condoms for contraception when condoms have a one-year failure rate of over 15 percent? 
It's because many women can't either safely take currently available female contraceptives, for reasons such as blood clots, or they can't tolerate the side effects. 
So if we think a male contraceptive would be useful, the next question is: How do we go about developing one? 
Well, there's two general approaches. 
The first approach is to try and interfere with the way the sperm swim towards or bind to the egg. 
This approach turns out to be really difficult, because it's hard to get enough medication in the small volume of the ejaculate and have it still work inside the female reproductive tract. 
This is why there's been a lot more work done on the second approach, which is turning off sperm production entirely. 
This is also challenging. 
Why? Turns out that men make a lot of sperm. 
(Laughter) Men make a thousand sperm every second and to have an effective contraceptive, you need to get that level of sperm production down to one percent of its normal value. 
The good news is, this is possible, almost. 
The most studied approach has been to use hormones to suppress sperm production. 
Testosterone and progesterone, when administered together, will suppress the signals from the brain to the testes to make sperm, and in about 90 percent of men, sperm production after three to four months will stop. 
Unfortunately, 10 percent of men don't respond to these hormonal regimens for reasons that aren't understood. 
For the last several years, my colleagues and I have been taking a different approach to male contraceptive development, one that doesn't involve the administration of hormones. 
Specifically, we are looking to block the function of vitamin A in the testes. 
Why? Well, for over 90 years it's been known that you need vitamin A to make sperm. 
Animals who are deprived of vitamin A in their diet stop making sperm and restart making sperm again when the vitamin A is reintroduced. 
The vitamin A that we ingest is converted by a family of enzymes to something called retinoic acid. 
One of these enzymes is found only in the testes. 
It's this enzyme that we are attempting to block. 
The blockade of this enzyme should deprive the testes of retinoic acid and stop sperm production without affecting vitamin A's functions elsewhere in the body. 
We're testing this approach in animals and hope to move to human testing soon. 
Obviously, the impact of such a male contraceptive would go well beyond reproductive biology. 
It's interesting to speculate about the effect that it would have on relationships between men and women. 
One intriguing possibility is that a man could monitor his contraceptive status over time. 
In the last several years, two groups have introduced home sperm-testing devices that are iPhone-based and that are easy to use. 
A man could test his sperm count and share the result with his partner. 
If the man's sperm count were zero, the man and his partner would feel very comfortable relying on his contraceptive. 
A tool like this, coupled with a male contraceptive, could greatly increase the role for men in preventing unintended pregnancy. 
The researchers who are working on male contraception are trying to create a better future for couples, a future where contraception is no longer considered just "a woman's issue," rather an issue for couples to decide together. 
So why does the world need a male pill? 
Well, I believe that a male pill will help reduce the stubbornly high rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion and allow men to equally participate in contraception. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block. 
The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together. 
Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world. 
They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time. 
Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time. 
Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this. 
It was called the Automatic Binding Brick. 
And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household. 
It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced -- or 75 bricks for every person on the planet. 
You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings. 
LEGO made it accessible. 
LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination. 
Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block. 
The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. 
Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time. 
But there's a main difference: The transistor was only for experts. 
I personally don't accept this, that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, so I decided to change that. 
Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers. 
A few years ago I started developing littleBits. 
Let me show you how they work. 
LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function. 
They're pre-engineered to be light, sound, motors and sensors. 
And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets. 
So you can't put them the wrong way. 
The bricks are color-coded. 
Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire. 
So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits. 
You put a blue to a green, you can make light. 
You can put a knob in between and now you've made a little dimmer. 
Switch out the knob for a pulse module, which is here, and now you've made a little blinker. 
Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine. 
I'm going to stop that. 
So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful. 
Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures. 
So to make this blink faster or slower, you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower. 
The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library. 
We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick. 
Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors -- everything should be accessible. 
We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them. 
And it's been an incredible experience. 
The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don't learn at schools. 
For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch. 
We've also been taking littleBits to design schools. 
So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material. 
Here you see, with felt and paper water bottles, we have Geordie making ... 
(Clanging) (Buzzing) A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever -- just cardboard, wood and paper -- and told them "Make something." 
Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball. 
(Laughter) But wait, this is actually my favorite project. 
It's a lobster made of playdough that's afraid of the dark. 
(Laughter) To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material. 
And we want to make this material accessible to everyone. 
So littleBits is open-source. 
You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself. 
We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours. 
So go ahead and start inventing. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, without romanticizing this too much: imagine that you light your home with kerosene and candles every night, and that you do all of your cooking with charcoal. 
This is how the world's two billion poorest people cook and light their homes every day. 
This isn't just inconvenient, this is inefficient, it's expensive, it's harmful to human health, harmful to the environment, and it's unproductive. 
And that's energy poverty. 
So let me give you a couple of examples. 
I work in Haiti, where about 80% of the population lives in energy poverty. 
The average household spends 10% of its income on kerosene for lighting – that's an order of magnitude greater than what the average US household spends on electricity to light their homes. 
The 2008 hurricane season in Haiti caused about one billion dollars in damage. 
That was a sixth of their GDP. 
The damage was so severe because the primary energy fuel in Haiti is charcoal, which is made from trees, and has left the country almost completely deforested. 
Without trees, the country can't absorb heavy rains and massive flooding, as a result. 
So in the industrialized world, we built walls that protect us from the externalities of our energy use; we can afford to clean up acute environmental disasters; and we can also afford to adapt to chronic conditions like climate change. 
That's not the case for Haiti. They can't afford this. 
The only way they're going to lift themselves out of energy poverty is by adapting fuels that are more efficient, that are less expensive, that are better for human health, better for the environment and that are more productive. 
So it turns out that those fuels and technologies exist, and this is an example of that. 
This is a solar LED lightbulb that we sell for a retail price of about 10 dollars in rural Haiti. 
That's a payback period of less than three months for the average Haitian household. 
The prescriptions to solve energy poverty seems pretty straightforward: you develop these technologies that have a great return on investment, and people should be snatching them up. 
But that's not the case. 
The first time I ever went down to Haiti was in August of 2008, sort of on a whim, and I was fielding surveys in the rural south of the country to assess the extent of energy poverty. 
And at night, I would go around sometimes and I would speak with the street vendors and see if they were interested in buying these solar LED lamps. 
One woman who I encountered turned down my offer, and she said, “Mon chéri, c'est trop Cher,” which basically means, “My dear, it's too expensive.” But I tried to explain to her, “Look, this is going to save you a lot of money, and it's going to give you even better light than what you're using now with the kerosene.” So I didn't make the sale, but I did learn a really important lesson, which is that technology, products, were not going to end energy poverty. 
Instead, access was going to. 
Specifically, there are two types of access that are going to end energy poverty: there's physical access, and there's financial access. 
So, physical access -- what does that mean? 
It's very expensive for low-income households in developing countries to reach major centers of commerce. 
And it's basically impossible for them to order something off Amazon.com. 
“The last mile” is a phrase that's normally associated with the telecommunications industry. 
It means that last bit of wire that's necessary to connect the customer to the provider. 
What we need for ending energy poverty are last-mile retailers that bring these clean energy products to the people. 
The kerosene and charcoal value chains already figured this out: those fuels are ubiquitous across the entire country. 
You can go to the most remote village in Haiti and you will find somebody selling kerosene and charcoal. 
So the other type of access: financial. 
We all know that clean energy products, technologies, tend to be characterized by higher upfront costs, but very low operating costs. 
And so in the industrialized world, we have very generous subsidies that are specifically designed to bring down those upfront costs. 
Those subsidies don't exist in Haiti. 
What they do have is microfinance. 
But you're going to severely diminish the value proposition of your clean energy product if you expect somebody in Haiti to go out, get a microloan, go back to the retailer, and then buy the clean energy product. 
So the prescription to end energy poverty is much more complicated than simply products. 
We need to integrate financial access directly into new, innovative distribution models. 
What does that mean? 
That means bundling consumer credit with the retailer. 
This is really easy for Bloomingdale’s to do, but it's not so easy for a rural sales agent in Haiti to do. 
We need to redirect cash flows that are going now from the diaspora in the United States through Western Union wire transfers in cash directly into clean energy products that can be delivered to or picked up by their friends or family in Haiti. 
So the next time you hear about a technology or product that's going to change the world, be a little bit skeptical. 
The inventor Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway, a genius by any standards, once said that his job is easy, inventing things is easy, the hard part is the technology dissemination -- it's getting those technologies and products to the people who need it most. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

So I want to talk today about money and happiness, which are two things a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, either trying to earn them or trying to increase them. 
And a lot of us resonate with this phrase, we see it in religions and self-help books: money can't buy happiness. 
(Laughter) I'm at a business school, so that's what we do. 
So that's wrong, and in fact, if you think that, you're just not spending it right. 
So instead of spending it the way you usually spend it, maybe if you spent it differently, that might work a little bit better. 
Before I tell you the ways you can spend it that will make you happier, let's think about the ways we usually spend it that don't, in fact, make us happier. 
We had a little natural experiment. 
So CNN, a little while ago, wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery. 
It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives will be amazing. 
This article's about how their lives get ruined. 
What happens when people win the lottery is, one, they spend all the money and go into debt; and two, all of their friends and everyone they've ever met find them and bug them for money. 
It ruins their social relationships, in fact. 
So they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery. 
What was interesting about the article was, people started commenting on the article, readers of the thing. 
And instead of talking about how it made them realize that money doesn't lead to happiness, everyone started saying, "You know what I'd do if I won the lottery ...?" 
and fantasizing about what they'd do. 
One person wrote, "When I win, I'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top." 
(Laughter) And another person wrote, "I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne." 
This is even worse: "... then I'd have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made. 
Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else." 
(Laughter) And so many of the comments were exactly of this type, where people got money and, in fact, it made them antisocial. 
So I told you it ruins people's lives and their friends bug them. 
Also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves. 
We thought maybe the reason money doesn't make us happy is that we're spending it on the wrong things; in particular, we're always spending it on ourselves. 
And we wondered what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on others. 
So instead of being antisocial with your money, what if you were more pro-social with it? 
We thought, let's make people do it and see what happens. 
Let's have some people do what they usually do, spend money on themselves, and let's make some people give money away, and measure their happiness and see if, in fact, they get happier. 
The first way we did this was, one Vancouver morning, we went out on the campus at University of British Columbia, approached people and said, "Do you want to be in an experiment?" 
They said, "Yes." 
One of the envelopes had things in it that said, "By 5pm today, spend this money on yourself." 
Other people got a slip of paper that said, "By 5pm today, spend this money on somebody else." 
Also inside the envelope was money. 
And we manipulated how much money we gave them; some people got this slip of paper and five dollars, some got this slip of paper and 20 dollars. 
We let them go about their day and do whatever they wanted. 
We found out they did spend it in the way we asked them to. 
We called them up and asked them, "What did you spend it on? 
How happy do you feel now?" 
What did they spend it on? 
These are college undergrads; a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup. 
One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece. 
People gave money to homeless people. 
(Laughter) So if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee to them, and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can. 
Some people bought coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but others bought coffee for somebody else. 
So the very same purchase, just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else. 
What did we find when we called at the end of the day? 
People who spent money on others got happier; people who spent it on themselves, nothing happened. 
It didn't make them less happy, it just didn't do much for them. 
The other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn't matter much. 
People thought 20 dollars would be way better than five. 
What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself. 
We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on others instead of on themselves. 
Of course, these are undergraduates in Canada -- not the world's most representative population. 
We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries. 
So we went to Uganda and ran a very similar experiment. 
Imagine, instead of just people in Canada, we say, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others. 
Describe it. How happy did it make you?" 
Or in Uganda, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others and describe that." 
Then we asked them how happy they are, again. 
And what we see is sort of amazing, because there's human universals on what you do with your money, and real cultural differences on what you do as well. 
So for example, one guy from Uganda says this: "I called a girl I wished to love." 
They basically went out on a date, and he says at the end that he didn't "achieve" her up till now. 
(Laughter) Here's a guy from Canada. 
Very similar thing. 
We went to a movie, we left early, and then went back to her room for ... cake," just cake. 
(Laughter) Human universal: you spend money on others, you're being nice. 
Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not. 
But then we see extraordinary differences. 
So look at these two. 
We say, "Name a time you spent money on somebody else." 
She says, "I bought a present for my mom. 
I drove to the mall, bought a present, gave it to my mom." 
Perfectly nice thing to do. 
Compare that to this woman from Uganda: "I was walking and met a longtime friend whose son was sick with malaria. 
They had no money, they went to a clinic and I gave her this money." 
This isn't $10,000, it's the local currency. 
So it's a very small amount of money, in fact. 
But enormously different motivations here. 
This is a real medical need, literally a lifesaving donation. 
Above, it's just kind of, I bought a gift for my mother. 
What we see again, though, is that the specific way you spend on other people isn't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy, which is really quite important. 
So you don't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy. 
These are only two countries. 
We wanted to look at every country in the world if we could, to see what the relationship is between money and happiness. 
We got data from the Gallup Organization, which you know from all the political polls happening lately. 
They asked people, "Did you donate money to charity recently?" 
We can see what the relationship is between those two things. 
Are they positively correlated, giving money makes you happy? 
Or are they negatively correlated? 
On this map, green will mean they're positively correlated, red means they're negatively correlated. 
And you can see, the world is crazily green. 
So in almost every country in the world where we have this data, people who give money to charity are happier people than people who don't give money to charity. 
I would be a jerk and not tell you what it is, but it's Central African Republic. 
You can make up stories. 
Maybe it's different there for some reason. 
Just below that to the right is Rwanda, though, which is amazingly green. 
So almost everywhere we look, we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself. 
What about work, which is where we spend the rest of our time, when we're not with the people we know. 
We decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing. 
These are sales teams in Belgium. 
They work in teams, go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs. 
We can look and see how well they sell things as a function of being a member of a team. 
We give people on some teams some money "Spend it however you want on yourself," just like we did with the undergrads in Canada. 
To other teams we say, "Here's 15 euro. Spend it on one of your teammates. 
Buy them something as a gift and give it to them. 
Then we can see, we've got teams that spend on themselves and these pro-social teams who we give money to make the team better. 
The reason I have a ridiculous pinata there is one team pooled their money and bought a pinata, they smashed the pinata, the candy fell out and things like that. 
A silly, trivial thing to do, but think of the difference on a team that didn't do that at all, that got 15 euro, put it in their pocket, maybe bought themselves a coffee, or teams that had this pro-social experience where they bonded together to buy something and do a group activity. 
What we see is that the teams that are pro-social sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves. 
One way to think of it is: for every 15 euro you give people for themselves, they put it in their pocket and don't do anything different than before. 
You don't get money from that; you lose money, since it doesn't motivate them to perform better. 
But when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates, they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money. 
You're probably thinking to yourselves, this is all fine, but there's a context that's incredibly important for public policy, and I can't imagine it would work there. 
And if he doesn't show me that it works here, I don't believe anything he said. 
I know what you're all thinking about are dodgeball teams. 
(Laughter) This was a huge criticism that we got, that if you can't show it with dodgeball teams, this is all stupid. 
So we went and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them, and did the exact same thing as before. 
Other teams, we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates. 
The teams that spend money on themselves have the same winning percentages as before. 
The teams we give the money to spend on each other become different teams; they dominate the league by the time they're done. 
Across all of these different contexts -- your personal life, you work life, even things like intramural sports -- we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself. 
So if you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right. 
The implication isn't you should buy this product instead of that product, and that's the way to make yourself happier. 
It's that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself, and try giving some of it to other people instead. 
And we luckily have an opportunity for you. 
DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools. 
They post projects like, "I want to teach Huckleberry Finn and we don't have the books," or, "I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don't have a microscope." 
You and I can go on and buy it for them. 
The teacher and the kids write you thank-you notes, sometimes they send pictures of them using the microscope. 
It's an extraordinary thing. 
Go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking less about "How can I spend money on myself?" 
and more about "If I've got five dollars or 15 dollars, what can I do to benefit other people?" 
Ultimately, when you do that, you'll find you benefit yourself much more. 
Thank you. 

You probably already know everything is made up of little tiny things called atoms or even that each atom is made up of even smaller particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. 
And you've probably heard that atoms are small. 
But I bet you haven't ever thought about how small atoms really are. 
Well, the answer is that they are really, really small. 
So you ask, just how small are atoms? 
To understand this, let's ask this question: How many atoms are in a grapefruit? 
Well, let's assume that the grapefruit is made up of only nitrogen atoms, which isn't at all true, but there are nitrogen atoms in a grapefruit. 
To help you visualize this, let's blow up each of the atoms to the size of a blueberry. 
And then how big would the grapefruit have to be? 
It would have to be the same size of -- well, actually, the Earth. 
That's crazy! 
You mean to say that if I filled the Earth with blueberries, I would have the same number of nitrogen atoms as a grapefruit? 
That's right! 
So how big is the atom? 
Well, it's really, really small! 
And you know what? It gets even more crazy. 
Let's now look inside of each atom -- and thus the blueberry, right? -- What do you see there? 
In the center of the atom is something called the nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons, and on the outside, you'd see electrons. 
So how big is the nucleus? 
If atoms are like blueberries in the Earth, how big would the nucleus be? 
You might remember the old pictures of the atom from science class, where you saw this tiny dot on the page with an arrow pointing to the nucleus. 
Well, those pictures, they're not drawn to scale, so they're kind of wrong. 
So how big is the nucleus? 
So if you popped open the blueberry and were searching for the nucleus ... 
You know what? It would be invisible. 
It's too small to see! 
OK. Let's blow up the atom -- the blueberry -- to the size of a house. 
So imagine a ball that is as tall as a two-story house. 
Let's look for the nucleus in the center of the atom. 
And do you know what? It would just barely be visible. 
So to get our minds wrapped around how big the nucleus is, we need to blow up the blueberry, up to the size of a football stadium. 
So imagine a ball the size of a football stadium, and right smack dab in the center of the atom, you would find the nucleus, and you could see it! 
And it would be the size of a small marble. 
And there's more, if I haven't blown your mind by now. 
Let's consider the atom some more. 
It contains protons, neutrons and electrons. 
The protons and neutrons live inside of the nucleus, and contain almost all of the mass of the atom. 
Way on the edge are the electrons. 
So if an atom is like a ball the size of a football stadium, with the nucleus in the center, and the electrons on the edge, what is in between the nucleus and the electrons? 
Surprisingly, the answer is empty space. 
(Wind noise) That's right. Empty! 
Between the nucleus and the electrons, there are vast regions of empty space. 
Now, technically there are some electromagnetic fields, but in terms of stuff, matter, it is empty. 
Remember this vast region of empty space is inside the blueberry, which is inside the Earth, which really are the atoms in the grapefruit. 
OK, one more thing, if I can even get more bizarre. 
Since virtually all the mass of an atom is in the nucleus -- now, there is some amount of mass in the electrons, but most of it is in the nucleus -- how dense is the nucleus? 
Well, the answer is crazy. 
The density of a typical nucleus is four times 10 to the 17th kilograms per meter cubed. 
But that's hard to visualize. OK, I'll put it in English units. 
2.5 times 10 to the 16th pounds per cubic feet. 
OK, that's still kind of hard to figure. 
OK, here's what I want you to do. 
Make a box that is one foot by one foot by one foot. 
Now let's go and grab all of the nuclei from a typical car. 
Now, cars on average weigh two tons. 
How many cars' nuclei would you have to put into the box to have your one-foot-box have the same density of the nucleus? 
Is it one car? Two? 
How about 100? 
Nope, nope and nope. 
The answer is much bigger. 
It is 6.2 billion. 
That is almost equal to the number of people in the Earth. 
So if everyone in the Earth owned their own car -- and they don't -- (Cars honking) and we put all of those cars into your box ... 
That would be about the density of a nucleus. 
So I'm saying that if you took every car in the world and put it into your one-foot box, you would have the density of one nucleus. 
OK, let's review. 
The atom is really, really, really small. 
Think atoms in a grapefruit like blueberries in the Earth. 
The nucleus is crazy small. 
Now look inside the blueberry, and blow it up to the size of a football stadium, and now the nucleus is a marble in the middle. 
The atom is made up of vast regions of empty space. 
That's weird. 
The nucleus has a crazy-high density. 
Think of putting all those cars in your one-foot box. 
I think I'm tired. 

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

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

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

I'm going to talk about religion. 
But it's a broad and very delicate subject, so I have to limit myself. 
And therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality. 
(Laughter) This is a very serious talk. 
So I will talk of what I remember as the most wonderful. 
It's when the young couple whisper, "Tonight we are going to make a baby." 
My talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman. 
This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet. 
And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this -- three billion in 1960, seven billion just last year -- and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies, and it may continue like this. 
To what extent are these people right? 
When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world, and today, 2000, there's almost two billion. 
What has happened since, and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century? 
This is a quiz. What do you think? 
Do you think it will decrease to one billion? 
Will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century? 
Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years, or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there? 
I will tell you by the end of my speech. 
But now, what does religion have to do with it? 
When you want to classify religion, it's more difficult than you think. 
You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this. 
It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion, but that's not detailed enough. 
So we went on and we looked in Wikipedia, we found this map. 
But that subdivides Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups, which was too detailed. 
Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map, and it looks like this. 
Each country's a bubble. 
The size is the population -- big China, big India here. 
And the color now is the majority religion. 
It's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong. 
It's Eastern religion in India and China and neighboring Asian countries. 
Islam is the majority religion all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across the Middle East, Southern Europe and through Asia all the way to Indonesia. 
That's where we find Islamic majority. 
And Christian majority religions, we see in these countries. They are blue. 
And that is most countries in America and Europe, many countries in Africa and a few in Asia. 
The white here are countries which cannot be classified, because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there's some other reason. 
So we were careful with that. 
So bear with our simplicity now when I take you over to this shot. 
This is in 1960. 
And now I show the number of babies per woman here: two, four or six -- many babies, few babies. 
And here the income per person in comparable dollars. 
The reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies. 
So low income here, high income there. 
And indeed in 1960, you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies. 
The exception was Japan. 
Japan here was regarded as an exception. 
Otherwise it was only Christian countries. 
But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman. 
But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa. 
And countries with Islam as the majority religion, all of them almost had six to seven children per woman, irregardless of the income level. 
And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level. 
Now let's see what has happened in the world. 
I start the world, and here we go. 
Now 1962 -- can you see they're getting a little richer, but the number of babies per woman is falling? 
Look at China. They're falling fairly fast. 
And all of the Muslim majority countries across the income are coming down, as do the Christian majority countries in the middle income range. 
And when we enter into this century, you'll find more than half of mankind down here. 
And by 2010, we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman. 
(Applause) It's a quite amazing development which has happened. 
(Applause) And these are countries from United States here, with $40,000 per capita, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam, which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman. 
I can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries. 
We get that from the census data. 
It's not one of these statistics which is very doubtful. 
So what we can conclude is you don't have to get rich to have few children. 
It has happened across the world. 
And then when we look at religions, we can see that the Eastern religions, indeed there's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children. 
Whereas with Islam as a majority religion and Christianity, you see countries all the way. 
But there's no major difference. 
There's no major difference between these religions. 
There is a difference with income. 
The countries which have many babies per woman here, they have quite low income. 
Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. 
But there are also countries here like Guatemala, like Papua New Guinea, like Yemen and Afghanistan. 
Many think that Afghanistan here and Congo, which have suffered severe conflicts, that they don't have fast population growth. 
It's the other way around. 
In the world today, it's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth. 
Because the death of a child is compensated by one more child. 
These countries have six children per woman. 
They have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman. 
But 30 years from now, Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million. 
Congo will go from 60 to 120. 
That's where we have the fast population growth. 
And many think that these countries are stagnant, but they are not. 
Let me compare Senegal, a Muslim dominated country, with a Christian dominated country, Ghana. 
I take them backwards here to their independence, when they were up here in the beginning of the 1960s. 
Just look what they have done. 
It's an amazing improvement, from seven children per woman, they've gone all the way down to between four and five. 
It's a tremendous improvement. 
So what does it take? 
Well we know quite well what is needed in these countries. 
You need to have children to survive. 
You need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family. 
You need to have access to some family planning. 
And you need the fourth factor, which perhaps is the most important factor. 
But let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at Qatar. 
Here we have Qatar today, and there we have Bangladesh today. 
If I take these countries back to the years of their independence, which is almost the same year -- '71, '72 -- it's a quite amazing development which had happened. 
Look at Bangladesh and Qatar. 
With so different incomes, it's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman. 
And what is the reason in Qatar? 
Well I do as I always do. 
I went to the statistical authority of Qatar, to their webpage -- It's a very good webpage. I recommend it -- and I looked up -- oh yeah, you can have lots of fun here -- and provided free of charge, I found Qatar's social trends. 
Very interesting. Lots to read. 
I found fertility at birth, and I looked at total fertility rate per woman. 
These are the scholars and experts in the government agency in Qatar, and they say the most important factors are: "Increased age at first marriage, increased educational level of Qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force." 
I couldn't agree more. Science couldn't agree more. 
This is a country that indeed has gone through a very, very interesting modernization. 
So what it is, is these four: Children should survive, children shouldn't be needed for work, women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible. 
Now look again at this. 
The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia -- it's 2.4 today. 
There are countries up here which are very poor. 
And that's where family planning, better child survival is needed. 
I strongly recommend Melinda Gates' last TEDTalk. 
And here, down, there are many countries which are less than two children per woman. 
So when I go back now to give you the answer of the quiz, it's two. 
We have reached peak child. 
The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. 
We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child. 
And the world population will stop growing. 
The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion. 
But why do they grow if the number of children doesn't grow? 
Well I will show you here. 
I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came. 
They are quite useful for educational purposes. 
Each card box is one billion people. 
And there are two billion children in the world. 
There are two billion young people between 15 and 30. 
These are rounded numbers. 
Then there is one billion between 30 and 45, almost one between 45 and 60. 
And then it's my box. 
This is me: 60-plus. 
We are here on top. 
So what will happen now is what we call "the big fill-up." 
You can see that it's like three billion missing here. 
They are not missing because they've died; they were never born. 
Because before 1980, there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years. 
So what will happen now is quite straightforward. 
The old, sadly, we will die. 
The rest of you, you will grow older and you will get two billion children. 
Then the old will die. 
The rest will grow older and get two billion children. 
And then again the old will die and you will get two billion children. 
(Applause) This is the great fill-up. 
It's inevitable. 
And can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children? 
Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman. 
All the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world. 
And we will be just 10 billion in this world, if the poorest people get out of poverty, their children survive, they get access to family planning. 
That is needed. 
But it's inevitable that we will be two to three billion more. 
So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. 
But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. 
They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. 
However, over time, I got used to looking for them. 
I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. 
This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. 
And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. 
Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile. 
And my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. 
This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. 
For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently. 
So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. 
This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Mendes. 
And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. 
What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians. 
What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. 
Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom, about four thousand years ago. 
The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important, because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. 
Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plain. 
This area is huge -- it's four miles by three miles in size. 
The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. 
So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? 
Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts. 
(Laughter) So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. 
We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. 
But you can see in more detail, and even more interesting, this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy. 
So we collaborated with Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. 
When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change, you're looking for layers of human occupation. 
And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. 
What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have a layer of occupation for several hundred years, dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. 
We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jeweler's workshop here. 
These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used. 
So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. 
We also have evidence of an elite jeweler's workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. 
No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. 
And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well. 
So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom -- it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. 
"Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. 
There's nothing like it in the land." 
So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD. 
(Laughter) Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. 
It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As a magician, I'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion. 
And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century. 
It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage. Now, I won't use mirrors, but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater. 
So let the story begin. 
On a dark and stormy night -- really! -- it was the 10th of July, 1856. 
Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born. 
His name was Nikola, Nikola Tesla. 
Now the baby grew into a very smart guy. 
Let me show you. 
Tesla, what is 236 multiplied by 501? 
Nikola Tesla: The result is 118,236. 
Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way. 
When a word was mentioned, an image of it instantly appeared in his mind. 
Tree. Chair. Girl. 
They were hallucinations, which vanished the moment he touched them. 
Probably a form of synesthesia. 
But it was something he later turned to his advantage. 
Where other scientists would play in their laboratory, Tesla created his inventions in his mind. 
NT: To my delight, I discovered I could visualize my inventions with the greatest facility. 
MT: And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination, he would build them in his workshop. 
NT: I needed no models, drawings or experiments. 
I could picture them as real in my mind, and there I run it, test it and improve it. 
Only then do I construct it. 
MT: His great idea was alternating current. 
But how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe? 
To sell his idea, he became a showman. 
NT: We are at the dawn of a new age, the age of electricity. 
I have been able, through careful invention, to transmit, with the mere flick of a switch, electricity across the ether. 
It is the magic of science. 
(Applause) Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics. 
He even photographed the bones of the human body. 
But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city. 
But Tesla's success didn't last. 
NT: I had bigger ideas. 
Illuminating the city was only the beginning. 
A world telegraphy center -- imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly. 
MT: It's a great idea; it was a huge project. Expensive, too. 
NT: They wouldn't give me the money. 
MT: Well, maybe you shouldn't have told them it could be used to contact other planets. 
NT: Yes, that was a big mistake. 
MT: Tesla's career as an inventor never recovered. 
He became a recluse. 
Dodged by death, he spent much of his time in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. 
NT: Everything I did, I did for mankind, for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich, where products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life. 
MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943. 
His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. 
His legacy is with us still. 
Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning. 
Tesla's insight was profound. 
NT: Tell me, what will man do when the forests disappear, and the coal deposits are exhausted? 
MT: Tesla thought he had the answer. 
We are still asking the question. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

(Music) (Applause) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Chris Anderson: You guys were amazing. 
That's amazing. 
(Applause) You just don't hear that every day. 
(Laughter) Usman, the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching Jimmy Page on YouTube. 
Usman Riaz: Yes, that was the first one. And then I -- That was the first thing I learned, and then I started progressing to other things. 
And I started watching Kaki King a lot, and she would always cite Preston Reed as a big influence, so then I started watching his videos, and it's very surreal right now to be -- (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Was that piece just now, that was one of his songs that you learned, or how did that happen? 
UR: I'd never learned it before, but he told me that we would be playing that on stage, so I was familiar with it, so that's why I had so much more fun learning it. 
And it finally happened, so ... 
(Laughter) CA: Preston, from your point of view, I mean, you invented this like 20 years ago, right? 
How does it feel to see someone like this come along taking your art and doing so much with it? 
Preston Reed: It's mind-blowing, and I feel really proud, really honored. 
And he's a wonderful musician, so it's cool. 
(Laughter) CA: I guess, I don't think there is like a one-minute other piece you guys can do? 
Can you? Do you jam? Do you have anything else? 
PR: We haven't prepared anything. 
CA: There isn't. I'll tell you what. 
If you have another 30 or 40 seconds, and you have another 30 or 40 seconds, and we just see that, I just think -- I can feel it. We want to hear a little more. 
And if it goes horribly wrong, no worries. 
(Applause) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) 

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

(Music) (Vocalizing) Ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndisuse iinkathazo. 
Ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndikhuphe iinkathazo. 
(Vocalizing) (Improvising) Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma. 
Ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndisuse iinkathazo ndicela iyeza iyeza lokughabha ndisuse iinkathazo ndicela iyeza lokuhlamba ndisuse iinkathazo. 
(Vocalizing) Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, Thongo lam vuma, Lam vuma, lam vuma. 
(Improvising) (Music ends) (Applause) Thandiswa Mazwai: Hello everybody. 
Thank you so much for having us here. 
My name is Thandiswa Mazwai. 
I am a wild woman, a rebel singer, a conduit. 
My music is about memory and struggling between oppresion and freedom. 
After over 20 years in South Africa we find ourselves as the black masses still suffering and fighting for our freedom and humanity. 
This first song was called "Iyeza" which means "medicine." 
Medicine for our madness, medicine for our rage. 
This song we're doing now is called "Zabalaza," and it means "rebel." 
I'd like to dedicate this to the valiant student movement in South Africa who came up with the #FeesMustFall. 
(Applause) Rhodes Must Fall. 
(Applause) But more importantly, the new vigor that has been brought into the feminist movement so patriarchy must fall. 
(Applause) (Music) Gogo bek' umthwalo Kunin' uhlupheka? 
Little ghetto child Ungazibulali sana Oh ... 
If you take my hand, I'll show you how to be free. 
Ayifanelang' ub' iyenzeka lento Emzini kabawo kunge kudala Sizozabalaza. 
Zabalaza, zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
Sizozabalaza. 
Zabalaza, zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
Zabalaza, zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
(Vocalizing) (Improvising) It's my people in Soweto, my people in Mozambique, my people in Senegal. 
These are my people in the ghettos. 
Zabalaza, zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
Zabalaza. 
(Music ends) (Applause) (Cheering) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

At age four, I found a garden, living underneath the kitchen floor. 
It was hiding behind leftover patches of linoleum on the worn-out floor my mother was having removed. 
The workman was busy when the garden caught my attention. 
My eyes became glued to the patterns of embroidered roses blooming across my childhood landscape. 
I saw them and felt a sense of joy and adventure. 
This excitement felt like a feeling to go forward into something I knew nothing about. 
My passion and connection to garden started at that exact moment. 
When spring arrived, I ran so fast through the house, speeding ahead of my mother's voice. 
I pulled on my red corduroy jumper and my grey plaid wool hat before my mother could get her jacket on. 
I catapulted out of the front screen door and threw myself on a fresh carpet of grass. 
Excited, I bounced to my feet and flipped three more cartwheels before landing by her side. 
Mother dear was in the garden busy breaking up the soil, and I sat beside her, playing with mud pies in the flower bed. 
When her work was done, she rewarded me with an ice-cold glass of bittersweet lemonade and then lined my shoes with sprigs of mint to cool off my feet. 
My mother cooked with the colors and textures of her garden. 
She baked yams and squash and heirloom tomatoes and carrots. 
She fed love to a generation of people with purple hull peas and greens. 
It seems that during my childhood, the blooms from my mother's gardens have healed all the way from her halo to the roots on the soles of our feet. 
In our last conversation before her death, she encouraged me to go anywhere in the world that would make me happy. 
Since then, I have planted her gardens through art installations throughout the world, in countries of the people that I meet. 
Now they are lining parks and courtyards, painted on walls and even in blighted lots off the street. 
If you were in Berlin, Germany, you would have seen my garden at Stilwerk Design Center, where rosemary and lavender, hydrangea and lemon balm trailed up the glass elevators to all six floors. 
In 2009, I planted "Philosophers Garden," a garden mural, blooming at the historic Frederick Douglass High School in Memphis, Tennessee. 
This school’s garden fed an entire community and was honored by Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression. 
Again, in 2011, I planted at Court Square Park -- six entry gardens with 80 varieties of deliciously fragrant floribunda and hybrid tea roses. 
Gardening has taught me that planting and growing a garden is the same process as creating our lives. 
This process of creation begins in the spring, when you break up the soil and start anew. 
Then it's time to clear out the dead leaves, debris and roots of the winter. 
The gardener must then make sure that a good disposition and the proper nutrients are correctly mixed in the soil. 
Then it's important to aerate the topsoil and leave it loosely packed on the surface. 
You won't get those beautiful blooms in life until you first do the work just right. 
When our gardens are balanced with care, we can harvest the beauty of living a life of grace. 
In the forests, when trees realize through their roots that another tree is sick, they will send a portion of their nutrients to that tree to help them to heal. 
They never think about what will happen to them or feel vulnerable when they do. 
When a tree is dying, it releases all of its nutrients to other trees that need it the most. 
Below the surface, we are all connected by our roots and sharing nutrients with each other. 
It's only when we come together that we can honestly grow. 
It's the same for humans in the garden of hardship. 
In this garden, when the caterpillar transforms into a chrysalis, this involves some struggle. 
But it's a challenge with a purpose. 
Without this painful fight to break free from the confines of the cocoon, the newly formed butterfly can't strengthen its wings. 
Without the battle, the butterfly dies without ever taking flight. 
My life's work is to illustrate how to integrate human connectivity into the garden. 
Gardens are full of magical wisdom for this transformation. 
Mother Nature is creative energy waiting to be born. 
Gardens are a mirror that cast their own reflection into our waking lives. 
So nurture your talents and strengths while you appreciate all you've been given. 
Remain humble to healing. 
And maintain compassion for others. 
Cultivate your garden for giving and plant those seeds for the future. 
The garden is the world living deep inside of you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) 

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

Thanks very much. 
I am Hannah Fry, the badass. 
And today I'm asking the question: Is life really that complex? 
Now, I've only got nine minutes to try and provide you with an answer, so what I've done is split this neatly into two parts: part one: yes; and later on, part two: no. 
Or, to be more accurate: no? 
(Laughter) So first of all, let me try and define what I mean by "complex." 
Now, I could give you a host of formal definitions, but in the simplest terms, any problem in complexity is something that Einstein and his peers can't do. 
So, let's imagine -- if the clicker works ... there we go. 
Einstein is playing a game of snooker. 
He's a clever chap, so he knows that when he hits the cue ball, he could write you an equation and tell you exactly where the red ball is going to hit the sides, how fast it's going and where it's going to end up. 
Now, if you scale these snooker balls up to the size of the solar system, Einstein can still help you. 
Sure, the physics changes, but if you wanted to know about the path of the Earth around the Sun, Einstein could write you an equation telling you where both objects are at any point in time. 
Now, with a surprising increase in difficulty, Einstein could include the Moon in his calculations. 
But as you add more and more planets, Mars and Jupiter, say, the problem gets too tough for Einstein to solve with a pen and paper. 
Now, strangely, if instead of having a handful of planets, you had millions of objects or even billions, the problem actually becomes much simpler, and Einstein is back in the game. 
Let me explain what I mean by this, by scaling these objects back down to a molecular level. 
If you wanted to trace the erratic path of an individual air molecule, you'd have absolutely no hope. 
But when you have millions of air molecules all together, they start to act in a way which is quantifiable, predictable and well-behaved. 
And thank goodness air is well-behaved, because if it wasn't, planes would fall out of the sky. 
Now, on an even bigger scale, across the whole of the world, the idea is exactly the same with all of these air molecules. 
It's true that you can't take an individual rain droplet and say where it's come from or where it's going to end up. 
But you can say with pretty good certainty whether it will be cloudy tomorrow. 
So that's it. 
In Einstein's time, this is how far science had got. 
We could do really small problems with a few objects with simple interactions, or we could do huge problems with millions of objects and simple interactions. 
But what about everything in the middle? 
Well, just seven years before Einstein's death, an American scientist called Warren Weaver made exactly this point. 
He said that scientific methodology has gone from one extreme to another, leaving out an untouched great middle region. 
Now, this middle region is where complexity science lies, and this is what I mean by complex. 
Now, unfortunately, almost every single problem you can think of to do with human behavior lies in this middle region. 
Einstein's got absolutely no idea how to model the movement of a crowd. 
There are too many people to look at them all individually and too few to treat them as a gas. 
Similarly, people are prone to annoying things like decisions and not wanting to walk into each other, which makes the problem all the more complicated. 
Einstein also couldn't tell you when the next stock market crash is going to be. 
Einstein couldn't tell you how to improve unemployment. 
Einstein can't even tell you whether the next iPhone is going to be a hit or a flop. 
So to conclude part one: we're completely screwed. 
We've got no tools to deal with this, and life is way too complex. 
But maybe there's hope, because in the last few years, we've begun to see the beginnings of a new area of science using mathematics to model our social systems. 
And I'm not just talking here about statistics and computer simulations. 
I'm talking about writing down equations about our society that will help us understand what's going on in the same way as with the snooker balls or the weather prediction. 
And this has come about because people have begun to realize that we can use and exploit analogies between our human systems and those of the physical world around us. 
Now, to give you an example: the incredibly complex problem of migration across Europe. 
Actually, as it turns out, when you view all of the people together, collectively, they behave as though they're following the laws of gravity. 
But instead of planets being attracted to one another, it's people who are attracted to areas with better job opportunities, higher pay, better quality of life and lower unemployment. 
And in the same way as people are more likely to go for opportunities close to where they live already -- London to Kent, for example, as opposed to London to Melbourne -- the gravitational effect of planets far away is felt much less. 
So, to give you another example: in 2008, a group in UCLA were looking into the patterns of burglary hot spots in the city. 
Now, one thing about burglaries is this idea of repeat victimization. 
So if you have a group of burglars who manage to successfully rob an area, they'll tend to return to that area and carry on burgling it. 
So they learn the layout of the houses, the escape routes and the local security measures that are in place. 
And this will continue to happen until local residents and police ramp up the security, at which point, the burglars will move off elsewhere. 
And it's that balance between burglars and security which creates these dynamic hot spots of the city. 
As it turns out, this is exactly the same process as how a leopard gets its spots, except in the leopard example, it's not burglars and security, it's the chemical process that creates these patterns and something called "morphogenesis." 
We actually know an awful lot about the morphogenesis of leopard spots. 
Maybe we can use this to try and spot some of the warning signs with burglaries and perhaps, also to create better crime strategies to prevent crime. 
There's a group here at UCL who are working with the West Midlands police right now on this very question. 
I could give you plenty of examples like this, but I wanted to leave you with one from my own research on the London riots. 
Now, you probably don't need me to tell you about the events of last summer, where London and the UK saw the worst sustained period of violent looting and arson for over twenty years. 
It's understandable that, as a society, we want to try and understand exactly what caused these riots, but also, perhaps, to equip our police with better strategies to lead to a swifter resolution in the future. 
Now, I don't want to upset the sociologists here, so I absolutely cannot talk about the individual motivations for a rioter, but when you look at the rioters all together, mathematically, you can separate it into a three-stage process and draw analogies accordingly. 
So, step one: let's say you've got a group of friends. 
None of them are involved in the riots, but one of them walks past a Foot Locker which is being raided, and goes in and bags himself a new pair of trainers. 
He texts one of his friends and says, "Come on down to the riots." 
So his friend joins him, and then the two of them text more of their friends, who join them, and text more of their friends and more and more, and so it continues. 
This process is identical to the way that a virus spreads through a population. 
If you think about the bird flu epidemic of a couple of years ago, the more people that were infected, the more people that got infected, and the faster the virus spread before the authorities managed to get a handle on events. 
And it's exactly the same process here. 
So let's say you've got a rioter, he's decided he's going to riot. 
The next thing he has to do is pick a riot site. 
Now, what you should know about rioters is that, um ... 
Oops, clicker's gone. There we go. 
What you should know about rioters is, they're not prepared to travel that far from where they live, unless it's a really juicy riot site. 
(Laughter) So you can see that here from this graph, with an awful lot of rioters having traveled less than a kilometer to the site that they went to. 
Now, this pattern is seen in consumer models of retail spending, i.e., where we choose to go shopping. 
So, of course, people like to go to local shops, but you'd be prepared to go a little bit further if it was a really good retail site. 
And this analogy, actually, was already picked up by some of the papers, with some tabloid press calling the events "Shopping with violence," which probably sums it up in terms of our research. 
Oh! -- we're going backwards. 
OK, step three. 
Finally, the rioter is at his site, and he wants to avoid getting caught by the police. 
The rioters will avoid the police at all times, but there is some safety in numbers. 
And on the flip side, the police, with their limited resources, are trying to protect as much of the city as possible, arrest rioters wherever possible and to create a deterrent effect. 
And actually, as it turns out, this mechanism between the two species, so to speak, of rioters and police, is identical to predators and prey in the wild. 
So if you can imagine rabbits and foxes, rabbits are trying to avoid foxes at all costs, while foxes are patrolling the space, trying to look for rabbits. 
We actually know an awful lot about the dynamics of predators and prey. 
We also know a lot about consumer spending flows. 
And we know a lot about how viruses spread through a population. 
So if you take these three analogies together and exploit them, you can come up with a mathematical model of what actually happened, that's capable of replicating the general patterns of the riots themselves. 
Now, once we've got this, we can almost use this as a petri dish and start having conversations about which areas of the city were more susceptible than others and what police tactics could be used if this were ever to happen again in the future. 
Even twenty years ago, modeling of this sort was completely unheard of. 
But I think that these analogies are an incredibly important tool in tackling problems with our society, and perhaps, ultimately improving our society overall. 
So, to conclude: life is complex, but perhaps understanding it need not necessarily be that complicated. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Listen to the sounds of why hearing matters to the Alaskan Native people. 
Hearing loss makes it hard to fish on the open water, hunt caribou and harvest berries, activities central to Alaskan Native culture. 
Hearing loss isn't unique to rural Alaska. 
It's global. 
The Global Burden of Disease Project estimates there are 1.1 billion people living with hearing loss worldwide. 
That's more people than the entire population here in sub-Saharan Africa. 
Over 80 percent are in low- and middle-income countries, and many have no access to hearing care. 
The impact on people's lives is tremendous. 
Anuk is a three-year-old boy I treated in Alaska. 
Ear infections started when he was barely four months old. 
His parents brought him into clinic, worried he didn't say much compared to his brothers. 
Sure enough, many rounds of infections had resulted in hearing loss. 
Without treatment, Anuk's speech will continue to lag behind. 
He's more likely to do worse in school, have worse job prospects and experience social isolation. 
But it doesn't have to be this way. 
The World Health Organization estimates that half of all global hearing loss can be prevented. 
If Anuk's hearing loss is identified and treated promptly, his life and the opportunities he has as he grows up could look vastly different. 
I'm an ear surgeon working with partners around the world on new pathways for hearing loss prevention. 
This solution comes from my collaboration with a tribal health organization called the Norton Sound Health Corporation. 
Hearing loss evaluation traditionally requires testing by an audiologist in a soundproof room, with a lot of permanent equipment. 
An ear surgeon then examines Anuk's ears under a microscope and decides a treatment plan. 
These resources simply aren't available in remote settings. 
In a state where 75 percent of communities aren't connected to a hospital by road, an expensive flight is required. 
To overcome these barriers, Alaska has developed a state-of-the-art telemedicine system that connects over 250 village health clinics with specialists who triage all types of health concerns. 
My colleagues have validated that ear-related telemedicine consults are equivalent to an in-person exam. 
In 2016, travel was prevented for 91 percent of patients receiving specialty telemedicine in the Norton Sound region. 
Telemedicine has saved over 18 million in travel costs in this single region over the past 15 years. 
Our team is taking the power of telemedicine to a new level, through a project funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. 
For the first time, we are merging telemedicine with mobile screening technology that extends the reach of expert triage beyond health care settings. 
This cell-based screen, developed in South Africa, costs over 10 times less than traditional equipment and does not require advanced training. 
If I were screening Anuk at school, sound-attenuating headphones and noise monitoring would take the place of a sound booth, and I would use a phone adapter instead of a microscope to examine his ears. 
In a matter of minutes, screening and images are done. 
We then apply Alaska telemedicine technology to transmit the data to specialists, who connect Anuk to the treatment he needs. 
Our team is launching a randomized trial in 15 communities along the Bering Sea to study how well this intervention works. 
Our goal is to prevent childhood hearing loss across the state of Alaska. 
But the concept is bigger than a single state. 
The impact is global. 
Mobile telemedicine can revolutionize access to care. 
In Malawi, for example, there are only two ear surgeons and 11 audiologists for a population of 17 million. 
This technology could empower teachers and community health workers to provide access to care to children in places like Malawi. 
Scaling up globally could change children's lives who have never had access to hearing care before, using just the power of a cell phone. 
It's time to change the course of preventable hearing loss. 
Anuk and countless children like him are depending on us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. 
We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. 
So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. 
And these projects came from questions I had, like: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? 
(Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? 
How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? 
How can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? 
Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. 
My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. 
I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. 
(Laughter) The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. 
I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. 
In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. 
Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me. 
And her death was sudden and unexpected. 
And I thought about death a lot. 
And ... this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had. 
And ... brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. 
But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. 
I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. 
So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ..." 
So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their life, and share their personal aspirations in public space. 
I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. 
And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. 
"Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." 
(Laughter) "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Dateline." 
"Before I die, I want to sing for millions." 
"Before I die, I want to plant a tree." 
"Before I die, I want to live off the grid." 
"Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." 
"Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." 
"Before I die, I want to be completely myself." 
So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. 
It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. 
I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community. 
So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. 
Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another. 
Two of the most valuable things we have are time, and our relationships with other people. 
In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective, and remember that life is brief and tender. 
Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about, or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. 
Thinking about death clarifies your life. 
Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated -- (Laughter) Oh! 
(Laughter) OK, I meant younger and more short. 
(Laughter) If that's possible to imagine. 
But ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated with how the world worked exactly how it did. 
So this, very early on, led me to the fields of mathematics and chemistry. 
I would keep going further and further, and as I kept going, I realized that all the fields of science are interconnected. 
And without one, the others have little or no value. 
So, inspired by Marie Curie and my local science museum, I decided to start asking these questions myself and engage in my own independent research, whether it be out of my garage or my bedroom. 
I started reading journal papers, started doing science competitions, started participating in science fairs, doing anything I could to get the knowledge that I so desperately wanted. 
So while I was studying anatomy for a competition, I came across the topic of something called chronic wounds. 
And one thing that stood out to me was a statistic that said that the number of people in the United States with chronic wounds exceeds the number of people with breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer and leukemia, combined. 
Hold up. 
So what is a chronic wound? 
(Laughter) And why haven't I heard about a 5K walk for chronic wounds, why haven't I even heard about a chronic wound in general? 
(Laughter) So after I got past those preliminary questions, and one that I will clarify for you, a chronic wound is essentially when someone gets a normal wound, except it fails to heal normally because the patient has some kind of preexisting condition, which in most cases is diabetes. 
So more staggering statistics were to be found as I kept going on in this research. 
In the year 2010 alone, 50 billion dollars were spent worldwide to treat chronic wounds. 
In addition, it's estimated that about two percent of the population will get a chronic wound at some point in their lifetime. 
This was absurd. 
So as I started doing more research, I found that there was a correlation between the moisture level inside a wound dressing and the stage of healing that the chronic wound would be at. 
So I decided, why don't I design something to measure the moisture level within the wound so this can help doctors and patients treat their wounds better. 
And essentially, expedite the healing process. 
So that's exactly what I set out to do. 
Being a 14-year-old working out of her garage-turned-lab, I had a lot of constraints. 
Most being that I wasn't given a grant, I wasn't given a lot of money, and I wasn't given a lot of resources. 
In addition, I had a lot of criteria, as well. 
Since this product would be readily interacting with the body, it had to be biocompatible, it also had to be low-cost, as I was designing it and paying for it myself. 
It also had to be mass-manufacturable, because I wanted it to be made anywhere, for anyone. 
Thus, I drafted up a schematic. 
What you see on the left hand-side is the early schematics in my design, showing both a bird's-eye view and also one stacking variant. 
A stacking variant means that the entire product is consisted of different individual parts that have to work in unison. 
And what's shown there is one possible arrangement. 
So what exactly is this? 
So I had gone on to testing my sensors and as all scientists have stumbles along their work, I also had a couple of problems in my first generation of sensors. 
First of all, I couldn't figure out how to get a nanoparticle ink into a printcheck cartridge without spilling it all over my carpet. 
That was problem number one. 
Problem number two was, I couldn't exactly control the sensitivity of my sensors. 
I couldn't scale them up or down, I couldn't really do anything of that sort. 
So I wanted something to solve it. 
Problem one was easily solved by some scouting on eBay and Amazon for syringes that I could use. 
Problem two, however, required a lot more thought. 
So this is where this factors in. 
So what a space-filling curve does is it aims to take up all the area it can within one unit square. 
And by writing a computer program, you can have different iterations of the different curve, which increasingly get close to one unit square, but never quite reaches there. 
So now I could control the thickness, the size, I could do whatever I want with it, and I could predict my results. 
So I started constructing my sensors and testing them more rigorously, using money that I had gotten from previous science fair awards. 
Lastly, I had to connect this data in order to be read. 
So I interfaced it with a Bluetooth chip, which you can see here by the app screenshots on the right. 
And what this does is that anyone can monitor the progress of their wound, and it can be transmitted over a wireless connection to the doctor, the patient or whoever needs it. 
[Continued Testing and Refinement] So in conclusion, my design was successful -- however, science never ends. 
There's always something to be done, something to be refined. 
So that's what I'm currently in the process of doing. 
However, what I learned was what's more important than the actual thing I designed is an attitude that I had taken on while doing this. 
And that attitude was, even though I'm a 14-year-old working in her garage on something that she doesn't completely understand, I could still make a difference and contribute to the field. 
And that's what inspired me to keep going, and I hope it inspires many others to also do work like this even though they're not very sure about it. 
So I hope that's a message that you all take on today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. 
But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body. 
So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? 
Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. 
Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. 
Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. 
So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now. 
We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds. 
So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. 
You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. 
Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. 
This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. 
Here comes the Prime Minister -- No. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause) Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. 
Even the BBC and The New York Times. 
So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we think about communication. 
When we think about communication, we think about interactions. 
So what is your body language communicating to me? 
What's mine communicating to you? 
And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. 
So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. 
And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. 
And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. 
For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. 
So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? 
Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation. 
If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? 
So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. 
We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. 
We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology. 
So what nonverbals am I talking about? 
I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. 
I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance. 
And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? 
Well, this is what they are. 
So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. 
So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up. 
It's about opening up. 
And this is true across the animal kingdom. 
It's not just limited to primates. 
And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. 
And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. 
This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. 
She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. 
So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it. 
They do this. 
So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted. 
What do we do when we feel powerless? 
We do exactly the opposite. 
We close up. We wrap ourselves up. 
We make ourselves small. 
We don't want to bump into the person next to us. 
So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. 
And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. 
So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals. 
So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them. 
We do the opposite of them. 
So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? 
I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. 
So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. 
When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. 
They raise their hands like this. 
You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it. 
You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand. 
I notice a couple of things about this. 
One, you're not going to be surprised. 
It seems to be related to gender. 
So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. 
Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising. 
But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. 
And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade. 
So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. 
You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. 
So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating. 
Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more? 
So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? 
Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? 
So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence. 
But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves? 
There's some evidence that they do. 
So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. 
So it goes both ways. 
When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. 
So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful. 
So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? 
And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? 
So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. 
So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? 
So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. 
They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance. 
They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. 
So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. 
There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. 
Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. 
So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. 
So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. 
But really, power is also about how you react to stress. 
So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? 
Probably not, right? 
You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back. 
So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. 
So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. 
So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? 
"For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this, and it's going to make you feel more powerful." 
So this is what we did. 
We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. 
So here's one. 
A couple more. 
This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman" by the media. 
Here are a couple more. 
So you can be standing or you can be sitting. 
And here are the low-power poses. 
So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. 
This one is very low-power. 
When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself. 
So this is what happens. 
They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, "You need to do this or this." 
They don't look at pictures of the poses. 
We don't want to prime them with a concept of power. 
We want them to be feeling power. 
So two minutes they do this. 
We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. 
That's it. That's the whole experiment. 
So this is what we find. 
Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. 
When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference. 
Here's what we find on testosterone. 
From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. 
So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. 
Here's what you get on cortisol. 
High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. 
So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. 
And we've all had the feeling, right? 
So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. 
Also, our bodies change our minds. 
But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? 
This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes. 
Where can you actually apply this? 
Which we cared about, of course. 
And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. 
Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? 
For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table. 
For some people it's speaking at a school board meeting. 
It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. 
We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview. 
So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right? 
(Laughter) You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that's not what we meant at all. 
For numerous reasons, no, don't do that. 
Again, this is not about you talking to other people. 
It's you talking to yourself. 
What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. 
You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone -- or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. 
You're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. 
So that's what we want to test. Okay? 
So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. 
It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. 
They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. 
Imagine this is the person interviewing you. 
So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. 
People hate this. 
It's what Marianne LaFrance calls "standing in social quicksand." 
So this really spikes your cortisol. 
So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. 
We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. 
They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. 
They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, "We want to hire these people," all the high-power posers. 
"We don't want to hire these people. 
We also evaluate these people much more positively overall." 
But what's driving it? 
It's not about the content of the speech. 
It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. 
Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? 
How good is it? What are their qualifications? 
No effect on those things. This is what's affected. 
These kinds of things. 
People are bringing their true selves, basically. 
They're bringing themselves. 
They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. 
So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect. 
So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, "It feels fake." Right? 
So I said, fake it till you make it. 
It's not me. 
I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. 
I don't want to feel like an impostor. 
I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. 
And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here. 
When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. 
I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. 
I was thrown from the car. 
And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. 
I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. 
So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. 
They say, "You're not going to finish college. 
Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you." 
So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. 
So I felt entirely powerless. 
I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked. 
Eventually I graduated from college. 
It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. 
I am an impostor. 
And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. 
That's it. 
I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, "I'm quitting." 
She was like, "You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. 
You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. 
You are going to fake it. 
You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. 
You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. 
Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'" So that's what I did. 
Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, "Not supposed to be here." 
So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail," came into my office. I really didn't know her at all. 
She came in totally defeated, and she said, "I'm not supposed to be here." 
And that was the moment for me. 
Because two things happened. 
One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. 
I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. 
And the second was, she is supposed to be here! 
Like, she can fake it, she can become it. 
So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! 
And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know -- (Applause) And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever." 
You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there. (Laughter) She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. 
So she had changed. 
And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. 
Fake it till you become it. 
Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize. 
The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. 
Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. 
So, this is two minutes. 
Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. 
Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. 
That's what you want to do. 
Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. 
Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. 
Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. 
Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am. 
So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. 
I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. 
Give it to them because they can do it in private. 
They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Cello music starts) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, steady love. 
You rocked me, you rocked me, you rocked me all through the night with your steady, steady love. 
(Cello music continues) (Taps rhythmically) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, your steady, steady love. 
And you rocked me, you rocked me, you rocked me all through the night with your steady, steady, steady love. 
(Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

Hello, everyone. 
It's a bit funny, because I did write that humans will become digital, but I didn't think it will happen so fast and that it will happen to me. 
But here I am, as a digital avatar, and here you are, so let's start. 
And let's start with a question. 
How many fascists are there in the audience today? 
(Laughter) Well, it's a bit difficult to say, because we've forgotten what fascism is. 
People now use the term "fascist" as a kind of general-purpose abuse. 
Or they confuse fascism with nationalism. 
So let's take a few minutes to clarify what fascism actually is, and how it is different from nationalism. 
The milder forms of nationalism have been among the most benevolent of human creations. 
Nations are communities of millions of strangers who don't really know each other. 
For example, I don't know the eight million people who share my Israeli citizenship. 
But thanks to nationalism, we can all care about one another and cooperate effectively. 
This is very good. 
Some people, like John Lennon, imagine that without nationalism, the world will be a peaceful paradise. 
But far more likely, without nationalism, we would have been living in tribal chaos. 
If you look today at the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world, countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Japan, you will see that they have a very strong sense of nationalism. 
In contrast, countries that lack a strong sense of nationalism, like Congo and Somalia and Afghanistan, tend to be violent and poor. 
So what is fascism, and how is it different from nationalism? 
Well, nationalism tells me that my nation is unique, and that I have special obligations towards my nation. 
Fascism, in contrast, tells me that my nation is supreme, and that I have exclusive obligations towards it. 
I don't need to care about anybody or anything other than my nation. 
Usually, of course, people have many identities and loyalties to different groups. 
For example, I can be a good patriot, loyal to my country, and at the same time, be loyal to my family, my neighborhood, my profession, humankind as a whole, truth and beauty. 
Of course, when I have different identities and loyalties, it sometimes creates conflicts and complications. 
But, well, who ever told you that life was easy? 
Life is complicated. 
Deal with it. 
Fascism is what happens when people try to ignore the complications and to make life too easy for themselves. 
Fascism denies all identities except the national identity and insists that I have obligations only towards my nation. 
If my nation demands that I sacrifice my family, then I will sacrifice my family. 
If the nation demands that I kill millions of people, then I will kill millions of people. 
And if my nation demands that I betray truth and beauty, then I should betray truth and beauty. 
For example, how does a fascist evaluate art? 
How does a fascist decide whether a movie is a good movie or a bad movie? 
Well, it's very, very, very simple. 
There is really just one yardstick: if the movie serves the interests of the nation, it's a good movie; if the movie doesn't serve the interests of the nation, it's a bad movie. 
That's it. 
Similarly, how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school? 
Again, it's very simple. 
There is just one yardstick: you teach the kids whatever serves the interests of the nation. 
The truth doesn't matter at all. 
Now, the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust remind us of the terrible consequences of this way of thinking. 
But usually, when we talk about the ills of fascism, we do so in an ineffective way, because we tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster, without really explaining what was so seductive about it. 
It's a bit like these Hollywood movies that depict the bad guys -- Voldemort or Sauron or Darth Vader -- as ugly and mean and cruel. 
They're cruel even to their own supporters. 
When I see these movies, I never understand -- why would anybody be tempted to follow a disgusting creep like Voldemort? 
The problem with evil is that in real life, evil doesn't necessarily look ugly. 
It can look very beautiful. 
This is something that Christianity knew very well, which is why in Christian art, as [opposed to] Hollywood, Satan is usually depicted as a gorgeous hunk. 
This is why it's so difficult to resist the temptations of Satan, and why it is also difficult to resist the temptations of fascism. 
Fascism makes people see themselves as belonging to the most beautiful and most important thing in the world -- the nation. 
And then people think, "Well, they taught us that fascism is ugly. 
But when I look in the mirror, I see something very beautiful, so I can't be a fascist, right?" 
Wrong. 
That's the problem with fascism. 
When you look in the fascist mirror, you see yourself as far more beautiful than you really are. 
In the 1930s, when Germans looked in the fascist mirror, they saw Germany as the most beautiful thing in the world. 
If today, Russians look in the fascist mirror, they will see Russia as the most beautiful thing in the world. 
And if Israelis look in the fascist mirror, they will see Israel as the most beautiful thing in the world. 
This does not mean that we are now facing a rerun of the 1930s. 
Fascism and dictatorships might come back, but they will come back in a new form, a form which is much more relevant to the new technological realities of the 21st century. 
In ancient times, land was the most important asset in the world. 
Politics, therefore, was the struggle to control land. 
And dictatorship meant that all the land was owned by a single ruler or by a small oligarch. 
And in the modern age, machines became more important than land. 
Politics became the struggle to control the machines. 
And dictatorship meant that too many of the machines became concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. 
Now data is replacing both land and machines as the most important asset. 
Politics becomes the struggle to control the flows of data. 
And dictatorship now means that too much data is being concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. 
The greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient than democracies. 
In the 20th century, democracy and capitalism defeated fascism and communism because democracy was better at processing data and making decisions. 
Given 20th-century technology, it was simply inefficient to try and concentrate too much data and too much power in one place. 
But it is not a law of nature that centralized data processing is always less efficient than distributed data processing. 
With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it might become feasible to process enormous amounts of information very efficiently in one place, to take all the decisions in one place, and then centralized data processing will be more efficient than distributed data processing. 
And then the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century -- their attempt to concentrate all the information in one place -- it will become their greatest advantage. 
Another technological danger that threatens the future of democracy is the merger of information technology with biotechnology, which might result in the creation of algorithms that know me better than I know myself. 
And once you have such algorithms, an external system, like the government, cannot just predict my decisions, it can also manipulate my feelings, my emotions. 
A dictator may not be able to provide me with good health care, but he will be able to make me love him and to make me hate the opposition. 
Democracy will find it difficult to survive such a development because, in the end, democracy is not based on human rationality; it's based on human feelings. 
During elections and referendums, you're not being asked, "What do you think?" 
You're actually being asked, "How do you feel?" 
And if somebody can manipulate your emotions effectively, democracy will become an emotional puppet show. 
So what can we do to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships? 
The number one question that we face is: Who controls the data? 
If you are an engineer, then find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands. 
And find ways to make sure the distributed data processing is at least as efficient as centralized data processing. 
This will be the best safeguard for democracy. 
As for the rest of us who are not engineers, the number one question facing us is how not to allow ourselves to be manipulated by those who control the data. 
The enemies of liberal democracy, they have a method. 
They hack our feelings. 
Not our emails, not our bank accounts -- they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within. 
This is actually a method that Silicon Valley pioneered in order to sell us products. 
But now, the enemies of democracy are using this very method to sell us fear and hate and vanity. 
They cannot create these feelings out of nothing. 
So they get to know our own preexisting weaknesses. 
And then use them against us. 
And it is therefore the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure that they do not become a weapon in the hands of the enemies of democracy. 
Getting to know our own weaknesses will also help us to avoid the trap of the fascist mirror. 
As we explained earlier, fascism exploits our vanity. 
It makes us see ourselves as far more beautiful than we really are. 
This is the seduction. 
But if you really know yourself, you will not fall for this kind of flattery. 
If somebody puts a mirror in front of your eyes that hides all your ugly bits and makes you see yourself as far more beautiful and far more important than you really are, just break that mirror. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Yuval, thank you. 
Goodness me. 
It's so nice to see you again. 
So, if I understand you right, you're alerting us to two big dangers here. 
One is the possible resurgence of a seductive form of fascism, but close to that, dictatorships that may not exactly be fascistic, but control all the data. 
I wonder if there's a third concern that some people here have already expressed, which is where, not governments, but big corporations control all our data. 
What do you call that, and how worried should we be about that? 
Yuval Noah Harari: Well, in the end, there isn't such a big difference between the corporations and the governments, because, as I said, the questions is: Who controls the data? 
This is the real government. 
If you call it a corporation or a government -- if it's a corporation and it really controls the data, this is our real government. 
So the difference is more apparent than real. 
CA: But somehow, at least with corporations, you can imagine market mechanisms where they can be taken down. 
I mean, if consumers just decide that the company is no longer operating in their interest, it does open the door to another market. 
It seems easier to imagine that than, say, citizens rising up and taking down a government that is in control of everything. 
YNH: Well, we are not there yet, but again, if a corporation really knows you better than you know yourself -- at least that it can manipulate your own deepest emotions and desires, and you won't even realize -- you will think this is your authentic self. 
So in theory, yes, in theory, you can rise against a corporation, just as, in theory, you can rise against a dictatorship. 
But in practice, it is extremely difficult. 
CA: So in "Homo Deus," you argue that this would be the century when humans kind of became gods, either through development of artificial intelligence or through genetic engineering. 
Has this prospect of political system shift, collapse impacted your view on that possibility? 
YNH: Well, I think it makes it even more likely, and more likely that it will happen faster, because in times of crisis, people are willing to take risks that they wouldn't otherwise take. 
And people are willing to try all kinds of high-risk, high-gain technologies. 
So these kinds of crises might serve the same function as the two world wars in the 20th century. 
The two world wars greatly accelerated the development of new and dangerous technologies. 
And the same thing might happen in the 21st century. 
I mean, you need to be a little crazy to run too fast, let's say, with genetic engineering. 
But now you have more and more crazy people in charge of different countries in the world, so the chances are getting higher, not lower. 
CA: So, putting it all together, Yuval, you've got this unique vision. 
Roll the clock forward 30 years. 
What's your guess -- does humanity just somehow scrape through, look back and say, "Wow, that was a close thing. We did it!" 
Or not? 
YNH: So far, we've managed to overcome all the previous crises. 
And especially if you look at liberal democracy and you think things are bad now, just remember how much worse things looked in 1938 or in 1968. 
So this is really nothing, this is just a small crisis. 
But you can never know, because, as a historian, I know that you should never underestimate human stupidity. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It is one of the most powerful forces that shape history. 
CA: Yuval, it's been an absolute delight to have you with us. 
Thank you for making the virtual trip. 
Have a great evening there in Tel Aviv. 
Yuval Harari! 
YNH: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

We're holding hands, staring at the door. 
My siblings and I were waiting for my mother to come back from the hospital. 
She was there because my grandmother had cancer surgery that day. 
Finally, the doors opened, and she said, "She's gone. 
She's gone." 
She started sobbing and immediately said, "We must make arrangements. 
Your grandmother's dying wish was to be buried back home in Korea." 
I was barely 12 years old, and when the shock wore off, my mother's words were ringing in my ears. 
My grandmother wanted to be buried back home. 
We had moved from Korea to Argentina six years prior, without knowing any Spanish, or how we were going to make a living. 
And upon arrival, we were immigrants who had lost everything, so we had to work really hard to rebuild our lives. 
So it hadn't occurred to me that after all these years, back home was still in Korea. 
It made me ponder where I would want to be buried someday, where home was for me, and the answer was not obvious. 
And this really bothered me. 
So this episode launched a lifelong quest for my identity. 
I was born in Korea -- the land of kimchi; raised in Argentina, where I ate so much steak that I'm probably 80 percent cow by now; and I was educated in the US, where I became addicted to peanut butter. 
(Laughter) During my childhood, I felt very much Argentinian, but my looks betrayed me at times. 
I remember on the first day of middle school, my Spanish literature teacher came into the room. 
She scanned all of my classmates, and she said, "You -- you have to get a tutor, otherwise, you won't pass this class." 
But by then I was fluent in Spanish already, so it felt as though I could be either Korean or Argentinian, but not both. 
It felt like a zero-sum game, where I had to give up my old identity to be able to gain or earn a new one. 
So when I was 18, I decided to go to Korea, hoping that finally I could find a place to call home. 
But there people asked me, "Why do you speak Korean with a Spanish accent?" 
(Laughter) And, "You must be Japanese because of your big eyes and your foreign body language." 
And so it turns out that I was too Korean to be Argentinian, but too Argentinian to be Korean. 
And this was a pivotal realization to me. 
I had failed to find that place in the world to call home. 
But how many Japanese-looking Koreans who speak with a Spanish accent -- or even more specific, Argentinian accent -- do you think are out there? 
Perhaps this could be an advantage. 
It was easy for me to stand out, which couldn't hurt in a world that was rapidly changing, where skills could become obsolete overnight. 
So I stopped looking for that 100 percent commonality with the people that I met. 
Instead, I realized that oftentimes, I was the only overlap between groups of people that were usually in conflict with each other. 
So with this realization in mind, I decided to embrace all of the different versions of myself -- even allow myself to reinvent myself at times. 
So for example, in high school, I have to confess I was a mega-nerd. 
I had no sense of fashion -- thick glasses, simple hairstyle -- you can get the idea. 
I think, actually, I only had friends because I shared my homework. 
That's the truth. 
But once at university, I was able to find a new identity for myself, and the nerd became a popular girl. 
But it was MIT, so I don't know if I can take too much credit for that. 
As they say over there, "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." 
(Laughter) I switched majors so many times that my advisors joked that I should get a degree in "random studies." 
(Laughter) I told this to my kids. 
And then over the years, I have gained a lot of different identities. 
I started as an inventor, entrepreneur, social innovator. 
Then I became an investor, a woman in tech, a teacher. 
And most recently, I became a mom, or as my toddler says repeatedly, "Mom!" day and night. 
Even my accent was so confused -- its origin was so obscure, that my friends called it, "Rebecanese." 
(Laughter) But reinventing yourself can be very hard. 
You can face a lot of resistance at times. 
When I was nearly done with my PhD, I got bitten by that entrepreneurial bug. 
I was in Silicon Valley, and so writing a thesis in the basement didn't seem as interesting as starting my own company. 
So I went to my very traditional Korean parents, who are here today, with the task of letting them know that I was going to drop out from my PhD program. 
You see, my siblings and I are the first generation to go to university, so for a family of immigrants, this was kind of a big deal. 
You can imagine how this conversation was going to go. 
But fortunately, I had a secret weapon with me, which was a chart that had the average income of all of the graduates from Stanford PhD programs, and then the average income of all the dropouts from Stanford graduate programs. 
(Laughter) I must tell you -- this chart was definitely skewed by the founders of Google. 
(Laughter) But my mom looked at the chart, and she said, "Oh, for you -- follow your passion." 
(Laughter) Hi, Mom. 
Now, today my identity quest is no longer to find my tribe. 
It's more about allowing myself to embrace all of the possible permutations of myself and cultivating diversity within me and not just around me. 
My boys now are three years and five months old today, and they were already born with three nationalities and four languages. 
I should mention now that my husband is actually from Denmark -- just in case I don't have enough culture shocks in my life, I decided to marry a Danish guy. 
In fact, I think my kids will be the first Vikings who will have a hard time growing a beard when they become older. 
(Laughter) Yeah, we'll have to work on that. 
But I really hope that they will find that their multiplicity is going to open and create a lot of doors for them in their lives, and that they can use this as a way to find commonality in a world that's increasingly global today. 
I hope that instead of feeling anxious and worried that they don't fit in that one box or that their identity will become irrelevant someday, that they can feel free to experiment and to take control of their personal narrative and identity. 
I also hope that they will use their unique combination of values and languages and cultures and skills to help create a world where identities are no longer used to alienate what looks different, but rather, to bring together people. 
And most importantly, I really hope that they find tremendous joy in going through these uncharted territories, because I know I have. 
Now, as for my grandmother, her last wish was also her last lesson to me. 
It turns out that it was never about going back to Korea and being buried there. 
It was about resting next to her son, who had died long before she moved to Argentina. 
What mattered to her was not the ocean that divided her past and new world; it was about finding common ground. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

We live in an incredibly busy world. 
The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something. 
So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? 
Just 10 minutes, undisturbed? 
So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. 
Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. 
Simply doing nothing. 
I see a lot of very blank faces. 
(Laughter) You probably have to go a long way back. 
And this is an extraordinary thing, right? 
We're talking about our mind. 
The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. 
The mind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the same time, to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. 
This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. 
And yet, we don't take any time out to look after it. 
In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we -- okay, maybe not our hair, (Laughter) but you see where I'm going. 
You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don't really know how to deal with that. 
And the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we're no longer present in the world in which we live. 
We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. 
That's really not how it has to be. 
So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. 
And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. 
I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. 
Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. 
You get stressed, you do some meditation. 
I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. 
Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again. 
It was a really very stressful time. 
I guess we all deal with stress in different ways. 
Some people will bury themselves in work, grateful for the distraction. 
Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. 
Some people hit the bottle, start taking medication. 
My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. 
So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation. 
People often ask me what I learned from that time. 
Well, obviously it changed things. 
Let's face it, becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things. 
But it was more than that. 
It taught me -- it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. 
By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present. 
I think the present moment is so underrated. 
It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. 
There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 
47 percent. 
At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness. 
Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted. 
And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life. 
But we need to know how to do it. 
We need an exercise. 
We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful. 
That's essentially what meditation is. 
It's familiarizing ourselves with the present moment. 
But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the best from it. 
And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. 
It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind. 
So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way I can relax and talk to you at the same time. 
Equally, if I relax too much talking to you, there's no way I can focus on the balls. 
Now in life, and in meditation, there'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense, and life starts to feel a bit like this. 
It's a very uncomfortable way to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. 
At other times, we might take our foot off the gas a little bit too much, and things just become a sort of little bit like this. 
Of course in meditation -- (Snores) we're going to end up falling asleep. 
So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement. 
Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought. 
Let's say this is an anxious thought. 
Everything's going fine, and we see the anxious thought. 
"Oh, I didn't realize I was worried about that." 
You go back to it, repeat it. 
I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety." 
And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious. 
(Laughter) You know, this is crazy. 
We do this all the time, even on an everyday level. 
If you think about the last time you had a wobbly tooth. 
You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. 
But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds? 
(Mumbling) It does hurt. 
And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time. 
And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind. 
But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns. 
You might find a mind that's really restless and -- the whole time. 
Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. 
You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it's just, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up, work. 
Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind. 
Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. 
We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. 
That's the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. 
You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor. 
All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life. 
Thank you very much. 

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

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

So, I'm an artist. 
I live in New York, and I've been working in advertising for -- ever since I left school, so about seven, eight years now, and it was draining. 
I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends, and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own. 
And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED, and it was called "The power of time off," and he spoke about how every seven years, he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired, and I just said, "I have to do that. I have to take a year off. 
I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas." 
So the first of those projects ended up being something I called "One Second Every Day." 
Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life, chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until, you know, I can't record them anymore. 
The purpose of this project is, one: I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past. 
There's all these things that I've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, "Oh yeah, that's something that I did." 
And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video. 
So the day -- the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me, because it's something that I really wanted to -- from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted to keep this project going until forever, and having missed that one second, I realized, it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again. 
So if I live to see 80 years of age, I'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life. 
When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s. 
This has really invigorated me day-to-day, when I wake up, to try and do something interesting with my day. 
Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory. 
You know, this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done. 
Even just this one second allows me to remember everything else I did that one day. 
It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second. 
On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose, but I'll just have to narrow it down to one, but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway. 
It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest, against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you. 
They're not even enjoying the show. 
They're watching the concert through their cell phone. 
I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit, back in the day, and I've decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person, is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of, "Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert." 
And it just takes a quick, quick second. 
I was on a three-month road trip this summer. 
It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life, just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day, and it was kind of outstanding. 
I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off, so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project. 
One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family, and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law, her intestine suddenly strangled one day, and we took her to the emergency room, and she was, she was in really bad shape. 
We almost lost her a couple of times, and I was there with my brother every day. 
It helped me realize something else during this project, is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult. 
It's not -- we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things. 
Or we're, "Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture." 
But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day, and something horrible is happening. 
And I found that it's actually been very, very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment. 
It really helps you appreciate the good times. 
It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one, I think it's important to remember it, just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days. 
Now one of the things that I do is I don't use any filters, I don't use anything to -- I try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes. 
I started a rule of first person perspective. 
Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn't the way to go. 
The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it. 
Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are, wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this? 
I turned 31 last week, which is there. 
I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this. 
I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it. 
I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day. 
Personally, I'm tired of forgetting, and this is a really easy thing to do. 
I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now -- most people in this room, I bet -- and it's something that's -- I never want to forget another day that I've ever lived, and this is my way of doing that, and it'd be really interesting also to see, if you could just type in on a website, "June 18, 2018," and you would just see a stream of people's lives on that particular day from all over the world. 
And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities, and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day, so you can never forget that that day, you lived. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) 

What is going to be the future of learning? 
I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage. 
I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? 
And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. 
It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. 
But the Victorians actually did it. 
What they did was amazing. 
They created a global computer made up of people. 
It's still with us today. 
It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. 
In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. 
They made another machine to produce those people: the school. 
The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. 
They must be identical to each other. 
They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. 
They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. 
The Victorians were great engineers. 
They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. 
The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it? 
["Schools as we know them are obsolete"] So that's a pretty strong comment there. 
I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. 
I'm not saying they're broken. 
It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. 
It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. 
It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated. 
What are the kind of jobs that we have today? 
Well, the clerks are the computers. 
They're there in thousands in every office. 
And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. 
Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. 
They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. 
They do need to be able to read. 
In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly. 
Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. 
We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. 
How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world? 
Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. 
I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. 
And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. 
And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? 
Or should they not? 
At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. 
And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent." 
And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? 
(Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? 
I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was. 
The children came running in. 
It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?" 
And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know." 
(Laughter) They said, "Why have you put it there?" 
I said, "Just like that." 
And they said, "Can we touch it?"I said, "If you wish to." 
And I went away. 
About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. 
So I said, "Well that's impossible, because -- How is it possible? They don't know anything." 
My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution. 
One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse." 
So I said, "Yeah, that's possible." 
So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. 
There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. 
When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse." 
(Laughter) So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?" 
And they said something very interesting to me. 
In an irritated voice, they said, "You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter) That's the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually. 
Here's a short glimpse from those years. 
That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. 
On your right is an eight-year-old. 
To his left is his student. She's six. 
And he's teaching her how to browse. 
Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. 
["Hole in the wall film - 1999"] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. 
And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, "There's a processor inside." 
So I started publishing. 
I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. 
I'd seen it happen over and over and over again. 
But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? 
I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. 
There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. 
I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say." 
(Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this. 
Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you. 
Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her. 
She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent. 
So then people said, well, how far will it go? 
Where does it stop? 
I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. 
I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. 
Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer? 
And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. 
I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. 
I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. 
I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. 
I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand. 
The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?" 
So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English." 
So they said, "How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?" 
So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest idea." 
(Laughter) "And anyway, I am going away." 
(Laughter) So I left them for a couple of months. 
They'd got a zero. I gave them a test. 
I came back after two months and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing." 
So I said, "Well, what did I expect?" 
So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you can't understand anything?" 
So they said, "We haven't given up. 
We look at it every single day." 
So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?" 
So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English, she said, "Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven't understood anything else." 
(Laughter) (Applause) So I tested them. 
I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time. 
Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. 
Thirty percent is a fail. 
How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. 
I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time. 
So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?" 
So she says, "Absolutely not. 
I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you." 
I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother." 
So she says, "What's that?" 
I said, "Stand behind them. 
Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? 
What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.' You know what grannies do." 
So she did that for two more months. 
The scores jumped to 50 percent. 
Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. 
When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field. 
Here's Kallikuppam. 
(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication. 
I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate. 
At 12. 
So what are jobs going to be like? 
Well, we know what they're like today. 
What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today, children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand. 
What will it be tomorrow? 
Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? 
Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? 
Could it be -- a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte -- could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? 
But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. 
Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. 
But look at it this way. 
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. 
It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. 
What an achievement that is. 
But we have to integrate that into our own future. 
Encouragement seems to be the key. 
If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that I did, it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning. 
There is evidence from neuroscience. 
The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. 
Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. 
We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform." 
Why did they create a system like that? 
Because it was needed. 
There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat. 
When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. 
If you didn't, you failed. 
But the Age of Empires is gone. 
What happens to creativity in our age? 
We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure. 
I came back to England looking for British grandmothers. 
I put out notices in papers saying, if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free? 
I got 200 in the first two weeks. 
I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud. 
The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet. 
If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran. 
She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out. 
I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away. 
She does it with only one age-old gesture. 
"Shhh." 
Okay? 
Watch this. 
Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it. 
You can't catch me. 
Children: You can't catch me. 
Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man. 
Grandmother: Well done! Very good. 
SM: So what's happening here? 
I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. 
If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. 
It's not about making learning happen. 
It's about letting it happen. 
The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. 
I think that's what all this is pointing at. 
But how will we know? How will we come to know? 
Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments. 
They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together. 
I've tried this in many, many schools. 
It's been tried all over the world, and teachers sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?" 
And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself.""How did you know that?" 
I said, "You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from." 
Here's a SOLE in action. 
(Children talking) This one is in England. 
He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around. 
Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM: Australia Girl: -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. 
The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons. 
SM: A decade ahead of her time. 
So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions. 
You already heard about that. You know what that means. 
There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?" 
They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. 
We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle. 
But that's not sexy enough. 
The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say, "If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not?" 
And if he says, "Well, what? how?" 
you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle," and leave him alone. He'll figure it out. 
So here are a couple of images from SOLEs. 
I've tried incredible, incredible questions -- "When did the world begin? How will it end?" — to nine-year-olds. 
This one is about what happens to the air we breathe. 
This is done by children without the help of any teacher. 
The teacher only raises the question, and then stands back and admires the answer. 
So what's my wish? 
My wish is that we design the future of learning. 
We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we? 
So we need to design a future for learning. 
And I've got to -- hang on, I've got to get this wording exactly right, because, you know, it's very important. 
My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. 
Help me build this school. 
It will be called the School in the Cloud. 
It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in. 
The way I want to do this is to build a facility where I can study this. 
It's a facility which is practically unmanned. 
There's only one granny who manages health and safety. 
The rest of it's from the cloud. 
The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud. 
But I want you for another purpose. 
You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs. 
It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it. 
If you would please, please do it across all five continents and send me the data, then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds, and create the future of learning. 
That's my wish. 
And just one last thing. 
I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas. 
At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin, I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there. 
And there was this little girl who was following me around. 
And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child. 
I don't know, what should I do?" 
And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly. 
She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me, "Get on with it." 
(Laughter) (Applause) I think it was good advice. 
I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking. 
Thank you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause) 

(Breathes in) (Breathes out) So, I didn't always make my living from music. 
For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. 
(Laughter) I was a self-employed living statue called the Eight-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life. 
(Laughter) Hello. 
I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower -- and some intense eye contact. 
And if they didn't take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing -- as they walked away. 
(Laughter) So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. 
And my eyes would say -- "Thank you. 
I see you." 
And their eyes would say -- "Nobody ever sees me. 
Thank you." 
I would get harassed sometimes. 
People would yell at me from their cars. 
"Get a job!" 
(Laughing) And I'd be, like, "This is my job." 
But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. 
I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. 
And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. 
It was consistent. 
And meanwhile, I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band, the Dresden Dolls. 
This was me on piano, a genius drummer. 
I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it. 
So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests. 
And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere. 
So I would need a piano to practice on, and an hour later I would be at a fan's house. 
This is in London. 
People would bring home-cooked food to us all over the world backstage and feed us and eat with us. 
This is in Seattle. 
Fans who worked in museums and stores and any kind of public space would wave their hands if I would decide to do a last-minute, spontaneous, free gig. 
This is a library in Auckland. 
On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello. 
I once tweeted, "Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot?" 
And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death. 
And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing. 
In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option. 
(Laughter) My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras. 
And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds. 
And I lay there thinking, these people have so little. 
Is this fair? 
And in the morning, her mom taught us how to try to make tortillas and wanted to give me a Bible, and she took me aside and she said to me in her broken English, "Your music has helped my daughter so much. 
Thank you for staying here. We're all so grateful." 
And I thought, this is fair. 
This is this. 
A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone. 
I've always been with my band or my crew. 
Is this what stupid people do? 
(Laughter) Is this how stupid people die? 
And before I can change my mind, the door busts open. 
She's an artist. 
He's a financial blogger for Reuters, and they're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath, and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that. 
So I couchsurf a lot. I also crowdsurf a lot. 
I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing. 
You're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other. 
I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get some extra money, something that I did a lot. 
And as usual, the band was psyched, but there was this one guy in the band who told me he just couldn't bring himself to go out there. 
It felt too much like begging to stand there with the hat. 
And I recognized his fear of "Is this fair?" 
and "Get a job." 
And meanwhile, my band is becoming bigger and bigger. 
We sign with a major label. 
And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret. 
It's not for everybody. 
Well, maybe it's for you. 
(Laughter) We sign, and there's all this hype leading up to our next record. 
And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure. 
I was like, "25,000, isn't that a lot?" 
They said, "No, the sales are going down. 
It's a failure." 
And they walk off. 
Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, "I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend." 
(Laughter) "But I read your blog, I know you hate your label. 
I just want you to have this money." 
And this starts happening all the time. 
I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there. 
Thank you. 
And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. 
So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding. 
And I fell into those thousands of connections that I'd made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. 
And the goal was 100,000 dollars. 
My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date. 
(Applause) And you can see how many people it is. 
It's about 25,000 people. 
And the media asked, "Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. 
How did you make all these people pay for music?" 
And the real answer is, I didn't make them. 
I asked them. 
And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you. 
It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists. 
They don't want to ask for things. 
But it's not easy. 
It's not easy to ask. 
And a lot of artists have a problem with this. 
Asking makes you vulnerable. 
And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website. 
And this hurt in a really familiar way. 
And people saying, "You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help," really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, "Get a job." 
Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them. 
So this is slightly not safe for work. 
This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin. 
At the end of the night, I stripped and let everyone draw on me. 
Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers -- (Laughter) I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people. 
(Laughter) This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much. 
Should I? 
Show me. 
For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community. 
Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. 
Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. 
It's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough. 
So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price. 
They see it as an unpredictable risk, but the things I've done, the Kickstarter, the street, the doorbell, I don't see these things as risk. 
I see them as trust. 
Now, the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street, they're getting there. 
But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important -- to ask without shame. 
My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box. 
So blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and we see each other. 
And I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other. 
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, "How do we make people pay for music?" 
What if we started asking, "How do we let people pay for music?" 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet. 
And I grew up singing a song called "Nothing To Envy." 
And I was very proud. 
In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies. 
Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed. 
When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution. 
But I thought my life in North Korea was normal. 
My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger. 
But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister. 
It read, "When you read this, our five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past three weeks. 
We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak, we are waiting to die." 
I was so shocked. 
This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. 
Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that to this day I can't erase from my memory. 
A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. 
But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families. 
A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. 
Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. 
Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night, except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home. 
I always wondered why they had lights, but we didn't. 
This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors. 
This is the Amnok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. 
As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. 
But many die. 
Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river. 
I can't reveal many details about how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine, I was sent to China to live with distant relatives. 
But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time. 
I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together. 
In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. 
I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. 
But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants. 
So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate, back in North Korea. 
One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police, and brought to the police station for interrogation. 
Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities, and asked me tons of questions. 
I thought my heart was going to explode. 
If anything seemed unnatural, I could be imprisoned and repatriated. 
I thought my life was over. 
But I managed to control all the emotions inside me, and answer the questions. 
After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, "This was a false report. She's not North Korean." 
And they let me go. It was a miracle. 
Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies. 
But many can be caught by the Chinese police, and repatriated. 
These girls were so lucky. 
Even though they were caught, they were eventually released, after heavy international pressure. 
These North Koreans were not so lucky. 
Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned, or publicly executed. 
Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky. 
It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive. 
Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant. 
That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea. 
And I started a new life yet again. 
Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected. 
English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language. 
Also, I realized there was a wide gap between North and South. 
We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different, due to 67 years of division. 
I even went through an identity crisis. 
Am I South Korean or North Korean? 
Where am I from? Who am I? 
Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own. 
Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan -- I started studying for the university entrance exam. 
Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call. 
The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. 
They had to get out quickly. 
So I started planning how to help them escape. 
North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom. 
It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea. 
So, ironically, I took a flight back to China and headed toward the North Korean border. 
Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia. 
The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. 
One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. 
He took everyone's I.D. cards, and he started asking them questions. 
Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. 
As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. 
He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me. 
We made it all the way to the border of Laos. 
But I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos. 
But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing. 
After I paid the fine and bribe, my family was released in one month. 
But soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again, in the capital of Laos. 
This was one of the lowest points in my life. 
I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail, just a short distance from the South Korean embassy. 
I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out. 
but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore. 
I lost all hope. 
At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, "What's wrong?" 
I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. 
In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM, and he paid the rest of the money for my family, and two other North Koreans to get out of jail. 
I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, "Why are you helping me?" 
"I'm not helping you," he said. 
"I'm helping the North Korean people." 
I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. 
The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people, when we needed it most. 
And he showed me that the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need. 
Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea. 
But getting to freedom is only half the battle. 
Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money. 
So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more. 
We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world. 
Because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside. 
I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support. 
I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park. 
Those are my dad's cows at the back, and behind the cows, that's the Nairobi National Park. 
Nairobi National Park is not fenced in the south widely, which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely. 
So predators like lions follow them, and this is what they do. 
They kill our livestock. 
This is one of the cows which was killed at night, and I just woke up in the morning and I found it dead, and I felt so bad, because it was the only bull we had. 
My community, the Maasai, we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them, and that's why we value them so much. 
So I grew up hating lions so much. 
The morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock, and they're also upset about this problem. 
So they kill the lions. 
It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi. 
And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few. 
So a boy, from six to nine years old, in my community is responsible for his dad's cows, and that's the same thing which happened to me. 
So I had to find a way of solving this problem. 
And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire. 
But I came to realize that that didn't really help, because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed. 
So I didn't give up. I continued. 
And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow. 
I was trying to trick the lions [into thinking] that I was standing near the cowshed. 
But lions are very clever. (Laughter) They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back, but the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it's always here. (Laughter) So he jumps in and kills the animals. 
So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch, and that day, the lions didn't come. 
And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light. 
So I had an idea. 
Since I was a small boy, I used to work in my room for the whole day, and I even took apart my mom's new radio, and that day she almost killed me, but I learned a lot about electronics. (Laughter) So I got an old car battery, an indicator box. It's a small device found in a motorcycle, and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left. It blinks. 
And I got a switch where I can switch on the lights, on and off. 
And that's a small torch from a broken flashlight. 
So I set up everything. 
As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer. 
And the indicator box makes the lights flash. 
As you can see, the bulbs face outside, because that's where the lions come from. 
And that's how it looks to lions when they come at night. 
The lights flash and trick the lions into thinking I was walking around the cowshed, but I was sleeping in my bed. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thanks. 
So I set it up in my home two years ago, and since then, we have never experienced any problem with lions. 
And my neighboring homes heard about this idea. 
One of them was this grandmother. 
She had a lot of her animals being killed by lions, and she asked me if I could put the lights for her. 
And I said, "Yes." 
So I put the lights. You can see at the back, those are the lion lights. 
Since now, I've set up seven homes around my community, and they're really working. 
And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms. 
Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this. 
My new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness. 
I even took my friends back to my community, and we're installing the lights to the homes which don't have [any], and I'm teaching them how to put them. 
So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside. 
And here I am today. 
I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED. 
So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up. 
I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict. 
Ashê olên. It means in my language, thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: You have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours. 
So you got this scholarship.Richard Turere: Yep. 
CA: You're working on other electrical inventions. 
What's the next one on your list? 
RT: My next invention is, I want to make an electric fence.CA: Electric fence? 
RT: But I know electric fences are already invented, but I want to make mine. 
(Laughter) CA: You already tried it once, right, and you --RT: I tried it before, but I stopped because it gave me a shock. (Laughter) CA: In the trenches. Richard Turere, you are something else. 
We're going to cheer you on every step of the way, my friend. 
Thank you so much.RT: Thank you. (Applause) 

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

What happens when technology knows more about us than we do? 
A computer now can detect our slightest facial microexpressions and be able to tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one. 
That's only the beginning. 
Technology has become incredibly intelligent and already knows a lot about our internal states. 
And whether we like it or not, we already are sharing parts of our inner lives that's out of our control. 
That seems like a problem, because a lot of us like to keep what's going on inside from what people actually see. 
We want to have agency over what we share and what we don't. 
We all like to have a poker face. 
But I'm here to tell you that I think that's a thing of the past. 
And while that might sound scary, it's not necessarily a bad thing. 
I've spent a lot of time studying the circuits in the brain that create the unique perceptual realities that we each have. 
And now I bring that together with the capabilities of current technology to create new technology that does make us better, feel more, connect more. 
And I believe to do that, we have to be OK losing some of our agency. 
With some animals, it's really amazing, and we get to see into their internal experiences. 
We get this upfront look at the mechanistic interaction between how they respond to the world around them and the state of their biological systems. 
This is where evolutionary pressures like eating, mating and making sure we don't get eaten drive deterministic behavioral responses to information in the world. 
And we get to see into this window, into their internal states and their biological experiences. 
It's really pretty cool. 
Now, stay with me for a moment -- I'm a violinist, not a singer. 
But the spider's already given me a critical review. 
(Video) (Singing in a low pitch) (Singing in a middle pitch) (Singing in a high pitch) (Singing in a low pitch) (Singing in a middle pitch) (Singing in a high pitch) (Laughter) Poppy Crum: It turns out, some spiders tune their webs like violins to resonate with certain sounds. 
And likely, the harmonics of my voice as it went higher coupled with how loud I was singing recreated either the predatory call of an echolocating bat or a bird, and the spider did what it should. 
It predictively told me to bug off. 
I love this. 
The spider's responding to its external world in a way that we get to see and know what's happening to its internal world. 
Biology is controlling the spider's response; it's wearing its internal state on its sleeve. 
But us, humans -- we're different. 
We like to think we have cognitive control over what people see, know and understand about our internal states -- our emotions, our insecurities, our bluffs, our trials and tribulations -- and how we respond. 
We get to have our poker face. 
Or maybe we don't. 
Try this with me. 
Your eye responds to how hard your brain is working. 
The response you're about to see is driven entirely by mental effort and has nothing to do with changes in lighting. 
We know this from neuroscience. 
I promise, your eyes are doing the same thing as the subject in our lab, whether you want them to or not. 
At first, you'll hear some voices. 
Try and understand them and keep watching the eye in front of you. 
It's going to be hard at first, one should drop out, and it should get really easy. 
You're going to see the change in effort in the diameter of the pupil. 
(Video) (Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data. 
(Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data. 
PC: Your pupil doesn't lie. 
Your eye gives away your poker face. 
When your brain's having to work harder, your autonomic nervous system drives your pupil to dilate. 
When it's not, it contracts. 
When I take away one of the voices, the cognitive effort to understand the talkers gets a lot easier. 
I could have put the two voices in different spatial locations, I could have made one louder. 
You would have seen the same thing. 
We might think we have more agency over the reveal of our internal state than that spider, but maybe we don't. 
Today's technology is starting to make it really easy to see the signals and tells that give us away. 
The amalgamation of sensors paired with machine learning on us, around us and in our environments, is a lot more than cameras and microphones tracking our external actions. 
Our bodies radiate our stories from changes in the temperature of our physiology. 
We can look at these as infrared thermal images showing up behind me, where reds are hotter and blues are cooler. 
The dynamic signature of our thermal response gives away our changes in stress, how hard our brain is working, whether we're paying attention and engaged in the conversation we might be having and even whether we're experiencing a picture of fire as if it were real. 
We can actually see people give off heat on their cheeks in response to an image of flame. 
But aside from giving away our poker bluffs, what if dimensions of data from someone's thermal response gave away a glow of interpersonal interest? 
Tracking the honesty of feelings in someone's thermal image might be a new part of how we fall in love and see attraction. 
Our technology can listen, develop insights and make predictions about our mental and physical health just by analyzing the timing dynamics of our speech and language picked up by microphones. 
Groups have shown that changes in the statistics of our language paired with machine learning can predict the likelihood someone will develop psychosis. 
I'm going to take it a step further and look at linguistic changes and changes in our voice that show up with a lot of different conditions. 
Dementia, diabetes can alter the spectral coloration of our voice. 
Changes in our language associated with Alzheimer's can sometimes show up more than 10 years before clinical diagnosis. 
What we say and how we say it tells a much richer story than we used to think. 
And devices we already have in our homes could, if we let them, give us invaluable insight back. 
The chemical composition of our breath gives away our feelings. 
There's a dynamic mixture of acetone, isoprene and carbon dioxide that changes when our heart speeds up, when our muscles tense, and all without any obvious change in our behaviors. 
Alright, I want you to watch this clip with me. 
Some things might be going on on the side screens, but try and focus on the image in the front and the man at the window. 
(Eerie music) (Woman screams) PC: Sorry about that. I needed to get a reaction. 
(Laughter) I'm actually tracking the carbon dioxide you exhale in the room right now. 
We've installed tubes throughout the theater, lower to the ground, because CO2 is heavier than air. 
But they're connected to a device in the back that lets us measure, in real time, with high precision, the continuous differential concentration of CO2. 
The clouds on the sides are actually the real-time data visualization of the density of our CO2. 
You might still see a patch of red on the screen, because we're showing increases with larger colored clouds, larger colored areas of red. 
And that's the point where a lot of us jumped. 
It's our collective suspense driving a change in carbon dioxide. 
Alright, now, watch this with me one more time. 
(Cheerful music) (Woman laughs) PC: You knew it was coming. 
But it's a lot different when we changed the creator's intent. 
Changing the music and the sound effects completely alter the emotional impact of that scene. 
And we can see it in our breath. 
Suspense, fear, joy all show up as reproducible, visually identifiable moments. 
We broadcast a chemical signature of our emotions. 
It is the end of the poker face. 
Our spaces, our technology will know what we're feeling. 
We will know more about each other than we ever have. 
We get a chance to reach in and connect to the experience and sentiments that are fundamental to us as humans in our senses, emotionally and socially. 
I believe it is the era of the empath. 
And we are enabling the capabilities that true technological partners can bring to how we connect with each other and with our technology. 
If we recognize the power of becoming technological empaths, we get this opportunity where technology can help us bridge the emotional and cognitive divide. 
And in that way, we get to change how we tell our stories. 
We can enable a better future for technologies like augmented reality to extend our own agency and connect us at a much deeper level. 
Imagine a high school counselor being able to realize that an outwardly cheery student really was having a deeply hard time, where reaching out can make a crucial, positive difference. 
Or authorities, being able to know the difference between someone having a mental health crisis and a different type of aggression, and responding accordingly. 
Or an artist, knowing the direct impact of their work. 
Leo Tolstoy defined his perspective of art by whether what the creator intended was experienced by the person on the other end. 
Today's artists can know what we're feeling. 
But regardless of whether it's art or human connection, today's technologies will know and can know what we're experiencing on the other side, and this means we can be closer and more authentic. 
But I realize a lot of us have a really hard time with the idea of sharing our data, and especially the idea that people know things about us that we didn't actively choose to share. 
Anytime we talk to someone, look at someone or choose not to look, data is exchanged, given away, that people use to learn, make decisions about their lives and about ours. 
I'm not looking to create a world where our inner lives are ripped open and our personal data and our privacy given away to people and entities where we don't want to see it go. 
But I am looking to create a world where we can care about each other more effectively, we can know more about when someone is feeling something that we ought to pay attention to. 
And we can have richer experiences from our technology. 
Any technology can be used for good or bad. 
Transparency to engagement and effective regulation are absolutely critical to building the trust for any of this. 
But the benefits that "empathetic technology" can bring to our lives are worth solving the problems that make us uncomfortable. 
And if we don't, there are too many opportunities and feelings we're going to be missing out on. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. 
Right? 
Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really do shout. 
[Beautiful] [Intriguing] So you don't have to say a lot. 
[Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories. 
If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos? 
A few, but not most. 
What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos? 
And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would? 
What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself. 
And electronic tattoos also shout. 
And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good. 
So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos. 
And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online. 
Here's what happened to this company. 
[Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, "Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you." 
So what if Andy was wrong? 
Here's Andy's theory. 
[In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this? 
What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will. 
And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American. 
Why the Greeks? 
Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time. 
So lesson number one: Sisyphus. 
Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down. 
It's a little like your reputation. 
Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful what you post. 
Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out. 
So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever. 
With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love. 
Lesson number three: Atalanta. 
Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody. 
If you won, she would marry you. 
If you lost, you died. 
How did Hippomenes beat her? 
Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. 
She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. 
She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race. 
Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message. 
And then, of course, there's Narcissus. 
Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus. 
(Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection. 
Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges. 
When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?" 
The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality. 
And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I teach chemistry. 
(Explosion) All right, all right. 
So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. 
Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? 
Some people nodding yes. 
Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. 
The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. 
Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. 
(Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. 
But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. 
If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. 
Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario. 
You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. 
But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. 
For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. 
But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction. 
So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information. 
In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. 
This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. 
Now, when I got this, I was -- press Caps Lock -- absolutely freaked out, okay? 
But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. 
Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it? 
So when I asked him, he told me three things. 
He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. 
Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. 
And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life. 
Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. 
Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. 
Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. 
Rule number two: Embrace the mess. 
We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. 
And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. 
And rule number three: Practice reflection. 
What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. 
Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? 
As if what we are doing one day will save lives. 
Our students our worth it. 
And each case is different. 
(Explosion) All right. Sorry. 
The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on. 
So these are my daughters. 
On the right we have little Emmalou -- Southern family. 
And, on the left, Riley. 
Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. 
She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "Why?" 
Yeah. Why. 
I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. 
We all were at that age. 
But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. 
How will they grow this curiosity? 
You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms -- to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. 
But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. 
I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. 
And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. 
I gave out homework assignments. 
When the work came back, I calculated grades. 
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. 
Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. 
Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. 
And that got me thinking. 
The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. 
But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. 
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. 
In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. 
But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? 
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. 
I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? 
My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. 
We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. 
We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. 
We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? 
We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? 
And who's going to earn the most money? 
In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. 
And it wasn't social intelligence. 
It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. 
It was grit. 
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. 
Grit is having stamina. 
Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. 
Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. 
A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. 
I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. 
Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. 
So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. 
It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. 
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. 
Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? 
What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? 
How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" 
The honest answer is, I don't know. 
(Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. 
Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. 
In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. 
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." 
This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. 
Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. 
So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. 
But we need more. 
And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. 
That's the work that stands before us. 
We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. 
We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. 
In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Thank you very much. 
I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. 
Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles -- (Laughter) thinking we were moving to America, but anyway -- (Laughter) It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. 
(Laughter) I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony." 
(Laughter) Have you come across this idea? 
It's not true. 
I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. 
I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. 
It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved." 
(Laughter) I don't know why people think this. 
(Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. 
You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence. 
(Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "No Child Left Behind." 
(Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony. 
(Laughter) Don't they? 
(Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind. 
Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left Behind." 
I can see that. 
What's the plan? 
We propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work. 
And it's working beautifully. 
(Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. 
In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. 
If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. 
From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? 
It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. 
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. 
What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. 
And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. 
America spends more money on education than most other countries. 
Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. 
And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. 
The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. 
There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. 
The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. 
Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? 
Okay. Or grandchildren. 
How about two children or more? Right. 
And the rest of you have seen such children. 
(Laughter) Small people wandering about. 
(Laughter) I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. 
If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. 
Aren't they? 
(Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? 
Like, "Which one are you? Remind me." 
(Laughter) "Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused." 
Education under "No Child Left Behind" is based on not diversity but conformity. 
What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. 
One of the effects of "No Child Left Behind" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. 
They're very important. 
I'm not here to argue against science and math. 
On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. 
A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. 
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you -- (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. 
ADHD. 
I'm not saying there's no such thing. 
I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. 
If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. 
They're suffering from childhood. 
(Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. 
I went through the whole thing. 
Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. 
And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. 
They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched. 
The second, thank you -- (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. 
If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. 
Children are natural learners. 
It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. 
Curiosity is the engine of achievement. 
Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. 
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. 
Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. 
But teaching is a creative profession. 
Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. 
You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. 
Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. 
You see, in the end, education is about learning. 
If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. 
And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. 
The whole point of education is to get people to learn. 
An old friend of mine -- actually very old, he's dead. 
(Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. 
(Laughter) But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. 
He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. 
You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. 
(Laughter) It's a very good example. 
There he is. He's dieting. 
Is he losing any weight? Not really. 
(Laughter) Teaching is a word like that. 
You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching." 
But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it. 
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. 
That's it. 
And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. 
Now, testing is important. 
Standardized tests have a place. 
But they should not be the dominant culture of education. 
They should be diagnostic. They should help. 
(Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. 
I do. 
I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. 
I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car. 
(Laughter) "Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange." 
"Really?" 
(Laughter) "Is that good?" "We don't know." 
(Laughter) But all that should support learning. 
It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. 
So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. 
Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. 
And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. 
It's why we all have different résumés. 
We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. 
It's the common currency of being a human being. 
It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. 
I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? 
I mean, you may have a dog. 
And your dog may get depressed. 
You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? 
(Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. 
(Laughter) "Would you like to come for a walk?" 
"No, I'm fine." 
(Laughter) "You go. I'll wait. But take pictures." 
(Laughter) We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. 
Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. 
Now, it doesn't have to be that way. 
It really doesn't. 
Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. 
Now, we only know that's what they do well at, because that's all that's being tested. 
That's one of the problems of the test. 
They don't look for other things that matter just as much. 
The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. 
They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts. 
Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. 
I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks. 
The third thing -- and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?" 
And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "Well, we don't have one. 
Why would you drop out? 
If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them." 
Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." 
No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. 
But you can compare it to a state in America. 
Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. 
I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. 
(Laughter) Really. Really. 
I was asked to lock up when I left. 
(Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America -- I mean, as a whole. 
One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. 
They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. 
That's how you get them to learn. 
The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. 
They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. 
Investing in professional development is not a cost. 
It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. 
They know that to be the case. 
And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. 
You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education -- That's what happens in some systems. 
Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. 
The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. 
It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. 
You have to put it back to the people. 
(Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. 
But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. 
It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. 
And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. 
It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. 
It won't, and it never did. 
The point is that education is not a mechanical system. 
It's a human system. 
It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. 
Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. 
They may find it boring. 
They may find it irrelevant. 
They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. 
There are trends, but the stories are always unique. 
I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of -- they're called alternative education programs. 
These are programs designed to get kids back into education. 
They have certain common features. 
They're very personalized. 
They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. 
And they work. 
What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education." 
(Laughter) You know? 
And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. 
We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. 
We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. 
Culture is an organic term, isn't it? 
Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. 
Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. 
Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. 
Hence, Death Valley. 
In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. 
Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. 
And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. 
The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. 
What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. 
It's dormant. 
Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. 
It happens all the time. 
You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life. 
Great leaders know that. 
The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control. 
The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. 
And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. 
There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. 
"There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen." 
And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. 
And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. 
And that's what we need. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s. 
When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid. 
But my tiger mother said, "No." 
My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them. 
After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. 
It is not important if I like the job or not. 
But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. 
That is me playing my imaginary piano. 
An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school. 
I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show. 
But no adults liked the idea. 
No adults believed I was serious. 
Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was. 
So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained. 
My dream would never come true. 
I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for. 
But that's so unfair. 
So I was determined to find another calling. 
Nobody around to teach me? Fine. 
I turned to books. 
I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.["Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei"] I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.["Jane Eyre"] And I learned to be efficient from this book.["Cheaper by the Dozen"] And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these. 
["Complete Works of Sanmao" (aka Echo Chan)] ["Lessons From History" by Nan Huaijin] I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first? 
Books banned in China, of course. 
"The Good Earth" is about Chinese peasant life. 
That's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it. 
The Bible is interesting, but strange. 
(Laughter) That's a topic for a different day. 
But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother." 
"Honor," I said. "That's so different, and better, than obey." 
So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents. 
Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading. 
It offers many insights. 
For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with. 
It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world. 
A map actually carries somebody's view. 
Comparative reading actually is nothing new. 
It's a standard practice in the academic world. 
There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature. 
Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. 
So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? 
So I started reading books in pairs. 
So they can be about people -- ["Benjamin Franklin" by Walter Isaacson]["John Adams" by David McCullough] -- who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences. 
["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres -- (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] -- or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations. 
For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual. 
For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty -- interesting. 
So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages. 
["The Way of Chuang Tzu" Thomas Merton]["Tao: The Watercourse Way" Alan Watts] Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain. 
For example, it's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh! 
"Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh. 
(Laughter) Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. 
I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. 
Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. 
I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. 
Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. 
Even a shattered dream can do that for you. 
So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time. 
So may books be always with you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

2014, July 5, the Ukrainian army entered Sloviansk city in eastern Ukraine. 
They gathered all the locals in Lenin Square. 
Then, they organized the public crucifixion of the son of a pro-Russia militant. 
He was only three years old. 
Refugee Galina Pyshnyak told this story to Russia's First TV channel. 
In fact, this incident never happened. 
I visited Sloviansk. 
There is no Lenin Square. 
In reality, Galina's husband was an active pro-Russia militant in Donbass. 
This is just one of many examples. 
Ukraine has been suffering from Russian propaganda and fake news for four years now, but Russia is not the only player in this space. 
Fake news is happening all around the world. 
We all know about fake news. 
We see it and read it all the time. 
But the thing about fake news is that we don't always know what is fake and what is real, but we base our decisions on facts we get from the press and social media. 
When facts are false, decisions are wrong. 
A lot of people stop believing anyone at all and this is even more dangerous. 
They easily become prey to populists in elections, or even take up arms. 
Fake news is not only bad for journalism. 
It's a threat for democracy and society. 
Four years ago, unmarked soldiers entered the Crimean Peninsula, and at the same time, Russian media was going crazy with fake news about Ukraine. 
So a group of journalists, including me, started a website to investigate this fake news. 
We called it StopFake. 
The idea was simple: take a piece of news, check it with verifiable proof like photos, videos and other strong evidence. 
If it turns out to be fake, we put it on our website. 
Now, StopFake is an informational hub which analyzes propaganda in all its phases. 
We have 11 language versions, we have millions of views, We have taught more than 10,000 people how to distinguish true from false. 
And we teach fact checkers all around the world. 
StopFake has uncovered more than 1,000 fakes about Ukraine. 
We've identified 18 narratives created using this fake news, such as Ukraine is a fascist state, a failed state, a state run by a junta who came to power as a result of a coup d'état. 
We proved that it's not bad journalism; it's a deliberate act of misinformation. 
Fake news is a powerful weapon in information warfare, but there is something we can do about it. 
We all have smartphones. 
When we see something interesting, it's often automatic. 
We just click and pass it along. 
But how can you not be a part of fake news? 
First, if it's too dramatic, too emotional, too clickbait, then it's very likely that it isn't true. 
The truth is boring sometimes. 
(Laughter) Manipulations are always sexy. 
They are designed to captivate you. 
Do your research. 
This is the second point, very simple. 
Look at other sites. 
Check out alternative news sources. 
Google names, addresses, license plates, experts and authors. 
Don't just believe, check. 
It's the only way to stop this culture of fake news. 
This information warfare is not only about fake news. 
Our society depends on trust: trust in our institutions, in science, trust in our leaders, trust in our news outlets. 
And it's on us to find a way to rebuild trust, because fake news destroys it. 
So ask yourself, what have you lost your faith in? 
Where has trust been ruined for you? 
And what are you going to do about it? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing, that all you wanted to do was learn as much as you could to make sense of it all? 
When I was 13, a close family friend who was like an uncle to me passed away from pancreatic cancer. 
When the disease hit so close to home, I knew I needed to learn more. 
So I went online to find answers. 
Using the Internet, I found a variety of statistics on pancreatic cancer, and what I had found shocked me. 
Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival. 
Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer? 
The reason? 
Today's current "modern" medicine is a 60-year-old technique. 
That's older than my dad. 
(Laughter) But also, it's extremely expensive, costing 800 dollars per test, and it's grossly inaccurate, missing 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers. 
Your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you have the cancer in order to give you this test. 
Learning this, I knew there had to be a better way. 
So, I set up scientific criteria as to what a sensor would have to look like in order to effectively diagnose pancreatic cancer. 
The sensor would have to be: inexpensive, rapid, simple, sensitive, selective, and minimally invasive. 
Now, there's a reason why this test hasn't been updated in over six decades. 
And that's because when we're looking for pancreatic cancer, we're looking at your bloodstream, which is already abundant in all these tons and tons of protein, and you're looking for this miniscule difference in this tiny amount of protein. 
Just this one protein. 
That's next to impossible. 
However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism -- (Laughter) (Applause) I went online to a teenager's two best friends, Google and Wikipedia. 
I got everything for my homework from those two sources. 
(Laughter) And what I had found was an article that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer. 
So, I decided to go and make it my new mission to go through all these proteins, and see which ones could serve as a bio-marker for pancreatic cancer. 
And to make it a bit simpler for myself, I decided to map out scientific criteria, and here it is. 
Essentially, first, the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers, at high levels in the bloodstream, in the earliest stages, but also only in cancer. 
And so I'm just plugging and chugging through this gargantuan task, and finally, on the 4,000th try, when I'm close to losing my sanity, I find the protein. 
And the name of the protein I'd located was called mesothelin, and it's just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill type protein, unless, of course, you have pancreatic, ovarian or lung cancer, in which case it's found at these very high levels in your bloodstream. 
But also, the key is that it's found in the earliest stages of the disease, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. 
So now that I'd found a reliable protein I could detect, I then shifted my focus to actually detecting that protein, and thus, pancreatic cancer. 
Now, my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place, possibly the most unlikely place for innovation -- my high school biology class, the absolute stifler of innovation. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And I had snuck in this article on these things called carbon nanotubes, and that's just a long, thin pipe of carbon that's an atom thick, and one 50,000th the diameter of your hair. 
And despite their extremely small sizes, they have these incredible properties. 
They're kind of like the superheroes of material science. 
And while I was sneakily reading this article under my desk in my biology class, we were supposed to be paying attention to these other kind of cool molecules, called antibodies. 
And these are pretty cool because they only react with one specific protein, but they're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes. 
And so then, I was sitting in class, and suddenly it hit me: I could combine what I was reading about, carbon nanotubes, with what I was supposed to be thinking about, antibodies. 
Essentially, I could weave a bunch of these antibodies into a network of carbon nanotubes, such that you have a network that only reacts with one protein, but also, due to the properties of these nanotubes, it will change its electrical properties, based on the amount of protein present. 
However, there's a catch. 
These networks of carbon nanotubes are extremely flimsy. 
And since they're so delicate, they need to be supported. 
So that's why I chose to use paper. 
Making a cancer sensor out of paper is about as simple as making chocolate chip cookies, which I love. 
(Laughs) You start with some water, pour in some nanotubes, add antibodies, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it, and you can detect cancer. 
(Applause) Then, suddenly, a thought occurred that kind of put a blemish on my amazing plan here. 
I can't really do cancer research on my kitchen countertop. 
My mom wouldn't really like that. 
So instead, I decided to go for a lab. 
So I typed up a budget, a materials list, a timeline, and a procedure, and I emailed it to 200 different professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health -- essentially, anyone that had anything to do with pancreatic cancer. 
I sat back waiting for these positive emails to be pouring in, saying, "You're a genius! You're going to save us all!" 
And -- (Laughter) Then reality took hold, and over the course of a month, I got 199 rejections out of those 200 emails. 
One professor even went through my entire procedure, painstakingly -- I'm not really sure where he got all this time -- and he went through and said why each and every step was like the worst mistake I could ever make. 
Clearly, the professors did not have as high of an opinion of my work as I did. 
However, there is a silver lining. 
One professor said, "Maybe I might be able to help you, kid." 
So, I went in that direction. 
(Laughter) As you can never say no to a kid. 
And so then, three months later, I finally nailed down a harsh deadline with this guy, and I get into his lab, I get all excited, and then I sit down, I start opening my mouth and talking, and five seconds later, he calls in another Ph.D. 
Ph.D.s just flock into this little room, and they're just firing these questions at me, and by the end, I kind of felt like I was in a clown car. 
There were 20 Ph.D.s, plus me and the professor crammed into this tiny office space, with them firing these rapid-fire questions at me, trying to sink my procedure. 
How unlikely is that? I mean, pshhh. 
(Laughter) However, subjecting myself to that interrogation -- I answered all their questions, and I guessed on quite a few but I got them right -- and I finally landed the lab space I needed. 
But it was shortly afterwards that I discovered my once brilliant procedure had something like a million holes in it, and over the course of seven months, I painstakingly filled each and every one of those holes. 
The result? 
One small paper sensor that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run. 
This makes it 168 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standard for pancreatic cancer detection. 
(Applause) One of the best parts of the sensor, though, is that it has close to 100 percent accuracy, and can detect the cancer in the earliest stages, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. 
And so in the next two to five years, this sensor could potentially lift the pancreatic cancer survival rates from a dismal 5.5 percent to close to 100 percent, and it would do similar for ovarian and lung cancer. 
But it wouldn't stop there. 
By switching out that antibody, you can look at a different protein, thus, a different disease -- potentially any disease in the entire world. 
So that ranges from heart disease, to malaria, HIV, AIDS, as well as other forms of cancer -- anything. 
And so, hopefully one day, we can all have that one extra uncle, that one mother, that one brother, sister, we can have that one more family member to love. 
And that our hearts will be rid of that one disease burden that comes from pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer, and potentially any disease. 
But through the Internet, anything is possible. 
Theories can be shared, and you don't have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. 
It's a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender -- it doesn't matter. 
It's just your ideas that count. 
For me, it's all about looking at the Internet in an entirely new way, to realize that there's so much more to it than just posting duck-face pictures of yourself online. 
(Laughter) You could be changing the world. 
So if a 15 year-old who didn't even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer -- just imagine what you could do. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

(Applause) (Music) (Applause) 

Each of these songs represents a scene, a movement, in some cases, a sonic revolution that completely altered the course of popular music. 
They're all also calling cards, almost, for those cities, songs totally linked with their city's identity, and it might be why you probably consider them to be music cities. 
Now, the magical mythical thing, the thing we kind of all love about stories like these is that those cities weren't doing anything in particular to make those moments happen. 
There's no formula for capturing lightning in a bottle. 
A formula didn't give us grunge music or introduce Tupac to Dr. Dre, and there's definitely no blueprint for how to open your record business in a South Memphis neighborhood that, turns out, is home to Booker T. Jones, William Bell and Albert King. 
So this is just something that happens, then, right? 
When the stars perfectly align, great music just happens. 
And in the meantime, New York and Nashville can churn out the hits that come through our radios, define our generations and soundtrack our weddings and our funerals and everything in between. 
Well, I don't know about you, but the very idea of that is just deadly boring to me. 
There are musicians all around you, making powerful, important music, and thanks to the internet and its limitless possibilities for creators to create music and fans to discover that music, those zeitgeist songs don't have to be handed down to us from some conference room full of songwriters in a corporate high-rise. 
But also, and more importantly, we can't decide that it's just something that happens, because music is about so much more than hits, those big, iconic moments that change everything. 
It's more than just entertainment. 
For so many of us, music is truly a way to navigate life. 
A means of self-expression, sure, but it also helps us find our self-worth and figure out who we are. 
It connects us with other people as almost nothing else can, across language barriers, across social and cultural and economic divides. 
Music makes us smarter and healthier and happier. 
Music is necessary. 
What if you lived in a city that believed that, that said, "We're not waiting for that hit song to define us. 
We're a music city because music is necessary." 
By seeing music as necessary, a city can build two things: first, an ecosystem to support the development of professional musicians and music business; and second, a receptive and engaged audience to sustain them. 
And those are the two critical elements of a music city, a city whose leaders recognize the importance of music for our development as individuals, our connection as a community and our viability as a vibrant place to live. 
See, smart cities, music cities, know that thriving nightlife, a creative class, culture is what attracts young, talented people to cities. 
It's what brings that lightning. 
And no, we can't predict the next egg that will hatch, but we can create a city that acts like an incubator. 
To do that, first, we've got to know what we've got. 
That means identifying and quantifying our assets. 
We need to know them backward and forward, from who and what and where they are to what their impact is on the economy. 
Let's count our recording studios and our record labels, our historic landmarks and our hard-core punk clubs. 
We should count monthly free jazz nights and weekly folk jams, music schools, artist development, instrument shops, every lathe and every luthier, music museums open year round and music festivals open just one weekend a year. 
Now, ideally through this process, we'll create an actual asset map, dropping a pin for each one, allowing us to see exactly what we've got and where organic momentum is already happening. 
Because it's not enough to paint in broad strokes here. 
When it comes to specific support for music locally and a broad understanding of a music brand nationally, you've got to have the receipts. 
Next, we'll need to identify our challenges. 
Now, it's important to know that, for the most part, this won't be just the opposite of step one. 
We won't gain a whole lot by simply thinking about what's missing from our map. 
Instead, we need to approach this more holistically. 
There are lots of music venues on our map. 
Awesome. 
But are they struggling? 
Do we have a venue ladder, which just means, can an artist starting out at a coffee house open mic see a clear path for how they'll grow from that 25-seat room to a hundred-seat room and so on? 
Or are we expecting them to go from a coffeehouse to a coliseum? 
Maybe our challenges lie in city infrastructure: public transportation, affordable housing. 
Maybe, like in London, where the number of music venues went from 400 in 2010 to 100 in 2015, we need to think about protections against gentrification. 
The mayor of London, in December of last year, actually added something called the "Agent of Change" principle to the city's comprehensive plan. 
And the name says it all. 
If a real-estate developer wants to build condos next to an existing music venue, the developer is the agent of change. 
They have to take the necessary steps for noise mitigation. 
Next, and this is a very big one, we need leadership, and we need a strategy. 
Now we know there's a lot of magic in this mix: a lot of right people, right place, right time. 
And that will never stop being an important element of the way music is made, the way some of the best, most enduring music is made. 
But there cannot be a leadership vacuum. 
In 2018, thriving music cities don't often happen and don't have to happen accidentally. 
We need elected officials who recognize the power of music and elevate the voices of creatives, and they're ready to put a strategy in place. 
In music cities, from Berlin to Paris to Bogotá, music advisory councils ensure that musicians have a seat at the table. 
They're volunteer councils, and they work directly with a designated advocate inside of city hall or even the chamber of commerce. 
The strongest strategies will build music community supports like this one inward while also exporting music outward. 
They go hand in hand. 
When we look inward, we create that place that musicians want to live. 
And when we look outward, we build opportunities for them to advance their career while also driving attention back to our city and leveraging music as a talent-attraction tool. 
And here's something else that will help with that: we've got to figure out who we are. 
Now, when I say Austin, you probably think "live music capital." 
And why? 
Because in 1991, leadership in Austin saw something percolating with an existing asset, and they chose to own it. 
By recognizing that momentum, naming it and claiming it, they inevitably caused more live music venues to open, existing spaces to add live music to their repertoire, and they created a swell of civic buy-in around the idea, which meant that it wasn't just a slogan in some tourism pamphlet. 
It was something that locals really started to believe and take pride in. 
Now, generally speaking, what Austin created is just an assets-based narrative. 
And when we think back to step one, we know that every city will not tick every box. 
Many cities won't have recording studios like Memphis or a songwriter and publishing scene like Nashville, and that's not a dealbreaker. 
We simply have to find the momentum happening in our city. 
What are our unique assets in comparison to no other place? 
So, if all of that sounds like something you'd like to happen where you live, here are three things you can do to move the needle. 
First, you can use your feet, your ears and your dollars. 
Show up. Be that receptive and engaged audience that is so necessary for a music city to thrive. 
Pay a cover charge. 
Buy a record. 
Discover new music, and please, take your friends. 
Two, you can use your voice. 
Buy into the assets-based narrative. 
Talk about and celebrate what your city has. 
And three, you can use your vote. 
Seek out leadership that doesn't just pay lip service to your city's music, but recognizes its power and is prepared to put a strategy in place to elevate it, grow it and build collaboration. 
There really is no telling what city could be defined by a certain scene or a certain song in the next decade, but as much as we absolutely cannot predict that, what we absolutely can predict is what happens when we treat music as necessary and we work to build a music city. 
And that is a place where I want to live. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We're at a critical moment. 
Our leaders, some of our great institutions are failing us. 
Why? 
In some cases, it's because they're bad or unethical, but often, they've taken us to the wrong objectives. 
And this is unacceptable. 
This has to stop. 
How are we going to correct these wrongs? 
How are we going to choose the right course? 
It's not going to be easy. 
For years, I've worked with talented teams and they've chosen the right objectives and the wrong objectives. 
Many have succeeded, others of them have failed. 
And today I'm going to share with you what really makes a difference -- that's what's crucial, how and why they set meaningful and audacious goals, the right goals for the right reasons. 
Let's go back to 1975. 
Yep, this is me. 
I've got a lot to learn, I'm a computer engineer, I've got long hair, but I'm working under Andy Grove, who's been called the greatest manager of his or any other era. 
Andy was a superb leader and also a teacher, and he said to me, "John, it almost doesn't matter what you know. 
Execution is what matters the most." 
And so Andy invented a system called "Objectives and Key Results." 
It kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? 
And it's all about excellent execution. 
So here's a classic video from the 1970s of professor Andy Grove. 
(Video) Andy Grove: The two key phrases of the management by objective systems are the objectives and the key results, and they match the two purposes. 
The objective is the direction. 
The key results have to be measured, but at the end you can look and without any argument say, "Did I do that, or did I not do that?" Yes. No. Simple. 
John Doerr: That's Andy. 
Yes. No. Simple. 
Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, are a simple goal-setting system and they work for organizations, they work for teams, they even work for individuals. 
The objectives are what you want to have accomplished. 
The key results are how I'm going to get that done. 
Objectives. Key results. 
What and how. 
But here's the truth: many of us are setting goals wrong, and most of us are not setting goals at all. 
A lot of organizations set objectives and meet them. 
They ship their sales, they introduce their new products, they make their numbers, but they lack a sense of purpose to inspire their teams. 
So how do you set these goals the right way? 
First, you must answer the question, "Why?" 
Why? 
Because truly transformational teams combine their ambitions to their passion and to their purpose, and they develop a clear and compelling sense of why. 
I want to tell you a story. 
I work with a remarkable entrepreneur. 
Her name is Jini Kim. 
She runs a company called Nuna. 
Nuna is a health care data company. 
And when Nuna was founded, they used data to serve the health needs of lots of workers at large companies. 
And then two years into the company's life, the federal government issued a proposal to build the first ever cloud database for Medicaid. 
Now, you'll remember that Medicaid is that program that serves 70 million Americans, our poor, our children and people with disabilities. 
Nuna at the time was just 15 people and this database had to be built in one year, and they had a whole set of commitments that they had to honor, and frankly, they weren't going to make very much money on the project. 
This was a bet-your-company moment, and Jini seized it. 
She jumped at the opportunity. She did not flinch. 
Why? 
Well, it's a personal why. 
Jini's younger brother Kimong has autism. 
And when he was seven, he had his first grand mal seizure at Disneyland. 
He fell to the ground. He stopped breathing. 
Jini's parents are Korean immigrants. 
They came to the country with limited resources speaking little English, so it was up to Jini to enroll her family in Medicaid. 
She was nine years old. 
That moment defined her mission, and that mission became her company, and that company bid on, won and delivered on that contract. 
Here's Jini to tell you why. 
(Video) Jini Kim: Medicaid saved my family from bankruptcy, and today it provides for Kimong's health and for millions of others. 
Nuna is my love letter to Medicaid. 
Every row of data is a life whose story deserves to be told with dignity. 
JD: And Jini's story tells us that a compelling sense of why can be the launchpad for our objectives. 
Remember, that's what we want to have accomplished. 
And objectives are significant, they're action-oriented, they are inspiring, and they're a kind of vaccine against fuzzy thinking. 
You think a rockstar would be an unlikely user of Objectives and Key Results, but for years, Bono has used OKRs to wage a global war against poverty and disease, and his ONE organization has focused on two really gorgeous, audacious objectives. 
The first is debt relief for the poorest countries in the world. 
The next is universal access to anti-HIV drugs. 
Now, why are these good objectives? 
Let's go back to our checklist. 
Significant? Check. Concrete? Yes. 
Action-oriented? Yes. 
Inspirational? 
Well, let's just listen to Bono. 
(Video) Bono: So you're passionate? 
How passionate? 
What actions does your passion lead you to do? 
If the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head, then your passion means nothing. 
The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside it. 
It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where failing is not a fireable offense. 
And when you have that sort of structure and environment and the right people, magic is around the corner. 
JD: I love that. 
OKRs cultivate the madness, and magic is right around the corner. 
This is perfect. 
So with Jini we've covered the whys, with Bono the whats of goal-setting. 
Let's turn our attention to the hows. 
Remember, the hows are the key results. 
That's how we meet our objectives. 
And good results are specific and time-bound. 
They're aggressive but realistic. 
They're measurable, and they're verifiable. 
Those are good key results. 
In 1999, I introduced OKRs to Google's cofounders, Larry and Sergey. 
Here they are, 24 years old in their garage. 
And Sergey enthusiastically said he'd adopt them. 
Well, not quite. 
What he really said was, "We don't have any other way to manage this company, so we'll give it a go." 
(Laughter) And I took that as a kind of endorsement. 
But every quarter since then, every Googler has written down her objectives and her key results. 
They've graded them, and they've published them for everyone to see. 
And these are not used for bonuses or for promotions. 
They're set aside. 
They're used for a higher purpose, and that's to get collective commitment to truly stretch goals. 
In 2008, a Googler, Sundar Pichai, took on an objective which was to build the next generation client platform for the future of web applications -- in other words, build the best browser. 
He was very thoughtful about how he chose his key results. 
How do you measure the best browser? 
It could be ad clicks or engagement. 
No. He said: numbers of users, because users are going to decide if Chrome is a great browser or not. 
So he had this one three-year-long objective: build the best browser. 
And then every year he stuck to the same key results, numbers of users, but he upped the ante. 
In the first year, his goal was 20 million users and he missed it. 
He got less than 10. 
Second year, he raised the bar to 50 million. 
He got to 37 million users. 
Somewhat better. 
In the third year, he upped the ante once more to a hundred million. 
He launched an aggressive marketing campaign, broader distribution, improved the technology, and kaboom! 
He got 111 million users. 
Here's why I like this story, not so much for the happy ending, but it shows someone carefully choosing the right objective and then sticking to it year after year after year. 
It's a perfect story for a nerd like me. 
Now, I think of OKRs as transparent vessels that are made from the whats and hows of our ambitions. 
What really matters is the why that we pour into those vessels. 
That's why we do our work. 
OKRs are not a silver bullet. 
They're not going to be a substitute for a strong culture or for stronger leadership, but when those fundamentals are in place, they can take you to the mountaintop. 
I want you to think about your life for a moment. 
Do you have the right metrics? 
Take time to write down your values, your objectives and your key results. 
Do it today. 
If you'd like some feedback on them, you can send them to me. 
I'm john@whatmatters.com. 
If we think of the world-changing goals of an Intel, of a Nuna, of Bono, of Google, they're remarkable: ubiquitous computing, affordable health care, high-quality for everyone, ending global poverty, access to all the world's information. 
Here's the deal: every one of those goals is powered today by OKRs. 
Now, I've been called the Johnny Appleseed of OKRs for spreading the good gospel according to Andy Grove, but I want you to join me in this movement. 
Let's fight for what it is that really matters, because we can take OKRs beyond our businesses. 
We can take them to our families, to our schools, even to our governments. 
We can hold those governments accountable. 
We can transform those informations. 
We can get back on the right track if we can and do measure what really matters. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

You hear the gentle lap of waves, the distant cawing of a seagull. 
But then an annoying whine interrupts the peace, getting closer, and closer, and closer. 
Until...whack! 
You dispatch the offending mosquito, and calm is restored. 
How did you detect that noise from afar and target its maker with such precision? 
The ability to recognize sounds and identify their location is possible thanks to the auditory system. 
That’s comprised of two main parts: the ear and the brain. 
The ear’s task is to convert sound energy into neural signals; the brain’s is to receive and process the information those signals contain. 
To understand how that works, we can follow a sound on its journey into the ear. 
The source of a sound creates vibrations that travel as waves of pressure through particles in air, liquids, or solids. 
But our inner ear, called the cochlea, is actually filled with saltwater-like fluids. 
So, the first problem to solve is how to convert those sound waves, wherever they’re coming from, into waves in the fluid. 
The solution is the eardrum, or tympanic membrane, and the tiny bones of the middle ear. 
Those convert the large movements of the eardrum into pressure waves in the fluid of the cochlea. 
When sound enters the ear canal, it hits the eardrum and makes it vibrate like the head of a drum. 
The vibrating eardrum jerks a bone called the hammer, which hits the anvil and moves the third bone called the stapes. 
Its motion pushes the fluid within the long chambers of the cochlea. 
Once there, the sound vibrations have finally been converted into vibrations of a fluid, and they travel like a wave from one end of the cochlea to the other. 
A surface called the basilar membrane runs the length of the cochlea. 
It’s lined with hair cells that have specialized components called stereocilia, which move with the vibrations of the cochlear fluid and the basilar membrane. 
This movement triggers a signal that travels through the hair cell, into the auditory nerve, then onward to the brain, which interprets it as a specific sound. 
When a sound makes the basilar membrane vibrate, not every hair cell moves - only selected ones, depending on the frequency of the sound. 
This comes down to some fine engineering. 
At one end, the basilar membrane is stiff, vibrating only in response to short wavelength, high-frequency sounds. 
The other is more flexible, vibrating only in the presence of longer wavelength, low-frequency sounds. 
So, the noises made by the seagull and mosquito vibrate different locations on the basilar membrane, like playing different keys on a piano. 
But that’s not all that’s going on. 
The brain still has another important task to fulfill: identifying where a sound is coming from. 
For that, it compares the sounds coming into the two ears to locate the source in space. 
A sound from directly in front of you will reach both your ears at the same time. 
You’ll also hear it at the same intensity in each ear. 
However, a low-frequency sound coming from one side will reach the near ear microseconds before the far one. 
And high-frequency sounds will sound more intense to the near ear because they’re blocked from the far ear by your head. 
These strands of information reach special parts of the brainstem that analyze time and intensity differences between your ears. 
They send the results of their analysis up to the auditory cortex. 
Now, the brain has all the information it needs: the patterns of activity that tell us what the sound is, and information about where it is in space. 
Not everyone has normal hearing. 
Hearing loss is the third most common chronic disease in the world. 
Exposure to loud noises and some drugs can kill hair cells, preventing signals from traveling from the ear to the brain. 
Diseases like osteosclerosis freeze the tiny bones in the ear so they no longer vibrate. 
And with tinnitus, the brain does strange things to make us think there’s a sound when there isn’t one. 
But when it does work, our hearing is an incredible, elegant system. 
Our ears enclose a fine-tuned piece of biological machinery that converts the cacophony of vibrations in the air around us into precisely tuned electrical impulses that distinguish claps, taps, sighs, and flies. 

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

I have a confession to make. 
But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. 
In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. 
Anyone? 
How about a moderate amount of stress? 
Who has experienced a lot of stress? 
Yeah. Me too. 
But that is not my confession. 
My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. 
But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. 
For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. 
It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. 
Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. 
But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours. 
Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. 
This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" 
They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" 
And then they used public death records to find out who died. 
(Laughter) Okay. 
Some bad news first. 
People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. 
But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. 
(Laughter) People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. 
In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress. 
Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. 
(Laughter) That is over 20,000 deaths a year. 
Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide. 
(Laughter) You can see why this study freaked me out. 
Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health. 
So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? 
And here the science says yes. 
When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. 
Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. 
It's called the social stress test. 
You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this. 
(Laughter) And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this. 
(Exhales) (Laughter) Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. 
And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. 
Now we're going to all do this together. 
It's going to be fun. 
For me. 
Okay. 
(Laughter) I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. 
You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. 
Go! 
(Audience counting) Go faster. Faster please. 
You're going too slow. 
(Audience counting) Stop. Stop, stop, stop. 
That guy made a mistake. 
We are going to have to start all over again. 
(Laughter) You're not very good at this, are you? 
Okay, so you get the idea. 
If you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. 
Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. 
And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. 
But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? 
Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. 
Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. 
That pounding heart is preparing you for action. 
If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. 
It's getting more oxygen to your brain. 
And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. 
Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. 
And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. 
It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. 
But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. 
Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. 
It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. 
Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. 
And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters. 
So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. 
I no longer want to get rid of your stress. 
I want to make you better at stress. 
And we just did a little intervention. 
If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. 
And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier. 
Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. 
I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social. 
To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. 
It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. 
But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. 
Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. 
It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. 
It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. 
Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. 
It enhances your empathy. 
It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. 
Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... 
to become more compassionate and caring. 
But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. 
It's a stress hormone. 
Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. 
It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. 
And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. 
Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. 
Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. 
When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you. 
Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? 
Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. 
It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. 
It's a natural anti-inflammatory. 
It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. 
But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. 
Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. 
This stress hormone strengthens your heart. 
And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. 
So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. 
I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection. 
I want to finish by telling you about one more study. 
And listen up, because this study could also save a life. 
This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" 
They also asked, "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?" 
And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died. 
Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. 
But -- and I hope you are expecting a "but" by now -- but that wasn't true for everyone. 
People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. 
Zero. 
Caring created resilience. 
And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. 
How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. 
When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. 
And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. 
Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. 
Stress gives us access to our hearts. 
The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. 
And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. 
You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. 
And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. 
It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. 
How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? 
It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense? 
KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. 
And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows. 
CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool. 
(Applause) 

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

For the last two and a half years, I'm one of the few, if not the only, child psychiatrist operating in refugee camps, shorelines and rescue boats in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea. 
And I can say, with great confidence, that we are witnessing a mental-health catastrophe that will affect most of us, and it will change our world. 
I live in Haifa, but nowadays, I spend most of my time abroad. 
During my time on the Greek island of Lesbos and on the rescue boats in the Mediterranean, thousands of refugee boats arrived to the shoreline, crowded with more than 1.5 million refugees. 
One-fourth of them are children, fleeing war and hardship. 
Each boat carries different sufferings and traumas from Syria, Iraq, Afganistan and different countries in Africa. 
In the last three years alone, more than 12,000 refugees lost their lives. 
And hundreds of thousands lost their souls and their mental health due to this cruel and traumatic experience. 
I want to tell you about Omar, a five-year-old Syrian refugee boy who arrived to the shore on Lesbos on a crowded rubber boat. 
Crying, frightened, unable to understand what's happening to him, he was right on the verge of developing a new trauma. 
I knew right away that this was a golden hour, a short period of time in which I could change his story, I could change the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life. 
I could reframe his memories. 
I quickly held out my hands and said to his shaking mother in Arabic, (Arabic) "Ateeni elwalad o khudi nafas." 
"Give me the boy, and take a breath." 
His mother gave him to me. 
Omar looked at me with scared, tearful eyes and said, (Arabic) "Ammo (uncle in Arabic), shu hada?" 
"What is this?" 
as he pointed out to the police helicopter hovering above us. 
"It's a helicopter! 
It's here to photograph you with big cameras, because only the great and the powerful heroes, like you, Omar, can cross the sea." 
Omar looked at me, stopped crying and asked me, (Arabic) "Ana batal?" 
"I'm a hero?" 
I talked to Omar for 15 minutes. 
And I gave his parents some guidance to follow. 
This short psychological intervention decreases the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues in the future, preparing Omar to get an education, join the workforce, raise a family and beyond. 
How? 
By stimulating the good memories that will be stored in the amygdala, the emotional storage of the human brain. 
These memories will fight the traumatic ones, if they are reactivated in the future. 
To Omar, the smell of the sea will not just remind him of his traumatic journey from Syria. 
Because to Omar, this story is now a story of bravery. 
This is the power of the golden hour, which can reframe the trauma and establish a new narrative. 
But Omar is only one out of more than 350,000 children without the proper mental health support in this crisis alone. 
Three hundred and fifty thousand children and me. 
We need mental health professionals to join rescue teams during times of active crisis. 
This is why my wife and I and friends co-founded "Humanity Crew." 
One of the few aid organizations in the world that specializes in providing psychosocial aid and first-response mental health interventions to refugees and displaced populations. 
To provide them with a suitable intervention, we create the four-step approach, a psychosocial work plan that follows the refugees on each step of their journey. 
Starting inside the sea, on the rescue boats, as mental health lifeguards. 
Later in the camps, hospitals and through our online clinic that breaks down borders and overcomes languages. 
And ending in the asylum countries, helping them integrate. 
Since our first mission in 2015, "Humanity Crew" had 194 delegations of qualified, trained volunteers and therapists. 
We have provided 26,000 hours of mental health support to over 10,000 refugees. 
We can all do something to prevent this mental health catastrophe. 
We need to acknowledge that first aid is not just needed for the body, but it has also to include the mind, the soul. 
The impact on the soul is hardly visible, but the damage can be there for life. 
Let's not forget that what distinguishes us humans from machines is the beautiful and the delicate soul within us. 
Let's try harder to save more Omars. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) 

I'm James. 
I'm a writer and artist, and I make work about technology. 
I do things like draw life-size outlines of military drones in city streets around the world, so that people can start to think and get their heads around these really quite hard-to-see and hard-to-think-about technologies. 
I make things like neural networks that predict the results of elections based on weather reports, because I'm intrigued about what the actual possibilities of these weird new technologies are. 
Last year, I built my own self-driving car. 
But because I don't really trust technology, I also designed a trap for it. 
(Laughter) And I do these things mostly because I find them completely fascinating, but also because I think when we talk about technology, we're largely talking about ourselves and the way that we understand the world. 
So here's a story about technology. 
This is a "surprise egg" video. 
It's basically a video of someone opening up loads of chocolate eggs and showing the toys inside to the viewer. 
That's it. That's all it does for seven long minutes. 
And I want you to notice two things about this. 
First of all, this video has 30 million views. 
(Laughter) And the other thing is, it comes from a channel that has 6.3 million subscribers, that has a total of eight billion views, and it's all just more videos like this -- 30 million people watching a guy opening up these eggs. 
It sounds pretty weird, but if you search for "surprise eggs" on YouTube, it'll tell you there's 10 million of these videos, and I think that's an undercount. 
I think there's way, way more of these. 
If you keep searching, they're endless. 
There's millions and millions of these videos in increasingly baroque combinations of brands and materials, and there's more and more of them being uploaded every single day. 
Like, this is a strange world. Right? 
But the thing is, it's not adults who are watching these videos. 
It's kids, small children. 
These videos are like crack for little kids. 
There's something about the repetition, the constant little dopamine hit of the reveal, that completely hooks them in. 
And little kids watch these videos over and over and over again, and they do it for hours and hours and hours. 
And if you try and take the screen away from them, they'll scream and scream and scream. 
If you don't believe me -- and I've already seen people in the audience nodding -- if you don't believe me, find someone with small children and ask them, and they'll know about the surprise egg videos. 
So this is where we start. 
It's 2018, and someone, or lots of people, are using the same mechanism that, like, Facebook and Instagram are using to get you to keep checking that app, and they're using it on YouTube to hack the brains of very small children in return for advertising revenue. 
At least, I hope that's what they're doing. 
I hope that's what they're doing it for, because there's easier ways of making ad revenue on YouTube. 
You can just make stuff up or steal stuff. 
So if you search for really popular kids' cartoons like "Peppa Pig" or "Paw Patrol," you'll find there's millions and millions of these online as well. 
Of course, most of them aren't posted by the original content creators. 
They come from loads and loads of different random accounts, and it's impossible to know who's posting them or what their motives might be. 
Does that sound kind of familiar? 
Because it's exactly the same mechanism that's happening across most of our digital services, where it's impossible to know where this information is coming from. 
It's basically fake news for kids, and we're training them from birth to click on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the source is. 
That's doesn't seem like a terribly good idea. 
Here's another thing that's really big on kids' YouTube. 
This is called the "Finger Family Song." 
I just heard someone groan in the audience. 
This is the "Finger Family Song." 
This is the very first one I could find. 
It's from 2007, and it only has 200,000 views, which is, like, nothing in this game. 
But it has this insanely earwormy tune, which I'm not going to play to you, because it will sear itself into your brain in the same way that it seared itself into mine, and I'm not going to do that to you. 
But like the surprise eggs, it's got inside kids' heads and addicted them to it. 
So within a few years, these finger family videos start appearing everywhere, and you get versions in different languages with popular kids' cartoons using food or, frankly, using whatever kind of animation elements you seem to have lying around. 
And once again, there are millions and millions and millions of these videos available online in all of these kind of insane combinations. 
And the more time you start to spend with them, the crazier and crazier you start to feel that you might be. 
And that's where I kind of launched into this, that feeling of deep strangeness and deep lack of understanding of how this thing was constructed that seems to be presented around me. 
Because it's impossible to know where these things are coming from. 
Like, who is making them? 
Some of them appear to be made of teams of professional animators. 
Some of them are just randomly assembled by software. 
Some of them are quite wholesome-looking young kids' entertainers. 
And some of them are from people who really clearly shouldn't be around children at all. 
(Laughter) And once again, this impossibility of figuring out who's making this stuff -- like, this is a bot? 
Is this a person? Is this a troll? 
What does it mean that we can't tell the difference between these things anymore? 
And again, doesn't that uncertainty feel kind of familiar right now? 
So the main way people get views on their videos -- and remember, views mean money -- is that they stuff the titles of these videos with these popular terms. 
So you take, like, "surprise eggs" and then you add "Paw Patrol," "Easter egg," or whatever these things are, all of these words from other popular videos into your title, until you end up with this kind of meaningless mash of language that doesn't make sense to humans at all. 
Because of course it's only really tiny kids who are watching your video, and what the hell do they know? 
Your real audience for this stuff is software. 
It's the algorithms. 
It's the software that YouTube uses to select which videos are like other videos, to make them popular, to make them recommended. 
And that's why you end up with this kind of completely meaningless mash, both of title and of content. 
But the thing is, you have to remember, there really are still people within this algorithmically optimized system, people who are kind of increasingly forced to act out these increasingly bizarre combinations of words, like a desperate improvisation artist responding to the combined screams of a million toddlers at once. 
There are real people trapped within these systems, and that's the other deeply strange thing about this algorithmically driven culture, because even if you're human, you have to end up behaving like a machine just to survive. 
And also, on the other side of the screen, there still are these little kids watching this stuff, stuck, their full attention grabbed by these weird mechanisms. 
And most of these kids are too small to even use a website. 
They're just kind of hammering on the screen with their little hands. 
And so there's autoplay, where it just keeps playing these videos over and over and over in a loop, endlessly for hours and hours at a time. 
And there's so much weirdness in the system now that autoplay takes you to some pretty strange places. 
This is how, within a dozen steps, you can go from a cute video of a counting train to masturbating Mickey Mouse. 
Yeah. I'm sorry about that. 
This does get worse. 
This is what happens when all of these different keywords, all these different pieces of attention, this desperate generation of content, all comes together into a single place. 
This is where all those deeply weird keywords come home to roost. 
You cross-breed the finger family video with some live-action superhero stuff, you add in some weird, trollish in-jokes or something, and suddenly, you come to a very weird place indeed. 
The stuff that tends to upset parents is the stuff that has kind of violent or sexual content, right? 
Children's cartoons getting assaulted, getting killed, weird pranks that actually genuinely terrify children. 
What you have is software pulling in all of these different influences to automatically generate kids' worst nightmares. 
And this stuff really, really does affect small children. 
Parents report their children being traumatized, becoming afraid of the dark, becoming afraid of their favorite cartoon characters. 
If you take one thing away from this, it's that if you have small children, keep them the hell away from YouTube. 
(Applause) But the other thing, the thing that really gets to me about this, is that I'm not sure we even really understand how we got to this point. 
We've taken all of this influence, all of these things, and munged them together in a way that no one really intended. 
And yet, this is also the way that we're building the entire world. 
We're taking all of this data, a lot of it bad data, a lot of historical data full of prejudice, full of all of our worst impulses of history, and we're building that into huge data sets and then we're automating it. 
And we're munging it together into things like credit reports, into insurance premiums, into things like predictive policing systems, into sentencing guidelines. 
This is the way we're actually constructing the world today out of this data. 
And I don't know what's worse, that we built a system that seems to be entirely optimized for the absolute worst aspects of human behavior, or that we seem to have done it by accident, without even realizing that we were doing it, because we didn't really understand the systems that we were building, and we didn't really understand how to do anything differently with it. 
There's a couple of things I think that really seem to be driving this most fully on YouTube, and the first of those is advertising, which is the monetization of attention without any real other variables at work, any care for the people who are actually developing this content, the centralization of the power, the separation of those things. 
And I think however you feel about the use of advertising to kind of support stuff, the sight of grown men in diapers rolling around in the sand in the hope that an algorithm that they don't really understand will give them money for it suggests that this probably isn't the thing that we should be basing our society and culture upon, and the way in which we should be funding it. 
And the other thing that's kind of the major driver of this is automation, which is the deployment of all of this technology as soon as it arrives, without any kind of oversight, and then once it's out there, kind of throwing up our hands and going, "Hey, it's not us, it's the technology." 
Like, "We're not involved in it." 
That's not really good enough, because this stuff isn't just algorithmically governed, it's also algorithmically policed. 
When YouTube first started to pay attention to this, the first thing they said they'd do about it was that they'd deploy better machine learning algorithms to moderate the content. 
Well, machine learning, as any expert in it will tell you, is basically what we've started to call software that we don't really understand how it works. 
And I think we have enough of that already. 
We shouldn't be leaving this stuff up to AI to decide what's appropriate or not, because we know what happens. 
It'll start censoring other things. 
It'll start censoring queer content. 
It'll start censoring legitimate public speech. 
What's allowed in these discourses, it shouldn't be something that's left up to unaccountable systems. 
It's part of a discussion all of us should be having. 
But I'd leave a reminder that the alternative isn't very pleasant, either. 
YouTube also announced recently that they're going to release a version of their kids' app that would be entirely moderated by humans. 
Facebook -- Zuckerberg said much the same thing at Congress, when pressed about how they were going to moderate their stuff. 
He said they'd have humans doing it. 
And what that really means is, instead of having toddlers being the first person to see this stuff, you're going to have underpaid, precarious contract workers without proper mental health support being damaged by it as well. 
(Laughter) And I think we can all do quite a lot better than that. 
(Applause) The thought, I think, that brings those two things together, really, for me, is agency. 
It's like, how much do we really understand -- by agency, I mean: how we know how to act in our own best interests. 
Which -- it's almost impossible to do in these systems that we don't really fully understand. 
Inequality of power always leads to violence. 
And we can see inside these systems that inequality of understanding does the same thing. 
If there's one thing that we can do to start to improve these systems, it's to make them more legible to the people who use them, so that all of us have a common understanding of what's actually going on here. 
The thing, though, I think most about these systems is that this isn't, as I hope I've explained, really about YouTube. 
It's about everything. 
These issues of accountability and agency, of opacity and complexity, of the violence and exploitation that inherently results from the concentration of power in a few hands -- these are much, much larger issues. 
And they're issues not just of YouTube and not just of technology in general, and they're not even new. 
They've been with us for ages. 
But we finally built this system, this global system, the internet, that's actually showing them to us in this extraordinary way, making them undeniable. 
Technology has this extraordinary capacity to both instantiate and continue all of our most extraordinary, often hidden desires and biases and encoding them into the world, but it also writes them down so that we can see them, so that we can't pretend they don't exist anymore. 
We need to stop thinking about technology as a solution to all of our problems, but think of it as a guide to what those problems actually are, so we can start thinking about them properly and start to address them. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Helen Walters: James, thank you for coming and giving us that talk. 
So it's interesting: when you think about the films where the robotic overlords take over, it's all a bit more glamorous than what you're describing. 
But I wonder -- in those films, you have the resistance mounting. 
Is there a resistance mounting towards this stuff? 
Do you see any positive signs, green shoots of resistance? 
James Bridle: I don't know about direct resistance, because I think this stuff is super long-term. 
I think it's baked into culture in really deep ways. 
A friend of mine, Eleanor Saitta, always says that any technological problems of sufficient scale and scope are political problems first of all. 
So all of these things we're working to address within this are not going to be addressed just by building the technology better, but actually by changing the society that's producing these technologies. 
So no, right now, I think we've got a hell of a long way to go. 
But as I said, I think by unpacking them, by explaining them, by talking about them super honestly, we can actually start to at least begin that process. 
HW: And so when you talk about legibility and digital literacy, I find it difficult to imagine that we need to place the burden of digital literacy on users themselves. 
But whose responsibility is education in this new world? 
JB: Again, I think this responsibility is kind of up to all of us, that everything we do, everything we build, everything we make, needs to be made in a consensual discussion with everyone who's avoiding it; that we're not building systems intended to trick and surprise people into doing the right thing, but that they're actually involved in every step in educating them, because each of these systems is educational. 
That's what I'm hopeful about, about even this really grim stuff, that if you can take it and look at it properly, it's actually in itself a piece of education that allows you to start seeing how complex systems come together and work and maybe be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere in the world. 
HW: James, it's such an important discussion, and I know many people here are really open and prepared to have it, so thanks for starting off our morning. 
JB: Thanks very much. Cheers. 
(Applause) 

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

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

There is something you know about me, something very personal, and there is something I know about every one of you and that's very central to your concerns. 
There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with. 
And that is that all of us want to be happy. 
In this, we are all together. 
How we imagine our happiness, that differs from one another, but it's already a lot that we have all in common, that we want to be happy. 
Now my topic is gratefulness. 
What is the connection between happiness and gratefulness? 
Many people would say, well, that's very easy. 
When you are happy, you are grateful. 
But think again. 
Is it really the happy people that are grateful? 
We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy, because they want something else or they want more of the same. 
And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. 
They radiate happiness. You are surprised. 
Why? Because they are grateful. 
So it is not happiness that makes us grateful. 
It's gratefulness that makes us happy. 
If you think it's happiness that makes you grateful, think again. 
It's gratefulness that makes you happy. 
Now, we can ask, what do we really mean by gratefulness? 
And how does it work? 
I appeal to your own experience. 
We all know from experience how it goes. 
We experience something that's valuable to us. 
Something is given to us that's valuable to us. 
And it's really given. 
These two things have to come together. 
It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. 
You haven't bought it. You haven't earned it. 
You haven't traded it in. You haven't worked for it. 
It's just given to you. 
And when these two things come together, something that's really valuable to me and I realize it's freely given, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. 
That's how gratefulness happens. 
Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. 
We cannot only have grateful experiences. 
We can be people who live gratefully. 
Grateful living, that is the thing. 
And how can we live gratefully? 
By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say. 
It's a gift. You haven't earned it. 
You haven't brought it about in any way. 
You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. 
If we didn't have this present moment, we wouldn't have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything, and this moment is a gift. 
It's a given moment, as we say. 
Now, we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity. 
What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn't have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn't be grateful for it. 
Opportunity is the gift within every gift, and we have this saying, opportunity knocks only once. 
Well, think again. 
Every moment is a new gift, over and over again, and if you miss the opportunity of this moment, another moment is given to us, and another moment. 
We can avail ourselves of this opportunity, or we can miss it, and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity, it is the key to happiness. 
Behold the master key to our happiness in our own hands. 
Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift. 
Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? 
Certainly not. 
We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. 
On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. 
But I didn't say we can be grateful for everything. 
I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. 
It isn't as bad as it might seem. 
Actually, when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is the opportunity to enjoy, and we only miss it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity. 
But once in a while, something very difficult is given to us, and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity, and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful. 
Learning patience, for instance. 
We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon. 
That takes patience. That's difficult. 
It may be to stand up for your opinion, to stand up for your conviction. 
That's an opportunity that is given to us. 
To learn, to suffer, to stand up, all these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire. 
They make something out of life. 
And those who fail get another opportunity. 
We always get another opportunity. 
That's the wonderful richness of life. 
So how can we find a method that will harness this? 
How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful. 
How can we do it? It's a very simple method. 
It's so simple that it's actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. 
Stop. 
Look. 
Go. 
That's all. 
But how often do we stop? 
We rush through life. We don't stop. 
We miss the opportunity because we don't stop. 
We have to stop. 
We have to get quiet. 
And we have to build stop signs into our lives. 
When I was in Africa some years ago and then came back, I noticed water. 
In Africa where I was, I didn't have drinkable water. 
Every time I turned on the faucet, I was overwhelmed. 
Every time I clicked on the light, I was so grateful. 
It made me so happy. 
But after a while, this wears off. 
So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet, and every time I turned it on, water. 
So leave it up to your own imagination. 
You can find whatever works best for you, but you need stop signs in your life. 
And when you stop, then the next thing is to look. 
You look. You open your eyes. 
You open your ears. You open your nose. 
You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us. 
There is no end to it, and that is what life is all about, to enjoy, to enjoy what is given to us. 
And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy. 
And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third. 
Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. 
And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment. 
Mostly it's the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it's something more difficult. 
But whatever it is, if we take this opportunity, we go with it, we are creative, those are the creative people. 
And that little stop, look, go, is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world. 
Because we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you -- I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word "gratefulness" and "gratitude" comes up. 
Everywhere you find it, a grateful airline, a restaurant gratefulness, a café gratefulness, a wine that is gratefulness. 
Yes, I have even come across a toilet paper whose brand is called "Thank You." 
(Laughter) There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. 
It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. 
If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. 
If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live. 
And it doesn't make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing. 
The future of the world will be a network, not a pyramid turned upside down. 
The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution, and it's so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution, because the normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones before. 
What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world. 
A grateful world is a world of joyful people. 
Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people -- the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we'll have a joyful world. 
We have a network for grateful living, and it has mushroomed. 
We couldn't understand why it mushroomed. 
We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something. 
And there have been 15 million candles lit in one decade. 
People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place. 
And that is what I hope for us, and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same, stop, look, go. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly. 
Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand. 
You've got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. 
And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself: How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way you think about yourself and regard that other player? 
So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. 
We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin, randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. 
They got two times as much money; when they passed Go, they collected twice the salary; and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more. 
(Laughter) And over the course of 15 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened. 
What I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw. 
You'll to have to pardon the sound quality, because again, these were hidden cameras. 
So we've provided subtitles. 
[Video] Rich Player: How many 500s did you have? 
Poor Player: Just one. 
RP: Are you serious? PP: Yeah. 
RP: I have three. (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much. 
Paul Piff: So it was quickly apparent to players that something was up. 
One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences, dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. 
The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with the piece as he went around. 
(Game piece smacks board) We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players. 
We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side. 
It's on the bottom right corner. 
That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior. 
So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat. 
[Video] RP: Are those pretzels a trick? 
PP: I don't know. 
Paul Piff: OK, so no surprises, people are on to us. 
They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place. 
One even asks, like you just saw, "Is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?" 
And yet, despite that, the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate, and those rich players start to eat more pretzels. 
(Laughter) [Video] RP: I love pretzels. 
(Laughter) Paul Piff: And as the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person -- less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they're doing. 
PP: How much is that? 
RP: You owe me 24 dollars. 
You're going to lose all your money soon. 
I'll buy it. I have so much money. 
I have so much money, it takes me forever. 
RP 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board. 
RP 3: You're going to run out of money soon. 
I'm pretty much untouchable at this point. 
(Laughter) Paul Piff: And here's what I think was really, really interesting: it's that, at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. 
And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly ... 
(Laughter) They talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game. 
(Laughter) And they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation -- including that flip of a coin -- that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place. 
And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage. 
Now, this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don't; they have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources. 
And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies. 
What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increase. 
In surveys, we've found that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral. 
Now, what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self-interest, talk about why we should care about those implications, and end with what might be done. 
Some of the first studies that we ran in this area looked at helping behavior, something social psychologists call "pro-social behavior." 
And we were really interested in who's more likely to offer help to another person: someone who's rich or someone who's poor. 
In one of the studies, we bring rich and poor members of the community into the lab, and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars. 
We told the participants they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger, who's totally anonymous. 
They'll never meet that stranger; the stranger will never meet them. 
And we just monitor how much people give. 
Individuals who made 25,000, sometimes under 15,000 dollars a year, gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making 150,000, 200,000 dollars a year. 
We've had people play games to see who's more or less likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize. 
In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible -- You couldn't get above 12 in this game, and yet ... 
the richer you were, the more likely you were to cheat in this game to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize -- sometimes by three to four times as much. 
We ran another study where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children -- (Laughter) I'm not kidding -- I know it sounds like I'm making a joke. 
We explicitly told participants: "This candy is for children participating in a developmental lab nearby. 
They're in studies. This is for them." 
And we just monitored how much candy participants took. 
Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor. 
We've even studied cars. 
Not just any cars, but whether drivers of different kinds of cars are more or less inclined to break the law. 
In one of these studies, we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk. 
Now in California, as you all know, because I'm sure we all do this, it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross. 
So here's an example of how we did it. 
That's our confederate off to the left, posing as a pedestrian. 
He approaches as the red truck successfully stops. 
In typical California fashion, it's overtaken by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over. 
(Laughter) Now here's an example of a more expensive car, a Prius, driving through, and a BMW doing the same. 
So we did this for hundreds of vehicles on several days, just tracking who stops and who doesn't. 
What we found was as the expensiveness of a car increased ... 
(Laughter) the drivers' tendencies to break the law increased as well. 
None of the cars -- none of the cars -- in our least expensive car category broke the law. 
Close to 50 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law. 
We've run other studies, finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work, like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes, lying to customers. 
Now, I don't mean to suggest that it's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior. 
Not at all -- in fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people. 
And that's understandable, because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper, as long as we apply ourselves and work hard. 
And a piece of that means that sometimes, you need to put your own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you. 
But what we're finding is that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you. 
Here I've plotted for you the mean household income received by each fifth and top five percent of the population over the last 20 years. 
In 1993, the differences between the different quintiles of the population, in terms of income, are fairly egregious. 
It's not difficult to discern that there are differences. 
But over the last 20 years, that significant difference has become a Grand Canyon of sorts between those at the top and everyone else. 
In fact, the top 20 percent of our population own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country. 
We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. 
What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us. 
And if it's the case, as we've been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well, then, there's no reason to think that those patterns will change. 
In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse, and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years. 
Now inequality -- economic inequality -- is something we should all be concerned about, and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse ... 
not just the people at the bottom, everyone. 
There's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world, showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse. 
Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. 
Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. 
Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society. 
Even people at the top experience these outcomes. 
So what do we do? 
This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. 
But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. 
For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people. 
In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them. 
And after watching that, we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab, who was in distress. 
After watching this video, an hour later, rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person, a stranger, as someone who's poor, suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values, and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy. 
And beyond the walls of our lab, we're even beginning to see signs of change in society. 
Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals, in his Harvard commencement speech, talked about the problem of inequality facing society as being the most daunting challenge, and talked about what must be done to combat it, saying, "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries -- but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity." 
And there's the Giving Pledge, in which more than 100 of our nation's wealthiest individuals are pledging half of their fortunes to charity. 
And there's the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements, like "We are the 1 percent," "Resource Generation," or "Wealth for Common Good," in which the most privileged members of the population, members of the one percent and elsewhere, people who are wealthy, are using their own economic resources, adults and youth alike -- that's what's most striking to me -- leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values and changes in people's behavior that work against their own economic interests, but that may ultimately restore the American dream. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It looks very much like the Apollo pictures that are very well known. 
There is something different; you can click on it, and if you click on it, you can zoom in on almost any place on the Earth. 
For instance, this is a bird's-eye view of the EPFL campus. 
In many cases, you can also see how a building looks from a nearby street. 
This is pretty amazing. 
But there's something missing in this wonderful tour: It's time. 
I'm not even sure it was taken at the same moment as the bird's-eye view. 
In my lab, we develop tools to travel not only in space but also through time. 
The kind of question we're asking is Is it possible to build something like Google Maps of the past? 
Can I add a slider on top of Google Maps and just change the year, seeing how it was 100 years before, 1,000 years before? 
Is that possible? 
Can I make a Facebook of the Middle Ages? 
So, can I build time machines? 
Maybe we can just say, "No, it's not possible." 
Or, maybe, we can think of it from an information point of view. 
This is what I call the information mushroom. 
Vertically, you have the time. 
and horizontally, the amount of digital information available. 
Obviously, in the last 10 years, we have much information. 
And obviously the more we go in the past, the less information we have. 
If we want to build something like Google Maps of the past, or Facebook of the past, we need to enlarge this space, we need to make that like a rectangle. 
How do we do that? 
One way is digitization. 
There's a lot of material available -- newspaper, printed books, thousands of printed books. 
I can digitize all these. 
I can extract information from these. 
Of course, the more you go in the past, the less information you will have. 
So, it might not be enough. 
So, I can do what historians do. 
This is what we call, in computer science, simulation. 
If I take a log book, I can consider, it's not just a log book of a Venetian captain going to a particular journey. 
I can consider it is actually a log book which is representative of many journeys of that period. 
I'm extrapolating. 
If I have a painting of a facade, I can consider it's not just that particular building, but probably it also shares the same grammar of buildings where we lost any information. 
So if we want to construct a time machine, we need two things. 
We need very large archives, and we need excellent specialists. 
The Venice Time Machine, the project I'm going to talk to you about, is a joint project between the EPFL and the University of Venice Ca'Foscari. 
There's something very peculiar about Venice, that its administration has been very, very bureaucratic. 
They've been keeping track of everything, almost like Google today. 
At the Archivio di Stato, you have 80 kilometers of archives documenting every aspect of the life of Venice over more than 1,000 years. 
You have every boat that goes out, every boat that comes in. 
You have every change that was made in the city. 
This is all there. 
We are setting up a 10-year digitization program which has the objective of transforming this immense archive into a giant information system. 
The type of objective we want to reach is 450 books a day that can be digitized. 
Of course, when you digitize, that's not enough, because these documents, most of them are in Latin, in Tuscan, in Venetian dialect, so you need to transcribe them, to translate them in some cases, to index them, and this is obviously not easy. 
In particular, traditional optical character recognition method that can be used for printed manuscripts, they do not work well on the handwritten document. 
So the solution is actually to take inspiration from another domain: speech recognition. 
This is a domain of something that seems impossible, which can actually be done, simply by putting additional constraints. 
If you have a very good model of a language which is used, if you have a very good model of a document, how well they are structured. 
And these are administrative documents. 
They are well structured in many cases. 
If you divide this huge archive into smaller subsets where a smaller subset actually shares similar features, then there's a chance of success. 
If we reach that stage, then there's something else: we can extract from this document events. 
Actually probably 10 billion events can be extracted from this archive. 
And this giant information system can be searched in many ways. 
You can ask questions like, "Who lived in this palazzo in 1323?" 
"How much cost a sea bream at the Realto market in 1434?" 
"What was the salary of a glass maker in Murano maybe over a decade?" 
You can ask even bigger questions because it will be semantically coded. 
And then what you can do is put that in space, because much of this information is spatial. 
And from that, you can do things like reconstructing this extraordinary journey of that city that managed to have a sustainable development over a thousand years, managing to have all the time a form of equilibrium with its environment. 
You can reconstruct that journey, visualize it in many different ways. 
But of course, you cannot understand Venice if you just look at the city. 
You have to put it in a larger European context. 
So the idea is also to document all the things that worked at the European level. 
We can reconstruct also the journey of the Venetian maritime empire, how it progressively controlled the Adriatic Sea, how it became the most powerful medieval empire of its time, controlling most of the sea routes from the east to the south. 
But you can even do other things, because in these maritime routes, there are regular patterns. 
You can go one step beyond and actually create a simulation system, create a Mediterranean simulator which is capable actually of reconstructing even the information we are missing, which would enable us to have questions you could ask like if you were using a route planner. 
"If I am in Corfu in June 1323 and want to go to Constantinople, where can I take a boat?" 
Probably we can answer this question with one or two or three days' precision. 
"How much will it cost?" 
"What are the chance of encountering pirates?" 
Of course, you understand, the central scientific challenge of a project like this one is qualifying, quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistency at each step of this process. 
There are errors everywhere, errors in the document, it's the wrong name of the captain, some of the boats never actually took to sea. 
There are errors in translation, interpretative biases, and on top of that, if you add algorithmic processes, you're going to have errors in recognition, errors in extraction, so you have very, very uncertain data. 
So how can we detect and correct these inconsistencies? 
How can we represent that form of uncertainty? 
It's difficult. One thing you can do is document each step of the process, not only coding the historical information but what we call the meta-historical information, how is historical knowledge constructed, documenting each step. 
That will not guarantee that we actually converge toward a single story of Venice, but probably we can actually reconstruct a fully documented potential story of Venice. 
Maybe there's not a single map. 
The system should allow for that, because we have to deal with a new form of uncertainty, which is really new for this type of giant databases. 
And how should we communicate this new research to a large audience? 
Again, Venice is extraordinary for that. 
With the millions of visitors that come every year, it's actually one of the best places to try to invent the museum of the future. 
Imagine, horizontally you see the reconstructed map of a given year, and vertically, you see the document that served the reconstruction, paintings, for instance. 
Imagine an immersive system that permits to go and dive and reconstruct the Venice of a given year, some experience you could share within a group. 
On the contrary, imagine actually that you start from a document, a Venetian manuscript, and you show, actually, what you can construct out of it, how it is decoded, how the context of that document can be recreated. 
This is an image from an exhibit which is currently conducted in Geneva with that type of system. 
So to conclude, we can say that research in the humanities is about to undergo an evolution which is maybe similar to what happened to life sciences 30 years ago. 
It's really a question of scale. 
We see projects which are much beyond any single research team can do, and this is really new for the humanities, which very often take the habit of working in small groups or only with a couple of researchers. 
When you visit the Archivio di Stato, you feel this is beyond what any single team can do, and that should be a joint and common effort. 
So what we must do for this paradigm shift is actually foster a new generation of "digital humanists" that are going to be ready for this shift. 
I thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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(Applause) Maya Penn: I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, and I've been making animated flip books since I was three years old. 
At that age, I also learned about what an animator was. 
There was a program on TV about jobs most kids don't know about. 
When I understood that an animator makes the cartoons I saw on TV, I immediately said, "That's what I want to be." 
I don't know if I said it mentally or out loud, but that was a greatly defining moment in my life. 
Animation and art has always been my first love. 
It was my love for technology that sparked the idea for "Malicious Dishes." 
There was a virus on my computer, and I was trying to get rid of it, and all of a sudden, I just thought, what if viruses have their own little world inside the computer? 
Maybe a restaurant where they meet up and do virusy things? 
And thus, "Malicious Dishes" was born. 
At four years old, my dad showed me how to take apart a computer and put it back together again. 
That started my love for technology. 
I built my first website myself in HTML, and I'm learning JavaScript and Python. 
I'm also working on an animated series called "The Pollinators." 
It's about bees and other pollinators in our environment and why they're so important. 
If plants aren't pollinated by the pollinators, then all creatures, including ourselves, that depend on these plants, would starve. 
So I decided to take these cool creatures and make a superhero team. 
(Applause) (Foot stomp) (Music) (Roar) Pollinator: Deforestsaurus! I should have known! 
I need to call on the rest of the Pollinators! 
(Music) Thank you. (Applause) All of my animations start with ideas, but what are ideas? 
Ideas can spark a movement. 
Ideas are opportunities and innovation. 
Ideas truly are what make the world go round. 
If it wasn't for ideas, we wouldn't be where we are now with technology, medicine, art, culture, and how we even live our lives. 
At eight years old, I took my ideas and started my own business called Maya's Ideas, and my nonprofit, Maya's Ideas for the Planet. 
(Laughter) And I make eco-friendly clothing and accessories. 
I'm 13 now, and although I started my business in 2008, my artistic journey started way before then. 
I was greatly influenced by art, and I wanted to incorporate it in everything I did, even my business. 
I would find different fabrics around the house, and say, "This could be a scarf or a hat," and I had all these ideas for designs. 
I noticed when I wore my creations, people would stop me and say, "Wow, that's really cute. Where can I get one?" 
And I thought, I can start my own business. 
Now I didn't have any business plans at only eight years old. 
I only knew I wanted to make pretty creations that were safe for the environment and I wanted to give back. 
My mom taught me how to sew, and on my back porch, I would sit and make little headbands out of ribbon, and I would write down the names and the price of each item. 
I started making more items like hats, scarves and bags. 
Soon, my items began selling all over the world, and I had customers in Denmark, Italy, Australia, Canada and more. 
Now, I had a lot to learn about my business, like branding and marketing, staying engaged with my customers, and seeing what sold the most and the least. 
Soon, my business really started to take off. 
Then one day, Forbes magazine contacted me when I was 10 years old. 
(Laughter) They wanted to feature me and my company in their article. 
Now a lot of people ask me, why is your business eco-friendly? 
I've had a passion for protecting the environment and its creatures since I was little. 
My parents taught me at an early age about giving back and being a good steward to the environment. 
I heard about how the dyes in some clothing or the process of even making the items was harmful to the people and the planet, so I started doing my own research, and I discovered that even after dyeing has being completed, there is a waste issue that gives a negative impact on the environment. 
For example, the grinding of materials, or the dumping of dried powder materials. 
These actions can pollute the air, making it toxic to anyone or anything that inhales it. 
So when I started my business, I knew two things: All of my items had to be eco-friendly, and 10 to 20 percent of the profits I made went to local and global charities and environmental organizations. 
(Applause) I feel I'm part of the new wave of entrepreneurs that not only seeks to have a successful business, but also a sustainable future. 
I feel that I can meet the needs of my customers without compromising the ability of future generations to live in a greener tomorrow. 
We live in a big, diverse and beautiful world, and that makes me even more passionate to save it. 
But it's never enough to just to get it through your heads about the things that are happening in our world. 
It takes to get it through your hearts, because when you get it through your heart, that is when movements are sparked. 
That is when opportunities and innovation are created, and that is why ideas come to life. 
Thank you, and peace and blessings. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Pat Mitchell: So, you heard Maya talk about the amazing parents who are behind this incredible woman. Where are they? 
Please, Mr. and Mrs. Penn. Would you just -- Ah! 
(Applause) 

Hi. So today, I'd like to share some works in progress. 
Since we are still realizing these works, we are largely working within the realm of intuition and mystery, still. 
So I'm going to try and describe some of the experiences that we're looking for through each of the works. 
So the first work is called the Imperial Monochromes. 
A viewer sort of unsuspectingly walks into the room, and catches a glimpse of these panels in a messy composition on the wall. 
Within seconds, as if the panels have noticed the presence of the viewer, they appear to panic and sort of get into a strict symmetry. 
(Laughter) So this is the sketch of the two states. 
One is total chaos. The other is absolute order. 
And we were interested in seeing how little change it takes to move from one state to the other state. 
This also reminded us of two very different pictorial traditions. 
One is the altar tablets of the 15th century, and the other is about 100 years ago, Malevich's abstract compositions. 
So I'm just going to take you to a video. 
To give you a sense of scale, the largest panel is about two meters high. 
That's about this much. And the smallest one is an A4. 
So a viewer enters the space, and they snap to attention. 
And after a while, if the viewer continues to remain in the space, the panels will sort of become immune to the presence of the viewer and become lax and autonomous again, until they sort of sense a presence in the room or a movement, when they will again snap to attention. 
(Laughter) So here it appears as if it's the viewer that's sort of instigating the sense of order among the panels, but it could also be the other way around, that the panels are so stuck within their preconditioned behaviors that they sort of thrust the viewer with the role of a tyrant. 
So this brings me to a quieter, small work called Handheld. 
The viewer sees a piece of paper that's mounted on the far end of the wall, but when you go closer, you see that it's a blank A4, or a letter-sized piece of paper, that's held on either side by two small hands that appear to be carved with a great deal of attention and care from a small block of wood. 
The viewer also sees that this entire sculpture is sort of moving very slightly, as if these two hands are trying to hold the paper very still for a long period of time, and somehow are not managing to. 
So this instability in the movement very closely resembles the unsteady nature of images seen through a handheld camera. 
So here I'm going to show you two tandem clips. 
One is through a still camera and the other is through a handheld camera. 
And you immediately see how the unsteady nature of the video suggests the presence of an observer and a subjective point of view. 
So we've just removed the camera and transferred that movement onto the panel. 
So here's a video. 
You have to imagine the other hand. It's not there yet. 
But to us, we're sort of trying to evoke a self-effacing gesture, as if there's a little person with outstretched arms behind this enormous piece of paper. 
That sort of likens it to the amount of strain to be at the service of the observer and present this piece of paper very delicately to the viewer in front of them. 
The next work is Decoy. 
This is a cardboard model, so the object is about as tall as I am. 
It has a rounded body, two arms, and a very tall, head-like antenna, and its sole purpose is to attract attention towards itself. 
So when a viewer passes by, it sort of tilts from side to side, and moves its arms more and more frantically as the person gets closer. 
So here is the first test scenario. 
You see the two movements integrated, and the object seems to be employing its entire being in this expression of desperation. 
But the idea is that once it's got the person's attention, it's no longer interested, and it looks for the next person whose attention to get. 
(Laughter) So this is the final fabricated body of the Decoy. 
It appears to be mass-manufactured like it came out of a factory like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. 
Because we are always working from a very personal space, we like how this consumer aesthetic sort of depersonalizes the object and gives us a bit of distance in its appearance, at least. 
And so to us this is a kind of sinister being which is trying to distract you from the things that actually need your attention, but it could also be a figure that needs a lot of help. 
The next work is an object, that's also a kind of sound instrument. 
In the shape of an amphitheater that's scaled to the size of an audience as perceived from somebody from the stage. 
So from where I'm standing, each of you appears to be this big, and the audience sort of takes the entire field of my vision. 
Seated in this audience are 996 small figures. 
They're mechanically enabled to clap of their own free will. 
This means that each of them can decide if and when they want to clap, how hard, for how long, how they want to be influenced by those around them or influence others, and if they want to contribute to innovation. 
So when the viewer steps in front of the audience, there will be a response. 
It could be a few claps or a strong applause, and then nothing happens until the viewer leaves the stage, and again the audience will respond. 
It could be anything from a few feeble claps from members in the audience, or it could be a very loud ovation. 
So to us, I think we're really looking at an audience as its own object or its own organism that's also got a sort of musical-like quality to it, an instrument. 
So the viewer can play it by eliciting quite complex and varied, nuanced musical or sound patterns, but cannot really provoke the audience into any particular kind of response. 
So there's a sense of judgment and capriciousness and uneasiness involved. 
It also has an alluring and trap-like quality to it. 
So here if you see we're quite excited about the image of the head splitting to form the two hands. 
So here's a small visual animation, as if the two sides of the brain are sort of clashing against each other to kind of make sense of the duality and the tension. 
And here is a prototype. 
So we can't wait to be engulfed by 996 of them. 
Okay, this is the last work. It's called the Framerunners. 
It comes out of the idea of a window. 
This is an actual window in our studio, and as you can see, it's made up of three different thicknesses of wooden sections. 
So we used the same window vocabulary to construct our own frame or grid that's suspended in the room and that can be viewed from two sides. 
This grid is inhabited by a tribe of small figures. 
They're also made up of three different sizes, as if to suggest a kind of perspective or landscape on the single plain. 
Each of these figures can also run backward and forward in the track and hide behind two adjacent tracks. 
So in contrast to this very tight grid, we wanted to give these figures a very comical and slapstick-like quality, as if a puppeteer has taken them and physically animated them down the path. 
So we like the idea of these figures sort of skipping along like they're oblivious and carefree and happy-go-lucky and content, until they sort of sense a movement from the viewer and they will hide behind the fastest wall. 
So to us, this work also presents its own contradiction. 
These figures are sort of entrapped within this very strong grid, which is like a prison, but also a fortress, because it allows them to be oblivious and naive and carefree and quite oblivious of the external world. 
So all these real life qualities that I talk about are sort of translated to a very specific technical configuration, and we were very lucky to collaborate with ETH Zurich to develop the first prototype. 
So you see they extracted the motion cogs from our animations and created a wiggle that integrated the head-bobbing movement and the back-and-forth movement. 
So it's really quite small. 
You can see it can fit into the palm of my hand. 
So imagine our excitement when we saw it really working in the studio, and here it is. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

I love airplanes. 
Oh -- I love airplanes. 
So, when I went to college in the late 90s, it was obvious that I was going to study aerospace. 
And you wouldn't believe how many people told me, "Oh no, not aerospace. 
Aerospace is going to be boring, everything in aerospace has already been done." 
Well, they were a little bit off the mark. 
And in fact, I think the next decade is going to be another golden age for aviation. 
For one thing, and this is where I get excited, flight is about to get a lot more personal. 
So, a little compare and contrast. 
In the last century, large commercial airplanes have connected cities across the globe. 
And 100 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for all of us to fly here from around the world for a five-day conference. 
But we did, and most of us probably without a second thought. 
And that's a remarkable achievement for humanity. 
But on a day-to-day basis, we still spend a lot of time in cars. 
Or actively trying to avoid it. 
Some of my best friends live in San Francisco, I live in Mountain View, about 40 miles away. 
We're all busy. 
At the end of the day, we're separated by something like two hours of heavy traffic. 
So frankly, we haven't seen each other in a few months. 
Now, I work in downtown San Jose, which is near the airport. 
And there are actually days when I can leave work, get on a plane and fly to Los Angeles faster than I can drive to San Francisco. 
Cities are only getting more populated, the roads are full, and it's really difficult to expand them. 
And so in a lot of places, there really aren't a lot of good solutions for getting around traffic. 
But what if you could fly over it? 
The sky is underutilized, and I would argue it will never be as congested as the roads are. 
First of all, you've got a whole other dimension, but also just safety considerations and air-traffic management will not allow bumper-to-bumper traffic in the sky. 
Which means, in many cases, flying can be a long-term, compelling alternative to traveling on the ground. 
So imagine this: you call an Uber, it takes you to a nearby landing spot -- we call these vertiports -- there's an airplane waiting for you there, flies you over all of the traffic in the middle, and on the other side, another Uber takes you to your friend's house. 
And I said Uber, but I really think we need to congratulate the Lyft branding team for their forward thinking in choosing their brand. 
(Laughter) So in that example, OK, there are a few extra steps, I admit. 
But it's 30 minutes versus two hours, it costs around 60 dollars, and you get to fly. 
We're not there yet, but we are a lot closer than you might think. 
So one of the first things we need is we need an aircraft that can take off and land in small spaces and quickly take you where you want to go. 
And helicopters can do that today, but traditionally, helicopters have been just a little bit too expensive, just a little too hard to pilot and just a little too noisy to be used for daily transportation in cities. 
Well, electric flight and autonomy are changing that. 
Electric flight, in particular, unlocks new possibilities for vehicle configurations that we just could not explore in the past. 
If you use electric motors, you can have many of them around the aircraft, and it doesn't add a lot of extra weight. 
And that gives you redundancy and safety. 
And also, they are cleaner, cheaper and quieter than internal combustion engines. 
Autonomy allows the transportation network to scale, and I actually think it makes the aircraft safer. 
Commercial flights are already automated for most of their duration, and I believe there will come a day when we won't even trust an airplane that required a human to fly. 
So, one of our teams at A3 wanted to see just how close this future really was. 
So they built and flew a prototype of one such vehicle. 
And they made a point of only using mature, commercially available technologies today. 
We call it Vahana. 
It's fully electric. 
It takes off and lands vertically, but flies forward like a regular airplane. 
It's fully self-piloted. 
You push a button, it takes off, flies and lands, all by itself. 
The prototype that you see here is designed to carry a single passenger and luggage. 
And it can go about 20 miles in 15 minutes. 
And our estimate for a trip like that is it would cost around 40 dollars, which you can really build a business around. 
It has multiple redundant motors and batteries, you can lose one, it will continue flying and land normally. 
It's pretty quiet. 
When it's flying overhead, it will be quieter than a Prius on the highway. 
It's intelligent and has cameras, lidar and radar, so it can detect and avoid unexpected obstacles. 
And the team really focused on making it efficient, so the batteries are small, light, and they last longer. 
For reference, the Vahana battery is less than half the size of a Tesla Model S battery. 
It's about 40 kilowatt-hours. 
And you can hot swap the batteries in just a few minutes. 
And I do think that in a few years, people will be comfortable getting by themselves in a self-piloted, electric, VTOL air taxi. 
But the team is busy working on the next version, which is going to carry at least two passengers and fly quite a bit farther. 
But more importantly, there are over 20 companies around the world working on vehicles just like this one right now. 
My best guess is in the next five years, you'll start seeing vertiports in some cities, and little airplane icons on your ride-sharing apps. 
And it might begin with a dozen, but eventually, we could have hundreds of these, flying around our cities. 
And it will fundamentally transform our relationship with local travel. 
In the past century, flight connected our planet, in the next, it will reconnect our local communities, and I hope it will reconnect us to each other. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: OK, so when these things first roll out -- right now, it's a single person aircraft, right? 
Rodin Lyasoff: Ours is, yes. 
CA: Yours is. 
I mean, someone comes out of their car, the door opens, they get in, there's no one else in there. 
This thing takes off. 
Because these are early adopters in this room. 
I want to know who here is excited about the idea of being picked up solo in an auto-flying -- Well, there you go! 
RL: It's pretty good. 
CA: That is pretty awesome, half of TED is completely stark staring bonkers. 
(Laughter) RL: So, one of the things we're really focusing on is, really, the cost. 
And so, that's why some of the features are really driven by price. 
And the 40-dollar price tag is really a target that we're aiming for. 
Which should make it accessible to a larger crowd than this one. 
CA: The biggest blockage in terms of when this rolls out is probably not the technology at this point -- it's regulation, right? 
RL: That's probably true, yes, I would agree with that. 
The technology need to mature in terms of safety, to get to the safety levels that we expect from aircraft. 
But I don't think there are any blockers there, just work needs to get done. 
CA: So, first, this is ride sharing. 
Are we that far away from a time when lots of people have one of these in their garage and just kind of, go direct to their friend's house? 
RL: My personal view is that ride sharing actually allows you to operate that entire business much more efficiently. 
You know, there are millennials that say they never want to own a car. 
I think they'll probably feel even stronger about aircraft. 
So -- (Laughter) I really think that the network scales and operates a lot better as a ride-sharing platform, also because the integration with air-traffic management works a lot better if it's handled centrally. 
CA: Cool. Thank you for that. 
RL: Thank you. CA: That was amazing. 

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

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

The year is 1800. 
A curious little invention is being talked about. 
It's called a microscope. 
What it allows you to do is see tiny little lifeforms that are invisible to the naked eye. 
Soon comes the medical discovery that many of these lifeforms are actually causes of terrible human diseases. 
Imagine what happened to the society when they realized that an English mom in her teacup actually was drinking a monster soup, not very far from here. This is from London. 
Fast forward 200 years. 
We still have this monster soup around, and it's taken hold in the developing countries around the tropical belt. 
Just for malaria itself, there are a million deaths a year, and more than a billion people that need to be tested because they are at risk for different species of malarial infections. 
Now it's actually very simple to put a face to many of these monsters. 
You take a stain, like acridine orange or a fluorescent stain or Giemsa, and a microscope, and you look at them. 
They all have faces. 
Why is that so, that Alex in Kenya, Fatima in Bangladesh, Navjoot in Mumbai, and Julie and Mary in Uganda still wait months to be able to diagnose why they are sick? 
And that's primarily because scalability of the diagnostics is completely out of reach. 
And remember that number: one billion. 
The problem lies with the microscope itself. 
Even though the pinnacle of modern science, research microscopes are not designed for field testing. 
Neither were they first designed for diagnostics at all. 
They are heavy, bulky, really hard to maintain, and cost a lot of money. 
This picture is Mahatma Gandhi in the '40s using the exact same setup that we actually use today for diagnosing T.B. in his ashram in Sevagram in India. 
Two of my students, Jim and James, traveled around India and Thailand, starting to think about this problem a lot. 
We saw all kinds of donated equipment. 
We saw fungus growing on microscope lenses. 
And we saw people who had a functional microscope but just didn't know how to even turn it on. 
What grew out of that work and that trip was actually the idea of what we call Foldscopes. 
So what is a Foldscope? 
A Foldscope is a completely functional microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization, projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding paper. 
So, now you think, how is that possible? 
I'm going to show you some examples here, and we will run through some of them. 
It starts with a single sheet of paper. 
What you see here is all the possible components to build a functional bright-field and fluorescence microscope. 
So, there are three stages: There is the optical stage, the illumination stage and the mask-holding stage. 
And there are micro optics at the bottom that's actually embedded in the paper itself. 
What you do is, you take it on, and just like you are playing like a toy, which it is, I tab it off, and I break it off. 
This paper has no instructions and no languages. 
There is a code, a color code embedded, that tells you exactly how to fold that specific microscope. 
When it's done, it looks something like this, has all the functionalities of a standard microscope, just like an XY stage, a place where a sample slide could go, for example right here. 
We didn't want to change this, because this is the standard that's been optimized for over the years, and many health workers are actually used to this. 
So this is what changes, but the standard stains all remain the same for many different diseases. 
You pop this in. 
There is an XY stage, and then there is a focusing stage, which is a flexure mechanism that's built in paper itself that allows us to move and focus the lenses by micron steps. 
So what's really interesting about this object, and my students hate when I do this, but I'm going to do this anyway, is these are rugged devices. 
I can turn it on and throw it on the floor and really try to stomp on it. 
And they last, even though they're designed from a very flexible material, like paper. 
Another fun fact is, this is what we actually send out there as a standard diagnostic tool, but here in this envelope I have 30 different foldscopes of different configurations all in a single folder. 
And I'm going to pick one randomly. 
This one, it turns out, is actually designed specifically for malaria, because it has the fluorescent filters built specifically for diagnosing malaria. 
So the idea of very specific diagnostic microscopes comes out of this. 
So up till now, you didn't actually see what I would see from one of these setups. 
So what I would like to do is, if we could dim the lights, please, it turns out foldscopes are also projection microscopes. 
I have these two microscopes that I'm going to turn -- go to the back of the wall -- and just project, and this way you will see exactly what I would see. 
What you're looking at -- (Applause) — This is a cross-section of a compound eye, and when I'm going to zoom in closer, right there, I am going through the z-axis. 
You actually see how the lenses are cut together in the cross-section pattern. 
Another example, one of my favorite insects, I love to hate this one, is a mosquito, and you're seeing the antenna of a culex pipiens. 
Right there. 
All from the simple setup that I actually described. 
So my wife has been field testing some of our microscopes by washing my clothes whenever I forget them in the dryer. 
So it turns out they're waterproof, and -- (Laughter) — right here is just fluorescent water, and I don't know if you can actually see this. 
This also shows you how the projection scope works. 
You get to see the beam the way it's projected and bent. 
Can we get the lights back on again? 
So I'm quickly going to show you, since I'm running out of time, in terms of how much it costs for us to manufacture, the biggest idea was roll-to-roll manufacturing, so we built this out of 50 cents of parts and costs. 
(Applause) And what this allows us to do is to think about a new paradigm in microscopy, which we call use-and-throw microscopy. 
I'm going to give you a quick snapshot of some of the parts that go in. 
Here is a sheet of paper. 
This is when we were thinking about the idea. 
This is an A4 sheet of paper. 
These are the three stages that you actually see. 
And the optical components, if you look at the inset up on the right, we had to figure out a way to manufacture lenses in paper itself at really high throughputs, so it uses a process of self-assembly and surface tension to build achromatic lenses in the paper itself. 
So that's where the lenses go. 
There are some light sources. 
And essentially, in the end, all the parts line up because of origami, because of the fact that origami allows us micron-scale precision of optical alignment. 
So even though this looks like a simple toy, the aspects of engineering that go in something like this are fairly sophisticated. 
So here is another obvious thing that we would do, typically, if I was going to show that these microscopes are robust, is go to the third floor and drop it from the floor itself. 
There it is, and it survives. 
So for us, the next step actually is really finishing our field trials. 
We are starting at the end of the summer. 
We are at a stage where we'll be making thousands of microscopes. 
That would be the first time where we would be doing field trials with the highest density of microscopes ever at a given place. 
We've started collecting data for malaria, Chagas disease and giardia from patients themselves. 
And I want to leave you with this picture. 
I had not anticipated this before, but a really interesting link between hands-on science education and global health. 
What are the tools that we're actually providing the kids who are going to fight this monster soup for tomorrow? 
I would love for them to be able to just print out a Foldscope and carry them around in their pockets. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life, which is be an educator, change lives, and spark magic. 
Right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible. 
Right now there's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards, who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately, while at the same time saying to herself over and over again, "Don't smile till November," because that's what she was taught in her teacher education program. 
Right now there's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he's very, very sick and can't make it to school tomorrow. 
On the other hand, right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information, information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge. 
Right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention, a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before, but if they close their eyes tightly enough, they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling. 
Right now there's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says, "Put them down." 
So people will then say, "Well, Chris, you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you're also describing these powerful educators. 
If you're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular, these guys will probably cancel each other out, and then we'll be okay." 
The reality is, the folks I described as the master teachers, the master narrative builders, the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms. 
The folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience don't even know what teacher certification means. 
They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education. 
And that to me is sad. 
It's sad because the people who I described, they were very disinterested in the learning process, want to be effective teachers, but they have no models. 
I'm going to paraphrase Mark Twain. 
Mark Twain says that proper preparation, or teaching, is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good, it can turn awful practices into powerful ones, it can change men and transform them into angels. 
The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching, not in any college or university, but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage. 
Guess where those places are? 
Barber shops, rap concerts, and most importantly, in the black church. 
And I've been framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy. 
Who here has been to a black church? 
We got a couple of hands. 
You go to a black church, their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience, so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes, and then he takes a pause, and he says, "Oh my gosh, they're not quite paying attention." 
So he says, "Can I get an amen?" 
Chris Emdin: So I can I get an amen? Audience: Amen. 
CE: And all of a sudden, everybody's reawoken. 
That preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention. 
He drops his voice at a very, very low volume when he wants people to key into him, and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers. 

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? 
Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. 
And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. 
So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, "Mysteries of the Unseen World." 
(Music) There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. 
We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. 
And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. 
We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. 
Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. 
We can do the same thing with ships at sea. 
We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. 
And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora Borealis. 
It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life. 
At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. 
With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. 
We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. 
And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. 
When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. 
It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. 
And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. 
Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. 
And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. 
We're giants, and we're unaware of things that are too small for us to see. 
The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. 
This is the egg of a butterfly. 
And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. 
Can you guess what this is? 
Shark skin. 
A caterpillar's mouth. 
The eye of a fruit fly. 
An eggshell. 
A flea. 
A snail's tongue. 
We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered. 
A spider also has great secrets, because spiders' silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. 
This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. 
The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. 
On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. 
Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA. 
And nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms. 
With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. 
Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. 
Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. 
We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. 
So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets and supernova explosions. 
People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. 
Knowing that there's so much around us we can't see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. 
Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives. 
We'll just have to see. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

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

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

So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads. 
The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, "Honey, I gotta ask you something. 
You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?" 
And I said, "Yes, I did." 
And she smacks her friend and she goes, "See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. 
That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie." 
(Laughter) So that's who I am. 
And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole "Eat, Pray, Love" thing was a huge break for me. 
But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be "Eat, Pray, Love," and all of those people who had hated "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. 
So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. 
But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. 
In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. 
And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. 
I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure. 
So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. 
I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. 
After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. 
I failed at getting published for almost six years. 
So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. 
And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. 
But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home." 
And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. 
For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. 
And that's how I pushed through it. 
But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of "Eat, Pray, Love," I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. 
She had failed constantly. 
I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. 
We had nothing in common. 
Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again? 
And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. 
So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. 
Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. 
And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. 
The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. 
And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche. 
But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. 
So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. 
For me, that home has always been writing. 
So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. 
I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." 
And you know what happened with that book? 
It bombed, and I was fine. 
Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. 
And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. 
My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live. 
Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. 
Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? 
The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. 
And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. 
You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Imagine trying to use words to describe every scene in a film, every note in your favorite song, or every street in your town. 
Now imagine trying to do it using only the numbers 1 and 0. 
Every time you use the Internet to watch a movie, listen to music, or check directions, that’s exactly what your device is doing, using the language of binary code. 
Computers use binary because it's a reliable way of storing data. 
For example, a computer's main memory is made of transistors that switch between either high or low voltage levels, such as 5 volts and 0 volts. 
Voltages sometimes oscillate, but since there are only two options, a value of 1 volt would still be read as "low." 
That reading is done by the computer’s processor, which uses the transistors’ states to control other computer devices according to software instructions. 
The genius of this system is that a given binary sequence doesn't have a pre-determined meaning on its own. 
Instead, each type of data is encoded in binary according to a separate set of rules. 
Let’s take numbers. 
In normal decimal notation, each digit is multiplied by 10 raised to the value of its position, starting from zero on the right. 
So 84 in decimal form is 4x10⁰ + 8x10¹. 
Binary number notation works similarly, but with each position based on 2 raised to some power. 
So 84 would be written as follows: Meanwhile, letters are interpreted based on standard rules like UTF-8, which assigns each character to a specific group of 8-digit binary strings. 
In this case, 01010100 corresponds to the letter T. 
So, how can you know whether a given instance of this sequence is supposed to mean T or 84? 
Well, you can’t from seeing the string alone – just as you can’t tell what the sound "da" means from hearing it in isolation. 
You need context to tell whether you're hearing Russian, Spanish, or English. 
And you need similar context to tell whether you’re looking at binary numbers or binary text. 
Binary code is also used for far more complex types of data. 
Each frame of this video, for instance, is made of hundreds of thousands of pixels. 
In color images, every pixel is represented by three binary sequences that correspond to the primary colors. 
Each sequence encodes a number that determines the intensity of that particular color. 
Then, a video driver program transmits this information to the millions of liquid crystals in your screen to make all the different hues you see now. 
The sound in this video is also stored in binary, with the help of a technique called pulse code modulation. 
Continuous sound waves are digitized by taking "snapshots" of their amplitudes every few milliseconds. 
These are recorded as numbers in the form of binary strings, with as many as 44,000 for every second of sound. 
When they’re read by your computer’s audio software, the numbers determine how quickly the coils in your speakers should vibrate to create sounds of different frequencies. 
All of this requires billions and billions of bits. 
But that amount can be reduced through clever compression formats. 
For example, if a picture has 30 adjacent pixels of green space, they can be recorded as "30 green" instead of coding each pixel separately - a process known as run-length encoding. 
These compressed formats are themselves written in binary code. 
So is binary the end-all-be-all of computing? 
Not necessarily. 
There’s been research into ternary computers, with circuits in three possible states, and even quantum computers, whose circuits can be in multiple states simultaneously. 
But so far, none of these has provided as much physical stability for data storage and transmission. 
So for now, everything you see, hear, and read through your screen comes to you as the result of a simple "true" or "false" choice, made billions of times over. 

So the first antidepressants were made from, of all things, rocket fuel, left over after World War II. 
Which is fitting, seeing as today, one in five soldiers develop depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder or both. 
But it's not just soldiers that are at high risk for these diseases. 
It's firefighters, ER doctors, cancer patients, aid workers, refugees -- anyone exposed to trauma or major life stress. 
And yet, despite how commonplace these disorders are, our current treatments, if they work at all, only suppress symptoms. 
In 1798, when Edward Jenner discovered the first vaccine -- it happened to be for smallpox -- he didn't just discover a prophylactic for a disease, but a whole new way of thinking: that medicine could prevent disease. 
However, for over 200 years, this prevention was not believed to extend to psychiatric diseases. 
Until 2014, when my colleague and I accidentally discovered the first drugs that might prevent depression and PTSD. 
We discovered the drugs in mice, and we're currently studying whether they work in humans. 
And these preventative psychopharmaceuticals are not antidepressants. 
They are a whole new class of drug. 
And they work by increasing stress resilience, so let's call them resilience enhancers. 
So think back to a stressful time that you've since recovered from. 
Maybe a breakup or an exam, you missed a flight. 
Stress resilience is the active biological process that allows us to bounce back after stress. 
Similar to if you have a cold and your immune system fights it off. 
And insufficient resilience in the face of a significant enough stressor, can result in a psychiatric disorder, such as depression. 
In fact, most cases of major depressive disorder are initially triggered by stress. 
And from what we've seen so far in mice, resilience enhancers can protect against purely biological stressors, like stress hormones, and social and psychological stressors, like bullying and isolation. 
So here is an example where we gave mice three weeks of high levels of stress hormones. 
So, in other words, a biological stressor without a psychological component. 
And this causes depressive behavior. 
And if we give three weeks of antidepressant treatment beforehand, it has no beneficial effects. 
But a single dose of a resilience enhancer given a week before completely prevents the depressive behavior. 
Even after three weeks of stress. 
This is the first time a drug has ever been shown to prevent the negative effects of stress. 
Depression and PTSD are chronic, often lifelong, clinical diseases. 
They also increase the risk of substance abuse, homelessness, heart disease, Alzheimer's, suicide. 
The global cost of depression alone is over three trillion dollars per year. 
But now, imagine a scenario where we know someone is predictively at high risk for exposure to extreme stress. 
Say, a red cross volunteer going into an earthquake zone. 
In addition to the typhoid vaccine, we could give her a pill or an injection of a resilience enhancer before she leaves. 
So when she is held at gunpoint by looters or worse, she would at least be protected against developing depression or PTSD after the fact. 
It won't prevent her from experiencing the stress, but it will allow her to recover from it. 
And that's what's revolutionary here. 
By increasing resiliency, we can dramatically reduce her susceptibility to depression and PTSD, possibly saving her from losing her job, her home, her family or even her life. 
After Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccine, a lot of other vaccines rapidly followed. 
But it was over 150 years before a tuberculosis vaccine was widely available. 
Why? 
In part because society believed that tuberculosis made people more sensitive and creative and empathetic. 
And that it was caused by constitution and not biology. 
And similar things are still said today about depression. 
And just as Jenner's discovery opened the door for all of the vaccines that followed after, the drugs we've discovered open the possibility of a whole new field: preventative psychopharmacology. 
But whether that's 15 years away, or 150 years away, depends not just on the science, but on what we as a society choose to do with it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. 
My name is Art Benjamin, and I am a "mathemagician." 
What that means is, I combine my loves of math and magic to do something I call "mathemagics." 
But before I get started, I have a quick question for the audience. 
By any chance, did anyone happen to bring with them this morning a calculator? 
Seriously, if you have a calculator with you, raise your hand. 
Raise your hand. Did your hand go up? 
Now bring it out, bring it out. Anybody else? 
I see, I see one way in the back. 
You sir, that's three. 
And anybody on this side here? 
OK, over there on the aisle. 
Would the four of you please bring out your calculators, then join me up on stage. 
Let's give them a nice round of applause. 
(Applause) That's right. 
Now, since I haven't had the chance to work with these calculators, I need to make sure that they are all working properly. 
Would somebody get us started by giving us a two-digit number, please? 
How about a two-digit number? 
Audience: 22. 
AB: 22. And another two-digit number, sir? 
Audience: 47. 
AB: Multiply 22 times 47, make sure you get 1,034, or the calculators are not working. 
Volunteer: No. 
AB: 594. Let's give three of them a nice round of applause there. 
(Applause) Would you like to try a more standard calculator, just in case? 
OK, great. 
What I'm going to try and do then -- I notice it took some of you a little bit of time to get your answer. 
That's OK. 
I'll give you a shortcut for multiplying even faster on the calculator. 
There is something called the square of a number, which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself. 
For instance, five squared would be? 
Audience: 25. 
AB: 25. The way we can square on most calculators -- let me demonstrate with this one -- is by taking the number, such as five, hitting "times" and then "equals," and on most calculators that will give you the square. 
On some of these ancient RPN calculators, you've got an "x squared" button on it, will allow you to do the calculation even faster. 
What I'm going to try and do now is to square, in my head, four two-digit numbers faster than they can do on their calculators, even using the shortcut method. 
What I'll use is the second row this time, and I'll get four of you to each yell out a two-digit number, and if you would square the first number, and if you would square the second, the third and the fourth, I will try and race you to the answer. OK? 
So quickly, a two-digit number please. 
Audience: 37. 
Arthur Benjamin: 37 squared, OK. 
Audience: 23. 
AB: 23 squared, OK. 
Audience: 59. 
AB: 59 squared, OK, and finally? 
Audience: 93. 
AB: 93 squared. 
Volunteer: 1369. AB: 1369. 
Volunteer: 529. AB: 529. 
Volunteer: 3481. AB: 3481. 
Volunteer: 8649. 
AB: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Let me try to take this one step further. 
I'm going to try to square some three-digit numbers this time. 
I won't even write these down -- I'll just call them out as they're called out to me. 
Anyone I point to, call out a three-digit number. 
Anyone on our panel, verify the answer. 
Just give some indication if it's right. 
A three-digit number, sir, yes? 
Audience: 987. 
AB: 987 squared is 974,169. 
(Laughter) AB: Yes? Good. 
Another three-digit -- (Applause) -- another three-digit number, sir? 
Audience: 457. 
205,849? 
AB: Yes? 
OK, another, another three-digit number, sir? 
AB: 321 is 103,041. 
103,041. 
Yes? One more three-digit number please. 
AB: 722 is 500, that's a harder one. 
Is that 513,284? 
Volunteer: Yes. 
AB: Yes? Oh, one more, one more three-digit number please. 
Audience: 162. 
162 squared is 26,244. 
Volunteer: Yes. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Let me try to take this one step further. 
(Laughter) I'm going to try to square a four-digit number this time. 
You can all take your time on this; I will not beat you to the answer on this one, but I will try to get the answer right. 
To make this a little bit more random, let's take the fourth row this time, let's say, one, two, three, four. 
If each of you would call out a single digit between zero and nine, that will be the four-digit number that I'll square. 
Nine. 
Seven. 
Five. 
9,758, this will take me a little bit of time, so bear with me. 
95 million -- (Sighs) 218,564? 
Volunteer: Yes! 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number -- and I can -- but unfortunately, most calculators cannot. 
(Laughter) Eight-digit capacity -- don't you hate that? 
So, since we've reached the limits of our calculators -- what's that? 
Does yours go higher? 
Volunteer: I don't know. 
AB: Oh, yours does? 
Volunteer: I can probably do it. AB: I'll talk to you later. 
In the meanwhile, let me conclude the first part of my show by doing something a little trickier. 
Let's take the largest number on the board here, 8649. 
Would you each enter that on your calculator? 
And instead of squaring it this time, I want you to take that number and multiply it by any three-digit number that you want, but don't tell me what you're multiplying by -- just multiply it by any random three-digit number. 
So you should have as an answer either a six-digit or probably a seven-digit number. 
How many digits do you have, six or seven? 
Seven, and yours? 
Seven? Seven? 
And, uncertain. 
Seven. 
Is there any possible way that I could know what seven-digit numbers you have? 
Say "No." 
(Laughter) Good, then I shall attempt the impossible -- or at least the improbable. 
What I'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits, any six of them, in any order you'd like. 
(Laughter) One digit at a time, I shall try and determine the digit you've left out. 
Starting with your seven-digit number, call out any six of them please. 
Volunteer: 1, 9, 7, 0, 4, 2. 
AB: Did you leave out the number 6? 
Good, OK, that's one. 
You have a seven-digit number, call out any six of them please. 
Volunteer: 4, 4, 8, 7, 5. 
I think I only heard five numbers. I -- wait -- 44875 -- did you leave out the number 6? 
Same as she did, OK. 
You've got a seven-digit number -- call out any six of them loud and clear. 
Volunteer: 0, 7, 9, 0, 4, 4. 
I think you left out the number 3? 
AB: That's three. 
The odds of me getting all four of these right by random guessing would be one in 10,000: 10 to the fourth power. 
OK, any six of them. 
(Laughter) Really scramble them up this time, please. 
Volunteer: 2, 6, 3, 9, 7, 2. 
Did you leave out the number 7? 
And let's give all four of these people a nice round of applause. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) For my next number -- (Laughter) while I mentally recharge my batteries, I have one more question for the audience. 
By any chance, does anybody here happen to know the day of the week that they were born on? 
If you think you know your birth day, raise your hand. 
Let's see, starting with -- let's start with a gentleman first. 
What year was it, first of all? 
That's why I pick a gentleman first. 
Audience: 1953. 
1953, and the month? 
November what? 
23rd -- was that a Monday? 
Audience: Yes. 
I haven't seen any women's hands up. 
OK, how about you, what year? 
1949, and the month? 
October what? 
Fifth -- was that a Wednesday? 
Yes! I'll go way to the back right now, how about you? 
Yell it out, what year? 
Audience: 1959. 
1959, OK -- and the month? 
Audience: February. 
Sixth -- was that a Friday? Audience: Yes. 
Good, how about the person behind her? 
Call out, what year was it? 
Audience: 1947. AB: 1947, and the month? 
Audience: May. AB: May what? 
Seventh -- would that be a Wednesday? 
Audience: Yes. AB: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Anybody here who'd like to know the day of the week they were born? 
We can do it that way. 
Of course, I could just make up an answer and you wouldn't know, so I come prepared for that. 
I brought with me a book of calendars. 
It goes as far back into the past as 1800, because you never know. 
(Laughter) I didn't mean to look at you, sir -- you were just sitting there. 
(Laughter) Anyway, Chris, you can help me out here, if you wouldn't mind. 
This is a book of calendars. 
Who wanted to know their birth day? 
What year was it, first of all? 
Audience: 1966. 
66 -- turn to the calendar with 1966. 
And what month? 
Audience: April. AB: April what? 
Audience: 17th. 
Can you confirm, Chris? 
Chris Anderson: Yes. 
AB: I'll tell you what, Chris: as long as you have that book in front of you, do me a favor, turn to a year outside of the 1900s, either into the 1800s or way into the 2000s -- that'll be a much greater challenge for me. 
AB: What year would you like? CA: 1824. 
AB: 1824, OK. 
AB: And what month? 
CA: June. 
AB: Was that a Sunday? 
CA: It was. AB: And it was cloudy. 
(Laughter) Good, thank you very much. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) But I'd like to wrap things up now by alluding to something from earlier in the presentation. 
There was a gentleman up here who had a 10-digit calculator. 
Where is he, would you stand up, 10-digit guy? 
OK, stand up for me just for a second, so I can see where you are. 
You have a 10-digit calculator, sir, as well? 
OK, what I'm going to try and do, is to square in my head a five-digit number requiring a 10-digit calculator. 
But to make my job more interesting for you, as well as for me, I'm going to do this problem thinking out loud. 
So you can actually, honestly hear what's going on in my mind while I do a calculation of this size. 
Now, I have to apologize to our magician friend Lennart Green. 
I know as a magician we're not supposed to reveal our secrets, but I'm not too afraid that people are going to start doing my show next week, so -- I think we're OK. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, let's see, let's take a different row of people, starting with you. 
I'll get five digits: one, two, three, four. 
Oh, I did this row already. 
Let's do the row before you, starting with you: one, two, three, four, five. 
Call out a single digit -- that will be the five-digit number that I will try to square, go ahead. 
Five. 
Seven. 
Six. 
Three. 
57,683 -- squared. 
Let me explain to you how I'm going to attempt this problem. 
I'm going to break the problem down into three parts. 
I'll do 57,000 squared, plus 683 squared, plus 57,000 times 683 times two. 
Add all those numbers together, and with any luck, arrive at the answer. 
Now, let me recap. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Laughter) While I explain something else -- (Laughter) -- I know, that you can use, right? 
(Laughter) While I do these calculations, you might hear certain words, as opposed to numbers, creep into the calculation. 
Let me explain what that is. 
This is a phonetic code, a mnemonic device that I use, that allows me to convert numbers into words. 
I store them as words, and later on retrieve them as numbers. 
I know it sounds complicated; it's not. 
I don't want you to think you're seeing something out of "Rain Man." 
(Laughter) There's definitely a method to my madness -- definitely, definitely. 
(Laughter) If you want to talk to me about ADHD afterwards, you can talk to me then. 
By the way, one last instruction, for my judges with the calculators -- you know who you are -- there is at least a 50 percent chance that I will make a mistake here. 
If I do, don't tell me what the mistake is; just say, "you're close," or something like that, and I'll try and figure out the answer -- which could be pretty entertaining in itself. 
If, however, I am right, whatever you do, don't keep it to yourself, OK? 
(Laughter) Make sure everybody knows that I got the answer right, because this is my big finish, OK. 
So, without any more stalling, here we go. 
I'll start the problem in the middle, with 57 times 683. 
57 times 68 is 3,400, plus 476 is 3876, that's 38,760 plus 171, 38,760 plus 171 is 38,931. 
38,931; double that to get 77,862. 
77,862 becomes cookie fission, cookie fission is 77,822. 
That seems right, I'll go on. Cookie fission, OK. 
Next, I do 57 squared, which is 3,249, so I can say, three billion. 
Take the 249, add that to cookie, 249, oops, but I see a carry coming -- 249 -- add that to cookie, 250 plus 77, is 327 million -- fission, fission, OK, finally, we do 683 squared, that's 700 times 666, plus 17 squared is 466,489, rev up if I need it, rev up, take the 466, add that to fission, to get, oh gee -- 328,489. 
Audience: Yeah! AB: Good. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) I hope you enjoyed mathemagics. 
Thank you. 

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

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

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

There's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8, 2009. 
On that day, a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials, a group of Afghan government officials, who would be meeting with some local village elders. 
The column came under ambush, and was surrounded on three sides, and amongst many other things, Captain Swenson was recognized for running into live fire to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead. 
One of the people he rescued was a sergeant, and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter. 
And what was remarkable about this day is, by sheer coincidence, one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera. 
It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck. 
They put him in the helicopter, and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more. 
I saw this, and I thought to myself, where do people like that come from? 
What is that? That is some deep, deep emotion, when you would want to do that. 
There's a love there, and I wanted to know why is it that I don't have people that I work with like that? 
You know, in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. 
In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. 
We have it backwards. Right? 
So I asked myself, where do people like this come from? 
And my initial conclusion was that they're just better people. 
That's why they're attracted to the military. 
These better people are attracted to this concept of service. 
But that's completely wrong. 
What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. 
I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, "Why would you do it? 
Why did you do it?" 
And they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." 
It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. 
So trust and cooperation are really important here. 
The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. 
I can't simply say to you, "Trust me," and you will. 
I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will. 
It's not how it works. It's a feeling. 
So where does that feeling come from? 
If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era, to the early days of Homo sapiens, what we find is that the world was filled with danger, all of these forces working very, very hard to kill us. 
Nothing personal. 
Whether it was the weather, lack of resources, maybe a saber-toothed tiger, all of these things working to reduce our lifespan. 
And so we evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. 
And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. 
There are inherent benefits to this. 
It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. 
If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you, that means you won't watch for danger. 
Bad system of survival. 
The modern day is exactly the same thing. 
The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. 
It could be the ups and downs in the economy, the uncertainty of the stock market. 
It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. 
Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you. 
It's sometimes trying to put you out of business, but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you. 
We have no control over these forces. 
These are a constant, and they're not going away. 
The only variable are the conditions inside the organization, and that's where leadership matters, because it's the leader that sets the tone. 
When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen. 
I was flying on a trip, and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called, and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal. 
He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon. 
So I said something. 
I said, "Why do you have treat us like cattle? 
Why can't you treat us like human beings?" 
And this is exactly what she said to me. 
She said, "Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job." 
All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. 
All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. 
The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. 
It's because they don't fear their leaders. 
You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. 
When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities. 
The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. 
If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? 
We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. 
Great leaders want exactly the same thing. 
They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves. 
Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City, a tech company, he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family, would you ever consider laying off one of your children? 
We would never do it. 
Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization? 
Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment. 
If you get a job at Next Jump, you cannot get fired for performance issues. 
In fact, if you have issues, they will coach you and they will give you support, just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school. 
It's the complete opposite. 
This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. 
It's not the numbers. 
It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. 
They have violated this deep-seated social contract. 
We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. 
This is what so offends us, not the numbers. 
Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? 
How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? 
Do we have an issue with that? None at all. 
None at all. 
Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. 
They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people. 
Bob Chapman, who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller, in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession, and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight. 
Now in a large manufacturing company, this is a big deal, and they could no longer afford their labor pool. 
They needed to save 10 million dollars, so, like so many companies today, the board got together and discussed layoffs. 
And Bob refused. 
You see, Bob doesn't believe in head counts. 
Bob believes in heart counts, and it's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count. 
And so they came up with a furlough program. 
Every employee, from secretary to CEO, was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation. 
They could take it any time they wanted, and they did not have to take it consecutively. 
But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much. 
He said, it's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot, and morale went up. 
They saved 20 million dollars, and most importantly, as would be expected, when the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organization, the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate. 
And quite spontaneously, nobody expected, people started trading with each other. 
Those who could afford it more would trade with those who could afford it less. 
People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three. 
Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. 
I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. 
They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. 
And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. 
This is what a leader is. 
I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. 
And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. 
We call them leaders because they go first. 
We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. 
We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. 
They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? 
Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." 
And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in? 
Thank you very much. 
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

What is history? 
It is something written by the winners. 
There is a stereotype that history should be focused on the rulers, like Lenin or Trotsky. 
As a result, people in many countries, like mine, Russia, look at history as something that was predetermined or determined by the leaders, and common people could not influence it in any way. 
Many Russians today do not believe that Russia could ever have been or ever will be a truly democratic nation, and this is due to the way history has been framed to the citizens of Russia. 
And this is not true. 
To prove it, I spent two years of my life trying to go 100 years back, to the year 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. 
I asked myself, what if the internet and Facebook existed 100 years ago? 
So last year, we built a social network for dead people, named Project1917.com. 
My team and I created our software, digitized and uploaded all possible real diaries and letters written by more than 3,000 people 100 years ago. 
So any user of our website or application can follow a news feed for each day of 1917 and read what people like Stravinsky or Trotsky, Lenin or Pavlova and others thought and felt. 
We watch all those personalities being ordinary people like you and me, not demigods, and we see that history consists of their mistakes, fears, weaknesses, not only their "genius ideas." 
Our project was a shock for many Russians, who used to think that our country has always been an autocratic empire and the ideas of freedom and democracy could never have prevailed, just because democracy was not our destiny. 
But if we take a broader look, it's not that black and white. 
Yes, 1917 led to 70 years of communist dictatorship. 
But with this project, we see that Russia could have had a different history and a democratic future, as any other country could or still can. 
Reading the posts from 1917, you learn that Russia was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty, or one of the first ones to grant women voting rights. 
Knowing history and understanding how ordinary people influenced history can help us create a better future, because history is just a rehearsal of what's happening right now. 
We do need new ways of telling history, and this year, for example, we started a new online project that is called 1968Digital.com, and that is an online documentary series that gives you an impression of that year, 1968, a year marked by global social change that, in many ways, created the world as we know it now. 
But we are making that history alive by imagining what if all the main characters could use mobile phones ... 
just like that? 
And we see that a lot of individuals were facing the same challenges and were fighting for the same values, no matter if they lived in the US or in USSR or in France or in China or in Czechoslovakia. 
By exposing history in such a democratic way, through social media, we show that people in power are not the only ones making choices. 
That gives any user a possibility of reclaiming history. 
Ordinary people matter. 
They have an impact. 
Ideas matter. 
Journalists, scientists, philosophers matter. 
We shape society. 
We all make history. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Banjo plays) (Banjo and guitar play) (Sings) Is this what it's like to be alive? 
I reached the point of no return and I don't know if I've been burned from the burned bridges in my life, thinkin' you were wrong and I was right. 
Maybe I messed up, either way it's too late for us. 
'Cause baby I'm old with regret, wishin' I could hold you and just forget. 
Since I can't I'll just be home but homesick, wishin' you were mine and I didn't hurt you like I did. 
Can't go back to when we had a chance, wishin' I could have a shot at real romance. 
Now I realize all the things I could have had were in your cold hands. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Gone, gone, gone. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Gone, gone, gone. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Is this what it's like to fantasize about a love that never was alive outside my mind or distance? 
With time I clearly lost my sight, thinkin' I was wrong to ever leave your side. 
But time's the harshest judge, makes us think we were in love. 
And now I'm old with regret, wishin' I could hold you and just forget. 
Since I can't I'll just be home but homesick, wishin' you were mine and I didn't hurt you like I did. 
Can't go back to when we had a chance, wishin' I could have a shot at real romance. 
Now I realize all the things I could have had were in your cold hands. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Gone, gone, gone. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
(Banjo and guitar play) And baby I'm old with regret, wishin' I could hold you and just forget. 
Since I can't I'll just be home but homesick, wishin' you were mine and I didn't hurt you like I did. 
Can't go back to when we had a chance, wishin' I could have a shot at real romance. 
Now I realize all the things I could have had were in your cold hands. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Gone, gone, gone. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Gone, gone, gone. 
I'm a fool for a dead romance. 
Is this what it's like? 

Computer algorithms today are performing incredible tasks with high accuracies, at a massive scale, using human-like intelligence. 
And this intelligence of computers is often referred to as AI or artificial intelligence. 
AI is poised to make an incredible impact on our lives in the future. 
Today, however, we still face massive challenges in detecting and diagnosing several life-threatening illnesses, such as infectious diseases and cancer. 
Thousands of patients every year lose their lives due to liver and oral cancer. 
Our best way to help these patients is to perform early detection and diagnoses of these diseases. 
So how do we detect these diseases today, and can artificial intelligence help? 
In patients who, unfortunately, are suspected of these diseases, an expert physician first orders very expensive medical imaging technologies such as fluorescent imaging, CTs, MRIs, to be performed. 
Once those images are collected, another expert physician then diagnoses those images and talks to the patient. 
As you can see, this is a very resource-intensive process, requiring both expert physicians, expensive medical imaging technologies, and is not considered practical for the developing world. 
And in fact, in many industrialized nations, as well. 
So, can we solve this problem using artificial intelligence? 
Today, if I were to use traditional artificial intelligence architectures to solve this problem, I would require 10,000 -- I repeat, on an order of 10,000 of these very expensive medical images first to be generated. 
After that, I would then go to an expert physician, who would then analyze those images for me. 
And using those two pieces of information, I can train a standard deep neural network or a deep learning network to provide patient's diagnosis. 
Similar to the first approach, traditional artificial intelligence approaches suffer from the same problem. 
Large amounts of data, expert physicians and expert medical imaging technologies. 
So, can we invent more scalable, effective and more valuable artificial intelligence architectures to solve these very important problems facing us today? 
And this is exactly what my group at MIT Media Lab does. 
We have invented a variety of unorthodox AI architectures to solve some of the most important challenges facing us today in medical imaging and clinical trials. 
In the example I shared with you today, we had two goals. 
Our first goal was to reduce the number of images required to train artificial intelligence algorithms. 
Our second goal -- we were more ambitious, we wanted to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients. 
So how did we do it? 
For our first goal, instead of starting with tens and thousands of these very expensive medical images, like traditional AI, we started with a single medical image. 
From this image, my team and I figured out a very clever way to extract billions of information packets. 
These information packets included colors, pixels, geometry and rendering of the disease on the medical image. 
In a sense, we converted one image into billions of training data points, massively reducing the amount of data needed for training. 
For our second goal, to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients, we started with a standard, white light photograph, acquired either from a DSLR camera or a mobile phone, for the patient. 
Then remember those billions of information packets? 
We overlaid those from the medical image onto this image, creating something that we call a composite image. 
Much to our surprise, we only required 50 -- I repeat, only 50 -- of these composite images to train our algorithms to high efficiencies. 
To summarize our approach, instead of using 10,000 very expensive medical images, we can now train the AI algorithms in an unorthodox way, using only 50 of these high-resolution, but standard photographs, acquired from DSLR cameras and mobile phones, and provide diagnosis. 
More importantly, our algorithms can accept, in the future and even right now, some very simple, white light photographs from the patient, instead of expensive medical imaging technologies. 
I believe that we are poised to enter an era where artificial intelligence is going to make an incredible impact on our future. 
And I think that thinking about traditional AI, which is data-rich but application-poor, we should also continue thinking about unorthodox artificial intelligence architectures, which can accept small amounts of data and solve some of the most important problems facing us today, especially in health care. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

In the mid-16th century, Italians were captivated by a type of male singer whose incredible range contained notes previously thought impossible for adult men. 
However, this gift came at a high price. 
To prevent their voices from breaking, these singers had been castrated before puberty, halting the hormonal processes that would deepen their voices. 
Known as castrati, their light, angelic voices were renowned throughout Europe, until the cruel procedure that created them was outlawed in the 1800s. 
Though stunting vocal growth can produce an extraordinary musical range, naturally developing voices are already capable of incredible variety. 
And as we age, our bodies undergo two major changes which explore that range. 
So how exactly does our voice box work, and what causes these shifts in speech? 
The specific sound of a speaking voice is the result of many anatomical variables, but it’s mostly determined by the age and health of our vocal cords and the size of our larynxes. 
The larynx is a complex system of muscle and cartilage that supports and moves the vocal cords, or, as they’re more accurately known, the vocal folds. 
Strung between the thyroid and arytenoid cartilages, these two muscles form an elastic curtain that opens and shuts across the trachea, the tube that carries air through the throat. 
The folds are apart when we’re breathing, but when we speak, they slam shut. 
Our lungs push air against the closed folds, blowing them open and vibrating the tissue to produce sound. 
Unlike the deliberate focus required for playing an external instrument, we effortlessly change notes as we speak. 
By pushing air faster or slower, we change the frequency and amplitude of these vibrations, which respectively translate to the pitch and volume of our voices. 
Rapid and small vibrations create high-pitched, quiet tones, while slow, large vibrations produce deep, bellowing rumbles. 
Finally, by moving the laryngeal muscles between the cartilages, we can stretch and contract those folds to intuitively play our internal instruments. 
This process is the same from your first words to your last, but as you age, your larynx ages too. 
During puberty, the first major shift starts, as your voice begins to deepen. 
This happens when your larynx grows in size, elongating the vocal folds and opening up more room for them to vibrate. 
These longer folds have slower, larger vibrations, which result in a lower baseline pitch. 
This growth is especially dramatic in many males, whose high testosterone levels lead first to voice cracks, and then to deeper, more booming voices, and laryngeal protrusions called Adam’s apples. 
Another vocal development during puberty occurs when the homogenous tissue covering the folds specializes into three distinct functional layers: a central muscle, a layer of stiff collagen wrapped in stretchy elastin fibers, and an outer layer of mucus membrane. 
These layers add nuance and depth to the voice, giving it a distinct timbre that sets it apart from its pre-pubescent tones. 
After puberty, most people’s voices remain more or less the same for about 50 years. 
But we all use our voices differently, and eventually we experience the symptoms associated with aging larynxes, known as presbyphonia. 
First, the collagen in our folds stiffens and the surrounding elastin fibers atrophy and decay. 
This decreased flexibility increases the pitch of older voices. 
But for people who have experienced the hormonal effects of menopause, the higher pitch is countered and outweighed by swollen vocal folds. 
The folds' increased mass slows their vibrations, resulting in deeper voices. 
All these symptoms are further complicated by having fewer healthy laryngeal nerve endings, which reduces precise muscle control and causes breathy or rough voices. 
Ultimately, these anatomical changes are just a few of the factors that can affect your voice. 
But when kept in good condition, your voice box is a finely tuned instrument, capable of operatic arias, moody monologues, and stirring speeches. 

How many of you have had your doctor ask you about sex? 
Your mental health? 
Alcohol use? 
These questions are almost universal. 
But how many of you have had your doctor ask you about money? 
Most of us haven't. 
But that is strange, because compared to most high-income countries, child poverty is an epidemic in the United States. 
It creates conditions that may elevate stress hormone levels and impair brain development. 
Poor children in the US are one and a half times more likely to die and twice as likely to be hospitalized as their middle-class counterparts. 
So my colleague Dr. Michael Hole and I started asking moms about money. 
We knew we needed to reimagine what a doctor's visit looks like, to get kids out of poverty and to give them a fair shot at a healthy life. 
Our questions led to a surprising solution: tax credits. 
It turns out, the earned income tax credit, or EITC, is the best poverty prescription we have in the US. 
The average mom gets two to three thousand dollars a year from it. 
When families get it, moms and babies are healthier: fewer depressed moms, babies weighing more at birth. 
But one out of five families who could get it doesn't, and most who do lose of hundreds of dollars to the for-profit tax-preparation industry. 
One day, a mom asked us why we couldn't do her taxes while she waited for the doctor. 
(Laughter) We all know that purgatory. Why not make good use of that time? 
So we started StreetCred, an organization prescribing tax preparation in clinics serving kids. 
This is a brand-new approach and one that left some questioning our sanity. 
After all, we're doctors, not accountants. 
But we have something accountants don't: access to families. 
Over 90 percent of kids in the US see a doctor at least once a year. 
Their parents trust us and will do anything to give them a better life. 
Doctors in every clinic around the country could be doing this work, too -- it's simple, really. 
The hospital registers as a tax-preparation site, and everyone, from medical students to retirees, can volunteer as a tax preparer after passing an IRS exam. 
It's not as hard as it sounds, I promise. 
I certainly never thought I would be doing other people's taxes, but here I am. 
We're nearing the end of our third year. 
In the first two, we returned 1.6 million dollars to 750 families in Boston alone. 
This year -- (Applause) This year, we've expanded to nine sites in four states. 
Sixty-three percent of our families have never heard of the EITC. 
How can you claim something you haven't heard of? 
And half have never used free tax preparation. 
That two to three thousand dollars a year goes a long way. 
Take hunger. 
An adequately nutritious, low-cost diet for a mom and two young kids costs 477 dollars a month. 
With EITC money, that family can eat for five to six months. 
Or think about medical care. 
Twenty million children in the US lack access to care meeting modern pediatric standards. 
And yet, the average cost of that care is only 400 dollars per kid per year. 
EITC money can help fix this access problem. 
Perhaps most powerfully of all, this money gives moms hope. 
One mom used her refund for her son to study abroad in Spain. 
She was struggling to pay her rent, but she saw EITC money as his shot at a better future. 
We have an opportunity, as doctors and as citizens, to get to the root of this problem. 
We can reimagine health care as a place addressing the causes of poor health, be it infections or finances. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I first tried online dating my freshman year of college, which was in 2001, in case you can't see my wrinkle. 
Now, as you may have noticed, I'm six-feet tall, and when I arrived at my chosen university and realized our men's Division III basketball team averaged five-foot-eight, I abandoned the on-campus scene and went online. 
Now, back then, online dating was pretty close to the plot of "You've Got Mail." 
You'd write long emails back and forth for weeks, before you finally met up in real life. 
Except, in my case, you'd realize you have no chemistry and so now, you're back to square one. 
So, while online dating has changed a lot in the last 17 years, many of the frustrations remain the same. 
Because here's what it does well. 
It broadens your pool of potential dates beyond your existing social and professional circles. 
And here's what it doesn't do well. 
Literally everything else. 
(Laughter) A few things you should know about me: I'm an action-oriented overachieving math and theater nerd, who ended up with an MBA. 
So, when things aren't working out, I tend to take a step back, apply my business toolkit to figure out why, and to fix it. 
My love life was no exception. 
The summer before I turned 30, I took myself on a relationship off-site. 
Which means I went camping solo in Maine for a week, to do a retro on my track record of mediocre relationships. 
Because the thing was, I knew what I wanted in a partner. 
Kindness, curiosity, empathy, a sense of purpose. 
And yet, here's what I chose for online: Ivy League degree, six feet or taller, lives within 12 subway stops of me. 
It's not that I intentionally prioritized those things, it's just the easiest to vet for online. 
It kind of is like a résumé review, which is why these guys looked great on paper and never quite fit me. 
So when I went back online in the spring of 2016, I decided to reengineer the process through some classic business tools. 
First, I went to OkCupid, because I wanted to avoid the gamification of swipe-based apps. 
And also, because I wanted a writing sample. 
Next, I set up a sales funnel, throwing out any sense of my type, and instead defining the criteria that would qualify a lead. 
An inbound message had to do three things: had to be written in complete sentences and with good grammar; it had to reference something in my profile, so I know it's not a copy-and-paste situation; and it had to avoid all sexual content. 
I figured this was a pretty low bar, but it turns out, of my 210 inbound messages, only 14 percent cleared that hurdle. 
(Laughter) Next, I wanted to meet in real life as quickly as possible, because the things I cared about, I couldn't see online. 
But the research, and my experience, shows you only need about 30 seconds with someone to tell if you click. 
So I invented the zero date. 
The zero date is one drink, one hour. 
With the goal of answering one question: Would I like to have dinner with this person? 
Not "are they the one"? 
Literally, "Would I like to spend three hours across the table from this person?" 
You tell them you have a hard stop -- drinks with girlfriends, a conference call with China -- it doesn't matter, they don't know you. 
The point is one hour. 
If it's awesome, you schedule a first date. 
And if it's not awesome, you downshift into entertainer mode and you workshop a few new stories for your next networking event. 
Plus, because it's just an hour, you can squeeze up to three in one evening and then you only have to do your hair and pick out one great outfit a week. 
The zero date also gave me a chance to see how they responded to me asking them out. 
I figured not everyone would dig my moxie, and I was right. 
Of my 29 qualified leads, only 15 replied to my message, and of those, six scheduled a zero date. 
My first zero date was with a set designer. 
And we were both into yoga and preferred our bagels with peanut butter, so it looked pretty promising. 
But two minutes in, I could tell it wasn't going to be a thing and I was relieved not to be spending dinner with him. 
After that, I was a little nervous about going to my next zero date. 
But we had agreed to meet on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with a flask of whiskey to watch the sunset, and honestly, it was two blocks from my apartment. 
Plus, this guy had a podcast, I have a podcast, worst case scenario, we can talk about our podcasts. 
Then, Chas set down next to me. 
And this kind and empathetic man told great jokes and asked even better questions. 
He was a lawyer and a writer, and his eyes twinkled when he laughed and they squeezed tight when I kissed him and at some point in the evening, our zero date became a first date. 
And two years later, we have a washer, dryer and two house plants together. 
Now, I can't promise you're going to end up with house plants. 
But the point of this story is that online dating doesn't have to suck. 
Don't treat it like a game, and don't treat it like a resume review. 
Instead, use it to source and qualify leads and then get offline as quickly as possible with the zero date. 
Because the point of this isn't swiping. 
It's finding your person. 
Good luck. 
(Applause) 

Look at these images. 
Now, tell me which Obama here is real. 
(Video) Barack Obama: To help families refinance their homes, to invest in things like high-tech manufacturing, clean energy and the infrastructure that creates good new jobs. 
Supasorn Suwajanakorn: Anyone? 
The answer is none of them. 
(Laughter) None of these is actually real. 
So let me tell you how we got here. 
My inspiration for this work was a project meant to preserve our last chance for learning about the Holocaust from the survivors. 
It's called New Dimensions in Testimony, and it allows you to have interactive conversations with a hologram of a real Holocaust survivor. 
(Video) Man: How did you survive the Holocaust? 
(Video) Hologram: How did I survive? 
I survived, I believe, because providence watched over me. 
SS: Turns out these answers were prerecorded in a studio. 
Yet the effect is astounding. 
You feel so connected to his story and to him as a person. 
I think there's something special about human interaction that makes it much more profound and personal than what books or lectures or movies could ever teach us. 
So I saw this and began to wonder, can we create a model like this for anyone? 
A model that looks, talks and acts just like them? 
So I set out to see if this could be done and eventually came up with a new solution that can build a model of a person using nothing but these: existing photos and videos of a person. 
If you can leverage this kind of passive information, just photos and video that are out there, that's the key to scaling to anyone. 
By the way, here's Richard Feynman, who in addition to being a Nobel Prize winner in physics was also known as a legendary teacher. 
Wouldn't it be great if we could bring him back to give his lectures and inspire millions of kids, perhaps not just in English but in any language? 
Or if you could ask our grandparents for advice and hear those comforting words even if they're no longer with us? 
Or maybe using this tool, book authors, alive or not, could read aloud all of their books for anyone interested. 
The creative possibilities here are endless, and to me, that's very exciting. 
And here's how it's working so far. 
First, we introduce a new technique that can reconstruct a high-detailed 3D face model from any image without ever 3D-scanning the person. 
And here's the same output model from different views. 
This also works on videos, by running the same algorithm on each video frame and generating a moving 3D model. 
And here's the same output model from different angles. 
It turns out this problem is very challenging, but the key trick is that we are going to analyze a large photo collection of the person beforehand. 
For George W. Bush, we can just search on Google, and from that, we are able to build an average model, an iterative, refined model to recover the expression in fine details, like creases and wrinkles. 
What's fascinating about this is that the photo collection can come from your typical photos. 
It doesn't really matter what expression you're making or where you took those photos. 
What matters is that there are a lot of them. 
And we are still missing color here, so next, we develop a new blending technique that improves upon a single averaging method and produces sharp facial textures and colors. 
And this can be done for any expression. 
Now we have a control of a model of a person, and the way it's controlled now is by a sequence of static photos. 
Notice how the wrinkles come and go, depending on the expression. 
We can also use a video to drive the model. 
(Video) Daniel Craig: Right, but somehow, we've managed to attract some more amazing people. 
SS: And here's another fun demo. 
So what you see here are controllable models of people I built from their internet photos. 
Now, if you transfer the motion from the input video, we can actually drive the entire party. 
George W. Bush: It's a difficult bill to pass, because there's a lot of moving parts, and the legislative processes can be ugly. 
(Applause) SS: So coming back a little bit, our ultimate goal, rather, is to capture their mannerisms or the unique way each of these people talks and smiles. 
So to do that, can we actually teach the computer to imitate the way someone talks by only showing it video footage of the person? 
And what I did exactly was, I let a computer watch 14 hours of pure Barack Obama giving addresses. 
And here's what we can produce given only his audio. 
(Video) BO: The results are clear. 
America's businesses have created 14.5 million new jobs over 75 straight months. 
SS: So what's being synthesized here is only the mouth region, and here's how we do it. 
Our pipeline uses a neural network to convert and input audio into these mouth points. 
(Video) BO: We get it through our job or through Medicare or Medicaid. 
SS: Then we synthesize the texture, enhance details and teeth, and blend it into the head and background from a source video. 
(Video) BO: Women can get free checkups, and you can't get charged more just for being a woman. 
Young people can stay on a parent's plan until they turn 26. 
SS: I think these results seem very realistic and intriguing, but at the same time frightening, even to me. 
Our goal was to build an accurate model of a person, not to misrepresent them. 
But one thing that concerns me is its potential for misuse. 
People have been thinking about this problem for a long time, since the days when Photoshop first hit the market. 
As a researcher, I'm also working on countermeasure technology, and I'm part of an ongoing effort at AI Foundation, which uses a combination of machine learning and human moderators to detect fake images and videos, fighting against my own work. 
And one of the tools we plan to release is called Reality Defender, which is a web-browser plug-in that can flag potentially fake content automatically, right in the browser. 
(Applause) Despite all this, though, fake videos could do a lot of damage, even before anyone has a chance to verify, so it's very important that we make everyone aware of what's currently possible so we can have the right assumption and be critical about what we see. 
There's still a long way to go before we can fully model individual people and before we can ensure the safety of this technology. 
But I'm excited and hopeful, because if we use it right and carefully, this tool can allow any individual's positive impact on the world to be massively scaled and really help shape our future the way we want it to be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm an artist. 
Being an artist is the greatest job there is. 
And I really pity each and every one of you who has to spend your days discovering new galaxies or saving humanity from global warming. 
(Laughter) But being an artist is also a daunting job. 
I spend every day, from nine to six, doing this. 
(Laughter) I even started a side career that consists entirely of complaining about the difficulty of the creative process. 
(Laughter) But today, I don't want to talk about what makes my life difficult. 
I want to talk about what makes it easy. 
And that is you -- and the fact that you are fluent in a language that you're probably not even aware of. 
You're fluent in the language of reading images. 
Deciphering an image like that takes quite a bit of an intellectual effort. 
But nobody ever taught you how this works, you just know it. 
College, shopping, music. 
What makes a language powerful is that you can take a very complex idea and communicate it in a very simple, efficient form. 
These images represent exactly the same ideas. 
But when you look, for example, at the college hat, you know that this doesn't represent the accessory you wear on your head when you're being handed your diploma, but rather the whole idea of college. 
Now, what drawings can do is they cannot only communicate images, they can even evoke emotions. 
Let's say you get to an unfamiliar place and you see this. 
You feel happiness and relief. 
(Laughter) Or a slight sense of unease or maybe downright panic. 
(Laughter) Or blissful peace and quiet. 
(Laughter) But visuals, they're of course more than just graphic icons. 
You know, if I want to tell the story of modern-day struggle, I would start with the armrest between two airplane seats and two sets of elbows fighting. 
What I love there is this universal law that, you know, you have 30 seconds to fight it out and once it's yours, you get to keep it for the rest of the flight. 
(Laughter) Now, commercial flight is full of these images. 
If I want to illustrate the idea of discomfort, nothing better than these neck pillows. 
They're designed to make you more comfortable -- (Laughter) except they don't. 
(Laughter) So I never sleep on airplanes. 
What I do occasionally is I fall into a sort of painful coma. 
And when I wake up from that, I have the most terrible taste in my mouth. 
It's a taste that's so bad, it cannot be described with words, but it can be drawn. 
(Laughter) The thing is, you know, I love sleeping. 
And when I sleep, I really prefer to do it while spooning. 
I've been spooning on almost a pro level for close to 20 years, but in all this time, I've never figured out what to do with that bottom arm. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And the only thing -- the only thing that makes sleeping even more complicated than trying to do it on an airplane is when you have small children. 
They show up at your bed at around 4am with some bogus excuse of, "I had a bad dream." 
(Laughter) And then, of course you feel sorry for them, they're your kids, so you let them into your bed. 
And I have to admit, at the beginning, they're really cute and warm and snugly. 
The minute you fall back asleep, they inexplicably -- (Laughter) start rotating. 
(Laughter) We like to call this the helicopter mode. 
(Laughter) Now, the deeper something is etched into your consciousness, the fewer details we need to have an emotional reaction. 
(Laughter) So why does an image like this work? 
It works, because we as readers are incredibly good at filling in the blanks. 
Now, when you draw, there's this concept of negative space. 
And the idea is, that instead of drawing the actual object, you draw the space around it. 
So the bowls in this drawing are empty. 
But the black ink prompts your brain to project food into a void. 
What we see here is not a owl flying. 
What we actually see is a pair of AA batteries standing on a nonsensical drawing, and I animate the scene by moving my desk lamp up and down. 
(Laughter) The image really only exists in your mind. 
So, how much information do we need to trigger such an image? 
My goal as an artist is to use the smallest amount possible. 
I try to achieve a level of simplicity where, if you were to take away one more element, the whole concept would just collapse. 
And that's why my personal favorite tool as an artist is abstraction. 
I've come up with this system which I call the abstract-o-meter, and this is how it works. 
So you take a symbol, any symbol, for example the heart and the arrow, which most of us would read as the symbol for love, and I'm an artist, so I can draw this in any given degree of realism or abstraction. 
Now, if I go too realistic on it, it just grosses everybody out. 
(Laughter) If I go too far on the other side and do very abstract, nobody has any idea what they're looking at. 
So I have to find the perfect place on that scale, in this case it's somewhere in the middle. 
Now, once we have reduced an image to a more simple form, all sorts of new connections become possible. 
And that allows for totally new angles in storytelling. 
(Laughter) And so, what I like to do is, I like to take images from really remote cultural areas and bring them together. 
Now, with more daring references -- (Laughter) I can have more fun. 
But of course, I know that eventually things become so obscure that I start losing some of you. 
So as a designer, it's absolutely key to have a good understanding of the visual and cultural vocabulary of your audience. 
With this image here, a comment on the Olympics in Athens, I assumed that the reader of the "New Yorker" would have some rudimentary idea of Greek art. 
If you don't, the image doesn't work. 
But if you do, you might even appreciate the small detail, like the beer-can pattern here on the bottom of the vase. 
(Laughter) A recurring discussion I have with magazine editors, who are usually word people, is that their audience, you, are much better at making radical leaps with images than they're being given credit for. 
And the only thing I find frustrating is that they often seem to push me towards a small set of really tired visual clichés that are considered safe. 
You know, it's the businessman climbing up a ladder, and then the ladder moves, morphs into a stock market graph, and anything with dollar signs; that's always good. 
(Laughter) If there are editorial decision makers here in the audience, I want to give you a piece of advice. 
Every time a drawing like this is published, a baby panda will die. 
(Laughter) Literally. 
(Laughter) (Applause) When is a visual cliché good or bad? 
It's a fine line. 
And it really depends on the story. 
In 2011, during the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan, I was thinking of a cover. 
And I went through the classic symbols: the Japanese flag, "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, one of the greatest drawings ever. 
And then the story changed when the situation at the power plant in Fukushima got out of hand. 
And I remember these TV images of the workers in hazmat suits, just walking through the site, and what struck me was how quiet and serene it was. 
And so I wanted to create an image of a silent catastrophe. 
And that's the image I came up with. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) What I want to do is create an aha moment, for you, for the reader. 
And unfortunately, that does not mean that I have an aha moment when I create these images. 
I never sit at my desk with the proverbial light bulb going off in my head. 
What it takes is actually a very slow, unsexy process of minimal design decisions that then, when I'm lucky, lead to a good idea. 
So one day, I'm on a train, and I'm trying to decode the graphic rules for drops on a window. 
And eventually I realize, "Oh, it's the background blurry upside-down, contained in a sharp image." 
And I thought, wow, that's really cool, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. 
A while later, I'm back in New York, and I draw this image of being stuck on the Brooklyn bridge in a traffic jam. 
It's really annoying, but also kind of poetic. 
And only later I realized, I can take both of these ideas and put them together in this idea. 
And what I want to do is not show a realistic scene. 
But, maybe like poetry, make you aware that you already had this image with you, but only now I've unearthed it and made you realize that you were carrying it with you all along. 
But like poetry, this is a very delicate process that is neither efficient nor scalable, I think. 
And maybe the most important skill for an artist is really empathy. 
You need craft and you need -- (Laughter) you need creativity -- (Laughter) thank you -- to come up with an image like that. 
But then you need to step back and look at what you've done from the perspective of the reader. 
I've tried to become a better artist by becoming a better observer of images. 
And for that, I started an exercise for myself which I call Sunday sketching, which meant, on a Sunday, I would take a random object I found around the house and try to see if that object could trigger an idea that had nothing to do with the original purpose of that item. 
And it usually just means I'm blank for a long while. 
And the only trick that eventually works is if I open my mind and run through every image I have stored up there, and see if something clicks. 
And if it does, just add a few lines of ink to connect -- to preserve this very short moment of inspiration. 
And the great lesson there was that the real magic doesn't happen on paper. 
It happens in the mind of the viewer. 
When your expectations and your knowledge clash with my artistic intentions. 
Your interaction with an image, your ability to read, question, be bothered or bored or inspired by an image is as important as my artistic contribution. 
Because that's what turns an artistic statement really, into a creative dialogue. 
And so, your skill at reading images is not only amazing, it is what makes my art possible. 
And for that, I thank you very much. 
(Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I read poetry all the time and write about it frequently and take poems apart to see how they work because I'm a word person. 
I understand the world best, most fully, in words rather than, say, pictures or numbers, and when I have a new experience or a new feeling, I'm a little frustrated until I can try to put it into words. 
I think I've always been that way. 
I devoured science fiction as a child. I still do. 
And I found poems by Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold and Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats because they were quoted in science fiction, and I loved their sounds and I went on to read about ottava rima and medial caesuras and enjambment and all that other technical stuff that you care about if you already care about poems, because poems already made me happier and sadder and more alive. 
And I became a poetry critic because I wanted to know how and why. 
Now, poetry isn't one thing that serves one purpose any more than music or computer programming serve one purpose. 
The greek word poem, it just means "a made thing," and poetry is a set of techniques, ways of making patterns that put emotions into words. 
The more techniques you know, the more things you can make, and the more patterns you can recognize in things you might already like or love. 
That said, poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. 
For example, we are all going to die. 
Poetry can help us live with that. 
Poems are made of words, nothing but words. 
The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another. 
Poems are easy to share, easy to pass on, and when you read a poem, you can imagine someone's speaking to you or for you, maybe even someone far away or someone made up or someone deceased. 
That's why we can go to poems when we want to remember something or someone, to celebrate or to look beyond death or to say goodbye, and that's one reason poems can seem important, even to people who aren't me, who don't so much live in a world of words. 
The poet Frank O'Hara said, "If you don't need poetry, bully for you," but he also said when he didn't want to be alive anymore, the thought that he wouldn't write any more poems had stopped him. 
Poetry helps me want to be alive, and I want to show you why by showing you how, how a couple of poems react to the fact that we're alive in one place at one time in one culture, and in another we won't be alive at all. 
So here's one of the first poems I memorized. 
It could address a child or an adult. 
"From far, from eve and morning From yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither; here am I. 
Now — for a breath I tarry Nor yet disperse apart — Take my hand quick and tell me, What have you in your heart. 
Speak now, and I will answer; How shall I help you, say; Ere to the wind's twelve quarters I take my endless way." 
[A. E. Housman] Now, this poem has appealed to science fiction writers. 
It's furnished at least three science fiction titles, I think because it says poems can brings us news from the future or the past or across the world, because their patterns can seem to tell you what's in somebody's heart. 
It says poems can bring people together temporarily, which I think is true, and it sticks in my head not just because it rhymes but for how it rhymes, cleanly and simply on the two and four, "say" and "way," with anticipatory hints on the one and three, "answer" and "quarters," as if the poem itself were coming together. 
It plays up the fact that we die by exaggerating the speed of our lives. 
A few years on Earth become one speech, one breath. 
It's a poem about loneliness -- the "I" in the poem feels no connection will last — and it might look like a plea for help 'til you get to the word "help," where this "I" facing you, taking your hand, is more like a teacher or a genie, or at least that's what he wants to believe. 
It would not be the first time a poet had written the poem that he wanted to hear. 
Now, this next poem really changed what I liked and what I read and what I felt I could read as an adult. 
It might not make any sense to you if you haven't seen it before. 
"The Garden" "Oleander: coral from lipstick ads in the 50's. 
Fruit of the tree of such knowledge To smack (thin air) meaning kiss or hit. 
It appears in the guise of outworn usages because we are bad? 
Big masculine threat, insinuating and slangy." 
[Rae Armantrout] Now, I found this poem in an anthology of almost equally confusing poems in 1989. 
I just heard that there were these scandalous writers called Language poets who didn't make any sense, and I wanted to go and see for myself what they were like, and some of them didn't do much for me, but this writer, Rae Armantrout, did an awful lot, and I kept reading her until I felt I knew what was going on, as I do with this poem. 
It's about the Garden of Eden and the Fall and the Biblical story of the Fall, in which sex as we know it and death and guilt come into the world at the same time. 
It's also about how appearances deceive, how our culture can sweep us along into doing and saying things we didn't intend or don't like, and Armantrout's style is trying to help us stop or slow down. 
"Smack" can mean "kiss" as in air kisses, as in lip-smacking, but that can lead to "smack" as in "hit" as in domestic abuse, because sexual attraction can seem threatening. 
The red that means fertility can also mean poison. 
Oleander is poisonous. 
And outworn usages like "smack" for "kiss" or "hit" can help us see how our unacknowledged assumptions can make us believe we are bad, either because sex is sinful or because we tolerate so much sexism. 
We let guys tell women what to do. 
The poem reacts to old lipstick ads, and its edginess about statement, its reversals and halts, have everything to do with resisting the language of ads that want to tell us so easily what to want, what to do, what to think. 
That resistance is a lot of the point of the poem, which shows me, Armantrout shows me what it's like to hear grave threats and mortal dishonesty in the language of everyday life, and once she's done that, I think she can show other people, women and men, what it's like to feel that way and say to other people, women and men who feel so alienated or so threatened that they're not alone. 
Now, how do I know that I'm right about this somewhat confusing poem? 
Well in this case, I emailed the poet a draft of my talk and she said, "Yeah, yeah, that's about it." 
Yeah. (Laughter) (Applause) But usually, you can't know. You never know. 
You can't be sure, and that's okay. 
All we can do we is listen to poems and look at poems and guess and see if they can bring us what we need, and if you're wrong about some part of a poem, nothing bad will happen. 
Now, this next poem is older than Armantrout's, but a little younger than A. E. Housman's. 
"The Brave Man" "The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man. 
Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away. 
The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away. 
Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away. 
That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man." 
[Wallace Stevens] Now, the sun in this poem, in Wallace Stevens' poem, seems so grave because the person in the poem is so afraid. 
The sun comes up in the morning through branches, dispels the dew, the eyes, on the grass, and defeats stars envisioned as armies. 
"Brave" has its old sense of showy as well as its modern sense, courage. 
This sun is not afraid to show his face. 
But the person in the poem is afraid. 
He might have been up all night. 
That is the reveal Stevens saves for that fourth stanza, where run away has become a refrain. 
This person might want to run away too, but fortified by the sun's example, he might just rise. 
Stevens saves that sonically odd word "meditation" for the end. 
Unlike the sun, human beings think. 
We meditate on past and future, life and death, above and below. 
And it can make us afraid. 
Poems, the patterns in poems, show us not just what somebody thought or what someone did or what happened but what it was like to be a person like that, to be so anxious, so lonely, so inquisitive, so goofy, so preposterous, so brave. 
That's why poems can seem at once so durable, so personal, and so ephemeral, like something inside and outside you at once. 
The Scottish poet Denise Riley compares poetry to a needle, a sliver of outside I cradle inside, and the American poet Terrance Hayes wrote six poems called "Wind in a Box." 
One of them asks, "Tell me, what am I going to do when I'm dead?" 
And the answer is that he'll stay with us or won't stay with us inside us as wind, as air, as words. 
It is easier than ever to find poems that might stay inside you, that might stay with you, from long, long ago, or from right this minute, from far away or from right close to where you live, almost no matter where you live. 
Poems can help you say, help you show how you're feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, ways of being in the world, people, very much unlike you, maybe even people from long, long ago. 
Some poems even tell you that that is what they can do. 
That's what John Keats is doing in his most mysterious, perhaps, poem. 
It's mysterious because it's probably unfinished, he probably left it unfinished, and because it might be meant for a character in a play, but it might just be Keats' thinking about what his own writing, his handwriting, could do, and in it I hear, at least I hear, mortality, and I hear the power of older poetic techniques, and I have the feeling, you might have the feeling, of meeting even for an instant, almost becoming, someone else from long ago, someone quite memorable. 
"This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d -- see here it is -- I hold it towards you." 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

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

There are some chasms so deep and so wide, we find it hard to imagine how we'll ever make it to the other side. 
That space between who we are and who we want to be, the gaps between our high ideals and our base realities. 
The distance between what we say and what we really mean. 
The raging river that flows between what actually happened and our convenient memories. 
The lies we tell ourselves are lakes, overflowing their banks, flooding our speech with waters, caustic and rank. 
The only bridge is the truth, passing through me and you, as we look one another eye to eye. 
But so often, that look is filled with our hesitations, and we can't help but glance to the side. 
See, we've long ago let go of the language with which we describe our softer parts. 
We learn early that those with softer hearts suffer. 
So we allow lean emotion to reign, never noticing that only strain has been the fruit of our restraints. 
We haven't escaped pain. 
And our battle scars are far from faint. 
Yet and still, despite our desire and willingness to heal, we often find ourselves fighting hard in the paint, holding onto false images of everything we ain't. 
So while our dream coincide, our fears collide. 
And we want to know one another, but think we can't. 
The gulf between empathy and equity is as unfathomable as the fissures that line our collective integrity. 
And we spend eternal eternities trying to translate that into virtue. 
Perhaps you have met one or two of the virtuous on your path. 
They are only very few, and I know that I have, from time to time, mistaken pretenders for real, yet still make room for the possibility that it's I who's been pretending. 
Please, bear with me, I'm still mending, but I'm no longer bending to the will of my injuries, nor my injurers. 
I much prefer to stretch my arms like Nüt until I become the sky. 
I'd rather stretch my tongue with truth, our bridge to cross when we look one another in the eye. 
But the tongue, like the heart, gets tired. 
The weak make it hard for the strong to stay inspired, like the lost prevent the found from escaping the mire, and the degraded stop the enlightened from taking us higher. 
But no matter what you hear from the mouths of these liars, we are one people with one destiny and the common enemy, that's why it really stresses me to see our hearts so tattered, our minds so scattered, our egos so easily flattered. 
We're enslaved, yet think of our shackles as gifts. 
Rather than resist our masters, we let them widen our rifts, like mindless, material junkies, we seek that which lowers, not lifts. 
But somewhere in our midst, there's been a paradigm shift. 
Justice is getting restless in its chains. 
Our youth find it useless to separate their souls from their brains, their truth is ingrained, their integrity insustained. 
Let me call your attention to those who serve as examples. 
Those who daily give their all, but their reserves are still ample. 
Those who battle friend and foe, yet their hope is never trampled, they make music, never sample, and the world's ugly could never cancel the fullness and the sweetness of their composition. 
Nor the unadulterated truth of their mission. 
It's time we shut our mouths and listen. 
Close our eyes and pray for the humility and the guidance to follow them to the way. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you all so much, you have no idea how fulfilling and energizing that is. 
For the past three years, I've had the privilege of codesigning with my neighbors a space in New Orleans known as Under the Bridge. 
In 1966, Interstate 10 landed on the Tremé neighborhood, displacing 326 black-owned businesses, over 300 live oak trees, effectively destroying the region's most successful black commercial district, disrupting intergenerational wealth and truly unraveling the fabric of the nation's oldest African American neighborhood. 
Today, after 45 years of community advocacy, after 500 hours of community engagement and 80 hours of community design, we are so excited that in 2018, after capturing the voices of thousands of residents and the support of our local, federal and philanthropic partners, as the city celebrates 300 years of transforming the world, we will get to transform 19 blocks under the Interstate into community space, into black-owned businesses, in the form of the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District. 
(Cheers) (Applause) We will be bridging time, we will bridge memory, we will bridge disparity and injustice, and we can't wait to see you all on the other side. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

They wanted her piecemealed, papier-mâchéd, practically broken, limp-like and loveless, a litany of exaggeration. 
They wanted her low. 
And high. 
Flat and wide. 
Filled with all of their empty. 
They wanted her to be more like them. 
Not knowing her conception was immaculate. 
That she was birthed in sandalwood-scented river water, sweet sapphire honey-touched tongue, she was too much of a mouthful for the greedy. 
Just a small amount of her was more than they could stand. 
Oh, they wanted her bland. 
And barren. 
Unspirited, un-African, uncultured, under siege in the streets. 
They wanted her face down, ass up, hands cuffed and ankles strapped. 
They wanted her knowing she could never want them back. 
Oh, they wanted her holy, baptized in her divine, they wanted her secrets, pearls to swine. 
They wanted to unravel the mystery of her design. 
Fascinated by glory, hypnotized by her kind. 
Oh, they wanted her complete. 
They wanted her whole, though they came fractioned, half-hearted, half-soul, with no regards and no knowledge as to who she really was. 
Oh, but if they knew. 
If they knew her, praise songs would rain from the clouds of their eyes, clearing the vision, bathing the heart. 
They would bow every time they saw her. 
Be their best selves when she was around. 
If they knew her, knew she was the glue to their revolution, the life flow of blood through their veins. 
If they knew her, she would know, she would feel that her body is more than battlefield. 
More than bone break and bleeding bigotry. 
More than bridge over your troubled conscience. 
More than used up, walked on, driven through, shot up. 
More than your "Selma, Lord, Selma" Edmund Pettus. 
More than your killer Katrina Danziger. 
More than your bust them out of Baltimore "Highway to Nowhere." 
If they knew her, she would know. 
(Singing) Wild women, wild women, they walk with buffalo. 
Have lightning on their tongues, fly whisks as weapons. 
Wild women, they walk with machetes. 
With wisdom, with grace, with ease. 
Wild women have hurricanes in their bellies, releasing a flood of a lesson. 
Oh, wild women, they fly free. 
Just watch their ways, how they rip and shred. 
Oh, who can understand her, this winding Niger river of a woman one who is unafraid to tear away only to roam and then become the wind. 
She who speaks in gusts and cyclones blasting us back to high ground, high consciousness, she turns and so does the world. 
Feel her spinning, spanning several lifetimes. 
Hear her speaking, sparking alarm. 
See her dancing, summoning the dead, resurrecting new life. 
Heaven hears her knocking on the door, safely transporting the ones who call for her assistance. 
Wild women, they open portals to new worlds, new speech, new dreams. 
Oh, dearly beloveds, so dearly departed from the ways of the guardian, beware. 
For wild women are not to be tamed. 
Only admired. 
Just let her in and witness her set your days ablaze. 
(Cheers) (Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Welcome to "Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do." 
I don't have children. 
I borrow my friends' children, so -- (Laughter) take all this advice with a grain of salt. 
I'm Gever Tulley. 
I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. 
It's a summer program which aims to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of. 
So we build a lot of things, and I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders. 
So if you're thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School, they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody. 
(Laughter) You know, we live in a world that's subjected to ever more stringent child safety regulations. 
There doesn't seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get. 
We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. 
We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. 
And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10. 
So where does this trend stop? 
When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object, every pokey bit in the world, then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp, or not made out of round plastic, they'll hurt themselves with it. 
So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. 
And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can. 
(Laughter) So despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about safety, and about some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative, confident and in control of the environment around them. 
And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress. 
The book is called "50 Dangerous Things." 
This is "Five Dangerous Things." 
Thing number one: Play with fire. 
Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history. 
Whether we remember it or not, it's the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things. 
These mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it. 
So, playing with fire. 
This is like one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. 
From playing with it, they learn some basic principles about fire, about intake, combustion, exhaust. 
These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. 
And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. 
You don't know what they're going to learn from playing with it. 
Let them fool around with it on their own terms and trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys. 
(Laughter) Number two: Own a pocketknife. 
Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing. 
(Laughter) Your first pocketknife is like the first universal tool that you're given. 
You know, it's a spatula, it's a pry bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah. 
And it's a powerful and empowering tool. 
And in a lot of cultures they give knives -- like, as soon as they're toddlers, they have knives. 
These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. 
I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board film when I was 10, and it left a lasting impression, to see babies playing with knives. 
And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. 
You lay down a couple of very simple rules -- always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it -- and these are things kids can understand and practice with. 
And yeah, they're going to cut themselves. 
I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself. 
But you know, they're young. They heal fast. 
(Laughter) Number three: Throw a spear. 
It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things, and like muscles, if you don't use parts of your brain, they tend to atrophy over time. 
But when you exercise them, any given muscle adds strength to the whole system, and that applies to your brain, too. 
So practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal and parietal lobes, which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding, and structural problem solving, so it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive ability. 
And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it's very good for that kind of whole-body training. 
These kinds of target-based practices also help kids develop attention and concentration skills, so those are great. 
Number [four]: Deconstruct appliances. 
There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. 
Next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. 
Take it apart with your kid, or send him to my school, and we'll take it apart with them. 
Even if you don't know what the parts are, puzzling out what they might be for is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart, and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them. 
It's a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. 
So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them. 
Number five: Two-parter. 
Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 
(Laughter) There are laws beyond safety regulations that attempt to limit how we can interact with the things that we own -- in this case, digital media. 
It's a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. 
You've just broken a law. 
Technically, the RIAA could come and prosecute you. 
It's an important lesson for kids to understand, that some of these laws get broken by accident, and that laws have to be interpreted. 
That's something we often talk about with the kids when we're fooling around with things and breaking them open, and taking them apart and using them for other things. 
And also when we go out and drive a car. 
Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate -- (Laughter) For those of you who aren't comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. 
This is a great stage for a kid. 
This happens about the same time that they get latched onto things like dinosaurs, these big things in the outside world, that they're trying to get a grip on. 
A car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. 
And that really gives them a handle on a world in a way that they don't often have access to. 
And it's perfectly legal. 
Find a big empty lot, make sure there's nothing in it, and that it's on private property, and let them drive your car. 
It's very safe actually. 
And it's fun for the whole family. 
(Laughter) Let's see, I think that's it. That's number five and a half. OK. 

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

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

Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwells And announced that I'm "articulate" Which means that when it comes to enunciation and diction I don't even think of it ‘Cause I’m "articulate" So when my professor asks a question And my answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestion There’s no misdirected intention Pay attention ‘Cause I’m “articulate” So when my father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?” My “articulate” answer never goes amiss I say “father, this is the impending problem at hand” And when I’m on the block I switch it up just because I can So when my boy says, “What’s good with you son?” I just say, “I jus’ fall out wit dem people but I done!” And sometimes in class I might pause the intellectual sounding flow to ask “Yo! Why dese books neva be about my peoples” Yes, I have decided to treat all three of my languages as equals Because I’m “articulate” But who controls articulation? 
Because the English language is a multifaceted oration Subject to indefinite transformation Now you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken English But I’m here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British So when my Professor comes on the block and says, “Hello” I stop him and say “Noooo … You’re being inarticulate … the proper way is to say ‘what’s good’” Now you may think that’s too hood, that’s not cool But I’m here to tell you that even our language has rules So when Mommy mocks me and says “ya’ll-be-madd-going-to-the-store” I say “Mommy, no, that sentence is not following the law Never does the word "madd" go before a present participle That’s simply the principle of this English” If I had the vocal capacity I would sing this from every mountaintop, From every suburbia, and every hood ‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the Genesis Of this world saying “it is good" So I may not always come before you with excellency of speech But do not judge me by my language and assume That I’m too ignorant to teach ‘Cause I speak three tongues One for each: Home, school and friends I’m a tri-lingual orator Sometimes I’m consistent with my language now Then switch it up so I don’t bore later Sometimes I fight back two tongues While I use the other one in the classroom And when I mistakenly mix them up I feel crazy like … I’m cooking in the bathroom I know that I had to borrow your language because mines was stolen But you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines is broken These words are spoken By someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this season And the reason I speak a composite version of your language Is because mines was raped away along with my history I speak broken English so the profusing gashes can remind us That our current state is not a mystery I’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people mad So unless you’ve seen it rob a bank stop calling my hair bad I’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparity So don’t call it good unless your hair is known for donating to charity As much as has been raped away from our people How can you expect me to treat their imprint on your language As anything less than equal Let there be no confusion Let there be no hesitation This is not a promotion of ignorance This is a linguistic celebration That’s why I put "tri-lingual" on my last job application I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know And when they call me for the interview I’ll be more than happy to show that I can say: “What’s good” “Whatagwan” And of course …“Hello” Because I’m “articulate” Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Cigarettes aren’t good for us. 
That’s hardly news--we’ve known about the dangers of smoking for decades. 
But how exactly do cigarettes harm us? 
Let’s look at what happens as their ingredients make their way through our bodies, and how we benefit physically when we finally give up smoking. 
With each inhalation, smoke brings its more than 5,000 chemical substances into contact with the body’s tissues. 
From the start, tar, a black, resinous material, begins to coat the teeth and gums, damaging tooth enamel, and eventually causing decay. 
Over time, smoke also damages nerve-endings in the nose, causing loss of smell. 
Inside the airways and lungs, smoke increases the likelihood of infections, as well as chronic diseases like bronchitis and emphysema. 
It does this by damaging the cilia, tiny hairlike structures whose job it is to keep the airways clean. 
It then fills the alveoli, tiny air sacs that enable the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the lungs and blood. 
A toxic gas called carbon monoxide crosses that membrane into the blood, binding to hemoglobin and displacing the oxygen it would usually have transported around the body. 
That’s one of the reasons smoking can lead to oxygen deprivation and shortness of breath. 
Within about 10 seconds, the bloodstream carries a stimulant called nicotine to the brain, triggering the release of dopamine and other neurotransmitters including endorphins that create the pleasurable sensations which make smoking highly addictive. 
Nicotine and other chemicals from the cigarette simultaneously cause constriction of blood vessels and damage their delicate endothelial lining, restricting blood flow. 
These vascular effects lead to thickening of blood vessel walls and enhance blood platelet stickiness, increasing the likelihood that clots will form and trigger heart attacks and strokes. 
Many of the chemicals inside cigarettes can trigger dangerous mutations in the body’s DNA that make cancers form. 
Additionally, ingredients like arsenic and nickel may disrupt the process of DNA repair, thus compromising the body’s ability to fight many cancers. 
In fact, about one of every three cancer deaths in the United States is caused by smoking. 
And it’s not just lung cancer. 
Smoking can cause cancer in multiple tissues and organs, as well as damaged eyesight and weakened bones. 
It makes it harder for women to get pregnant. 
And in men, it can cause erectile dysfunction. 
But for those who quit smoking, there’s a huge positive upside with almost immediate and long-lasting physical benefits. 
Just 20 minutes after a smoker’s final cigarette, their heart rate and blood pressure begin to return to normal. 
After 12 hours, carbon monoxide levels stabilize, increasing the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. 
A day after ceasing, heart attack risk begins to decrease as blood pressure and heart rates normalize. 
After two days, the nerve endings responsible for smell and taste start to recover. 
Lungs become healthier after about one month, with less coughing and shortness of breath. 
The delicate hair-like cilia in the airways and lungs start recovering within weeks, and are restored after 9 months, improving resistance to infection. 
By the one-year anniversary of quitting, heart disease risk plummets to half as blood vessel function improves. 
Five years in, the chance of a clot forming dramatically declines, and the risk of stroke continues to reduce. 
After ten years, the chances of developing fatal lung cancer go down by 50%, probably because the body’s ability to repair DNA is once again restored. 
Fifteen years in, the likelihood of developing coronary heart disease is essentially the same as that of a non-smoker. 
There’s no point pretending this is all easy to achieve. 
Quitting can lead to anxiety and depression, resulting from nicotine withdrawal. 
But fortunately, such effects are usually temporary. 
And quitting is getting easier, thanks to a growing arsenal of tools. 
Nicotine replacement therapy through gum, skin patches, lozenges, and sprays may help wean smokers off cigarettes. 
They work by stimulating nicotine receptors in the brain and thus preventing withdrawal symptoms, without the addition of other harmful chemicals. 
Counselling and support groups, cognitive behavioral therapy, and moderate intensity exercise also help smokers stay cigarette-free. 
That’s good news, since quitting puts you and your body on the path back to health. 

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

I was born in Taiwan. 
I grew up surrounded by different types of hardware stores, and I like going to night markets. 
I love the energy of the night markets, the colors, the lights, the toys, and all the unexpected things I find every time I go, things like watermelon with straw antennas or puppies with mohawks. 
When I was growing up, I liked taking toys apart, any kind of toys I'd find around the house, like my brother's BB gun when he's not home. 
I also liked to make environments for people to explore and play. 
In these early installations, I would take plastic sheets, plastic bags, and things I would find in the hardware store or around the house. 
I would take things like highlighter pen, mix it with water, pump it through plastic tubing, creating these glowing circulatory systems for people to walk through and enjoy. 
I like these materials because of the way they look, the way they feel, and they're very affordable. 
I also liked to make devices that work with body parts. 
I would take camera LED lights and a bungee cord and strap it on my waist and I would videotape my belly button, get a different perspective, and see what it does. 
(Laughter) I also like to modify household appliances. 
This is an automatic night light. 
Some of you might have them at home. 
I would cut out the light sensor, add an extension line, and use modeling clay, stick it onto the television, and then I would videotape my eye, and using the dark part of my eye tricking the sensor into thinking it's night time, so you turn on the lightbulb. 
The white of the eye and the eyelid will trick the sensor into thinking it's daytime, and it will shut off the light. 
I wanted to collect more different types of eyes, so I built this device using bicycle helmets, some lightbulbs and television sets. 
It would be easier for other people to wear the helmet and record their eyes. 
This device allows me to symbolically extract other people's eyes, so I have a diversity of eyes to use for my other sculptures. 
This sculpture has four eyes. 
Each eye is controlling a different device. 
This eye is turning itself around in a television. 
This eye is inflating a plastic tube. 
This eye is watching a video of another piece being made. 
And these two eyes are activating glowing water. 
Many of these pieces are later on shown in museums, biennials, triennial exhibitions around the world. 
I love science and biology. 
In 2007, I was doing a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum looking at bioluminous organisms in the oean. 
I love these creatures. I love the way they look, the way they feel. 
They're soft, they're slimy, and I was fascinated by the way they use light in their environment, either to attract mates, for self-defense, or to attract food. 
This research inspired my work in many different ways, things like movement or different light patterns. 
So I started gathering a lot of different types of material in my studio and just experimenting and trying this out, trying that out, and seeing what types of creatures I can come up with. 
I used a lot of computer cooling fans and just kind of put them together and see what happens. 
This is an 8,000-square-foot installation composed of many different creatures, some hanging from the ceiling and some resting on the floor. 
From afar, they look alien-like, but when you look closer, they're all made out of black garbage bags or Tupperware containers. 
I'd like to share with you how ordinary things can become something magical and wondrous. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

We're going to go on a dive to the deep sea, and anyone that's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down, it's a perfectly positively pitch-black world. 
And we used to see the most mysterious animals out the window that you couldn't describe: these blinking lights -- a world of bioluminescence, like fireflies. 
Dr. Edith Widder -- she's now at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association -- was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals, and that's what you're seeing here on the screen. 
That's all bioluminescence. Like I said: just like fireflies. 
There's a flying turkey under a tree. 
(Laughter) I'm a geologist by training. 
But I love that. 
And you see, some of the bioluminescence they use to avoid being eaten, some they use to attract prey, but all of it, from an artistic point of view, is just positively amazing. 
And a lot of what goes on inside -- There's a fish with glowing eyes, pulsating eyes. 
Some of the colors are designed to hypnotize, these lovely patterns. 
And then this last one, one of my favorites, this pinwheel design. 
Just absolutely amazing, every single dive. 
That's the unknown world, and today we've only explored about 3 percent of what's out there in the ocean. 
Already we've found the world's highest mountains, the world's deepest valleys, underwater lakes, underwater waterfalls -- a lot of that we shared with you from the stage. 
And in a place where we thought no life at all, we find more life, we think, and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest, which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all. 
There's still 97 percent, and either that 97 percent is empty or just full of surprises. 
But I want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing. 
Cephalopods -- head-foots. 
As a kid I knew them as calamari, mostly. 
(Laughter) This is an octopus. 
This is the work of Dr. Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab, and it's just fascinating how cephalopods can, with their incredible eyes, sense their surroundings, look at light, look at patterns. 
Here's an octopus moving across the reef, finds a spot to settle down, curls up and then disappears into the background. 
Tough thing to do. 
In the next bit, we're going to see a couple squid. 
Now males, when they fight, if they're really aggressive, they turn white. 
And these two males are fighting. 
They do it by bouncing their butts together, which is an interesting concept. 
Now, here's a male on the left and a female on the right, and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder, gentler squid in him. 
(Laughter) Let's take a look at it again. Watch the coloration: white on the right, brown on the left. 
He takes a step back, he's keeping off the other males by splitting his body, and comes up on the other side -- Bingo! 
Now, I'm told that's not not just a squid phenomenon with males, but I don't know. 
(Laughter) Cuttlefish. I love cuttlefish. 
This is a Giant Australian Cuttlefish. 
And there he is, his droopy little eyes up here. 
But they can do pretty amazing things, too. 
Here we're going to see one backing into a crevice, and watch his tentacles -- he just pulls them in, makes them look just like algae. 
Disappears right into the background. 
Positively amazing. 
Here's two males fighting. 
Once again, they're smart enough, these cephalopods; they know not to hurt each other. 
But look at the patterns that they can do with their skin. 
That's an amazing thing. 
Here's an octopus. 
Sometimes they don't want to be seen when they move, because predators can see them. 
This guy can make himself look like a rock, and, looking at his environment, can actually slide across the bottom, using the waves and the shadows so he can't be seen. 
His motion blends right into the background -- the moving rock trick. 
So, we're learning lots new from the shallow water. 
Still exploring the deep, but learning lots from the shallow water. 
There's a good reason why: the shallow water's full of predators -- here's a barracuda -- and if you're an octopus or a cephalopod, you need to really understand how to use your surroundings to hide. 
In the next scene, you're going to see a nice coral bottom. 
And you see that an octopus would stand out very easily there if you couldn't use your camouflage, use your skin to change color and texture. 
Here's some algae in the foreground -- and an octopus. 
Ain't that amazing? 
Now, Roger spooked him, so he took off in a cloud of ink, and when he lands, the octopus says, "Oh, I've been seen. 
The best thing to do is to get as big as I can get." 
That big brown makes his eyespot very big. 
So, he's bluffing. Let's do it backwards. 
I thought he was joking when he first showed it to me. 
I thought it was all graphics. So here it is in reverse. 
Watch the skin color; watch the skin texture. 
Just an amazing animal, it can change color and texture to match the surroundings. 
Watch him blend right into this algae. 
One, two, three. 
(Applause) And now he's gone, and so am I. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

These are simple objects: clocks, keys, combs, glasses. 
They are the things the victims of genocide in Bosnia carried with them on their final journey. 
We are all familiar with these mundane, everyday objects. 
The fact that some of the victims carried personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush is a clear sign they had no idea what was about to happen to them. 
Usually, they were told that they were going to be exchanged for prisoners of war. 
These items have been recovered from numerous mass graves across my homeland, and as we speak, forensics are exhuming bodies from newly discovered mass graves, 20 years after the war. 
And it is quite possibly the largest ever discovered. 
During the four years of conflict that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early '90s, approximately 30,000 citizens, mainly civilians, went missing, presumed killed, and another 100,000 were killed during combat operations. 
Most of them were killed either in the early days of the war or towards the end of the hostilities, when U.N. safe zones like Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb army. 
The international criminal tribunal delivered a number of sentences for crimes against humanity and genocide. 
Genocide is a systematic and deliberate destruction of a racial, political, religious or ethnic group. 
As much as genocide is about killing. 
It is also about destroying their property, their cultural heritage, and ultimately the very notion that they ever existed. 
Genocide is not only about the killing; it is about the denied identity. 
There are always traces — no such thing as a perfect crime. 
There are always remnants of the perished ones that are more durable than their fragile bodies and our selective and fading memory of them. 
These items are recovered from numerous mass graves, and the main goal of this collection of the items is a unique process of identifying those who disappeared in the killings, the first act of genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. 
Not a single body should remain undiscovered or unidentified. 
Once recovered, these items that the victims carried with them on their way to execution are carefully cleaned, analyzed, catalogued and stored. 
Thousands of artifacts are packed in white plastic bags just like the ones you see on CSI. 
These objects are used as a forensic tool in visual identification of the victims, but they are also used as very valuable forensic evidence in the ongoing war crimes trials. 
Survivors are occasionally called to try to identify these items physically, but physical browsing is extremely difficult, an ineffective and painful process. 
Once the forensics and doctors and lawyers are done with these objects, they become orphans of the narrative. 
Many of them get destroyed, believe it or not, or they get simply shelved, out of sight and out of mind. 
I decided a few years ago to photograph every single exhumed item in order to create a visual archive that survivors could easily browse. 
As a storyteller, I like to give back to the community. 
I like to move beyond raising awareness. 
And in this case, someone may recognize these items or at least their photographs will remain as a permanent, unbiased and accurate reminder of what happened. 
Photography is about empathy, and the familiarity of these items guarantee empathy. 
In this case, I am merely a tool, a forensic, if you like, and the result is a photography that is as close as possible of being a document. 
Once all the missing persons are identified, only decaying bodies in their graves and these everyday items will remain. 
In all their simplicity, these items are the last testament to the identity of the victims, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

So recently, some white guys and some black women swapped Twitter avatars, or pictures online. 
They didn't change their content, they kept tweeting the same as usual, but suddenly, the white guys noticed they were getting called the n-word all the time and they were getting the worst kind of online abuse, whereas the black women all of a sudden noticed things got a lot more pleasant for them. 
Now, if you're my five-year-old, your Internet consists mostly of puppies and fairies and occasionally fairies riding puppies. 
That's a thing. Google it. 
But the rest of us know that the Internet can be a really ugly place. 
I'm not talking about the kind of colorful debates that I think are healthy for our democracy. 
I'm talking about nasty personal attacks. 
Maybe it's happened to you, but it's at least twice as likely to happen, and be worse, if you're a woman, a person of color, or gay, or more than one at the same time. 
In fact, just as I was writing this talk, I found a Twitter account called @SallyKohnSucks. 
The bio says that I'm a "man-hater and a bull dyke and the only thing I've ever accomplished with my career is spreading my perverse sexuality." 
Which, incidentally, is only a third correct. 
I mean, lies! (Laughter) But seriously, we all say we hate this crap. 
The question is whether you're willing to make a personal sacrifice to change it. 
I don't mean giving up the Internet. 
I mean changing the way you click, because clicking is a public act. 
It's no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers. 
Increasingly, we're all the media. 
I used to think, oh, okay, I get dressed up, I put on a lot of makeup, I go on television, I talk about the news. 
That is a public act of making media. 
And then I go home and I browse the web and I'm reading Twitter, and that's a private act of consuming media. 
I mean, of course it is. I'm in my pajamas. 
Wrong. 
Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. 
We are the new editors. 
We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. 
That's how the media works now. 
There's all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture. 
Over three out of five Americans think we have a major incivility problem in our country right now, but I'm going to guess that at least three out of five Americans are clicking on the same insult-oriented, rumor-mongering trash that feeds the nastiest impulses in our society. 
In an increasingly noisy media landscape, the incentive is to make more noise to be heard, and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty. 
It does not have to be that way. 
It does not. 
We can change the incentive. 
For starters, there are two things we can all do. 
First, don't just stand by the sidelines when you see someone getting hurt. 
If someone is being abused online, do something. 
Be a hero. This is your chance. 
Speak up. Speak out. Be a good person. 
Drown out the negative with the positive. 
And second, we've got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeding linkbait. 
If you don't like the 24/7 all Kardashian all the time programming, you've got to stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian's sideboob. 
I know you do it. (Applause) You too, apparently. 
I mean, really, same example: if you don't like politicians calling each other names, stop clicking on the stories about what one guy in one party called the other guy in the other party. 
Clicking on a train wreck just pours gasoline on it. 
It makes it worse, the fire spreads. 
Our whole culture gets burned. 
If what gets the most clicks wins, then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act. 
So click responsibly. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

There are more than a trillion galaxies in the universe. 
And my team discovered an extremely rare one, a galaxy that doesn't look quite like anything observed before. 
This galaxy is so peculiar, that it challenges our theories and our assumptions about how the universe works. 
The majority of the galaxies are spiral, similar to our own Milky Way. 
We have strong theories about how these common galaxies form and evolve. 
But we don't understand how rare galaxies form and evolve. 
An especially puzzling rare case is Hoag's Object. 
It has a very symmetric central body surrounded by a circular outer ring, with nothing visible connecting them. 
Hoag-type galaxies are among the rarest types of galaxies currently known. 
There are fewer than one in 1,000 galaxies. 
It's a mystery how the stars in the outer ring are just floating there in such an orderly manner. 
That's interesting, right? 
Hold on. 
Things are about to get more mysterious. 
The galaxy that my team discovered is even rarer and much more complex than that. 
You know, sometimes, you search and search for these objects, and you find nothing. 
But sometimes, it just appears in the background, when you are not even looking for it. 
This system looks very similar to Hoag's Object, with its central body and circular outer ring. 
We got very excited and thought we discovered another Hoag's Object. 
But my research showed this is an entirely new galaxy type, now commonly referred to as "Burçin's Galaxy." 
(Laughs) (Cheers) (Applause) We will not be visiting this galaxy anytime soon. 
It is approximately 359 million light years away from Earth. 
You may think this is far. 
Well, actually, this is one of the nearby galaxies. 
I study this object in different light -- in ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared. 
Small details on our body, like a scar or wrinkles, tell the story of our lives. 
Similarly, a galaxy's structure in different light can help us trace back their origin and evolution. 
How do I look for these details? 
I model the bright central body and remove my model from the image to check for any hidden features, because a bright structure in a galaxy may blind our views of faint features, just like using sunglasses when you are blinded by the intense light. 
The result was a big surprise. 
This galaxy doesn't just have an outer ring, it has an additional, diffused inner ring. 
We were having a hard time explaining the origin of the outer ring in Hoag-type galaxies. 
Now we also need to explain this mysterious second ring. 
There is currently no known mechanism that can explain the existence of an inner ring in such a peculiar galaxy. 
So the discovery of Burçin's Galaxy clearly highlights the gap in our knowledge of galaxy evolution. 
Further research into how this extremely rare galaxy was formed can provide us with new clues on how the universe works. 
This discovery tells us that we still have a lot to learn, and we should keep looking deeper and deeper in space and keep searching for the unknown. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Come on: Hasn't everyone here dreamt of flying? 
So why haven't humans flown yet? 
I've been obsessed with learning to fly my whole life. 
I grew up a feral, adopted child on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, following my bricklayer/fisherman father around. 
I was always fascinated by things that moved, catching small animals, holding them in my hands, feeling the magic of their movement; playing with fire, thrilled and terrified at its unrelenting force, accidentally burning my father's barn down -- just once. 
(Laughter) That was my first brush with real danger, the fire and my father. 
When I was about eight or nine years old, I caught a fly in a mason jar. 
Studying that fly, I thought, "Wow, it's changing directions in midair with acute angles, and it's going so fast, it's a blur. 
Why can't we do that? Can we?" 
Everywhere I looked, there were things moving. 
And these things moved with their very own causal rhythms, their very own mechanistic anatomies. 
It was clear to me -- and to Newton -- that things move based on their component parts: worms squirmed, birds flew, kangaroos hopped. 
And a human's first bout with flying was falling accidentally, tripping, or slipping on that fabled banana peel. 
Once your ground is dragged out from under you, a world of wonder comes rushing in. 
I had found my territory. 
I was seized with a compulsion, a primordial urge to learn how to fly, like a human. 
For the next 10 years, I did my experiments alone, on my own body. 
I drove my Honda 350 across the United States in an "Easy Rider" kind of way. 
I got my degree in modern dance. I mimicked that fly in the box. 
I dove horizontally through glass; on the way, I punched a hole in it. 
I was trying to figure out something about flight. 
When I was 27 years old, I found myself in a rat-infested New York City loft, getting ready to hurl myself off a ladder. 
I climbed higher, higher, higher, and I jumped. 
Wham-o! I landed. 
That hurt. 
(Laughter) And it occurred to me that people didn't really enjoy getting hurt, and that maybe the reason that we weren't flying yet is that we were still attached to that false idea that we would fly the way birds do, or butterflies. 
Maybe we needed to assumption-bust, to ask a different kind of question -- about duration, for instance. 
Humans in the air? A few seconds. 
Birds and butterflies? Minutes, maybe hours. 
And what about fear? 
I think fear is complex and personal. 
I really think it has to do with curiosity and not taking yourself so seriously. 
We might need to get a little hurt, just not too hurt. 
And pain: redefine it. 
Rather than "pain," say, "another rather interesting, foreign sensation." 
Something like that. 
I realized then that to learn to fly, we were going to have to learn to land. 
My hero, Evel Knievel -- one of them -- said, "Anyone can jump a motorcycle. 
The trouble begins when you try to land it." 
(Laughter) Landing hurts. 
I was curious, though. 
I thought, "Well, why don't we invent an impact technique? 
Why don't we just expand our base of support?" 
I had seen pieces of plywood fall, and they didn't flinch on the way down. 
So I made my body into a perfect line and tilted back. 
Whaft! 
It was a totally different sound than "wham-o." 
And I rushed out onto the streets of New York City and went up to complete strangers, and I said -- well, I thought -- "I did a backfall today. Did you?" 
In 1985, we started to tour all over the world a little bit, and I started my company, called STREB EXTREME ACTION. 
In 2003, we were invited to go to Kitty Hawk to celebrate the 100th anniversary of flight with the Wright Brothers. 
We had gotten very good at landing; now we needed to get up into the air. 
And like them, we wanted to stay there longer. 
I came across this quote by Wilbur: "If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial." 
Ah, machines. 
It incited the hardware junkie inside of me. 
And if we did want to go or travel to unhabitual places in space -- to that banana peel spot that confuses us; to that place outside our vertical comfort zone, where we encounter unexpected turbulence and get accelerated oddly, where the ground changes and moves out from under us -- like the composer who is trying to hit a note higher than the human voice can sing, he invents a piccolo or a flute, I set about the invention of my prototypic machines. 
And if we wanted to go higher, faster, sooner, harder, it was necessary that we create our very own spaceships. 
And we did. 
And we did travel to unknown, invisible, dangerous territories, and it changed us. 
If any of you want to try this, let me know. 
(Laughter) In 2012, we brought all of our best machines to London and put them in their most iconic places. 
We got on the London Eye. 
It was 443 feet above the earth. 
And as we reached the zenith, we unlocked our brake and fell -- 200 feet on the radius, on the spoke that we were attached to. 
We reached as far up as heaven that day, I'm pretty sure of it. 
And then I and two of my dancers walked down the outside of London's City Hall. 
As I stood up there, 300 feet above the ground, and looked down, I saw 2,000 eyes staring up at me, and they saw what they usually do -- the sky, a bird, a plane -- and then us. 
And we were just a tiny speck up there. 
And I realized that action is for everybody. 
Now we have our very own mason jar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 
It's called SLAM: STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. 
It was a former mustard seed factory. 
And I designed it after the use of a petri dish, and in that petri dish, I put Kid Action, STREB EXTREME ACTION and circus arts, and we all learned to fly, fall and land and invent extreme action together. 
And you know what we found? 
In comes everyone -- every size, shape, age, capacity, every nationality, every race, every class, all genders, the timid and the bold, the outcast and the cool, the risk avoiders and the risk obsessives. 
And these buildings exist all over the world, and every one of them can be a flying training center. 
And you know, as it turns out, people don't want to just dream about flying, nor do they want to watch us fly. 
They want to do it, too, and they can. 
And with a little training, they learn to relish the hit and the impact, and, I guess even more, getting up afterwards. 
I've found that the effect of flying causes smiles to get more common, self-esteem to blossom, and people get just a little bit braver. 
And people do learn to fly, as only humans can. 
So can you. 
Come fly with us. 
(Applause) (Music) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Good afternoon. 
My name is Uldus. 
I am a photo-based artist from Russia. 
I started my way around six years ago with ironic self-portraits to lay open so many stereotypes about nationalities, genders, and social issues — ["I am Russian. I sell drugs, guns, porno with kids!"] ["Vodka = water. I love vodka!"] (Laughter) — using photography as my tool to send a message. ["Marry me, I need a visa."] Today, I am still performing in front of the camera and trying to be brave like Wonder Woman. 
I focus on balancing meaningful message, aesthetic, beauty, composition, some irony, and artifacts. 
Today, I'm going to tell you about my project, which is named Desperate Romantics. 
They're my artifacts, or paintings from pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood England mid-19th century. 
I took the painting and gifted new, contemporary meaning talking about issues which are surrounding me in Russia, capturing people who are non-models but have an interesting story. 
This boy is a professional dancer, only 12 years old, but at secondary school, he hides his dancing classes and is wearing the mask of brutality, trying to be united with the rest of his classmates like a storm trooper has no personality. 
But this boy has goals and dreams but hides it to be socially accepted, because being different isn't easy, especially in Russia. 
Next portrait interpretation is metaphoric. 
And this is Nikita, a security guard from one of the bars in St. Petersburg. 
He likes to say, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry," quoting Hulk from the movie, but I've never seen him angry. 
He hides his sensitivities and romantic side, because in Russia, among guys, that's not cool to be romantic, but it's cool to be surrounded with women and look like an aggressive hulk. 
(Laughter) Sometimes, in my project, I would take the painting and give it new meaning and new temptation about it. 
Sometimes, I would compare facial features and playing with words: irony, Iron Man, ironing man. 
(Laughter) Through the artifacts, I bring social issues which surround me in Russia into the conversation. 
Interesting fact about marriage in Russia, that most of the 18, 19-year-old girls are already ready, and dream to get married. 
We're taught from childhood, successful marriage means successful life, so most of the girls kind of fight to get a good husband. 
And what about me? 
I'm 27 years old. 
For Russian society, I'm an old maid and hopeless to ever get married. 
That's why you see me in a Mexican fighter mask, in the wedding dress, all desperate in my garden. 
But remember, irony is the key, and this is actually to motivate girls to fight for goals, for dreams, and change stereotypes. 
Be brave. Be ironic — it helps. 
Be funny and create some magic. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I've spent nearly two decades observing what makes people luckier than others and trying to help people increase their luck. 
You see, I teach entrepreneurship, and we all know that most new ventures fail, and innovators and entrepreneurs need all the luck they can get. 
So what is luck? 
Luck is defined as success or failure apparently caused by chance. 
Apparently. 
That's the operative word. 
It looks like it's chance because we rarely see all the levers that come into play to make people lucky. 
But I've realized, by watching so long, that luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. 
It's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. 
Sometimes it's calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts, and sometimes it comes from directions that you didn't even imagine. 
So how do you catch the winds of luck? 
It's easy, but it's not obvious. 
So I'm going to share three things with you that you can do to build a sail to capture the winds of luck. 
The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with yourself. 
Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your comfort zone. 
Now, when we're children, we do this all the time. 
We have to do this if we're going to learn how to walk or talk or ride a bike or even quantum mechanics. Right? 
We need to go from someone one week who doesn't ride a bike to, next week, someone who does. 
And this requires us to get out of our comfort zone and take some risks. 
The problem is, as we get older, we rarely do this. 
We sort of lock down the sense of who we are and don't stretch anymore. 
Now, with my students, I spend a lot of time giving them encouragement to get out of their comfort zone and take some risks. 
How do I do this? 
Well, I start out by having them fill out a risk-o-meter. 
Now, it's basically a fun thing we developed in our class where they map out what risks they're willing to take. 
And it becomes clear very quickly to them that risk-taking is not binary. 
There are intellectual risks and physical risks and financial risks and emotional risks and social risks and ethical risks and political risks. 
And once they do this, they compare their risk profiles with others, and they quickly realize that they're all really different. 
I then encourage them to stretch, to take some risks that get them out of their comfort zone. 
For example, I might ask them to do an intellectual risk and try to tackle a problem they haven't tried before; or a social risk, talking to someone sitting next to them on the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone they really care about how they feel. 
I do this myself all the time. 
About a dozen years ago, I was on an airplane, early, early morning flight on my way to Ecuador. 
And normally, I would just put on my headphones and go to sleep, wake up, do some work, but I decided to take a little risk, and I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. 
I introduced myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. 
Interesting. 
We ended up having a fascinating conversation. 
I learned all about the future of the publishing industry. 
So about three quarters of the way through the flight, I decided to take another risk, and I opened up my laptop and I shared with him a book proposal I put together for something I was doing in my class. 
And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, "You know what, Tina, this isn't right for us, but thank you so much for sharing." 
It's OK. That risk didn't work out. 
I shut my laptop. 
At the end of the flight, we exchanged contact information. 
A couple of months later, I reached out to him, and I said, "Mark, would you like to come to my class? 
I'm doing a project on reinventing the book, the future of publishing." 
And he said, "Great. I'd love to come." 
So he came to my class. We had a great experience. 
A few months later, I wrote to him again. 
This time, I sent him a bunch of video clips from another project my students had done. 
He was so intrigued by one of the projects the students had done, he thought there might be a book in it, and he wanted to meet those students. 
I have to tell you, I was a little bit hurt. 
(Laughter) I mean, he wanted to do a book with my students and not with me, but OK, it's all right. 
So I invited him to come down, and he and his colleagues came to Stanford and met with the students, and afterwards, we had lunch together. 
And one of his editors said to me, "Hey, have you ever considered writing a book?" 
I said, "Funny you should ask." 
And I pulled out the exact same proposal that I had showed his boss a year earlier. 
Within two weeks, I had a contract, and within two years, the book had sold over a million copies around the world. 
(Applause) Now, you might say, "Oh, you're so lucky." 
But of course I was lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took, starting with saying hello. 
And anyone can do this, no matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world -- even if you think you're the most unlucky person, you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. 
You start building a sail to capture luck. 
The second thing you want to do is to change your relationship with other people. 
You need to understand that everyone who helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to your goals. 
And if you don't show appreciation, not only are you not closing the loop, but you're missing an opportunity. 
When someone does something for you, they're taking that time that they could be spending on themselves or someone else, and you need to acknowledge what they're doing. 
Now, I run three fellowship programs at Stanford, and they are very competitive to get into, and when I send out the letters to those students who don't get in, I always know there are going to be people who are disappointed. 
Some of the people who are disappointed send me notes, complaining. 
Some of them send notes saying what could I do to make myself more successful next time around? 
And every once in a while, someone sends me a note thanking me for the opportunity. 
This happened about seven years ago. 
A young man named Brian sent me a beautiful note saying, "I know I've been rejected from this program twice, but I want to thank you for the opportunity. 
I learned so much through the process of applying." 
I was so taken by the graciousness of his message that I invited him to come and meet me. 
And we spent some time chatting and cooked up an idea for an independent study project together. 
He was on the football team at Stanford, and he decided to do a project on looking at leadership in that context. 
We got to know each other incredibly well through that quarter, and he took the project that he started working on in the independent study and turned it, ultimately, into a company called Play for Tomorrow, where he teaches kids from disadvantaged backgrounds how to, essentially, craft the lives they dream to live. 
Now, the important thing about this story is that we both ended up catching the winds of luck as a result of his thank-you note. 
But it was the winds that we didn't expect in the first place. 
Over the course of the last couple of years, I've come up with some tactics for my own life to help me really foster appreciation. 
My favorite is that at the end of every single day, I look at my calendar and I review all the people I met with, and I send thank-you notes to every single person. 
It only takes a few minutes, but at the end of every day, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative, and I promise you it has increased my luck. 
So first, you need to take some risks and get out of your comfort zone. 
Second, you need to show appreciation. 
And third, you want to change your relationship with ideas. 
Most people look at new ideas that come there way and they judge them. 
"That's a great idea" or "That's a terrible idea." 
But it's actually much more nuanced. 
Ideas are neither good or bad. 
And in fact, the seeds of terrible ideas are often something truly remarkable. 
One of my favorite exercises in my classes on creativity is to help students foster an attitude of looking at terrible ideas through the lens of possibilities. 
So I give them a challenge: to create an idea for a brand new restaurant. 
They have to come up with the best ideas for a new restaurant and the worst ideas for a new restaurant. 
So the best ideas are things like a restaurant on a mountaintop with a beautiful sunset, or a restaurant on a boat with a gorgeous view. 
And the terrible ideas are things like a restaurant in a garbage dump, or a restaurant with terrible service that's really dirty, or a restaurant that serves cockroach sushi. 
(Laughter) So they hand all the ideas to me, I read the great ideas out loud, and then I rip them up and throw them away. 
I then take the horrible ideas and redistribute them. 
Each team now has an idea that another team thought was horrible, and their challenge is to turn it into something brilliant. 
Here's what happens. 
Within about 10 seconds, someone says, "This is a fabulous idea." 
And they have about three minutes before they pitch the idea to the class. 
So the restaurant in the garbage dump? What does that turn into? 
Well, they collect all the extra food from Michelin star restaurants that was going to get thrown out, and they have another restaurant at a much lower price, with all the leftovers. 
Pretty cool? 
Or the restaurant that's dirty with terrible service? 
Well, that turns into a restaurant that's a training ground for future restauranteurs to figure out how to avoid all the pitfalls. 
And the restaurant with cockroach sushi? 
It turns into a sushi bar with all sorts of really interesting and exotic ingredients. 
If you look around at the companies, the ventures that are really innovative around you, the ones that we now take for granted that have changed our life, well, you know what? 
They all started out as crazy ideas. 
They started ideas that when they pitched to other people, most people said, "That's crazy, it will never work." 
So, yes, sometimes people were born into terrible circumstances, and sometimes, luck is a lightning bolt that hits us with something wonderful or something terrible. 
But the winds of luck are always there, and if you're willing to take some risks, if you're willing to really go out and show appreciation and willing to really look at ideas, even if they're crazy, through the lens of possibilities, you can build a bigger and bigger sail to catch the winds of luck. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

We do not choose where to be born. 
We do not choose who our parents are. 
But we do choose how we are going to live our lives. 
I did not choose to be born in South Sudan, a country rife with conflict. 
I did not choose my name -- Nyiriak, which means "war." 
I've always rejected it and all the legacy it was born into. 
I choose to be called Mary. 
As a teacher, I've stood in front of 120 students, so this stage does not intimidate me. 
My students come from war-torn countries. 
They're so different from each other, but they have one thing in common: they fled their homes in order to stay alive. 
Some of them belong to parents back home in South Sudan who are killing each other because they belong to a different tribe or they have a different belief. 
Others come from other African countries devastated by war. 
But when they enter my class, they make friends, they walk home together, they do their homework together. 
There is no hatred allowed in my class. 
My story is like that of so many other refugees. 
The war came when I was still a baby. 
And my father, who had been absent in most of my early childhood, was doing what other men were doing: fighting for the country. 
He had two wives and many children. 
My mother was his second wife, married to him at the age of 16. 
This is simply because my mother came from a poor background, and she had no choice. 
My father, on the other hand, was rich. 
He had many cows. 
Gunshots were the order of the day. 
My community was constantly under attack. 
Communities would fight each other as they took water along the Nile. 
But that was not all. 
Planes would drop the spinning and terrifying bombs that chopped off people's limbs. 
But the most terrifying thing for every single parent was to see their children being abducted and turned into young soldiers. 
My mother dug a trench that soon became our home. 
But yet, we did not feel protected. 
She had to flee in search of a safe place for us. 
I was four years old, and my younger sister was two. 
We joined a huge mass of people, and together we walked for many agonizing days in search of a secure place. 
But we could barely rest before we were attacked again. 
I remember my mother was pregnant, when she would take turns to carry me and my younger sister. 
We finally made it across the Kenyan border, yes. 
But that was the longest journey that I have ever had in my whole life. 
My feet were raw with blisters. 
To our surprise, we found other family members who had fled into the camp earlier on, where you all are today, the Kakuma camp. 
Now, I want you all to be very quiet just for a moment. 
Do you hear that? 
The sound of silence. 
No gunshots. 
Peace, at last. 
That was my first memory of this camp. 
When you move from a war zone and come to a secure place like Kakuma, you've really gone far. 
I only stayed in the camp for three years, though. 
My father, who had been absent in most of my early childhood, came back into my life. 
And he organized for me to move with my uncle to our family in Nakuru. 
There, I found my father's first wife, my half sisters and my half brothers. 
I got enrolled in school. 
I remember my first day in school -- I could sing and laugh again -- and my first set of school uniforms, you bet. 
It was amazing. 
But then I came to realize that my uncle did not find it fit for me to go to school, simply because I was a girl. 
My half brothers were his first priority. 
He would say, "Educating a girl is a waste of time." 
And for that reason, I missed many days of school, because the fees were not paid. 
My father stepped in and organized for me to go to boarding school. 
I remember the faith that he put in me over the couple of years to come. 
He would say, "Education is an animal that you have to overcome. 
With an education, you can survive. 
Education shall be your first husband." 
And with these words came in his first big investment. 
I felt lucky! 
But I was missing something: my mother. 
My mother had been left behind in the camp, and I had not seen her since I left it. 
Six years without seeing her was really long. 
I was alone, in school, when I heard of her death. 
I've seen many people back in South Sudan lose their lives. 
I've heard from neighbors lose their sons, their husbands, their children. 
But I never thought that that would ever come into my life. 
A month earlier, my stepmother, who had been so good to me back in Nakuru, died first. 
Then I came to realize that after giving birth to four girls, my mother had finally given birth to something that could have made her be accepted into the community -- a baby boy, my baby brother. 
But he, too, joined the list of the dead. 
The most hurting part for me was the fact that I wasn't able to attend my mother's burial. 
I wasn't allowed. 
They said her family did not find it fit for her children, who are all girls, to attend her burial, simply because we were girls. 
They would lament to me and say, "We are sorry, Mary, for your loss. 
We are sorry that your parents never left behind any children." 
And I would wonder: What are we? 
Are we not children? 
In the mentality of my community, only the boy child counted. 
And for that reason, I knew this was the end of me. 
But I was the eldest girl. 
I had to take care of my siblings. 
I had to ensure they went to school. 
I was 13 years old. 
How could I have made that happen? 
I came back to the camp to take care of my siblings. 
I've never felt so stuck. 
But then, one of my aunts, Auntie Okoi, decided to take my sisters. 
My father sent me money from Juba for me to go back to school. 
Boarding school was heaven, but it was also so hard. 
I remember during the visiting days when parents would come to school, and my father would miss. 
But when he did come, he repeated the same faith in me. 
This time he would say, "Mary, you cannot go astray, because you are the future of your siblings." 
But then, in 2012, life took away the only thing that I was clinging on. 
My father died. 
My grades in school started to collapse, and when I sat for my final high school exams in 2015, I was devastated to receive a C grade. 
OK, I keep telling students in my class, "It's not about the A's; it's about doing your best." 
That was not my best. 
I was determined. 
I wanted to go back and try again. 
But my parents were gone. 
I had no one to take care of me, and I had no one to pay that fee. 
I felt so hopeless. 
But then, one of my best friends, a beautiful Kenyan lady, Esther Kaecha, called me during this devastating moment, and she was like, "Mary, you have a strong will. 
And I have a plan, and it's going to work." 
OK, when you're in those devastating moments, you accept anything, right? 
So the plan was, she organized some travel money for us to travel to Anester Victory Girls High School. 
I remember that day so well. 
It was raining when we entered the principal's office. 
We were shaking like two chickens that had been rained on, and we looked at him. 
He was asking, "What do you want?" 
And we looked at him with the cat face. 
"We just want to go back to school." 
Well, believe it or not, he not only paid our school fees but also our uniform and pocket money for food. 
Clap for him. 
(Applause) When I finished my high school career, I became the head girl. 
And when I sat for the KCSE for a second time, I was able to receive a B minus. Clap. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So I really want to say thank you to Anester Victory, Mr. Gatimu and the whole Anester fraternity for giving me that chance. 
From time to time, members of my family will insist that my sister and I should get married so that somebody will take care of us. 
They will say, "We have a man for you." 
I really hate the fact that people took us as property rather than children. 
Sometimes they will jokingly say, "You are going to lose your market value the more educated you become." 
But the truth is, an educated woman is feared in my community. 
But I told them, this is not what I want. 
I don't want to get kids at 16 like my mother did. 
This is not my life. 
Even though my sisters and I are suffering, there's no way we are heading in that direction. 
I refuse to repeat history. 
Educating a girl will create equal and stable societies. 
And educated refugees will be the hope of rebuilding their countries someday. 
Girls and women have a part to play in this just as much as men. 
Well, we have men in my family that encourage me to move on: my half brothers and also my half sisters. 
When I finished my high school career, I moved my sisters to Nairobi, where they live with my stepsister. 
They live 17 people in a house. 
But don't pity us. 
The most important thing is that they all get a decent education. 
The winners of today are the losers of yesterday, but who never gave up. 
And that is who we are, my sisters and I. 
And I'm so proud of that. 
My biggest investment in life -- (Applause) is the education of my sisters. 
Education creates an equal and fair chance for everyone to make it. 
I personally believe education is not all about the syllabus. 
It's about friendship. 
It's about discovering our talents. 
It's about discovering our destiny. 
I will, for example, not forget the joy that I had when I first had singing lessons in school, which is still a passion of mine. 
But I wouldn't have gotten that anywhere else. 
As a teacher, I see my classroom as a laboratory that not only generates skills and knowledge but also understanding and hope. 
Let's take a tree. 
A tree may have its branches cut, but give it water, and it will grow new branches. 
For the child of war, an education can turn their tears of loss into a passion for peace. 
And for that reason, I refuse to give up on a single student in my class. 
(Applause) Education heals. 
The school environment gives you a focus to focus ahead. 
Let's take it this way: when you're busy solving mathematical equations, and you are memorizing poetry, you forget the violence that you witnessed back home. 
And that is the power of education. 
It creates this place for peace. 
Kakuma is teeming with learners. 
Over 85,000 students are enrolled in schools here, which makes up 40 percent of the refugee population. 
It includes children who lost years of education because of the war back home. 
And I want to ask you a question: If education is about building a generation of hope, why are there 120 students packed in my classroom? 
Why is it that only six percent of the primary school students are making it to high school, simply because we do not have enough places for them? 
And why is it that only one percent of the secondary school graduates are making it to university? 
I began by saying that I am a teacher. 
But once again, I have become a student. 
In March, I moved to Rwanda on a scholarship program called "Bridge2Rwanda." 
It prepares scholars for universities. 
They are able to get a chance to compete for universities abroad. 
I am now having teachers telling me what to do, instead of the other way round. 
People are once again investing in me. 
So I want to ask you all to invest in young refugees. 
Think of the tree that we mentioned earlier. 
We are the generation to plant it, so that the next generation can water it, and the one that follows will enjoy the shade. 
They will reap the benefits. 
And the greatest benefit of them all is an education that will last. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

Picture this: It's Monday morning, you're at the office, you're settling in for the day at work, and this guy that you sort of recognize from down the hall, walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair. 
Doesn't say a word — just rolls away with it. 
Doesn't give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs that are out there. 
Doesn't acknowledge the fact that you might need your chair to get some work done today. 
You wouldn't stand for it. You'd make a stink. 
You'd follow that guy back to his cubicle and you'd say, "Why my chair?" 
Okay, so now it's Tuesday morning and you're at the office, and a meeting invitation pops up in your calendar. 
(Laughter) And it's from this woman who you kind of know from down the hall, and the subject line references some project that you heard a little bit about. 
But there's no agenda. 
There's no information about why you were invited to the meeting. 
And yet you accept the meeting invitation, and you go. 
And when this highly unproductive session is over, you go back to your desk, and you stand at your desk and you say, "Boy, I wish I had those two hours back, like I wish I had my chair back." 
(Laughter) Every day, we allow our coworkers, who are otherwise very, very nice people, to steal from us. 
And I'm talking about something far more valuable than office furniture. 
I'm talking about time. Your time. 
In fact, I believe that we are in the middle of a global epidemic of a terrible new illness known as MAS: Mindless Accept Syndrome. 
(Laughter) The primary symptom of Mindless Accept Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in your calendar. 
(Laughter) It's an involuntary reflex — ding, click, bing — it's in your calendar, "Gotta go, I'm already late for a meeting." (Laughter) Meetings are important, right? 
And collaboration is key to the success of any enterprise. 
And a well-run meeting can yield really positive, actionable results. 
But between globalization and pervasive information technology, the way that we work has really changed dramatically over the last few years. 
And we're miserable. (Laughter) And we're miserable not because the other guy can't run a good meeting, it's because of MAS, our Mindless Accept Syndrome, which is a self-inflicted wound. 
Actually, I have evidence to prove that MAS is a global epidemic. 
Let me tell you why. 
A couple of years ago, I put a video on Youtube, and in the video, I acted out every terrible conference call you've ever been on. 
It goes on for about five minutes, and it has all the things that we hate about really bad meetings. 
There's the moderator who has no idea how to run the meeting. 
There are the participants who have no idea why they're there. 
The whole thing kind of collapses into this collaborative train wreck. 
And everybody leaves very angry. 
It's kind of funny. 
(Laughter) Let's take a quick look. 
(Video) Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal. 
As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — Hi, who just joined? 
Hi, it's Joe. I'm working from home today. 
(Laughter) Hi, Joe. Thanks for joining us today, great. 
I was just saying, we have a lot of people on the call we'd like to get through, so let's skip the roll call and I'm gonna dive right in. 
Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal. 
As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — (Laughter) Hi, who just joined? 
No? I thought I heard a beep. (Laughter) Sound familiar? 
Yeah, it sounds familiar to me, too. 
A couple of weeks after I put that online, 500,000 people in dozens of countries, I mean dozens of countries, watched this video. 
And three years later, it's still getting thousands of views every month. 
It's close to about a million right now. 
And in fact, some of the biggest companies in the world, companies that you've heard of but I won't name, have asked for my permission to use this video in their new-hire training to teach their new employees how not to run a meeting at their company. 
And if the numbers — there are a million views and it's being used by all these companies — aren't enough proof that we have a global problem with meetings, there are the many, many thousands of comments posted online after the video went up. 
Thousands of people wrote things like, "OMG, that was my day today!" 
"That was my day every day!" 
"This is my life." 
One guy wrote, "It's funny because it's true. 
Eerily, sadly, depressingly true. 
It made me laugh until I cried. 
And cried. And I cried some more." 
(Laughter) This poor guy said, "My daily life until retirement or death, sigh." 
These are real quotes and it's real sad. 
A common theme running through all of these comments online is this fundamental belief that we are powerless to do anything other than go to meetings and suffer through these poorly run meetings and live to meet another day. 
But the truth is, we're not powerless at all. 
In fact, the cure for MAS is right here in our hands. 
It's right at our fingertips, literally. 
It's something that I call ¡No MAS! 
(Laughter) Which, if I remember my high school Spanish, means something like, "Enough already, make it stop!" 
Here's how No MAS works. It's very simple. 
First of all, the next time you get a meeting invitation that doesn't have a lot of information in it at all, click the tentative button! 
It's okay, you're allowed, that's why it's there. 
It's right next to the accept button. 
Or the maybe button, or whatever button is there for you not to accept immediately. 
Then, get in touch with the person who asked you to the meeting. 
Tell them you're very excited to support their work, ask them what the goal of the meeting is, and tell them you're interested in learning how you can help them achieve their goal. 
And if we do this often enough, and we do it respectfully, people might start to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations. 
And you can make more thoughtful decisions about accepting it. 
People might actually start sending out agendas. Imagine! 
Or they might not have a conference call with 12 people to talk about a status when they could just do a quick email and get it done with. 
People just might start to change their behavior because you changed yours. 
And they just might bring your chair back, too. (Laughter) No MAS! 
Thank you. 
(Applause). 

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

(Music) (Applause) 

The power of yet. 
I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn't pass a course, they got the grade "Not Yet." 
And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I'm nothing, I'm nowhere. 
But if you get the grade "Not Yet", you understand that you're on a learning curve. 
It gives you a path into the future. 
"Not Yet" also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. 
I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. 
Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. 
They said things like, "I love a challenge," or, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative." 
They understood that their abilities could be developed. 
They had what I call a growth mindset. 
But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. 
From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. 
Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now. 
So what do they do next? 
I'll tell you what they do next. 
In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. 
In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. 
And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. 
Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. 
On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. 
There's hardly any activity. 
They run from the error. 
They don't engage with it. 
But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. 
They engage deeply. 
Their brain is on fire with yet. 
They engage deeply. 
They process the error. 
They learn from it and they correct it. 
How are we raising our children? 
Are we raising them for now instead of yet? 
Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? 
Are we raising kids who don't know how to dream big dreams? 
Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? 
And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? 
Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, "We have already raised a generation of young workers who can't get through the day without an award." 
So what can we do? 
How can we build that bridge to yet? 
Here are some things we can do. 
First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. 
That has failed. 
Don't do that anymore. 
But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. 
This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient. 
There are other ways to reward yet. 
We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. 
In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. 
The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. 
And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems. 
Just the words "yet" or "not yet," we're finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. 
And we can actually change students' mindsets. 
In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter. 
Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. 
We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students. 
So let's talk about equality. 
In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. 
And they've done so poorly for so long that many people think it's inevitable. 
But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. 
And here are just a few examples. 
In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. 
Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. 
In one year, fourth-grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth-grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. 
In a year, to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. 
So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids. 
This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. 
Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that's when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. 
That's when they're getting smarter. 
I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. 
He said, "Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that's why I decided to put it into practice. 
I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. 
I now realize I've wasted most of my life." 
Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with "yet". 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I am a visual artist, and I make revolutionary art to propel history forward. 
I'm going to come right out and tell you something: I don't accept the economic foundation, the social relations or the governing ideas of America. 
My art contributes to fundamental change by encouraging an audience to address big questions from that perspective. 
Social change is hard, but ideas matter tremendously. 
When I say I'm an artist, most people think, "Oh, he's a painter." 
Behind me, you can see some of the kind of work I do. 
"Imagine a World Without America" is a painting, but I work in a range of media, including photography, video and performance art. 
A current project, "Slave Rebellion Reenactment," is going to be reenacted on the outskirts of New Orleans this November. 
In 1989, I had an artwork that became the center of controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag. 
"What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?" 
is a conceptual work that encouraged audience participation. 
It consisted of a photo montage that had text that read, "What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?" 
Below that were books that people could write responses to that question in, and below that was a flag that people had the option of standing on. 
The photo montage consisted of images of South Korean students burning American flags, holding signs that said, "Yankee go home. Son of a bitch," and below that were flag-draped coffins coming back from Vietnam. 
People wrote long and short answers. 
Thousands of people engaged with the work in a lot of different languages. 
Some of the people said, "I'm a German girl. 
If we Germans would admire our flag as you all do, we would be called Nazis again. 
I think you do have too much trouble about this flag." 
"I think that the artist should be returned to his heritage, i.e., the jungles of Africa, and then he can shovel manure in his artistic way." 
"This flag I'm standing on stands for everything oppressive in this system: the murder of the Indians and all the oppressed around the world, including my brother who was shot by a pig, who kicked over his body to 'make sure the nigger was dead.' That pig was wearing the flag. 
Thank you, Dread Scott, for this opportunity." 
"As a veteran defending the flag, I personally would never defend your stupid ass! 
You should be shot!" -- US Navy Seal Team. 
As you can see, people had very strong reactions about the flag then, as they do now. 
There were demonstrations of veterans in front of the Art Institute of Chicago. 
They chanted things like, "The flag and the artist, hang them both high," evoking images of lynching. 
I received numerous death threats, and bomb threats were phoned in to my school. 
It was a very dangerous situation. 
Later, President Bush called the work "disgraceful," which I viewed as a tremendous honor, and Congress outlawed the work. 
(Laughter) I became part of a Supreme Court case when I and others defied that law, by burning flags on the steps of the Capitol. 
That action and the subsequent legal and political battle led to a landmark First Amendment decision that prevented the government from demanding patriotism be mandatory. 
But let me back up a bit. 
These people literally wanted me dead. 
What I would do at this moment would make a difference. 
This is me at the exact same moment, eight stories above that crowd. 
It was supposed to be for a photo shoot that was going to take place on the steps where the veterans were at that time. 
It wouldn't have been safe for me to be there, to say the least. 
But it was really important to do that shoot, because while some wanted to kill me, it was also a situation where those who viewed the American flag as standing for everything oppressive in this system felt that they had a voice, and that voice needed to be amplified. 
The point is this: changing anything -- whether it's conventional ideas about US national symbols, traditional thinking challenged by scientific breakthroughs or ousting an authoritarian president -- requires a lot of things. 
It requires courage, luck and also vision and boldness of action. 
But on luck -- I have to say, the photo shoot we did might not have worked out so well. 
We laughed after we were out of the area. 
But the thing is, it was worth the risk because of the stakes that were involved. 
And in this case, the luck led to a wonderful, profound and powerful situation that was also humorous. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So over the past few centuries, microscopes have revolutionized our world. 
They revealed to us a tiny world of objects, life and structures that are too small for us to see with our naked eyes. 
They are a tremendous contribution to science and technology. 
Today I'd like to introduce you to a new type of microscope, a microscope for changes. 
It doesn't use optics like a regular microscope to make small objects bigger, but instead it uses a video camera and image processing to reveal to us the tiniest motions and color changes in objects and people, changes that are impossible for us to see with our naked eyes. 
And it lets us look at our world in a completely new way. 
So what do I mean by color changes? 
Our skin, for example, changes its color very slightly when the blood flows under it. 
That change is incredibly subtle, which is why, when you look at other people, when you look at the person sitting next to you, you don't see their skin or their face changing color. 
When we look at this video of Steve here, it appears to us like a static picture, but once we look at this video through our new, special microscope, suddenly we see a completely different image. 
What you see here are small changes in the color of Steve's skin, magnified 100 times so that they become visible. 
We can actually see a human pulse. 
We can see how fast Steve's heart is beating, but we can also see the actual way that the blood flows in his face. 
And we can do that not just to visualize the pulse, but also to actually recover our heart rates, and measure our heart rates. 
And we can do it with regular cameras and without touching the patients. 
So here you see the pulse and heart rate we extracted from a neonatal baby from a video we took with a regular DSLR camera, and the heart rate measurement we get is as accurate as the one you'd get with a standard monitor in a hospital. 
And it doesn't even have to be a video we recorded. 
We can do it essentially with other videos as well. 
So I just took a short clip from "Batman Begins" here just to show Christian Bale's pulse. 
(Laughter) And you know, presumably he's wearing makeup, the lighting here is kind of challenging, but still, just from the video, we're able to extract his pulse and show it quite well. 
So how do we do all that? 
We basically analyze the changes in the light that are recorded at every pixel in the video over time, and then we crank up those changes. 
We make them bigger so that we can see them. 
The tricky part is that those signals, those changes that we're after, are extremely subtle, so we have to be very careful when you try to separate them from noise that always exists in videos. 
So we use some clever image processing techniques to get a very accurate measurement of the color at each pixel in the video, and then the way the color changes over time, and then we amplify those changes. 
We make them bigger to create those types of enhanced videos, or magnified videos, that actually show us those changes. 
But it turns out we can do that not just to show tiny changes in color, but also tiny motions, and that's because the light that gets recorded in our cameras will change not only if the color of the object changes, but also if the object moves. 
So this is my daughter when she was about two months old. 
It's a video I recorded about three years ago. 
And as new parents, we all want to make sure our babies are healthy, that they're breathing, that they're alive, of course. 
So I too got one of those baby monitors so that I could see my daughter when she was asleep. 
And this is pretty much what you'll see with a standard baby monitor. 
You can see the baby's sleeping, but there's not too much information there. 
There's not too much we can see. 
Wouldn't it be better, or more informative, or more useful, if instead we could look at the view like this. 
So here I took the motions and I magnified them 30 times, and then I could clearly see that my daughter was indeed alive and breathing. 
(Laughter) Here is a side-by-side comparison. 
So again, in the source video, in the original video, there's not too much we can see, but once we magnify the motions, the breathing becomes much more visible. 
And it turns out, there's a lot of phenomena we can reveal and magnify with our new motion microscope. 
We can see how our veins and arteries are pulsing in our bodies. 
We can see that our eyes are constantly moving in this wobbly motion. 
And that's actually my eye, and again this video was taken right after my daughter was born, so you can see I wasn't getting too much sleep. (Laughter) Even when a person is sitting still, there's a lot of information we can extract about their breathing patterns, small facial expressions. 
Maybe we could use those motions to tell us something about our thoughts or our emotions. 
We can also magnify small mechanical movements, like vibrations in engines, that can help engineers detect and diagnose machinery problems, or see how our buildings and structures sway in the wind and react to forces. 
Those are all things that our society knows how to measure in various ways, but measuring those motions is one thing, and actually seeing those motions as they happen is a whole different thing. 
And ever since we discovered this new technology, we made our code available online so that others could use and experiment with it. 
It's very simple to use. 
It can work on your own videos. 
Our collaborators at Quanta Research even created this nice website where you can upload your videos and process them online, so even if you don't have any experience in computer science or programming, you can still very easily experiment with this new microscope. 
And I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of what others have done with it. 
So this video was made by a YouTube user called Tamez85. 
I don't know who that user is, but he, or she, used our code to magnify small belly movements during pregnancy. 
It's kind of creepy. 
(Laughter) People have used it to magnify pulsing veins in their hands. 
And you know it's not real science unless you use guinea pigs, and apparently this guinea pig is called Tiffany, and this YouTube user claims it is the first rodent on Earth that was motion-magnified. 
You can also do some art with it. 
So this video was sent to me by a design student at Yale. 
She wanted to see if there's any difference in the way her classmates move. 
She made them all stand still, and then magnified their motions. 
It's like seeing still pictures come to life. 
And the nice thing with all those examples is that we had nothing to do with them. 
We just provided this new tool, a new way to look at the world, and then people find other interesting, new and creative ways of using it. 
But we didn't stop there. 
This tool not only allows us to look at the world in a new way, it also redefines what we can do and pushes the limits of what we can do with our cameras. 
So as scientists, we started wondering, what other types of physical phenomena produce tiny motions that we could now use our cameras to measure? 
And one such phenomenon that we focused on recently is sound. 
Sound, as we all know, is basically changes in air pressure that travel through the air. 
Those pressure waves hit objects and they create small vibrations in them, which is how we hear and how we record sound. 
But it turns out that sound also produces visual motions. 
Those are motions that are not visible to us but are visible to a camera with the right processing. 
So here are two examples. 
This is me demonstrating my great singing skills. 
(Singing) (Laughter) And I took a high-speed video of my throat while I was humming. 
Again, if you stare at that video, there's not too much you'll be able to see, but once we magnify the motions 100 times, we can see all the motions and ripples in the neck that are involved in producing the sound. 
That signal is there in that video. 
We also know that singers can break a wine glass if they hit the correct note. 
So here, we're going to play a note that's in the resonance frequency of that glass through a loudspeaker that's next to it. 
Once we play that note and magnify the motions 250 times, we can very clearly see how the glass vibrates and resonates in response to the sound. 
It's not something you're used to seeing every day. 
But this made us think. It gave us this crazy idea. 
Can we actually invert this process and recover sound from video by analyzing the tiny vibrations that sound waves create in objects, and essentially convert those back into the sounds that produced them. 
In this way, we can turn everyday objects into microphones. 
So that's exactly what we did. 
So here's an empty bag of chips that was lying on a table, and we're going to turn that bag of chips into a microphone by filming it with a video camera and analyzing the tiny motions that sound waves create in it. 
So here's the sound that we played in the room. 
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And this is a high-speed video we recorded of that bag of chips. 
Again it's playing. 
There's no chance you'll be able to see anything going on in that video just by looking at it, but here's the sound we were able to recover just by analyzing the tiny motions in that video. 
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") I call it -- Thank you. 
(Applause) I call it the visual microphone. 
We actually extract audio signals from video signals. 
And just to give you a sense of the scale of the motions here, a pretty loud sound will cause that bag of chips to move less than a micrometer. 
That's one thousandth of a millimeter. 
That's how tiny the motions are that we are now able to pull out just by observing how light bounces off objects and gets recorded by our cameras. 
We can recover sounds from other objects, like plants. 
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And we can recover speech as well. 
So here's a person speaking in a room. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
Michael Rubinstein: And here's that speech again recovered just from this video of that same bag of chips. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
MR: We used "Mary Had a Little Lamb" because those are said to be the first words that Thomas Edison spoke into his phonograph in 1877. 
It was one of the first sound recording devices in history. 
It basically directed the sounds onto a diaphragm that vibrated a needle that essentially engraved the sound on tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder. 
Here's a demonstration of recording and replaying sound with Edison's phonograph. 
(Video) Voice: Testing, testing, one two three. 
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
Testing, testing, one two three. 
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
MR: And now, 137 years later, we're able to get sound in pretty much similar quality but by just watching objects vibrate to sound with cameras, and we can even do that when the camera is 15 feet away from the object, behind soundproof glass. 
So this is the sound that we were able to recover in that case. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
MR: And of course, surveillance is the first application that comes to mind. 
(Laughter) But it might actually be useful for other things as well. 
Maybe in the future, we'll be able to use it, for example, to recover sound across space, because sound can't travel in space, but light can. 
We've only just begun exploring other possible uses for this new technology. 
It lets us see physical processes that we know are there but that we've never been able to see with our own eyes until now. 
This is our team. 
Everything I showed you today is a result of a collaboration with this great group of people you see here, and I encourage you and welcome you to check out our website, try it out yourself, and join us in exploring this world of tiny motions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Hercules, son of Zeus and champion of humankind, gazed in horror as he realized he had just committed the most unspeakable crime imaginable. 
The goddess Hera, who hated Hercules for being born of her husband’s adultery, had stricken him with a temporary curse of madness. 
And his own family were the casualties. 
Consumed by grief, Hercules sought out the Oracle of Delphi, who told him the path to atonement lay with his cousin, King Eurystheus of Tiryns, a favorite of Hera’s. 
Eurystheus hoped to humiliate Hercules with ten impossible tasks that pitted him against invincible monsters and unfathomable forces. 
Instead, the king set the stage for an epic series of adventures that would come to be known as the Labors of Hercules. 
The first labor was to slay the Nemean Lion, who kidnapped women and devoured warriors. 
Its golden fur was impervious to arrows, but Hercules cornered the lion in its dark cave, stunned it with a club, and strangled it with his bare hands. 
He found no tool sharp enough to skin the beast, until the goddess Athena suggested using one of its own claws. 
Hercules returned to Tiryns wearing the lion’s hide, frightening King Eurystheus so much that he hid in a wine jar. 
From then on, Hercules was ordered to present his trophies at a safe distance. 
The second target was the Lernaean Hydra, a giant serpent with many heads. 
Hercules fought fiercely, but every time he cut one head off, two more grew in its place. 
The battle was hopeless until his nephew Iolaus thought to cauterize the necks with fire, keeping the heads from regrowing. 
The dead serpent’s remains became the Hydra constellation. 
Instead of slaying a beast, Hercules next had to catch one, alive. 
The Ceryneian Hind was a female deer so fast it could outrun an arrow. 
Hercules tracked it for a year, finally trapping it in the northern land of Hyperborea. 
The animal turned out to be sacred to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and Hercules swore to return it. 
When Eurystheus saw the hind, he demanded to keep it instead, but as soon as Hercules let go, the animal ran to its mistress. 
Thus, Hercules completed his task without breaking his promise. 
The fourth mission was to capture the Erymanthian boar, which had ravaged many fields. 
Advised by the wise centaur Chiron, Hercules trapped it by chasing it into thick snow. 
For the fifth task, there were no animals, just their leftovers. 
The stables where King Augeas kept his hundreds of divine cattle had not been maintained in ages. 
Hercules promised to clean them in one day if he could keep one-tenth of the livestock. 
Augeas expected the hero to fail. 
Instead, Hercules dug massive trenches, rerouting two nearby rivers to flow through the stables until they were spotless. 
Next came three more beastly foes, each requiring a clever strategy to defeat. 
The carnivorous Stymphalian birds nested in an impenetrable swamp, but Hercules used Athena’s special rattle to frighten them into the air, at which point he shot them down. 
No mortal could stand before the Cretan bull’s mad rampage, but a chokehold from behind did the trick. 
And the mad King Diomedes, who had trained his horses to devour his guests, got a taste of his own medicine when Hercules wrestled him into his own stables. 
The ensuing feast calmed the beasts enough for Hercules to bind their mouths. 
But the ninth labor involved someone more dangerous than any beast, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. 
Hercules was to retrieve the belt given to her by her father Ares, the god of war. 
He sailed to the Amazon land of Themyscira prepared for battle, but the queen was so impressed with the hero and his exploits that she gave the belt willingly. 
For his tenth labor, Hercules had to steal a herd of magical red cattle from Geryon, a giant with three heads and three bodies. 
On his way, Hercules was so annoyed by the Libyan desert heat that he shot an arrow at the Sun. 
The sun god Helios admired the hero’s strength and lent his chariot for the journey to the island of Erytheia. 
There, Hercules fought off Geryon’s herdsman and his two-headed dog, before killing the giant himself. 
That should have been the end. 
But Eurystheus announced that two labors hadn’t counted: the Hydra, because Iolaus had helped Hercules kill it, and the stables, because he’d accepted payment. 
And so, the hero set about his eleventh task, obtaining golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides nymphs. 
Hercules began by catching the Old Man of the Sea and holding the shape-shifting water-god until he revealed the garden’s location. 
Once there, the hero found the titan Atlas holding up the heavens. 
Hercules offered to take his place if Atlas would retrieve the apples. 
Atlas eagerly complied, but Hercules then tricked him into trading places again, escaping with apples in hand. 
The twelfth and final task was to bring back Cerberus, the three-headed hound guarding the underworld. 
Helped by Hermes and Athena, Hercules descended and met Hades himself. 
The lord of the dead allowed Hercules to take the beast if he could do it without weapons, which he achieved by grabbing all three of its heads at once. 
When he presented the hound to a horrified Eurystheus, the king finally declared the hero’s service complete. 
After 12 years of toil, Hercules had redeemed the tragic deaths of his family and earned a place in the divine pantheon. 
But his victory held an even deeper importance. 
In overcoming the chaotic and monstrous forces of the world, the hero swept away what remained of the Titans’ primordial order, reshaping it into one where humanity could thrive. 
Through his labors, Hercules tamed the world’s madness by atoning for his own. 

So we humans have an extraordinary potential for goodness, but also an immense power to do harm. 
Any tool can be used to build or to destroy. 
That all depends on our motivation. 
Therefore, it is all the more important to foster an altruistic motivation rather than a selfish one. 
So now we indeed are facing many challenges in our times. 
Those could be personal challenges. 
Our own mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. 
There's also societal challenges: poverty in the midst of plenty, inequalities, conflict, injustice. 
And then there are the new challenges, which we don't expect. 
Ten thousand years ago, there were about five million human beings on Earth. 
Whatever they could do, the Earth's resilience would soon heal human activities. 
After the Industrial and Technological Revolutions, that's not the same anymore. 
We are now the major agent of impact on our Earth. 
We enter the Anthropocene, the era of human beings. 
So in a way, if we were to say we need to continue this endless growth, endless use of material resources, it's like if this man was saying -- and I heard a former head of state, I won't mention who, saying -- "Five years ago, we were at the edge of the precipice. 
Today we made a big step forward." 
So this edge is the same that has been defined by scientists as the planetary boundaries. 
And within those boundaries, they can carry a number of factors. 
We can still prosper, humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years if we keep the same stability of climate as in the Holocene for the last 10,000 years. 
But this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity, growing qualitatively, not quantitatively. 
So in 1900, as you can see, we were well within the limits of safety. 
Now, in 1950 came the great acceleration. 
Now hold your breath, not too long, to imagine what comes next. 
Now we have vastly overrun some of the planetary boundaries. 
Just to take biodiversity, at the current rate, by 2050, 30 percent of all species on Earth will have disappeared. 
Even if we keep their DNA in some fridge, that's not going to be reversible. 
So here I am sitting in front of a 7,000-meter-high, 21,000-foot glacier in Bhutan. 
At the Third Pole, 2,000 glaciers are melting fast, faster than the Arctic. 
So what can we do in that situation? 
Well, however complex politically, economically, scientifically the question of the environment is, it simply boils down to a question of altruism versus selfishness. 
I'm a Marxist of the Groucho tendency. 
(Laughter) Groucho Marx said, "Why should I care about future generations? 
What have they ever done for me?" 
(Laughter) Unfortunately, I heard the billionaire Steve Forbes, on Fox News, saying exactly the same thing, but seriously. 
He was told about the rise of the ocean, and he said, "I find it absurd to change my behavior today for something that will happen in a hundred years." 
So if you don't care for future generations, just go for it. 
So one of the main challenges of our times is to reconcile three time scales: the short term of the economy, the ups and downs of the stock market, the end-of-the-year accounts; the midterm of the quality of life -- what is the quality every moment of our life, over 10 years and 20 years? -- and the long term of the environment. 
When the environmentalists speak with economists, it's like a schizophrenic dialogue, completely incoherent. 
They don't speak the same language. 
Now, for the last 10 years, I went around the world meeting economists, scientists, neuroscientists, environmentalists, philosophers, thinkers in the Himalayas, all over the place. 
It seems to me, there's only one concept that can reconcile those three time scales. 
It is simply having more consideration for others. 
If you have more consideration for others, you will have a caring economics, where finance is at the service of society and not society at the service of finance. 
You will not play at the casino with the resources that people have entrusted you with. 
If you have more consideration for others, you will make sure that you remedy inequality, that you bring some kind of well-being within society, in education, at the workplace. 
Otherwise, a nation that is the most powerful and the richest but everyone is miserable, what's the point? 
And if you have more consideration for others, you are not going to ransack that planet that we have and at the current rate, we don't have three planets to continue that way. 
So the question is, okay, altruism is the answer, it's not just a novel ideal, but can it be a real, pragmatic solution? 
And first of all, does it exist, true altruism, or are we so selfish? 
So some philosophers thought we were irredeemably selfish. 
But are we really all just like rascals? 
That's good news, isn't it? 
Many philosophers, like Hobbes, have said so. 
But not everyone looks like a rascal. 
Or is man a wolf for man? 
But this guy doesn't seem too bad. 
He's one of my friends in Tibet. 
He's very kind. 
So now, we love cooperation. 
There's no better joy than working together, is there? 
And then not only humans. 
Then, of course, there's the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. 
But in evolution, cooperation -- though competition exists, of course -- cooperation has to be much more creative to go to increased levels of complexity. 
We are super-cooperators and we should even go further. 
So now, on top of that, the quality of human relationships. 
The OECD did a survey among 10 factors, including income, everything. 
The first one that people said, that's the main thing for my happiness, is quality of social relationships. 
Not only in humans. 
And look at those great-grandmothers. 
So now, this idea that if we go deep within, we are irredeemably selfish, this is armchair science. 
There is not a single sociological study, psychological study, that's ever shown that. 
Rather, the opposite. 
My friend, Daniel Batson, spent a whole life putting people in the lab in very complex situations. 
And of course we are sometimes selfish, and some people more than others. 
But he found that systematically, no matter what, there's a significant number of people who do behave altruistically, no matter what. 
If you see someone deeply wounded, great suffering, you might just help out of empathic distress -- you can't stand it, so it's better to help than to keep on looking at that person. 
So we tested all that, and in the end, he said, clearly people can be altruistic. 
So that's good news. 
And even further, we should look at the banality of goodness. 
Now look at here. 
When we come out, we aren't going to say, "That's so nice. 
There was no fistfight while this mob was thinking about altruism." 
No, that's expected, isn't it? 
If there was a fistfight, we would speak of that for months. 
So the banality of goodness is something that doesn't attract your attention, but it exists. 
Now, look at this. 
So some psychologists said, when I tell them I run 140 humanitarian projects in the Himalayas that give me so much joy, they said, "Oh, I see, you work for the warm glow. 
That is not altruistic. You just feel good." 
You think this guy, when he jumped in front of the train, he thought, "I'm going to feel so good when this is over?" 
(Laughter) But that's not the end of it. 
They say, well, but when you interviewed him, he said, "I had no choice. I had to jump, of course." 
He has no choice. Automatic behavior. It's neither selfish nor altruistic. 
No choice? 
Well of course, this guy's not going to think for half an hour, "Should I give my hand? Not give my hand?" 
He does it. There is a choice, but it's obvious, it's immediate. 
And then, also, there he had a choice. 
(Laughter) There are people who had choice, like Pastor André Trocmé and his wife, and the whole village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France. 
For the whole Second World War, they saved 3,500 Jews, gave them shelter, brought them to Switzerland, against all odds, at the risk of their lives and those of their family. 
So altruism does exist. 
So what is altruism? 
It is the wish: May others be happy and find the cause of happiness. 
Now, empathy is the affective resonance or cognitive resonance that tells you, this person is joyful, this person suffers. 
But empathy alone is not sufficient. 
If you keep on being confronted with suffering, you might have empathic distress, burnout, so you need the greater sphere of loving-kindness. 
With Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig, we showed that the brain networks for empathy and loving-kindness are different. 
Now, that's all well done, so we got that from evolution, from maternal care, parental love, but we need to extend that. 
It can be extended even to other species. 
Now, if we want a more altruistic society, we need two things: individual change and societal change. 
So is individual change possible? 
Two thousand years of contemplative study said yes, it is. 
Now, 15 years of collaboration with neuroscience and epigenetics said yes, our brains change when you train in altruism. 
So I spent 120 hours in an MRI machine. 
This is the first time I went after two and a half hours. 
And then the result has been published in many scientific papers. 
It shows without ambiguity that there is structural change and functional change in the brain when you train the altruistic love. 
Just to give you an idea: this is the meditator at rest on the left, meditator in compassion meditation, you see all the activity, and then the control group at rest, nothing happened, in meditation, nothing happened. 
They have not been trained. 
So do you need 50,000 hours of meditation? No, you don't. 
Four weeks, 20 minutes a day, of caring, mindfulness meditation already brings a structural change in the brain compared to a control group. 
That's only 20 minutes a day for four weeks. 
Even with preschoolers -- Richard Davidson did that in Madison. 
An eight-week program: gratitude, loving- kindness, cooperation, mindful breathing. 
You would say, "Oh, they're just preschoolers." 
Look after eight weeks, the pro-social behavior, that's the blue line. 
And then comes the ultimate scientific test, the stickers test. 
Before, you determine for each child who is their best friend in the class, their least favorite child, an unknown child, and the sick child, and they have to give stickers away. 
So before the intervention, they give most of it to their best friend. 
Four, five years old, 20 minutes three times a week. 
After the intervention, no more discrimination: the same amount of stickers to their best friend and the least favorite child. 
That's something we should do in all the schools in the world. 
Now where do we go from there? 
(Applause) When the Dalai Lama heard that, he told Richard Davidson, "You go to 10 schools, 100 schools, the U.N., the whole world." 
So now where do we go from there? 
Individual change is possible. 
Now do we have to wait for an altruistic gene to be in the human race? 
That will take 50,000 years, too much for the environment. 
Fortunately, there is the evolution of culture. 
Cultures, as specialists have shown, change faster than genes. 
That's the good news. 
Look, attitude towards war has dramatically changed over the years. 
So now individual change and cultural change mutually fashion each other, and yes, we can achieve a more altruistic society. 
So where do we go from there? 
Myself, I will go back to the East. 
Now we treat 100,000 patients a year in our projects. 
We have 25,000 kids in school, four percent overhead. 
Some people say, "Well, your stuff works in practice, but does it work in theory?" 
There's always positive deviance. 
So I will also go back to my hermitage to find the inner resources to better serve others. 
But on the more global level, what can we do? 
We need three things. 
Enhancing cooperation: Cooperative learning in the school instead of competitive learning, Unconditional cooperation within corporations -- there can be some competition between corporations, but not within. 
We need sustainable harmony. I love this term. 
Not sustainable growth anymore. 
Sustainable harmony means now we will reduce inequality. 
In the future, we do more with less, and we continue to grow qualitatively, not quantitatively. 
We need caring economics. 
The Homo economicus cannot deal with poverty in the midst of plenty, cannot deal with the problem of the common goods of the atmosphere, of the oceans. 
We need a caring economics. 
If you say economics should be compassionate, they say, "That's not our job." 
But if you say they don't care, that looks bad. 
We need local commitment, global responsibility. 
We need to extend altruism to the other 1.6 million species. 
Sentient beings are co-citizens in this world. 
and we need to dare altruism. 
So, long live the altruistic revolution. 
Viva la revolución de altruismo. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

2,300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out to fulfill one of humanity’s most audacious goals: to collect all the knowledge in the world under one roof. 
In its prime, the Library of Alexandria housed an unprecedented number of scrolls and attracted some of the Greek world’s greatest minds. 
But by the end of the 5th century CE, the great library had vanished. 
Many believed it was destroyed in a catastrophic fire. 
The truth of the library’s rise and fall is much more complex. 
The idea for the library came from Alexander the Great. 
After establishing himself as a conqueror, the former student of Aristotle turned his attention to building an empire of knowledge headquartered in his namesake city. 
He died before construction began, but his successor, Ptolemy I, executed Alexander’s plans for a museum and library. 
Located in the royal district of the city, the Library of Alexandria may have been built with grand Hellenistic columns, native Egyptian influences, or a unique blend of the two--there are no surviving accounts of its architecture. 
We do know it had lecture halls, classrooms, and, of course, shelves. 
As soon as the building was complete, Ptolemy I began to fill it with primarily Greek and Egyptian scrolls. 
He invited scholars to live and study in Alexandria at his expense. 
The library grew as they contributed their own manuscripts, but the rulers of Alexandria still wanted a copy of every book in the world. 
Luckily, Alexandria was a hub for ships traveling through the Mediterranean. 
Ptolemy III instituted a policy requiring any ship that docked in Alexandria to turn over its books for copying. 
Once the Library’s scribes had duplicated the texts, they kept the originals and sent the copies back to the ships. 
Hired book hunters also scoured the Mediterranean in search of new texts, and the rulers of Alexandria attempted to quash rivals by ending all exports of the Egyptian papyrus used to make scrolls. 
These efforts brought hundreds of thousands of books to Alexandria. 
As the library grew, it became possible to find information on more subjects than ever before, but also much more difficult to find information on any specific subject. 
Luckily, a scholar named Callimachus of Cyrene set to work on a solution, creating the pinakes, a 120-volume catalog of the library’s contents, the first of its kind. 
Using the pinakes, others were able to navigate the Library’s swelling collection. 
They made some astounding discoveries. 
1,600 years before Columbus set sail, Eratosthenes not only realized the earth was round, but calculated its circumference and diameter within a few miles of their actual size. 
Heron of Alexandria created the world’s first steam engine over a thousand years before it was finally reinvented during the Industrial Revolution. 
For about 300 years after its founding in 283 BCE, the library thrived. 
But then, in 48 BCE, Julius Caesar laid siege to Alexandria and set the ships in the harbor on fire. 
For years, scholars believed the library burned as the blaze spread into the city. 
It's possible the fire destroyed part of the sprawling collection, but we know from ancient writings that scholars continued to visit the library for centuries after the siege. 
Ultimately, the library slowly disappeared as the city changed from Greek, to Roman, Christian, and eventually Muslim hands. 
Each new set of rulers viewed its contents as a threat rather than a source of pride. 
In 415 CE, the Christian rulers even had a mathematician named Hypatia murdered for studying the library’s ancient Greek texts, which they viewed as blasphemous. 
Though the Library of Alexandria and its countless texts are long gone, we’re still grappling with the best ways to collect, access, and preserve our knowledge. 
There’s more information available today and more advanced technology to preserve it, though we can’t know for sure that our digital archives will be more resistant to destruction than Alexandria’s ink and paper scrolls. 
And even if our reservoirs of knowledge are physically secure, they will still have to resist the more insidious forces that tore the library apart: fear of knowledge, and the arrogant belief that the past is obsolete. 
The difference is that, this time, we know what to prepare for. 

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

(Music: "Interpassion") Hi, my name is I am the one that tangles up consonants and vowels. 
I am international. 
Hello, how are you? 
Hello, how are you? 
Hello, how are you? 
Hello, how -- Hey! I speak a little bit -- you don't understand, but I speak a little bit and I'm sure you are my friend. 
You are my friend, You are my friend, You are my friend, You are my -- I love people. 
I think it's great we're all hugging here, as we mix our vowels, and we make the saddle. 
I appreciate less the consonants of those we haven't sounded. 
I'm pressing the buzzer; I am interpassionate. 
Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion. 
I am interpassionate. 
Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion. 
I am interpassionate. 
(Music) Good morning. 
What's your name? 
Do you know Mafalda? 
Do you speak Portuguese? 
Are you from California? 
Made in China, Made in China, Made in China, Made in China, I love people. 
I think it's great we're all hugging here, as we mix our vowels, that are making the saddle. 
I appreciate less the consonants of those we haven't sounded. 
I'm pressing the buzzer; I am interpassionate. 
Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. 
Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. 
Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. 
Interpassion, Interpassion, Interpassion, I am interpassionate. 
(Music) Interpassion, (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. 
Thank you very much. 
OK. 
Before leaving you guys with more talks with better English than mine -- (Laughter) I would like to see you dance. 
(Laughter) And especially a section of your body ... 
your hips. 
(Laughter) Alright? 
OK, you know your pelvis is the center of your body and this is the intersection that makes you really strong, alright? 
(Laughter) OK, so it's super easy. 
We're going to roll our hips together, OK? 
So please stand up. 
(Laughter) It's really easy. 
You're just going to have to roll your hips like that. 
(Music: "Ba$$in") Ready? 
(Music) I'd like to kiss that boy but I don't know how to tell him. 
Teach me, teach me, teach me, teach me, I'd like to hit on that boy last time I chased him away. 
Show me, show me, show me, show me. 
OK! 
Start with making eyes at him. 
Start with saying he is cute. 
Then you to have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips. 
I'd like to dance with him, like I were his partner. 
Teach me, teach me, teach me, teach me. 
I'd like to make him fall in love with me, as he's looking at my back. 
Show me, show me, show me. 
Start with making eyes at him. 
Start with saying he is cute. 
Then you have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hip. 
You have to roll your hips. 
roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You have to roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, roll your hips, You've to roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll OK! 
(Music) The weekend in Rome, I have to roll my hips. 
While I'm eating an apple, I have to roll my hips. 
Whenever I see a man, I have to roll my hips. 
roll my hips, roll my hips. 
roll my hips, roll my hips. 
(Music) (Clapping) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Cheering) Thank you so much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

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

About two and a half years ago, I watched this movie called "Her." 
And it features Samantha, a superintelligent form of AI that cannot take physical form. 
And because she can't appear in photographs, Samantha decides to write a piece of music that will capture a moment of her life just like a photograph would. 
As a musician and an engineer, and someone raised in a family of artists, I thought that this idea of musical photographs was really powerful. 
And I decided to create an AI composer. 
Her name is AIVA, and she's an artificial intelligence that has learned the art of music composition by reading over 30,000 scores of history's greatest. 
So here's what one score looks like to the algorithm in a matrix-like representation. 
And here's what 30,000 scores, written by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, look like in a single frame. 
So, using deep neural networks, AIVA looks for patterns in the scores. 
And from a couple of bars of existing music, it actually tries to infer what notes should come next in those tracks. 
And once AIVA gets good at those predictions, it can actually build a set of mathematical rules for that style of music in order to create its own original compositions. 
And in a way, this is kind of how we, humans, compose music, too. 
It's a trial-and-error process, during which we may not get the right notes all the time. 
But we can correct ourselves, either with our musical ear or our musical knowledge. 
But for AIVA, this process is taken from years and years of learning, decades of learning as an artist, as a musician and a composer, down to a couple of hours. 
But music is also a supersubjective art. 
And we needed to teach AIVA how to compose the right music for the right person, because people have different preferences. 
And to do that, we show to the algorithm over 30 different category labels for each score in our database. 
So those category labels are like mood or note density or composer style of a piece or the epoch during which it was written. 
And by seeing all this data, AIVA can actually respond to very precise requirements. 
Like the ones, for example, we had for a project recently, where we were commissioned to create a piece that would be reminiscent of a science-fiction film soundtrack. 
And the piece that was created is called "Among the Stars" and it was recorded with CMG Orchestra in Hollywood, under great conductor John Beal, and this is what they recorded, made by AIVA. 
(Music) (Music ends) What do you think? 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, as you've seen, AI can create beautiful pieces of music, and the best part of it is that humans can actually bring them to life. 
And it's not the first time in history that technology has augmented human creativity. 
Live music was almost always used in silent films to augment the experience. 
But the problem with live music is that it didn't scale. 
It's really hard to cram a full symphony into a small theater, and it's really hard to do that for every theater in the world. 
So when music recording was actually invented, it allowed content creators, like film creators, to have prerecorded and original music tailored to each and every frame of their stories. 
And that was really an enhancer of creativity. 
Two and a half years ago, when I watched this movie "Her," I thought to myself that personalized music would be the next single biggest change in how we consume and create music. 
Because nowadays, we have interactive content, like video games, that have hundreds of hours of interactive game plays, but only two hours of music, on average. 
And it means that the music loops and loops and loops over and over again, and it's not very immersive. 
So what we're working on is to make sure that AI can compose hundreds of hours of personalized music for those use cases where human creativity doesn't scale. 
And we don't just want to do that for games. 
Beethoven actually wrote a piece for his beloved, called "Für Elise," and imagine if we could bring back Beethoven to life. 
And if he was sitting next to you, composing a music for your personality and your life story. 
Or imagine if someone like Martin Luther King, for example, had a personalized AI composer. 
Maybe then we would remember "I Have a Dream" not only as a great speech, but also as a great piece of music, part of our history, and capturing Dr. King's ideals. 
And this is our vision at AIVA: to personalize music so that each and every one of you and every individual in the world can have access to a personalized live soundtrack, based on their story and their personality. 
So this moment here together at TED is now part of our life story. 
So it only felt fitting that AIVA would compose music for this moment. 
And that's exactly what we did. 
So my team and I worked on biasing AIVA on the style of the TED jingle, and on music that makes us feel a sense of awe and wonder. 
And the result is called "The Age of Amazement." 
Didn't take an AI to figure that one out. 
(Laughter) And I couldn't be more proud to show it to you, so if you can, close your eyes and enjoy the music. 
Thank you very much. 
(Music) [The Age of Amazement Composed by AIVA] (Music ends) This was for all of you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So infectious diseases, right? 
Infectious diseases are still the main cause of human suffering and death around the world. 
Every year, millions of people die of diseases such as T.B., malaria, HIV, around the world and even in the United States. 
Every year, thousands of Americans die of seasonal flu. 
Now of course, humans, we are creative. Right? 
We have come up with ways to protect ourselves against these diseases. 
We have drugs and vaccines. 
And we're conscious -- we learn from our experiences and come up with creative solutions. 
We used to think we're alone in this, but now we know we're not. 
We're not the only medical doctors. 
Now we know that there's a lot of animals out there that can do it too. 
Most famous, perhaps, chimpanzees. 
Not so much different from us, they can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites. 
But the last few decades have shown us that other animals can do it too: elephants, porcupines, sheep, goats, you name it. 
And even more interesting than that is that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication too. 
The problem with infectious diseases, as we all know, is that pathogens continue to evolve, and a lot of the drugs that we have developed are losing their efficacy. 
And therefore, there is this great need to find new ways to discover drugs that we can use against our diseases. 
Now, I think that we should look at these animals, and we can learn from them how to treat our own diseases. 
As a biologist, I have been studying monarch butterflies for the last 10 years. 
Now, monarchs are extremely famous for their spectacular migrations from the U.S. and Canada down to Mexico every year, where millions of them come together, but it's not why I started studying them. 
I study monarchs because they get sick. 
They get sick like you. They get sick like me. 
And I think what they do can tell us a lot about drugs that we can develop for humans. 
Now, the parasites that monarchs get infected with are called ophryocystis elektroscirrha -- a mouthful. 
What they do is they produce spores, millions of spores on the outside of the butterfly that are shown as little specks in between the scales of the butterfly. 
And this is really detrimental to the monarch. 
It shortens their lifespan, it reduces their ability to fly, it can even kill them before they're even adults. 
Very detrimental parasite. 
As part of my job, I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse growing plants, and the reason for this is that monarchs are extremely picky eaters. 
They only eat milkweed as larvae. 
Luckily, there are several species of milkweed that they can use, and all these milkweeds have cardenolides in them. 
These are chemicals that are toxic. 
They're toxic to most animals, but not to monarchs. 
In fact, monarchs can take up the chemicals, put it in their own bodies, and it makes them toxic against their predators, such as birds. 
And what they do, then, is advertise this toxicity through their beautiful warning colorations with this orange, black and white. 
So what I did during my job is grow plants in the greenhouse, different ones, different milkweeds. 
Some were toxic, including the tropical milkweed, with very high concentrations of these cardenolides. 
And some were not toxic. 
And then I fed them to monarchs. 
Some of the monarchs were healthy. They had no disease. 
But some of the monarchs were sick, and what I found is that some of these milkweeds are medicinal, meaning they reduce the disease symptoms in the monarch butterflies, meaning these monarchs can live longer when they are infected when feeding on these medicinal plants. 
And when I found this, I had this idea, and a lot of people said it was a crazy idea, but I thought, what if monarchs can use this? 
What if they can use these plants as their own form of medicine? 
What if they can act as medical doctors? 
So my team and I started doing experiments. 
In the first types of experiments, we had caterpillars, and gave them a choice: medicinal milkweed versus non-medicinal milkweed. 
And then we measured how much they ate of each species over their lifetime. 
And the result, as so often in science, was boring: Fifty percent of their food was medicinal. Fifty percent was not. 
These caterpillars didn't do anything for their own welfare. 
So then we moved on to adult butterflies, and we started asking the question whether it's the mothers that can medicate their offspring. 
Can the mothers lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick? 
We have done these experiments now over several years, and always get the same results. 
What we do is we put a monarch in a big cage, a medicinal plant on one side, a non-medicinal plant on the other side, and then we measure the number of eggs that the monarchs lay on each plant. 
And what we find when we do that is always the same. 
What we find is that the monarchs strongly prefer the medicinal milkweed. 
In other words, what these females are doing is they're laying 68 percent of their eggs in the medicinal milkweed. 
Intriguingly, what they do is they actually transmit the parasites when they're laying the eggs. 
They cannot prevent this. 
They can also not medicate themselves. 
But what these experiments tell us is that these monarchs, these mothers, can lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick. 
Now, this is a really important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs. 
Now, these are animals that are very small and we tend to think of them as very simple. 
They have tiny little brains, yet they can do this very sophisticated medication. 
Now, we know that even today, most of our drugs derive from natural products, including plants, and in indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. 
In this way, elephants have told us how to treat stomach upset, and porcupines have told people how to treat bloody diarrhea. 
What I think is important, though, is to move beyond these large-brained mammals and give these guys more credit, these simple animals, these insects that we tend to think of as very, very simple with tiny little brains. 
The discovery that these animals can also use medication opens up completely new avenues, and I think that maybe one day, we will be treating human diseases with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies, and I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

What's the fastest growing threat to Americans' health? 
Cancer? Heart attacks? Diabetes? 
The answer is actually none of these; it's Alzheimer's disease. 
Every 67 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 
As the number of Alzheimer's patients triples by the year 2050, caring for them, as well as the rest of the aging population, will become an overwhelming societal challenge. 
My family has experienced firsthand the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer's patient. 
Growing up in a family with three generations, I've always been very close to my grandfather. 
When I was four years old, my grandfather and I were walking in a park in Japan when he suddenly got lost. 
It was one of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in my life, and it was also the first instance that informed us that my grandfather had Alzheimer's disease. 
Over the past 12 years, his condition got worse and worse, and his wandering in particular caused my family a lot of stress. 
My aunt, his primary caregiver, really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him, and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed. 
I became really concerned about my aunt's well-being as well as my grandfather's safety. 
I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family's problems, but couldn't find one. 
Then, one night about two years ago, I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed. 
The moment his foot landed on the floor, I thought, why don't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? 
Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed, the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver's smartphone. 
That way, my aunt could sleep much better at night without having to worry about my grandfather's wandering. 
So now I'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock. 
Could I please have my sock model on the stage? 
Great. 
So once the patient steps onto the floor -- (Ringing) -- an alert is sent to the caregiver's smartphone. 
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, sock model. 
So this is a drawing of my preliminary design. 
My desire to create a sensor-based technology perhaps stemmed from my lifelong love for sensors and technology. 
When I was six years old, an elderly family friend fell down in the bathroom and suffered severe injuries. 
I became concerned about my own grandparents and decided to invent a smart bathroom system. 
Motion sensors would be installed inside the tiles of bathroom floors to detect the falls of elderly patients whenever they fell down in the bathroom. 
Since I was only six years old at the time and I hadn't graduated from kindergarten yet, I didn't have the necessary resources and tools to translate my idea into reality, but nonetheless, my research experience really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people. 
I really believe that sensors can improve the quality of life of the elderly. 
When I laid out my plan, I realized that I faced three main challenges: first, creating a sensor; second, designing a circuit; and third, coding a smartphone app. 
This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize than I initially had thought it to be. 
First, I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient's foot. 
After extensive research and testing of different materials like rubber, which I realized was too thick to be worn snugly on the bottom of the foot, I decided to print a film sensor with electrically conductive pressure-sensitive ink particles. 
Once pressure is applied, the connectivity between the particles increases. 
Therefore, I could design a circuit that would measure pressure by measuring electrical resistance. 
Next, I had to design a wearable wireless circuit, but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power and requires heavy, bulky batteries. 
Thankfully, I was able to find out about the Bluetooth low energy technology, which consumes very little power and can be driven by a coin-sized battery. 
This prevented the system from dying in the middle of the night. 
Lastly, I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform the care-giver's smartphone into a remote monitor. 
For this, I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks. 
Integrating these components, I was able to successfully create two prototypes, one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock, and another that's a re-attachable sensor assembly that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact with the bottom of the patient's foot. 
I've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now, and it's had a 100 percent success rate in detecting the over 900 known cases of his wandering. 
Last summer, I was able to beta test my device at several residential care facilities in California, and I'm currently incorporating the feedback to further improve the device into a marketable product. 
Testing the device on a number of patients made me realize that I needed to invent solutions for people who didn't want to wear socks to sleep at night. 
So sensor data, collected on a vast number of patients, can be useful for improving patient care and also leading to a cure for the disease, possibly. 
For example, I'm currently examining correlations between the frequency of a patient's nightly wandering and his or her daily activities and diet. 
One thing I'll never forget is when my device first caught my grandfather's wandering out of bed at night. 
At that moment, I was really struck by the power of technology to change lives for the better. 
People living happily and healthfully -- that's the world that I imagine. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Human beings are everywhere. 
With settlements on every continent, we can be found in the most isolated corners of Earth’s jungles, oceans, and tundras. 
Our impact is so profound, most scientists believe humanity has left a permanent mark on Earth’s geological record. 
So what would happen if suddenly, every human on Earth disappeared? 
With no one maintaining them, some of our creations backfire immediately. 
Hours after we disappear, oil refineries malfunction, producing month-long blazes at plants like the ones in western India, the southern United States, and South Korea. 
In underground rail systems like those in London, Moscow, and New York City, hundreds of drainage pumps are abandoned, flooding the tunnels in just three days. 
By the end of the first week, most emergency generators have shut down, and once the fires have gone out, the earth goes dark for the first time in centuries. 
After the first catastrophic month, changes come more gradually. 
Within 20 years, sidewalks have been torn apart by weeds and tree roots. 
Around this time, flooded tunnels erode the streets above into urban rivers. 
In temperate climates, the cycle of seasons freezes and thaws these waterways, cracking pavement and concrete foundations. 
Leaking pipes cause the same reaction in concrete buildings, and within 200 winters, most skyscrapers buckle and tumble down. 
In cities built in river deltas like Houston, these buildings eventually wash away completely - filling nearby tributaries with crushed concrete. 
Rural and suburban areas decay more slowly, but in largely unsurprising ways. 
Leaks, mold, bug and rodent infestations - all the usual enemies of the homeowner- now go uncontested. 
Within 75 years, most houses' supporting beams have rotted and sagged, and the resulting collapsed heap is now home to local rodents and lizards. 
But in this post-human world, “local” has a new meaning. 
Our cities are full of imported plants, which now run wild across their adopted homes. 
Water hyacinth coat the waterways of Shanghai in a thick green carpet. 
Poisonous giant hogweeds overgrow the banks of London’s Thames River. 
Chinese Ailanthus trees burst through New York City streets. 
And as sunken skyscrapers add crumbled concrete to the new forest floor, the soil acidity plummets, potentially allowing new plant life to thrive. 
This post-human biodiversity extends into the animal kingdom, as well. 
Animals follow the unchecked spread of native and non-native plants, venturing into new habitats with the help of our leftover bridges. 
In general, our infrastructure saves some animals and dooms others. 
Cockroaches continue to thrive in their native tropical habitats, but without our heating systems, their urban cousins likely freeze and die out in just two winters. 
And most domesticated animals are unable to survive without us – save for a handful of resourceful pigs, dogs, and feral housecats. 
Conversely, the reduced light pollution saves over a billion birds each year whose migrations were disrupted by blinking communication tower lights and high-tension wires. 
And mosquitos multiply endlessly in one of their favorite manmade nurseries – rubber tires, which last for almost a thousand years. 
As fauna and flora flourish, Earth’s climate slowly recovers from millennia of human impact. 
Within 35,000 years, the plant cycle removes the last traces of lead left by the Industrial Revolution from Earth’s soil, and it may take up to 65,000 years beyond that for CO2 to return pre-human levels. 
But even after several million years, humanity’s legacy lives on. 
Carved in unyielding granite, America’s Mt. Rushmore survives for 7.2 million years. 
The chemical composition of our bronze sculptures keeps them recognizable for over 10 million. 
And buried deep underground, the remnants of cities built on floodplains have been preserved in time as a kind of technofossil. 
Eventually, these traces, too, will be wiped from the planet’s surface. 
Humanity hasn’t always been here, and we won’t be here forever. 
But by investigating the world without us, perhaps we can learn more about the world we live in now. 

I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. 
Now, one thing about being a twin is, it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. 
If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. 
And clearly, I wasn't starving. 
(Laughter) When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of a different kind; and that is, how much more we value the body than we do the mind. 
I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say, "Oh -- a psychologist. So, not a real doctor," as if it should say that on my card. 
[Dr. Guy Winch, Just a Psychologist (Not a Real Doctor)] (Laughter) This favoritism we show the body over the mind -- I see it everywhere. 
I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. 
He was standing on a stool by the sink, brushing his teeth, when he slipped and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. 
He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. 
Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut so it doesn't become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. 
We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? 
We've known it since we were five years old. 
But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? 
Well, nothing. 
What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? 
Nothing. 
How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds? 
Why is it that our physical health is so much more important to us than our psychological health? 
We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. 
And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. 
And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. 
It doesn't even occur to us that we should. 
"Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head." 
Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: "Oh, just walk it off; it's all in your leg." 
(Laughter) It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health. 
It's time we made them more equal, more like twins. 
Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist. 
So he's not a real doctor, either. 
(Laughter) We didn't study together, though. 
In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. 
We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. 
But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. 
We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then, and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. 
When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together. 
We decided to splurge, and that week, we would talk for 10 minutes. 
(Laughter) I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call -- and waiting ... 
and waiting. 
But the phone didn't ring. 
Given the time difference, I assumed, "OK, he's out with friends, he'll call later." 
There were no cell phones then. 
But he didn't. 
And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. 
I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. 
I woke up the next morning. 
I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. 
I stumbled out of bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later. 
And it was my brother, and boy, was he pissed. 
(Laughter) It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. 
Now, I tried to explain what happened, but he said, "I don't understand. 
If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?" 
He was right. 
Why didn't I call him? 
I didn't have an answer then. 
But I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness. 
Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. 
It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. 
It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? 
I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me. 
But loneliness is defined purely subjectively. 
It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. 
And I did. 
There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. 
Loneliness won't just make you miserable; it will kill you. 
I'm not kidding. 
Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent. 
Fourteen percent! 
Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. 
It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. 
In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your long-term health and longevity as cigarette smoking. 
Now, cigarette packs come with warnings saying, "This could kill you." 
But loneliness doesn't. 
And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. 
Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. 
Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us. 
Failure does that as well. 
I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. 
You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. 
One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box with her lower lip trembling. 
The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and burst into tears without even touching it. 
Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. 
So: three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. 
The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. 
The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. 
Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. 
In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks. 
Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? 
You need to be. 
Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something, and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. 
And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. 
You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. 
Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it. 
Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind. 
I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager with my brother. 
We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. 
There had been a robbery in the area and they were looking for suspects. 
The officer approached the car, and shined his flashlight on the driver, then on my brother in the front seat, and then on me. 
And his eyes opened wide and he said, "Where have I seen your face before?" 
(Laughter) And I said, "In the front seat." 
(Laughter) But that made no sense to him whatsoever, so now he thought I was on drugs. 
(Laughter) So he drags me out of the car, he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I didn't have a police record, could I show him I had a twin in the front seat. 
But even as we were driving away, you could see by the look on his face he was convinced that I was getting away with something. 
(Laughter) Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. 
So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. 
But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed. 
You have to fight feelings of helplessness. 
You have to gain control over the situation. 
And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins. 
[Stop Emotional Bleeding] Our minds and our feelings -- they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. 
They're more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next. 
I once worked with this woman who, after 20 years marriage and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date. 
She had met this guy online, and he seemed nice and he seemed successful, and most importantly, he seemed really into her. 
So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink. 
Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, "I'm not interested," and walks out. 
Rejection is extremely painful. 
The woman was so hurt she couldn't move. 
All she could do was call a friend. 
Here's what the friend said: "Well, what do you expect? 
You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say. 
Why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out with a loser like you?" 
Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel? 
But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that. 
It's what the woman said to herself. 
And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection. 
We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't. 
We call ourselves names. 
Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it. 
And it's interesting that we do, because our self-esteem is already hurting. 
Why would we want to go and damage it even further? 
We wouldn't make a physical injury worse on purpose. 
You wouldn't get a cut on your arm and decide, "Oh! I know -- I'm going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it." 
But we do that with psychological injuries all the time. 
Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. 
Because we don't prioritize our psychological health. 
We know from dozens of studies that when your self-esteem is lower, you are more vulnerable to stress and to anxiety; that failures and rejections hurt more, and it takes longer to recover from them. 
So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive your self-esteem, not join Fight Club and beat it into a pulp. 
When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend. 
[Protect Your Self-Esteem] We have to catch our unhealthy psychological habits and change them. 
And one of unhealthiest and most common is called rumination. 
To ruminate means to chew over. 
It's when your boss yells at you or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. 
Now, ruminating about upsetting events in this way can easily become a habit, and it's a very costly one, because by spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease. 
The problem is, the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop. 
I know this for a fact, because a little over a year ago, I developed the habit myself. 
You see, my twin brother was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. 
His cancer was extremely aggressive. 
He had visible tumors all over his body. 
And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. 
And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through. 
I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was suffering, even though he never complained, not once. 
He had this incredibly positive attitude. 
His psychological health was amazing. 
I was physically healthy, but psychologically, I was a mess. 
But I knew what to do. 
Studies tell us that even a two-minute distraction is sufficient to break the urge to ruminate in that moment. 
And so each time I had a worrying, upsetting, negative thought, I forced myself to concentrate on something else until the urge passed. 
And within one week, my whole outlook changed and became more positive and more hopeful. 
[Battle Negative Thinking] Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy, my brother had a CAT scan, and I was by his side when he got the results. 
All the tumors were gone. 
He still had three more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but we knew he would recover. 
This picture was taken two weeks ago. 
By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. 
A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. 
I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene. 
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? 
If there were less loneliness and less depression? 
If people knew how to overcome failure? 
If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? 
If they were happier and more fulfilled? 
I can, because that's the world I want to live in. 
And that's the world my brother wants to live in as well. 
And if you just become informed and change a few simple habits, well -- that's the world we can all live in. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

How do we explain the unexplainable? 
This question has inspired numerous myths, religious practices, and scientific inquiries. 
But Zen Buddhists practicing throughout China from the 9th to 13th century asked a different question – why do we need an explanation? 
For these monks, blindly seeking answers was a vice to overcome, and learning to accept the mysteries of existence was the true path to enlightenment. 
But fighting the urge to explain the unexplainable can be difficult. 
So to help practice living with these mysteries, the meditating monks used a collection of roughly 1,700 bewildering and ambiguous philosophical thought experiments called kōans. 
The name, originally gong-an in Chinese, translates to “public record or case." 
But unlike real-world court cases, kōans were intentionally incomprehensible. 
They were surprising, surreal, and frequently contradicted themselves. 
On the surface, they contained a proverb about the Zen Buddhist monastic code - such as living without physical or mental attachments, avoiding binary thinking, and realizing one’s true “Buddha-nature." 
But by framing those lessons as illogical anecdotes, they became tests to help practicing monks learn to live with ambiguity and paradox. 
By puzzling through these confusing “cases," meditating monks could both internalize and practice Buddhist teachings. 
Hopefully, they would let go of the search for one true answer and trigger a spiritual breakthrough. 
Since these are intentionally unexplainable, it would be misguided to try and decipher these stories ourselves. 
But like the monks before us, we can puzzle over them together, and investigate just how resistant they are to simple explanations. 
Consider this kōan illustrating the practice of no-attachment. 
Two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, are traveling together down a muddy road. 
Ahead they see an attractive traveler, unable to cross the muddy path. 
Tanzan politely offers his help, carrying the traveler on his back across the street, and placing her down without a word. 
Ekido was shocked. 
According to monastic law, monks were not supposed to go near women, let alone touch a beautiful stranger. 
After miles of walking, Ekido could no longer restrain himself. 
“How could you carry that woman?” Tanzan smiled, “I left the traveler there. Are you still carrying her?” Like all kōans, this story has numerous interpretations. 
But one popular reading suggests that despite never having physically carried the traveler, Ekido broke monastic law by mentally "clinging to" the woman. 
This type of conflict – examining the grey area between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law – was common in kōans. 
In addition to exploring ambiguity, kōans often ridiculed characters claiming total understanding of the world around them. 
One such example finds three monks debating a temple flag rippling in the wind. 
The first monk refers to the flag as a moving banner, while the second monk insists that they are not seeing the flag move, but rather the wind blowing. 
They argue back and forth, until finally, a third monk intervenes, “It is not the flag moving, nor the wind blowing, but rather the movement of your minds!” One interpretation of this kōan plays on the supposed wisdom of the arguing monks – the first asserting the importance of the observable world, the second favoring deeper knowledge we can infer from that world. 
But each monk’s commitment to his own “answer” blinds him to the other’s insight, and in doing so, defies an essential Buddhist ideal: abolishing binary thinking. 
The third monk identifies their conflict as a perceptual one – both arguing monks fail to see the larger picture. 
Of course, all these interpretations only hint at how to wrestle with these kōans. 
Neither the wisdom from practicing monks before us, nor the supposedly wise characters in these stories can resolve them for you. 
That’s because the purpose of these kōans isn’t reaching a simple solution. 
It’s the very act of struggling with these paradoxical puzzles which challenge our desire for resolution, and our understanding of understanding itself. 

As an Arab female photographer, I have always found ample inspiration for my projects in personal experiences. 
The passion I developed for knowledge, which allowed me to break barriers towards a better life was the motivation for my project I Read I Write. 
Pushed by my own experience, as I was not allowed initially to pursue my higher education, I decided to explore and document stories of other women who changed their lives through education, while exposing and questioning the barriers they face. 
I covered a range of topics that concern women's education, keeping in mind the differences among Arab countries due to economic and social factors. 
These issues include female illiteracy, which is quite high in the region; educational reforms; programs for dropout students; and political activism among university students. 
As I started this work, it was not always easy to convince the women to participate. 
Only after explaining to them how their stories might influence other women's lives, how they would become role models for their own community, did some agree. 
Seeking a collaborative and reflexive approach, I asked them to write their own words and ideas on prints of their own images. 
Those images were then shared in some of the classrooms, and worked to inspire and motivate other women going through similar educations and situations. 
Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, wrote, "I sought education in order to be independent and to not count on men with everything." 
One of my first subjects was Umm El-Saad from Egypt. 
When we first met, she was barely able to write her name. 
She was attending a nine-month literacy program run by a local NGO in the Cairo suburbs. 
Months later, she was joking that her husband had threatened to pull her out of the classes, as he found out that his now literate wife was going through his phone text messages. 
(Laughter) Naughty Umm El-Saad. 
Of course, that's not why Umm El-Saad joined the program. 
I saw how she was longing to gain control over her simple daily routines, small details that we take for granted, from counting money at the market to helping her kids in homework. 
Despite her poverty and her community's mindset, which belittles women's education, Umm El-Saad, along with her Egyptian classmates, was eager to learn how to read and write. 
In Tunisia, I met Asma, one of the four activist women I interviewed. 
The secular bioengineering student is quite active on social media. 
Regarding her country, which treasured what has been called the Arab Spring, she said, "I've always dreamt of discovering a new bacteria. 
Now, after the revolution, we have a new one every single day." 
Asma was referring to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the region, which is another obstacle to women in particular. 
Out of all the women I met, Fayza from Yemen affected me the most. 
Fayza was forced to drop out of school at the age of eight when she was married. 
That marriage lasted for a year. 
At 14, she became the third wife of a 60-year-old man, and by the time she was 18, she was a divorced mother of three. 
Despite her poverty, despite her social status as a divorcée in an ultra-conservative society, and despite the opposition of her parents to her going back to school, Fayza knew that her only way to control her life was through education. 
She is now 26. 
She received a grant from a local NGO to fund her business studies at the university. 
Her goal is to find a job, rent a place to live in, and bring her kids back with her. 
The Arab states are going through tremendous change, and the struggles women face are overwhelming. 
Just like the women I photographed, I had to overcome many barriers to becoming the photographer I am today, many people along the way telling me what I can and cannot do. 
Umm El-Saad, Asma and Fayza, and many women across the Arab world, show that it is possible to overcome barriers to education, which they know is the best means to a better future. 
And here I would like to end with a quote by Yasmine, one of the four activist women I interviewed in Tunisia. 
Yasmine wrote, "Question your convictions. 
Be who you to want to be, not who they want you to be. 
Don't accept their enslavement, for your mother birthed you free." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One day in 1965, while driving to Acapulco for a vacation with his family, Colombian journalist Gabriel García Márquez abruptly turned his car around, asked his wife to take care of the family’s finances for the coming months, and returned home. 
The beginning of a new book had suddenly come to him: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Over the next eighteen months, those words would blossom into One Hundred Years of Solitude. 
A novel that would go on to bring Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination, earning García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. 
What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude so remarkable? 
The novel chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendía family over seven generations. 
With its lush, detailed sentences, large cast of characters, and tangled narrative, One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an easy book to read. 
But it’s a deeply rewarding one, with an epic assortment of intense romances, civil war, political intrigue, globe-trotting adventurers, and more characters named Aureliano than you’d think possible. 
Yet this is no mere historical drama. 
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most famous examples of a literary genre known as magical realism. 
Here, supernatural events or abilities are described in a realistic and matter-of-fact tone, while the real events of human life and history reveal themselves to be full of fantastical absurdity. 
Surreal phenomena within the fictional village of Macondo intertwine seamlessly with events taking place in the real country of Colombia. 
The settlement begins in a mythical state of isolation, but is gradually exposed to the outside world, facing multiple calamities along the way. 
As years pass, characters grow old and die, only to return as ghosts, or to be seemingly reincarnated in the next generation. 
When the American fruit company comes to town, so does a romantic mechanic who is always followed by yellow butterflies. 
A young woman up and floats away. 
Although the novel moves forward through subsequent generations, time moves in an almost cyclical manner. 
Many characters have similar names and features to their forebears, whose mistakes they often repeat. 
Strange prophecies and visits from mysterious gypsies give way to the skirmishes and firing squads of repeated civil wars. 
An American fruit company opens a plantation near the village and ends up massacring thousands of striking workers, mirroring the real-life ‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928. 
Combined with the novel’s magical realism, this produces a sense of history as a downward spiral the characters seem powerless to escape. 
Beneath the magic is a story about the pattern of Colombian and Latin American history from colonial times onward. 
This is a history that the author experienced firsthand. 
Gabriel García Márquez grew up in a Colombia torn apart by civil conflict between its Conservative and Liberal political parties. 
He also lived in an autocratic Mexico and covered the 1958 Venezuelan coup d’état as a journalist. 
But perhaps his biggest influences were his maternal grandparents. 
Nicolás Ricardo Márquez was a decorated veteran of the Thousand Days War whose accounts of the rebellion against Colombia's conservative government led Gabriel García Márquez to a socialist outlook. 
Meanwhile, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes’ omnipresent superstition became the foundation of One Hundred Years of Solitude’s style. 
Their small house in Aracataca where the author spent his childhood formed the main inspiration for Macondo. 
With One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez found a unique way to capture the unique history of Latin America. 
He was able to depict the strange reality of living in a post-colonial society, forced to relive the tragedies of the past. 
In spite of all this fatalism, the novel still holds hope. 
At his Nobel Lecture, García Marquez reflected on Latin America’s long history of civil strife and rampant iniquity. 
Yet he ended the speech by affirming the possibility of building a better world, to quote, “where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second chance on earth." 

I dedicated the past two years to understanding how people achieve their dreams. 
When we think about the dreams we have, and the dent we want to leave in the universe, it is striking to see how big of an overlap there is between the dreams that we have, and projects that never happen. 
(Laughter) So I'm here to talk to you today about five ways how not to follow your dreams. 
One: Believe in overnight success. 
You know the story, right? 
The tech guy built a mobile app and sold it very fast for a lot of money. 
You know, the story may seem real, but I bet it's incomplete. 
If you go investigate further, the guy has done 30 apps before and he has done a master's on the topic, a PhD. 
He has been working on the topic for 20 years. 
This is really interesting. 
I myself have a story in Brazil that people think is an overnight success. 
I come from a humble family, and two weeks before the deadline to apply for MIT, I started the application process. 
And, voilà! I got in. 
People may think it's an overnight success, but that only worked because for the 17 years prior to that, I took life and education seriously. 
Your overnight success story is always a result of everything you've done in your life through that moment. 
Two: Believe someone else has the answers for you. 
Constantly, people want to help out, right? 
All sorts of people: your family, your friends, your business partners, they all have opinions on which path you should take: "And let me tell you, go through this pipe." 
But whenever you go inside, there are other ways you have to pick as well. 
And you need to make those decisions yourself. 
No one else has the perfect answers for your life. 
And you need to keep picking those decisions, right? 
The pipes are infinite and you're going to bump your head, and it's a part of the process. 
Three, and it's very subtle but very important: Decide to settle when growth is guaranteed. 
So when your life is going great, you have put together a great team, and you have growing revenue, and everything is set -- time to settle. 
When I launched my first book, I worked really, really hard to distribute it everywhere in Brazil. 
With that, over three million people downloaded it, over 50,000 people bought physical copies. 
When I wrote a sequel, some impact was guaranteed. 
Even if I did little, sales would be OK. 
But OK is never OK. 
When you're growing towards a peak, you need to work harder than ever and find yourself another peak. 
Maybe if I did little, a couple hundred thousand people would read it, and that's great already. 
But if I work harder than ever, I can bring this number up to millions. 
That's why I decided, with my new book, to go to every single state of Brazil. 
And I can already see a higher peak. 
There's no time to settle down. 
Fourth tip, and that's really important: Believe the fault is someone else's. 
I constantly see people saying, "Yes, I had this great idea, but no investor had the vision to invest." 
"Oh, I created this great product, but the market is so bad, the sales didn't go well." 
Or, "I can't find good talent; my team is so below expectations." 
If you have dreams, it's your responsibility to make them happen. 
Yes, it may be hard to find talent. 
Yes, the market may be bad. 
But if no one invested in your idea, if no one bought your product, for sure, there is something there that is your fault. 
(Laughter) Definitely. 
You need to get your dreams and make them happen. 
And no one achieved their goals alone. 
But if you didn't make them happen, it's your fault and no one else's. 
Be responsible for your dreams. 
And one last tip, and this one is really important as well: Believe that the only things that matter are the dreams themselves. 
Once I saw an ad, and it was a lot of friends, they were going up a mountain, it was a very high mountain, and it was a lot of work. 
You could see that they were sweating and this was tough. 
And they were going up, and they finally made it to the peak. 
Of course, they decided to celebrate, right? 
I'm going to celebrate, so, "Yes! We made it, we're at the top!" 
Two seconds later, one looks at the other and says, "OK, let's go down." 
(Laughter) Life is never about the goals themselves. 
Life is about the journey. 
Yes, you should enjoy the goals themselves, but people think that you have dreams, and whenever you get to reaching one of those dreams, it's a magical place where happiness will be all around. 
But achieving a dream is a momentary sensation, and your life is not. 
The only way to really achieve all of your dreams is to fully enjoy every step of your journey. 
That's the best way. 
And your journey is simple -- it's made of steps. 
Some steps will be right on. 
Sometimes you will trip. 
If it's right on, celebrate, because some people wait a lot to celebrate. 
And if you tripped, turn that into something to learn. 
If every step becomes something to learn or something to celebrate, you will for sure enjoy the journey. 
So, five tips: Believe in overnight success, believe someone else has the answers for you, believe that when growth is guaranteed, you should settle down, believe the fault is someone else's, and believe that only the goals themselves matter. 
Believe me, you do that, and you will destroy your dreams. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 

I'd like to tell you a story about death and architecture. 
A hundred years ago, we tended to die of infectious diseases like pneumonia, that, if they took hold, would take us away quite quickly. 
We tended to die at home, in our own beds, looked after by family, although that was the default option because a lot of people lacked access to medical care. 
And then in the 20th century a lot of things changed. 
We developed new medicines like penicillin so we could treat those infectious diseases. 
New medical technologies like x-ray machines were invented. 
And because they were so big and expensive, we needed large, centralized buildings to keep them in, and they became our modern hospitals. 
After the Second World War, a lot of countries set up universal healthcare systems so that everyone who needed treatment could get it. 
The result was that lifespans extended from about 45 at the start of the century to almost double that today. 
The 20th century was this time of huge optimism about what science could offer, but with all of the focus on life, death was forgotten, even as our approach to death changed dramatically. 
Now, I'm an architect, and for the past year and a half I've been looking at these changes and at what they mean for architecture related to death and dying. 
We now tend to die of cancer and heart disease, and what that means is that many of us will have a long period of chronic illness at the end of our lives. 
During that period, we'll likely spend a lot of time in hospitals and hospices and care homes. 
Now, we've all been in a modern hospital. 
You know those fluorescent lights and the endless corridors and those rows of uncomfortable chairs. 
Hospital architecture has earned its bad reputation. 
But the surprising thing is, it wasn't always like this. 
This is L'Ospedale degli Innocenti, built in 1419 by Brunelleschi, who was one of the most famous and influential architects of his time. 
And when I look at this building and then think about hospitals today, what amazes me is this building's ambition. 
It's just a really great building. 
It has these courtyards in the middle so that all of the rooms have daylight and fresh air, and the rooms are big and they have high ceilings, so they just feel more comfortable to be in. 
And it's also beautiful. 
Somehow, we've forgotten that that's even possible for a hospital. 
Now, if we want better buildings for dying, then we have to talk about it, but because we find the subject of death uncomfortable, we don't talk about it, and we don't question how we as a society approach death. 
One of the things that surprised me most in my research, though, is how changeable attitudes actually are. 
This is the first crematorium in the U.K., which was built in Woking in the 1870s. 
And when this was first built, there were protests in the local village. 
Cremation wasn't socially acceptable, and 99.8 percent of people got buried. 
And yet, only a hundred years later, three quarters of us get cremated. 
People are actually really open to changing things if they're given the chance to talk about them. 
So this conversation about death and architecture was what I wanted to start when I did my first exhibition on it in Venice in June, which was called "Death in Venice." 
It was designed to be quite playful so that people would literally engage with it. 
This is one of our exhibits, which is an interactive map of London that shows just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death and dying, and as you wave your hand across the map, the name of that piece of real estate, the building or cemetery, is revealed. 
Another of our exhibits was a series of postcards that people could take away with them. 
And they showed people's homes and hospitals and cemeteries and mortuaries, and they tell the story of the different spaces that we pass through on either side of death. 
We wanted to show that where we die is a key part of how we die. 
Now, the strangest thing was the way that visitors reacted to the exhibition, especially the audio-visual works. 
We had people dancing and running and jumping as they tried to activate the exhibits in different ways, and at a certain point they would kind of stop and remember that they were in an exhibition about death, and that maybe that's not how you're supposed to act. 
But actually, I would question whether there is one way that you're supposed to act around death, and if there's not, I'd ask you to think about what you think a good death is, and what you think that architecture that supports a good death might be like, and mightn't it be a little less like this and a little more like this? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

You're looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. 
Obviously, that's changed, but only recently. 
It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk, at the Forbes "30 Under 30 Summit" -- 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30. 
That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, and the youngest, just four. 
I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs. 
Yes, I'm in rap songs. 
(Laughter) Almost 40 rap songs. 
(Laughter) But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. 
At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. 
(Laughter) I know, right? 
He was charming, and I was flattered, and I declined. 
You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? 
He could make me feel 22 again. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I realized, later that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again. 
(Laughter) (Applause) At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. 
And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences. 
Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22? 
Yep. That's what I thought. 
So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss. 
Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America. 
(Laughter) Of course, life is full of surprises. 
Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply. 
In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before. 
Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio or watching television. 
That was it. 
But that wasn't my fate. 
Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. 
That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere. 
And when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. 
It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet for a major news story -- a click that reverberated around the world. 
What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide. 
I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously. 
This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers. 
Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, e-mail stories, and, of course, e-mail cruel jokes. 
News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. 
Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret? 
Now, I admit I made mistakes -- especially wearing that beret. 
(Laughter) But the attention and judgment that I received -- not the story, but that I personally received -- was unprecedented. 
I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, "that woman." 
I was seen by many, but actually known by few. 
And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken. 
When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it. 
Now we call it "cyberbullying" and "online harassment." 
Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others. 
In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. 
I lost almost everything. 
And I almost lost my life. 
Let me paint a picture for you. 
It is September of 1998. 
I'm sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel, underneath humming fluorescent lights. 
I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. 
I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation. 
For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the sword of Damocles over my head. 
I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago? 
Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize. 
A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it. 
That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough. 
But a few weeks later, the audiotapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. 
The public humiliation was excruciating. 
Life was almost unbearable. 
This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by "this," I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public -- public without consent, public without context and public without compassion. 
Fast-forward 12 years, to 2010, and now social media has been born. 
The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually made a mistake, and now, it's for both public and private people. 
The consequences for some have become dire, very dire. 
I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University, named Tyler Clementi. 
Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. 
When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. 
A few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. 
He was 18. 
My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quite understand. 
And then eventually, I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving -- (Chokes up) sorry -- reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally. 
Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. 
Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation after it was too late. 
Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. 
It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. 
In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the internet would take us. 
Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways -- joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions ... 
But the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed. 
Every day online, people -- especially young people, who are not developmentally equipped to handle this -- are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day. 
And some, tragically, don't. 
And there's nothing virtual about that. 
Childline, a UK nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: from 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and e-mails related to cyberbullying. 
A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. 
And you know, what shocked me -- although it shouldn't have -- was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger. 
Cruelty to others is nothing new. 
But online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained and permanently accessible. 
The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community. 
But now, it's the online community too. 
Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain. 
And there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. 
There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the internet has jacked up that price. 
For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. 
Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame. 
It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online, which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy and cyberbullying. 
This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls "a culture of humiliation." 
Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone. 
Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its messages only have the life span of a few seconds. 
You can imagine the range of content that that gets. 
A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the life span of the messages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos and videos were leaked online, to now have a life span of forever. 
Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the internet without their permission. 
One gossip website had over five million hits for this one story. 
And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking? 
The documents which received the most attention were private e-mails that had maximum public embarrassment value. 
But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming. 
The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others -- notably, women, minorities and members of the LGBTQ community -- have paid, but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them. 
This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. 
A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity, and shame is an industry. 
How is the money made? 
Clicks. 
The more shame, the more clicks. 
The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. 
We're in a dangerous cycle. 
The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it. 
And the more numb we get, the more we click. 
All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering. 
With every click, we make a choice. 
The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking and online harassment. 
Why? Because they all have humiliation at their cores. 
This behavior is a symptom of the culture we've created. 
Just think about it. 
Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs. 
We've seen that to be true with racism, homophobia and plenty of other biases, today and in the past. 
As we've changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedoms. 
When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle. 
So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution. 
Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for an intervention on the internet and in our culture. 
The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. 
We need to return to a long-held value of compassion, compassion and empathy. 
Online, we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis. 
Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, "Shame can't survive empathy." 
Shame cannot survive empathy. 
I've seen some very dark days in my life. 
It was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals and sometimes even strangers that saved me. 
Even empathy from one person can make a difference. 
The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency over time, change can happen. 
In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. 
To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. 
Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity. 
We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the US; in the UK, there's Anti-Bullying Pro; and in Australia, there's PROJECT ROCKIT. 
We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression. 
But we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. 
We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. 
The internet is the superhighway for the id. 
But online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world. 
We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion and click with compassion. 
Just imagine walking a mile in someone else's headline. 
I'd like to end on a personal note. 
In the past nine months, the question I've been asked the most is "Why?" 
Why now? 
Why was I sticking my head above the parapet? 
You can read between the lines in those questions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics. 
The top-note answer was and is "Because it's time." 
Time to stop tiptoeing around my past, time to stop living a life of opprobrium and time to take back my narrative. 
It's also not just about saving myself. 
Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. 
I know it's hard. 
It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story. 
Have compassion for yourself. 
We all deserve compassion and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world. 
Thank you for listening. 
(Applause and cheers) 

People back home call me a heckler, a troublemaker, an irritant, a rebel, an activist, the voice of the people. 
But that wasn't always me. 
Growing up, I had a nickname. 
They used to call me Softy, meaning the soft, harmless boy. 
Like every other human being, I avoided trouble. 
In my childhood, they taught me silence. 
Don't argue, do as you're told. 
In Sunday school, they taught me don't confront, don't argue, even if you're right, turn the other cheek. 
This was reinforced by the political climate of the time. 
(Laughter) Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich. 
(Laughter) Kenya's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals. 
This was reinforced by the political climate of the day. 
We had a president, Moi, who was a dictator. 
He ruled the country with an iron fist, and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested, tortured, jailed or even killed. 
That meant that people were taught to be smart cowards, stay out of trouble. 
Being a coward was not an insult. 
Being a coward was a compliment. 
We used to be told that a coward goes home to his mother. 
What that meant: that if you stayed out of trouble you're going to stay alive. 
I used to question this advice, and eight years ago we had an election in Kenya, and the results were violently disputed. 
What followed that election was terrible violence, rape, and the killing of over 1,000 people. 
My work was to document the violence. 
As a photographer, I took thousands of images, and after two months, the two politicians came together, had a cup of tea, signed a peace agreement, and the country moved on. 
I was a very disturbed man because I saw the violence firsthand. 
I saw the killings. I saw the displacement. 
I met women who had been raped, and it disturbed me, but the country never spoke about it. 
We pretended. We all became smart cowards. 
We decided to stay out of trouble and not talk about it. 
Ten months later, I quit my job. I said I could not stand it anymore. 
After quitting my job, I decided to organize my friends to speak about the violence in the country, to speak about the state of the nation, and June 1, 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president's attention. 
It's a national holiday, it's broadcast across the country, and I showed up at the stadium. 
My friends did not show up. 
I found myself alone, and I didn't know what to do. 
I was scared, but I knew very well that that particular day, I had to make a decision. 
Was I able to live as a coward, like everyone else, or was I going to make a stand? 
And when the president stood up to speak, I found myself on my feet shouting at the president, telling him to remember the post-election violence victims, to stop the corruption. 
And suddenly, out of nowhere, the police pounced on me like hungry lions. 
They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium, where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail. 
I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail, and that got me thinking. 
What was making me feel this way? 
My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did, and the images that I took were disturbing my life. 
The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans. 
Most Kenyans did not see the violence. 
It was a story to them. 
And so I decided to actually start a street exhibition to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it. 
We traveled the country and showed the images, and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path, where I decided to become silent no more, to talk about those things. 
We traveled, and our general site from our street exhibit became for political graffiti about the situation in the country, talking about corruption, bad leadership. 
We have even done symbolic burials. 
We have delivered live pigs to Kenya's parliament as a symbol of our politicians' greed. 
It has been done in Uganda and other countries, and what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country, across the continent. 
Where I used to stand up alone seven years ago, now I belong to a community of many people who stand up with me. 
I am no longer alone when I stand up to speak about these things. 
I belong to a group of young people who are passionate about the country, who want to bring about change, and they're no longer afraid, and they're no longer smart cowards. 
So that was my story. 
That day in the stadium, I stood up as a smart coward. 
By that one action, I said goodbye to the 24 years living as a coward. 
There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why. 
That day standing up in that stadium shouting at the President, I discovered why I was truly born, that I would no longer be silent in the face of injustice. 
Do you know why you were born? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Tom Rielly: It's an amazing story. 
I just want to ask you a couple quick questions. 
So PAWA254: you've created a studio, a place where young people can go and harness the power of digital media to do some of this action. 
What's happening now with PAWA? 
Boniface Mwangi: So we have this community of filmmakers, graffiti artists, musicians, and when there's an issue in the country, we come together, we brainstorm, and take up on that issue. 
So our most powerful tool is art, because we live in a very busy world where people are so busy in their life, and they don't have time to read. 
So we package our activism and we package our message in art. 
So from the music, the graffiti, the art, that's what we do. 
Can I say one more thing? 
TR: Yeah, of course. (Applause) BM: In spite of being arrested, beaten up, threatened, the moment I discovered my voice, that I could actually stand up for what I really believed in, I'm no longer afraid. 
I used to be called softy, but I'm no longer softy, because I discovered who I really am, as in, that's what I want to do, and there's such beauty in doing that. 
There's nothing as powerful as that, knowing that I'm meant to do this, because you don't get scared, you just continue living your life. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. 
That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. 
When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. 
Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. 
Instead, it looks like this. 
If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. 
Not missiles, but microbes. 
Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. 
But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. 
We're not ready for the next epidemic. 
Let's look at Ebola. 
I'm sure all of you read about it in the newspaper, lots of tough challenges. 
I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication. 
And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we didn't have a system at all. 
In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces. 
We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. 
The case reports came in on paper. 
It was very delayed before they were put online and they were extremely inaccurate. 
We didn't have a medical team ready to go. 
We didn't have a way of preparing people. 
Now, Médecins Sans Frontières did a great job orchestrating volunteers. 
But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. 
And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers. 
There was no one there to look at treatment approaches. 
No one to look at the diagnostics. 
No one to figure out what tools should be used. 
As an example, we could have taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasma back in people to protect them. 
But that was never tried. 
So there was a lot that was missing. 
And these things are really a global failure. 
The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about. 
Now, in the movies it's quite different. 
There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood. 
The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola Let's look at the progression of Ebola over this year. 
About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries. 
There's three reasons why it didn't spread more. 
The first is that there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. 
They found the people and they prevented more infections. 
The second is the nature of the virus. 
Ebola does not spread through the air. 
And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick that they're bedridden. 
Third, it didn't get into many urban areas. 
And that was just luck. 
If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger. 
So next time, we might not be so lucky. 
You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. 
The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. 
So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse. 
In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu back in 1918. 
So here's what would happen: It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly. 
And you can see over 30 million people died from that epidemic. 
So this is a serious problem. 
We should be concerned. 
But in fact, we can build a really good response system. 
We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. 
We've got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. 
We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they're moving. 
We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. 
So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. 
And we need preparedness. 
The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. 
For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. 
We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. 
NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. 
NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained? 
Do they understand about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? 
So they are absolutely ready to go. 
So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic. 
What are the key pieces? 
First, we need strong health systems in poor countries. 
That's where mothers can give birth safely, kids can get all their vaccines. 
But, also where we'll see the outbreak very early on. 
We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise. 
And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. 
taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas. 
We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. 
The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001, and it didn't go so well. 
So far the score is germs: 1, people: 0. 
Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics. 
There are some big breakthroughs, like the Adeno-associated virus, that could work very, very quickly. 
Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm. 
The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths. 
These investments offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic. 
The primary healthcare, the R&D, those things would reduce global health equity and make the world more just as well as more safe. 
So I think this should absolutely be a priority. 
There's no need to panic. 
We don't have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement. 
But we need to get going, because time is not on our side. 
In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready. 
If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Music) (Singing) It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well. 
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle. 
Oh, and now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell. 
C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell. 
No, no. 
They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. 
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale. 
Oh, but when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well . 
C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell. 
You never can tell. 
They bought a souped-up jitney, was a cherry red '53. 
They drove it down to New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary. 
Oh, it was there where Pierre was wedded to the lovely mademoiselle. 
C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell. 
No, no, you never can tell. 
No, no, you never can tell. 
You never can tell. 
You never can tell. 
No, no, you never can tell. 
(Applause and cheers) Thank you. 
I recently had the tremendous opportunity of searching for gold in the vast mine of songs released by Chess Records, a Chicago-based label that was really very active in the '50s and '60s in the US and that music spread all over the world. 
And the songs that I'm singing tonight are from an album that I just put out called, "Playing Chess," that pays homage to those songs. 
And these guys were really the innovators of rock 'n' roll and soul and R&B as we now know it. 
(Applause) (Music) (Singing) Over the mountain, across the sea, there's a girl waiting, she's waiting for ... 
me. 
(Music) Over the river, beyond every cloud, she's passed the wind blowin' loud. 
Over the mountain, a girl waits for me. 
(Music) Tell the sands, every blade of grass, please tell the wind to let my love pass. 
Over the mountain, a girl waits for me. 
Tell the moon up -- up in the sky. 
Tell all the birds that fly on by that over and over the mountain ... 
my love waits for me. 
Oh, into each dark, starry night, oh, what a mystery that's sealed so tight. 
Over the mountain, a girl waits for me. 
Tell the moon up -- up in the sky. 
Tell the birds that fly by that over and over the mountain my love waits for me. 
Into each dark and starry night, oh, what a mystery that's sealed so tight. 
Over the mountains, a girl waits for me. 
She waits for me. 
Oh, she waits for me. 
I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. 
Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. 
Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, oh oh, oh oh. 
(Applause and cheers) 

Almost 20 years have passed since 9/11. 
It is time to take stock of where we stand and stop and think. 
It is time to ask ourselves, have the assumptions and policies we developed in the wake of those tragic events truly made us more secure? 
Have they made our societies, both in Europe and in the United States, more resilient? 
I've worked all my life in the field of security and defense, and I am convinced that now, more than ever, we need to radically reframe the way we think and act about security, and especially about international security. 
By international security, I actually mean what we do, how we prepare our countries to better respond and prevent external threats, and how we protect our citizens. 
The key to both is to focus on protecting civilians, both in our own countries and in those where we are present in the name of security. 
Now, this idea goes against the fixed narrative that we developed over the past 20 years over what security is and how to get it, but that narrative is flawed, and worse, it is counterproductive. 
Over the past 20 years, both in the United States and in Europe, we've come to accept that we must talk about security in zero sum terms, as if the only way to gain more security is by compromising on values and rights: security versus human rights, safety versus freedom and development. 
This is a false opposition. 
It just doesn't work like that. 
We need to recognize that security and human rights are not opposite values, they are intrinsically related. 
After all, the most basic human right is the right to live and to be free from violence, and a state's most basic responsibility is to guarantee that right for its citizens. 
Conversely, if we think about communities all over the world affected by war and conflict, it is insecurity and violence that stops them from achieving their full freedom and development. 
Now, they need basic security just as much as we do and they need it so they can live a normal life and so that they can enjoy their human rights. 
This is why we need to shift. 
We need to acknowledge that sustainable security builds on a foundation of human rights, builds on promoting and respecting human rights. 
Also, over the past two decades, we have accepted that the best way to guarantee our own security is by defeating our enemies, and to do that, we need to rely almost exclusively on the military. 
Again, this clashes with my work, with my research, with what I see in the field. 
What I see is that building sustainable security has a lot less to do with crushing enemies, has a lot less to do with winning on the battlefield, and has a lot more to do with protecting victims and building stability. 
And to do that, well, the military alone is simply insufficient. 
This is why I believe we need to shelve the never-ending War on Terror, and we need to replace it with a security agenda that is driven by the principle of protecting civilians, no matter where they are from, what passport they hold, or where they live: Vancouver, New York, Kabul, Mosul, Aleppo or Douma. 
Sustainable security tells us that we're more likely to have long-term security at home for ourselves if we focus our engagements abroad on protecting civilians and on ensuring their lives are lived in dignity and free from violence. 
For example, we all know that defeating ISIS is a security achievement. 
Absolutely. 
But rebuilding destroyed homes, restoring order, ensuring a representative political system, these are just as, if not more important, and not just for the security of civilians in Iraq and in Syria, but for our own security and for global stability. 
More fundamentally, ISIS's danger should not just be counted in the number of weapons it holds but also in the number of children it has kept out of school or indoctrinated. 
This is from a security perspective. 
From a security perspective, the long-term generational impact of having millions of children in Syria growing up knowing only war and out of school, this is a far more dangerous threat to stability than all of ISIS's weapons combined, and we should spend just as much time and just as much energy to counter this as what we spend when countering ISIS militarily. 
Over the past two decades, our security policy has been short-term. 
It has focused on the here and now. 
It has systematically downplayed the link between what we do today in the name of security and the long-term impact of those choices. 
In the years after 9/11, some of the choices, some of the policies we've implemented have probably made us less, not more secure in the long term. 
Sustainable, civilian-centered security needs to look at what happens in the long term. 
Again, for example, relying on drones to target enemies in faraway countries may be a tool. 
It may be a tool to make sure or to lessen the threat of an imminent attack on the United States. 
But what about the long-term impact? 
If civilians are killed, if communities are targeted, this will feed a vicious circle of war, conflict, trauma and radicalization, and that vicious circle is at the center of so many of the security challenges we face today. 
This will not make us safer in the long term. 
We need civilian security, we need sustainable civilian-centered security, and we need it now. 
We need to encourage thinking and research around this concept, and to implement it. 
We live in a dangerous world. 
We have many threats to peace and conflict. 
Much like in the days after 9/11, we simply cannot afford not to think about international security. 
But we have to learn the lessons of the past 20 years. 
To get it right, to get security right, we need to focus on the long term. 
We need to focus on protecting civilians. 
And we need to respect and acknowledge the fact that sustainable security builds on a foundation of human rights. 
Otherwise, in the name of security, we risk leaving the world a far more dangerous and unstable place than what we already found it in. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm really excited to share with you some findings that really surprise me about what makes companies succeed the most, what factors actually matter the most for startup success. 
I believe that the startup organization is one of the greatest forms to make the world a better place. 
If you take a group of people with the right equity incentives and organize them in a startup, you can unlock human potential in a way never before possible. 
You get them to achieve unbelievable things. 
But if the startup organization is so great, why do so many fail? 
That's what I wanted to find out. 
I wanted to find out what actually matters most for startup success. 
And I wanted to try to be systematic about it, avoid some of my instincts and maybe misperceptions I have from so many companies I've seen over the years. 
I wanted to know this because I've been starting businesses since I was 12 years old when I sold candy at the bus stop in junior high school, to high school, when I made solar energy devices, to college, when I made loudspeakers. 
And when I graduated from college, I started software companies. 
And 20 years ago, I started Idealab, and in the last 20 years, we started more than 100 companies, many successes, and many big failures. 
We learned a lot from those failures. 
So I tried to look across what factors accounted the most for company success and failure. 
So I looked at these five. 
First, the idea. 
I used to think that the idea was everything. 
I named my company Idealab for how much I worship the "aha!" moment when you first come up with the idea. 
But then over time, I came to think that maybe the team, the execution, adaptability, that mattered even more than the idea. 
I never thought I'd be quoting boxer Mike Tyson on the TED stage, but he once said, "Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face." (Laughter) And I think that's so true about business as well. 
So much about a team's execution is its ability to adapt to getting punched in the face by the customer. 
The customer is the true reality. 
And that's why I came to think that the team maybe was the most important thing. 
Then I started looking at the business model. 
Does the company have a very clear path generating customer revenues? 
That started rising to the top in my thinking about maybe what mattered most for success. 
Then I looked at the funding. 
Sometimes companies received intense amounts of funding. 
Maybe that's the most important thing? 
And then of course, the timing. 
Is the idea way too early and the world's not ready for it? 
Is it early, as in, you're in advance and you have to educate the world? 
Is it just right? 
Or is it too late, and there's already too many competitors? 
So I tried to look very carefully at these five factors across many companies. 
And I looked across all 100 Idealab companies, and 100 non-Idealab companies to try and come up with something scientific about it. 
So first, on these Idealab companies, the top five companies -- Citysearch, CarsDirect, GoTo, NetZero, Tickets.com -- those all became billion-dollar successes. 
And the five companies on the bottom -- Z.com, Insider Pages, MyLife, Desktop Factory, Peoplelink -- we all had high hopes for, but didn't succeed. 
So I tried to rank across all of those attributes how I felt those companies scored on each of those dimensions. 
And then for non-Idealab companies, I looked at wild successes, like Airbnb and Instagram and Uber and Youtube and LinkedIn. 
And some failures: Webvan, Kozmo, Pets.com Flooz and Friendster. 
The bottom companies had intense funding, they even had business models in some cases, but they didn't succeed. 
I tried to look at what factors actually accounted the most for success and failure across all of these companies, and the results really surprised me. 
The number one thing was timing. 
Timing accounted for 42 percent of the difference between success and failure. 
Team and execution came in second, and the idea, the differentiability of the idea, the uniqueness of the idea, that actually came in third. 
Now, this isn't absolutely definitive, it's not to say that the idea isn't important, but it very much surprised me that the idea wasn't the most important thing. 
Sometimes it mattered more when it was actually timed. 
The last two, business model and funding, made sense to me actually. 
I think business model makes sense to be that low because you can start out without a business model and add one later if your customers are demanding what you're creating. 
And funding, I think as well, if you're underfunded at first but you're gaining traction, especially in today's age, it's very, very easy to get intense funding. 
So now let me give you some specific examples about each of these. 
So take a wild success like Airbnb that everybody knows about. 
Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought, "No one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger." 
Of course, people proved that wrong. 
But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing. 
That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money, and that maybe helped people overcome their objection to renting out their own home to a stranger. 
Same thing with Uber. 
Uber came out, incredible company, incredible business model, great execution, too. 
But the timing was so perfect for their need to get drivers into the system. 
Drivers were looking for extra money; it was very, very important. 
Some of our early successes, Citysearch, came out when people needed web pages. 
GoTo.com, which we announced actually at TED in 1998, was when companies were looking for cost-effective ways to get traffic. 
We thought the idea was so great, but actually, the timing was probably maybe more important. 
And then some of our failures. 
We started a company called Z.com, it was an online entertainment company. 
We were so excited about it -- we raised enough money, we had a great business model, we even signed incredibly great Hollywood talent to join the company. 
But broadband penetration was too low in 1999-2000. 
It was too hard to watch video content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company eventually went out of business in 2003. 
Just two years later, when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash and when broadband penetration crossed 50 percent in America, YouTube was perfectly timed. 
Great idea, but unbelievable timing. 
In fact, YouTube didn't even have a business model when it first started. 
It wasn't even certain that that would work out. 
But that was beautifully, beautifully timed. 
So what I would say, in summary, is execution definitely matters a lot. 
The idea matters a lot. 
But timing might matter even more. 
And the best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them. 
And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing. 
As I said earlier, I think startups can change the world and make the world a better place. 
I hope some of these insights can maybe help you have a slightly higher success ratio, and thus make something great come to the world that wouldn't have happened otherwise. 
Thank you very much, you've been a great audience. 
(Applause) 

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

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

(Piano) (Singing) It was done When the benediction had been sung Firelight gently woke us from our golden night My surprise I can turn to see your open eyes And I know You are alive I know that smile Nothing more In the after There is waking from your sleep And your lover Is the only face you see We are after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath The war Nobody ever even asked what for Up above Nothing matters but the ones you love So get out with me Now you've got enough with me Just the two of us you see And nothing more In the after There is waking from your sleep And your lover Is the only face you see We are after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath Oh, we after Ever after There is laughter Afterneath Oh Oh Oh Oh Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thanks. 
I love a depressing song ... 
(Laughter) you know? 
I've been writing them for 15 years now, and to be honest, over that time, I've come to kind of believe that they're not really depressing at all. 
In fact, I think they're kind of the most important songs we have. 
Songs that sing of sorrow, of grief, of longing, of the darker side of love, the underside of being alive, these are the songs I just never tire of hearing and I never tire of writing, because they make me feel less alone. 
They speak to a very real part of being human that can often be hidden in fear and shame and pushed deep down where it lingers and rots. 
But I think in listening to these songs -- really listening -- can allow us to refeel these hard emotions, but in a cathartic and healing way. 
In a way that reminds us, as we listen, that we're not alone in darkness. 
There's a Japanese phrase known as "mono no aware," which roughly translates as "the bittersweet poignancy of things," or the pathos or "ahness" of things. 
It's a valuable awareness of impermanence, both a kind of gentle, transient sadness as things pass by in life, but also a deeper, softly lingering sadness about the impermanence of all reality. 
"Mono no aware" can be manifest in lots of life stories and moments and songs. 
One example in Japanese culture is the celebration of the cherry blossom. 
The cherry blossom in and of itself is no more impressive than that of an apple or orange tree, but what sets it apart is its brevity. 
Cherry blossoms fall within a single week -- can be whisked away on the gentlest breeze -- and it's this that makes it more beautiful. 
It's utterly fragile, and fragility gives life its poignancy. 
Now, being a cheery chap, nothing speaks to me more than this, and -- (Laughter) you know, I think it's been the essence of my songwriting for years, of what moves me to write, what inspires me to sing. 
Because pain and grief and doubt, when it's made manifest in music, in song -- when it's made beautiful in poetry and painting, it can build a community and a kinship in the knowledge that we are none of us alone in darkness. 
My next song is one that I call "Killing Me," and as the name suggests, it's not a dance floor favorite. 
(Laughter) But it isn't miserable. 
It's full of love and hope. 
And I think it exemplifies everything I've been talking about. 
And it's the first song I've written from the perspective of somebody else, specifically my grandmother, as she lives on without my late grandfather, as she experiences new things in her life -- her grandchildren getting married, having their own children, speaking at TED -- all the while she lives without, and all the while she misses her soul mate. 
Thank you. 
(Piano) (Singing) Sweetheart would you wake up today? 
I promise you would recognize my faith I want to show you how I've grown in this place In this place I'm not alone And I know I'll be OK But it's always harder When the winter comes to stay And I can't help remember all the words I never said And it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty And you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me But I will love you faithfully. 
(Piano) Oh, everything is taller these days Maybe I feel smaller and time rushes away So much I could show you How all the great-grandchildren Have been laughing like we did when we were young I've been laughing like we did when we were young Oh, it's killing me that you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me I will love you faithfully Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh, it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me I will love you faithfully Oh, it's killing me That you're not here with me I'm living happily But I'm feeling guilty Oh, you won't believe The wonders I can see This world is changing me But I will love you faithfully Thank you very much. 
(Applause and cheering) 

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

The way we tell stories has naturally changed since Aristotle defined the rules of tragedy about 2,500 years ago. 
According to him, the role of storytelling is to mimic life and make us feel emotions. 
And that's exactly what storytelling as we know it has done very well since then. 
But there is a dimension of life that storytelling could never really reproduce. 
It is the notion of choices. 
Choices are a very important part of our lives. 
We as individuals are defined by the choices we make. 
Some of our decisions can have very significant consequences and totally change the courses of our lives. 
But in a play, a novel or a film, the writer makes all the decisions in advance for the characters, and as the audience, we can only watch, passively, the consequences of his decisions. 
As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. 
My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories. 
Finding a way to achieve this is what I did in the past 20 years of my life. 
Today, I would like to introduce you to this new way of telling stories, a way that has interactivity at its heart. 
Rather than exposing the theory behind it, which could have been kind of abstract and probably a little bit boring, I thought it would be a great opportunity to do a little experiment. 
I would like you, the people here at TED, to tell your own story. 
So I came with an interactive scene that we are going to play together. 
I've asked Vicky -- hello, Vicky -- to control the main character for us. 
And your role -- you, the audience -- will be to make the choices. 
So Vicky and I don't know what's going to happen, because it will all be based on your decisions. 
This scene comes from our next game, called "Detroit: Become Human," and we are in the near future, where technology made possible the creation of androids that look exactly like human beings. 
We are in the shoes of this character called Connor, who is an android, and he can do very fancy things with coins, as you can see. 
He has this blue triangle on this chest, as all androids do, and now Vicky is in control of this character. 
She can walk around, she can go anywhere, she can look around, she can interact with her environment, and now she can tell her own stories by making choices. 
So here we have our first choice. 
There is a fish on the ground. 
What should we do? 
Should we save it or should we leave it? 
Remember, we are under time pressure, so we'd better be fast. 
What should we do? 
Audience: Save it! 
David Cage: Save it? Save the fish? 
(Video) (Fish plops) DC: There we go. 
OK, we have an android who likes animals. 
OK, let's move on. 
Remember, we have a hostage situation. 
(Video) Woman: Please, please, you've got to save my little girl! 
Wait -- you're sending an android? 
Officer: All right, ma'am, you need to go. 
W: You can't do that! 
Why aren't you sending a real person? 
DC: OK, she's not really happy. 
Her daughter's been taken hostage by an android, and of course, she's in a state of shock. 
Now we can continue to explore this apartment. 
We see all the SWAT forces in place. 
But we need to find this Captain Allen first. 
That's the first thing we need to do. 
So, again, we can go anywhere. 
Vicky's still in control of the character. 
Let's see -- oh, I think this is Captain Allen. He's on the phone. 
(Video) Connor: Captain Allen, my name is Connor. 
I'm the android sent by CyberLife. 
Captain Allen: Let's fire at everything that moves. 
It already shot down two of my men. 
We could easily get it, but they're on the edge of the balcony -- it if falls, she falls. 
DC: OK, now we need to decide what we want to ask the captain. 
What should be our choice? 
Deviant's name? Deviant's behavior? Emotional shock? 
(Video) C: Has it experienced an emotional shock recently? 
Capt A: I haven't got a clue. Does it matter? 
C: I need information to determine the best approach. 
DC: OK, a second choice. Maybe we can learn something. 
What should we choose? 
Audience: Behavior. 
DC: OK, deviant behavior, Vicky. 
(Video) C: Do you know if it's been behaving strangely before this? 
Capt A: Listen ... saving that kid is all that matters. 
DC: OK, we are not going to learn anything from this guy. 
We need to do something. 
Let's try to go back in the lobby. 
Oh, wait -- there's a room over there on your right, Vicky, I think. 
Maybe there's something we can learn here. 
Oh, there's a tablet. 
Let's have a look. 
(Video) Girl: This is Daniel, the coolest android in the world. 
Say "Hi," Daniel. 
Daniel: Hello! 
G: You're my bestie, we'll always be together! 
DC: That was just one way of playing the scenes, but there are many other ways of playing it. 
Depending on the choices you make, we could have seen many different actions, many different consequences, many different outcomes. 
So that gives you an idea of what my work is about as an interactive writer. 
Where a linear writer needs to deal with time and space, as an interactive writer, I need to deal with time, space and possibilities. 
I have to manage massive tree structures, where each branch is a new variation of the story. 
I need to think about all the possibilities in a given scene and try to imagine everything that can happen. 
I need to deal with thousands and thousands of variables, conditions and possibilities. 
As a consequence, where a film script is about 100 pages, an interactive script like this is between four and five thousand pages. 
So that gives you an idea of what this work is about. 
But I think, in the end, the experience is very unique, because it is the result of the collaboration between a writer creating this narrative landscape and the player making his own decisions, telling his own story and becoming the cowriter but also the coactor and the codirector of the story. 
Interactive storytelling is a revolution in the way we tell stories. 
With the emergence of new platforms like interactive television, virtual reality and video games, it can become a new form of entertainment and maybe even a new form of art. 
I am convinced that in the coming years, we will see more and more moving and meaningful interactive experiences, created by a new generation of talents. 
This is a medium waiting for its Orson Welles or its Stanley Kubrick, and I have no doubt that they will soon emerge and be recognized as such. 
I believe that interactive storytelling can be what cinema was in the 20th century: an art that deeply changes its time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As a matter of fact, I was trying to think about my career since I left the White House, and the best example I have is a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago. 
This little boy is looking up at his father, and he says, "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a former president." 
(Laughter) Well, I have had a great blessing as a former president, because I have had an access that very few other people in the world have ever had to get to know so many people around this whole universe. 
Not only am I familiar with the 50 states in the United States, but also my wife and I have visited more than 145 countries in the world, and the Carter Center has had full-time programs in 80 nations on Earth. 
And a lot of times, when we go into a country, we not only the meet the king or the president, but we also meet the villagers who live in the most remote areas of Africa. 
So our overall commitment at the Carter Center is to promote human rights, and knowing the world as I do, I can tell you without any equivocation that the number one abuse of human rights on Earth is, strangely, not addressed quite often, is the abuse of women and girls. 
(Applause) There are a couple of reasons for this that I'll mention to begin with. 
First of all is the misinterpretation of religious scriptures, holy scriptures, in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, Quran and so forth, and these have been misinterpreted by men who are now in the ascendant positions in the synagogues and the churches and in the mosques. 
And they interpret these rules to make sure that women are ordinarily relegated to a secondary position compared to men in the eyes of God. 
This is a very serious problem. It's ordinarily not addressed. 
A number of years ago, in the year 2000, I had been a Baptist, a Southern Baptist for 70 years -- I tell you, I still teach Sunday school every Sunday; I'll be teaching this Sunday as well -- but the Southern Baptist Convention in the year 2000 decided that women should play a secondary position, a subservient position to men. 
So they issued an edict, in effect, that prevents women from being priests, pastors, deacons in the church, or chaplains in the military, and if a woman teaches a classroom in a Southern Baptist seminary, they cannot teach if a boy is in the room, because you can find verses in the Bible, there's over 30,000 verses in the Bible, that say that a woman shouldn't teach a man, and so forth. 
But the basic thing is the scriptures are misinterpreted to keep men in an ascendant position. 
That is an all-pervasive problem, because men can exert that power and if an abusive husband or an employer, for instance, wants to cheat women, they can say that if women are not equal in the eyes of God, why should I treat them as equals myself? 
Why should I pay them equal pay for doing the same kind of work? 
The other very serious blight that causes this problem is the excessive resort to violence, and that is increasing tremendously around the world. 
In the United States of America, for instance, we have had an enormous increase in abuse of poor people, mostly black people and minorities, by putting them in prison. 
When I was in office as governor of Georgia, one out of every 1,000 Americans were in prison. 
Nowadays, 7.3 people per 1,000 are in prison. 
That's a sevenfold increase. 
And since I left the White House, there's been an 800 percent increase in the number of women who are black who are in prison. 
We also have [one of the only countries] on Earth that still has the death penalty that is a developed country. 
And we rank right alongside the countries that are most abusive in all elements of human rights in encouraging the death penalty. 
We're in California now, and I figured out the other day that California has spent four billion dollars in convicting 13 people for the death penalty. 
If you add that up, that's 307 million dollars it costs California to send a person to be executed. 
Nebraska this week just passed a law abolishing the death penalty, because it costs so much. (Applause) So the resort to violence and abuse of poor people and helpless people is another cause of the increase in abuse of women. 
Let me just go down a very few abuses of women that concern me most, and I'll be fairly brief, because I have a limited amount of time, as you know. 
One is genital mutilation. 
Genital mutilation is horrible and not known by American women, but in some countries, many countries, when a child is born that's a girl, very soon in her life, her genitals are completely cut away by a so-called cutter who has a razor blade and, in a non-sterilized way, they remove the exterior parts of a woman's genitalia. 
And sometimes, in more extreme cases but not very rare cases, they sew the orifice up so the girl can just urinate or menstruate. 
And then later, when she gets married, the same cutter goes in and opens the orifice up so she can have sex. 
This is not a rare thing, although it's against the law in most countries. 
In Egypt, for instance, 91 percent of all the females that live in Egypt today have been sexually mutilated in that way. 
In some countries, it's more than 98 percent of the women are cut that way before they reach maturity. 
This is a horrible affliction on all women that live in those countries. 
Another very serious thing is honor killings, where a family with misinterpretation, again, of a holy scripture -- there's nothing in the Quran that mandates this -- will execute a girl in their family if she is raped or if she marries a man that her father does not approve, or sometimes even if she wears inappropriate clothing. 
And this is done by members of her own family, so the family becomes murderers when the girl brings so-called disgrace to the family. 
An analysis was done in Egypt not so long ago by the United Nations and it showed that 75 percent of these murders of a girl are perpetrated by the father, the uncle or the brother, but 25 percent of the murders are conducted by women. 
Another problem that we have in the world that relates to women particularly is slavery, or human trafficking it's called nowadays. 
There were about 12.5 million people sold from Africa into slavery in the New World back in the 19th century and the 18th century. 
There are 30 million people now living in slavery. 
The United States Department of State now has a mandate from Congress to give a report every year, and the State Department reports that 800,000 people are sold across international borders every year into slavery, and that 80 percent of those sold are women, into sexual slavery. 
In the United States right this moment, 60,000 people are living in human bondage, or slavery. 
Atlanta, Georgia, where the Carter Center is located and where I teach at Emory University, they have between 200 and 300 women, people sold into slavery every month. 
It's the number one place in the nation because of that. 
Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world, and they also have a lot of passengers that come from the Southern Hemisphere. 
If a brothel owner wants to buy a girl that has brown or black skin, they can do it for 1,000 dollars. 
A white-skinned girl brings several times more than that, and the average brothel owner in Atlanta and in the United States now can earn about $35,000 per slave. 
The sex trade in Atlanta, Georgia, exceeds the total drug trade in Atlanta, Georgia. 
So this is another very serious problem, and the basic problem is prostitution, because there's not a whorehouse in America that's not known by the local officials, the local policemen, or the chief of police or the mayor and so forth. 
And this leads to one of the worst problems, and that is that women are bought increasingly and put into sexual slavery in all countries in the world. 
Sweden has got a good approach to it. 
About 15 to 20 years ago, Sweden decided to change the law, and women are no longer prosecuted if they are in sexual slavery, but the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers are prosecuted, and -- (Applause) -- prostitution has gone down. 
In the United States, we take just the opposite position. 
For every male arrested for illegal sex trade, 25 women are arrested in the United States of America. 
Canada, Ireland, I've already said Sweden, France, and other countries are moving now towards this so-called Swedish model. 
That's another thing that can be done. 
We have two great institutions in this country that all of us admire: our military and our great university system. 
In the military, they are now analyzing how many sexual assaults take place. 
The last report I got, there were 26,000 sexual assaults that took place in the military -- 26,000. 
Only 3,000, not much more than 1 percent, are actually prosecuted, and the reason is that the commanding officer of any organization -- a ship like my submarine, or a battalion in the Army or a company in the Marines -- the commanding officer has the right under law to decide whether to prosecute a rapist or not, and of course, the last thing they want is for anybody to know that under their command, sexual assaults are taking place, so they do not do it. 
That law needs to be changed. 
About one out of four girls who enter American universities will be sexually assaulted before she graduates, and this is now getting a lot of publicity, partially because of my book, but other things, and so 89 universities in America are now condemned by the Department of Education under Title IX because the officials of the universities are not taking care of the women to protect them from sexual assault. 
The Department of Justice says that more than half of the rapes on a college campus take place by serial rapists, because outside of the university system, if they rape somebody, they'll be prosecuted, but when they get on a university campus, they can rape with impunity. 
They're not prosecuted. 
Those are the kinds of things that go on in our society. 
Another thing that's very serious about the abuse of women and girls is the lack of equal pay for equal work, as you know. (Applause) And this is sometimes misinterpreted, but for full-time employment, a woman in the United States now gets 23 percent less than a man. 
When I became president, the difference was 39 percent. 
So we've made some progress, partially because I was president and so forth -- (Applause) (Laughter) -- but in the last 15 years, there's been no progress made, so it's been just about 23 or 24 percent difference for the last 15 years. 
These are the kind of things that go on. 
If you take the Fortune 500 companies, 23 of them have women CEOs, out of 500, and those CEOs, I need not tell you, make less on an average than the other CEOs. 
Well, that's what goes on in our country. 
Another problem with the United States is we are the most warlike nation on Earth. 
We have been to war with about 25 different countries since the Second World War. 
Sometimes, we've had soldiers on the ground fighting. 
The other times, we've been flying overhead dropping bombs on people. 
Other times, of course, now, we have drones that attack people and so forth. 
We've been at war with 25 different countries or more since the Second World War. 
There was four years, I won't say which ones, where we didn't -- (Applause) -- we didn't drop a bomb, we didn't launch a missile, we didn't fire a bullet. 
But anyway, those kinds of things, the resort to violence and the misinterpretation of the holy scriptures are what causes, are the basic causes, of abuse of women and girls. 
There's one more basic cause that I need not mention, and that is that in general, men don't give a damn. 
(Applause) That's true. 
The average man that might say, I'm against the abuse of women and girls quietly accepts the privileged position that we occupy, and this is very similar to what I knew when I was a child, when separate but equal had existed. 
Racial discrimination, legally, had existed for 100 years, from 1865 at the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War, all the way up to the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson got the bills passed for equal rights. 
But during that time, there were many white people that didn't think that racial discrimination was okay, but they stayed quiet, because they enjoyed the privileges of better jobs, unique access to jury duty, better schools, and everything else, and that's the same thing that exists today, because the average man really doesn't care. 
Even though they say, "I'm against discrimination against girls and women," they enjoy a privileged position. 
And it's very difficult to get the majority of men who control the university system, the majority of men that control the military system, the majority of men that control the governments of the world, and the majority of men that control the great religions. 
So what is the basic thing that we need to do today? 
I would say the best thing that we could do today is for the women in the powerful nations like this one, and where you come from, Europe and so forth, who have influence and who have freedom to speak and to act, need to take the responsibility on yourselves to be more forceful in demanding an end to racial discrimination against girls and women all over the world. 
The average woman in Egypt doesn't have much to say about her daughters getting genitally mutilated and so forth. 
I didn't even go down to detail about that. 
But I hope that out of this conference, that every woman here will get your husbands to realize that these abuses on the college campuses and the military and so forth and in the future job market, need to protect your daughters and your granddaughters. 
I have 12 grandchildren, four children, and 10 great-grandchildren, and I think often about them and about the plight that they will face in America, not only if they lived in Egypt or a foreign country, in having equal rights, and I hope that all of you will join me in being a champion for women and girls around the world and protect their human rights. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Five years ago, I stood on the TED stage, and I spoke about my work. 
But one year later, I had a terrible accident as I left a pub one dark night with friends, in Scotland. 
As we followed the path through a forest, I suddenly felt a massive thud, then a second thud, and I fell to the ground. 
I had no idea what had hit me. 
I later found out that when the gate was opened on a garden, a wild stag stampeded along the path and ran straight into me. 
Its antler penetrated my trachea and my esophagus and stopped at my spinal cord and fractured my neck. 
My best friend found me lying on the floor, gurgling for help through a hole in my neck. 
And we locked eyes, and although I couldn't speak, she could understand what I was thinking. 
And she told me, "Just breathe." 
And so, whilst focusing on my breath, I had a strong sense of calmness, but I was certain that I was going to die. 
Somehow, I was content with this, because I've always tried to do my best in life whenever I can. 
So I just continued to enjoy each breath as one more moment -- one breath in and one breath out. 
An ambulance came, I was still fully conscious, and I analyzed everything on the journey, because I'm a scientist: the sound of the tires on the road, the frequency of the street lights and eventually, the city street lights. 
And I thought, "Maybe I will survive." 
And then I passed out. 
I was stabilized at a local hospital and then airlifted to Glasgow, where they reconstructed my throat and put me in a coma. 
And while I was in the coma, I had many alternate realities. 
It was like a crazy mix of "Westworld" and "Black Mirror." 
But that's a whole other story. 
My local TV station reported live from outside the hospital of a Cambridge scientist who was in a coma, and they didn't know if she would live or die or walk or talk. 
And a week later, I woke up from that coma. 
And that was the first gift. 
Then I had the gift to think, the gift to move, the gift to breathe and the gift to eat and to drink. 
That took three and a half months. 
But there was one thing that I never got back, though, and that was my privacy. 
The tabloid press made the story about gender. 
Look -- I'm transgender, it's not that big a deal. 
Like, my hair color or my shoe size is way more interesting. 
When I last spoke here -- (Applause) When I last spoke here -- (Applause) at TED, I didn't talk about it, because it's boring. 
And one Scottish newspaper ran with the headline: "Sex Swap Scientist Gored by Stag." 
And five others did similar things. 
And for a minute, I was angry. 
But then I found my calm place. 
And what ran through my head was, "They've crossed the wrong woman, and they're not going to know what's hit them." 
(Laughter) I'm a kindness ninja. 
I don't really know what a ninja does, but to me, they slip through the shadows, crawl through the sewers, skip across the rooftops, and before you know it, they're behind you. 
They don't turn up with an army or complain, and they're laser-focused on a plan. 
So when I lay in my hospital bed, I thought of my plan to help reduce the chances of them doing this to somebody else, by using the system as is, and paying the price of sacrificing my privacy. 
What they told one million people, I will tell 10 million people. 
Because when you're angry, people defend themselves. 
So I didn't attack them, and they were defenseless. 
I wrote kind and calm letters to these newspapers. 
And The Sun newspaper, the kind of "Fox News" of the UK, thanked me for my "reasoned approach." 
I asked for no apology, no retraction, no money, just an acknowledgment that they broke their own rules, and what they did was just wrong. 
And on this journey, I started to learn who they are, and they began to learn who I am. 
And we actually became friends. 
I've even had a few glasses of wine with Philippa from The Sun since then. 
And after three months, they all agreed, and the statements were published on a Friday, and that was the end of that. 
Or so they thought. 
On the Saturday, I went on the evening news, with the headline "Six National Newspapers Admit They Were Wrong." 
And the anchor said to me, "But don't you think it's our job as journalists to sensationalize a story?" 
And I said, "I was laying on a forest floor, gored by a stag. 
Is that not sensational enough?" 
(Laughter) And I was now writing the headlines. 
My favorite one was, "The stag trampled on my throat, and the press trampled on my privacy." 
It was the most read piece of BBC News online that day. 
And I was kind of having fun. 
And by the end of my week of media, I started to use my newfound voice and platform to spread a message of love and kindness. 
And when I had the minute of anger and hatred towards those press and journalists, I had to identify my inner bigotry towards them. 
And I had to meet and speak with these people without judgment. 
I had to let myself understand them, and in return, they began to understand me. 
Well, six months later, they asked me to join the committee that regulates the press. 
And a few times a year, I sip tea and dip biscuits with the likes of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who says to me, "So, Kate, how have your last few months been?" 
And I respect them. 
And I'm now one of three members of the public who has a seat at the table -- not because I'm different, but because my voice counts, just like anybody else. 
And the irony is, every now and again, I'm asked to visit those printing presses of this declining industry, because some people think that the technology I spoke about here, last time at TED, my interactive print, might actually help save them. 
So beware of your inner bigot, and make friends from your enemies. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What if you could take a pill or a vaccine and, just like getting over a cold, you could heal your wounds faster? 
Today, if we have an operation or an accident, we're in the hospital for weeks, and often left with scars and painful side effects of our inability to regenerate or regrow healthy, uninjured organs. 
I work to create materials that instruct our immune system to give us the signals to grow new tissues. 
Just like vaccines instruct our body to fight disease, we could instead instruct our immune system to build tissues and more quickly heal wounds. 
Now, regrowing body parts out of nowhere might seem like magic, but there are several organisms that can achieve this feat. 
Some lizards can regrow their tails, the humble salamander can completely regenerate their arm, and even us mere humans can regrow our liver after losing more than half of its original mass. 
To make this magic a bit closer to reality, I'm investigating how our body can heal wounds and build tissue through instructions from the immune system. 
From a scrape on your knee to that annoying sinus infection, our immune system defends our body from danger. 
I'm an immunologist, and by using what I know about our body's defense system, I was able to identify key players in our fight to build back our cuts and bruises. 
When looking at materials that are currently being tested for their abilities to help regrow muscle, our team noticed that after treating an injured muscle with these materials, there was a large number of immune cells in that material and the surrounding muscle. 
So in this case, instead of the immune cells rushing off towards infection to fight bacteria, they're rushing toward an injury. 
I discovered a specific type of immune cell, the helper T cell, was present inside that material that I implanted and absolutely critical for wound healing. 
Now, just like when you were a kid and you'd break your pencil and try and tape it back together again, we can heal, but it might not be in the most functional way, and we'll get a scar. 
So if we don't have these helper T cells, instead of healthy muscle, our muscle develops fat cells inside of it, and if there's fat in our muscle, it isn't as strong. 
Now, using our immune system, our body could grow back without these scars and look like what it was before we were even injured. 
I'm working to create materials that give us the signals to build new tissue by changing the immune response. 
We know that any time a material is implanted in our body, the immune system will respond to it. 
This ranges from pacemakers to insulin pumps to the materials that engineers are using to try and build new tissue. 
So when I place that material, or scaffold, in the body, the immune system creates a small environment of cells and proteins that can change the way that our stem cells behave. 
Now, just like the weather affects our daily activities, like going for a run or staying inside and binge-watching an entire TV show on Netflix, the immune environment of a scaffold affects the way that our stem cells grow and develop. 
If we have the wrong signals, say the Netflix signals, we get fat cells instead of muscle. 
These scaffolds are made of a variety of different things, from plastics to naturally derived materials, nanofibers of varying thicknesses, sponges that are more or less porous, gels of different stiffnesses. 
And researchers can even make the materials release different signals over time. 
So in other words, we can orchestrate this Broadway show of cells by giving them the correct stage, cues and props that can be changed for different tissues, just like a producer would change the set for "Les Mis" versus "Little Shop of Horrors." 
I'm combining specific types of signals that mimic how our body responds to injury to help us regenerate. 
In the future, we could see a scar-proof band-aid, a moldable muscle filler or even a wound-healing vaccine. 
Now, we aren't going to wake up tomorrow and be able to heal like Wolverine. 
Probably not next Tuesday, either. 
But with these advances, and working with our immune system to help build tissue and heal wounds, we could begin seeing products on the market that work with our body's defense system to help us regenerate, and maybe one day be able to keep pace with a salamander. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Jeanie, Will and Adina are three senior citizens connected by a special relationship. 
They view their bond as a shield from the loneliness of aging. 
I first met them at a retirement home in Los Angeles, where I had been photographing for three years. 
I saw as they approached the gate one night, and felt an immediate connection to them. 
Although I didn't know the details of their love triangle, I intuitively felt that I had to find out who they were. 
Questioning a nurse a day later, she said to me, "Oh, you're talking about the threesome." 
(Laughter) I was intrigued. 
(Laughter) The trio set out on a daily adventure to coffee and doughnut shops, bus stops and street corners. 
I soon learned that the purpose of these outings was solace and a search for meaning. 
The trio sought to combat their alienation by literally integrating themselves in public streets. 
Yet, even when arm in arm, no one saw them. 
We often think that as we age, we lose the desires held in our youth. 
Actually, as a teenage photojournalist when I met the trio, I saw their behavior as a mirror to the fears of exclusion and desires for intimacy that I also carried. 
I related to their invisibility, which pained me during my childhood but has become my greatest asset as an immersive documentarian, because I can just fade into my empathy. 
As we walked down the streets of Hollywood, in a neighborhood of screenwriters, actors and filmmakers, the trio assumed the invisibility that each senior does. 
I would ask myself, "How is it that no one else sees these three human beings? 
Why is it that I am the only one who sees them?" 
Years later, as I began to share this work with the public, I noticed that people are largely uncomfortable with this story. 
Perhaps it is because the trio doesn't assume conventional notions associated with love, romance or partnership. 
They were unseen in public and shunned by their peers. 
They wanted to belong somewhere but only seemed to belong with each other. 
I wanted to belong somewhere, too. 
And my camera has been a catalyst for me to belong everywhere. 
But beyond challenging sociocultural norms about the elderly, the trio sheds light on fear of remoteness. 
At the end of each day, they return to their respective retirement homes. 
Under the surface of their aloneness, there is a desire for community, for their people. 
There was a sense that they were each yearning for their tribe, but that comfort comes with compromise, because Will cannot commit to one woman. 
Sitting with Jeanie one day in her apartment, she said to me, "Sharing Will is a thorn in your side. 
A relationship between a man and a woman is private. 
It is a couple, not a trio." 
My process is to essentially become the people I document by spending years with them as an observer-occupant, to create a safe space, to then become hidden in plain sight. 
I was about 17 when I met the trio, and I shadowed them for four years. 
We actually see, in the breakdown of social development, that adolescence and old age look strikingly alike, because both are periods of identity confusion. 
I identified with the women. 
But also with Will, who made me aware of the divide in me. 
The schism that we each often have about what we crave and the actuality of our situation. 
Before shooting this series, I was also in love with two different people who knew about each other, being the object over which they fought. 
But I also knew what it was like to be at the base of the triangle, like Jeanie or Adina, asking myself, "Why aren't I enough?" 
I would look through my viewfinder and see three elderly figures, and it became impossible to deny that regardless of age, we were each in pursuit of filling the proverbial hole through other people. 
Perhaps the discomfort of looking at Jeanie, Will and Adina's story is truly a reminder that even at the end of life, we may never reach the fantasy we have envisioned for ourselves. 
Thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

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

Seventy-thousand years ago, our ancestors were insignificant animals. 
The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. 
Their impact on the world was not much greater than that of jellyfish or fireflies or woodpeckers. 
Today, in contrast, we control this planet. 
And the question is: How did we come from there to here? 
How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes, minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of planet Earth? 
Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level. 
We want to believe -- I want to believe -- that there is something special about me, about my body, about my brain, that makes me so superior to a dog or a pig, or a chimpanzee. 
But the truth is that, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. 
And if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island, and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bet on the chimpanzee, not on myself. 
And this is not something wrong with me personally. 
I guess if they took almost any one of you, and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some island, the chimpanzee would do much better. 
The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level; it's on the collective level. 
Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. 
Now, there are other animals -- like the social insects, the bees, the ants -- that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don't do so flexibly. 
Their cooperation is very rigid. 
There is basically just one way in which a beehive can function. 
And if there's a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. 
They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees, or a communist dictatorship of worker bees. 
Other animals, like the social mammals -- the wolves, the elephants, the dolphins, the chimpanzees -- they can cooperate much more flexibly, but they do so only in small numbers, because cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge, one of the other. 
I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee, and I want to cooperate with you. 
I need to know you personally. 
What kind of chimpanzee are you? 
Are you a nice chimpanzee? 
Are you an evil chimpanzee? 
Are you trustworthy? 
If I don't know you, how can I cooperate with you? 
The only animal that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us, Homo sapiens. 
One versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. 
But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. 
And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tienanmen Square or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. 
Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. 
Complete madness. 
In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos, usually. 
What we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. 
All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. 
Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now: I'm standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. 
Similarly, I don't really know all the people who have organized and worked on this event. 
I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here, yesterday, to London. 
I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras, which are recording what I'm saying. 
I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I read in preparation for this talk. 
And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the Internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi. 
Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas. 
This is something chimpanzees cannot do. 
They communicate, of course, but you will never catch a chimpanzee traveling to some distant chimpanzee band to give them a talk about bananas or about elephants, or anything else that might interest chimpanzees. 
Now cooperation is, of course, not always nice; all the horrible things humans have been doing throughout history -- and we have been doing some very horrible things -- all those things are also based on large-scale cooperation. 
Prisons are a system of cooperation; slaughterhouses are a system of cooperation; concentration camps are a system of cooperation. 
Chimpanzees don't have slaughterhouses and prisons and concentration camps. 
Now suppose I've managed to convince you perhaps that yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. 
The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive listener is: How, exactly, do we do it? 
What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? 
The answer is our imagination. 
We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. 
And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. 
All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. 
A chimpanzee may say, "Look! There's a lion, let's run away!" 
Or, "Look! There's a banana tree over there! Let's go and get bananas!" 
Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. 
A human can say, "Look, there is a god above the clouds! 
And if you don't do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell." 
And if you all believe this story that I've invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. 
This is something only humans can do. 
You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him, "... after you die, you'll go to chimpanzee heaven ..." 
(Laughter) "... and you'll receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds. 
So now give me this banana." 
No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story. 
Only humans believe such stories, which is why we control the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. 
Now you may find it acceptable that yes, in the religious field, humans cooperate by believing in the same fictions. 
Millions of people come together to build a cathedral or a mosque or fight in a crusade or a jihad, because they all believe in the same stories about God and heaven and hell. 
But what I want to emphasize is that exactly the same mechanism underlies all other forms of mass-scale human cooperation, not only in the religious field. 
Take, for example, the legal field. 
Most legal systems today in the world are based on a belief in human rights. 
But what are human rights? 
Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. 
They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens. 
Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won't find any rights. 
The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries. 
They may be very positive stories, very good stories, but they're still just fictional stories that we've invented. 
The same is true of the political field. 
The most important factors in modern politics are states and nations. 
But what are states and nations? 
They are not an objective reality. 
A mountain is an objective reality. 
You can see it, you can touch it, you can even smell it. 
But a nation or a state, like Israel or Iran or France or Germany, this is just a story that we've invented and became extremely attached to. 
The same is true of the economic field. 
The most important actors today in the global economy are companies and corporations. 
Many of you today, perhaps, work for a corporation, like Google or Toyota or McDonald's. 
What exactly are these things? 
They are what lawyers call legal fictions. 
They are stories invented and maintained by the powerful wizards we call lawyers. 
(Laughter) And what do corporations do all day? 
Mostly, they try to make money. 
Yet, what is money? 
Again, money is not an objective reality; it has no objective value. 
Take this green piece of paper, the dollar bill. 
Look at it -- it has no value. 
You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it, you cannot wear it. 
But then came along these master storytellers -- the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers -- and they tell us a very convincing story: "Look, you see this green piece of paper? 
It is actually worth 10 bananas." 
And if I believe it, and you believe it, and everybody believes it, it actually works. 
I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to the supermarket, give it to a complete stranger whom I've never met before, and get, in exchange, real bananas which I can actually eat. 
This is something amazing. 
You could never do it with chimpanzees. 
Chimpanzees trade, of course: "Yes, you give me a coconut, I'll give you a banana." 
That can work. 
But, you give me a worthless piece of paper and you except me to give you a banana? 
No way! 
What do you think I am, a human? 
(Laughter) Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. 
Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in human rights, not everybody believes in nationalism, but everybody believes in money, and in the dollar bill. 
Take, even, Osama Bin Laden. 
He hated American politics and American religion and American culture, but he had no objection to American dollars. 
He was quite fond of them, actually. 
(Laughter) To conclude, then: We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. 
All other animals live in an objective reality. 
Their reality consists of objective entities, like rivers and trees and lions and elephants. 
We humans, we also live in an objective reality. 
In our world, too, there are rivers and trees and lions and elephants. 
But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations. 
And what is amazing is that as history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities. 
Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities, like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank -- entities that exist only in our own imagination. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Yuval, you have a new book out. 
After Sapiens, you wrote another one, and it's out in Hebrew, but not yet translated into ... 
Yuval Noah Harari: I'm working on the translation as we speak. 
BG: In the book, if I understand it correctly, you argue that the amazing breakthroughs that we are experiencing right now not only will potentially make our lives better, but they will create -- and I quote you -- "... new classes and new class struggles, just as the industrial revolution did." 
Can you elaborate for us? 
YNH: Yes. In the industrial revolution, we saw the creation of a new class of the urban proletariat. 
And much of the political and social history of the last 200 years involved what to do with this class, and the new problems and opportunities. 
Now, we see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. 
(Laughter) As computers become better and better in more and more fields, there is a distinct possibility that computers will out-perform us in most tasks and will make humans redundant. 
And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be, "What do we need humans for?", or at least, "What do we need so many humans for?" 
BG: Do you have an answer in the book? 
YNH: At present, the best guess we have is to keep them happy with drugs and computer games ... 
(Laughter) but this doesn't sound like a very appealing future. 
BG: Ok, so you're basically saying in the book and now, that for all the discussion about the growing evidence of significant economic inequality, we are just kind of at the beginning of the process? 
YNH: Again, it's not a prophecy; it's seeing all kinds of possibilities before us. 
One possibility is this creation of a new massive class of useless people. 
Another possibility is the division of humankind into different biological castes, with the rich being upgraded into virtual gods, and the poor being degraded to this level of useless people. 
BG: I feel there is another TED talk coming up in a year or two. 
Thank you, Yuval, for making the trip. 
YNH: Thanks! 
(Applause) 

I love infographics. 
As an information designer, I've worked with all sorts of data over the past 25 years. 
I have a few insights to share, but first: a little history. 
Communication is the encoding, transmission and decoding of information. 
Breakthroughs in communication mark turning points in human culture. 
Oracy, literacy and numeracy were great developments in communication. 
They allow us to encode ideas into words and quantities into numbers. 
Without communication, we'd still be stuck in the Stone Ages. 
Although humans have been around for a quarter million years, it was only 8,000 years ago that proto-writings began to surface. 
Nearly 3,000 years later, the first proper writing systems took shape. 
Maps have been around for millennia and diagrams for hundreds of years, but representing quantities through graphics is a relatively new development. 
It wasn't until 1786 that William Playfair invented the first bar chart, giving birth to visual display of quantitative information. 
Fifteen years later, he introduced the first pie and area charts. 
His inventions are still the most commonly used chart forms today. 
Florence Nightingale invented the coxcomb in 1857 for a presentation to Queen Victoria on troop mortality. 
Highlighted in blue, she showed how most troops' deaths could have been prevented. 
Shortly after, Charles Minard charted Napoleon's march on Moscow, illustrating how an army of 422,000 dwindled to just 10,000 as battles, geography and freezing temperatures took their toll. 
He combined a Sankey diagram with cartography and a line chart for temperature. 
I get excited when I get lots of data to play with, especially when it yields an interesting chart form. 
Here, Nightingale's coxcomb was the inspiration to organize data on thousands of federal energy subsidies, scrutinizing the lack of investment in renewables over fossil fuels. 
This Sankey diagram illustrates the flow of energy through the US economy, emphasizing how nearly half of the energy used is lost as waste heat. 
I love it when data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes. 
Here, the personal and professional connections of the women of Silicon Valley can be woven into arcs, same as the collaboration of inventors birthing patents across the globe can be mapped. 
I've even made charts for me. 
I'm a numbers person, so I rarely win at Scrabble. 
I made this diagram to remember all the two- and three-letter words in the official Scrabble dictionary. 
(Laughter) Knowing these 1,168 words certainly is a game changer. 
(Laughter) Sometimes I produce code to quickly generate graphics from thousands of data points. 
Coding also enables me to produce interactive graphics. 
Now we can navigate information on our own terms. 
Exotic chart forms certainly look cool, but something as simple as a little dot may be all you need to solve a particular thinking task. 
In 2006, the "New York Times" redesigned their "Markets" section, cutting it down from eight pages of stock listings to just one and a half pages of essential market data. 
We listed performance metrics for the most common stocks, but I wanted to help investors see how the stocks are doing. 
So I added a simple little dot to show the current price relative to its one-year range. 
At a glance, value investors can pick out stocks trading near their lows by looking for dots to the left. 
Momentum investors can find stocks on an upward trajectory via dots to the right. 
Shortly after, the "Wall Street Journal" copied the design. 
Simplicity is often the goal for most graphics, but sometimes we need to embrace complexity and show large data sets in their full glory. 
Alec Gallup, the former chairman of the Gallup Organization, once handed me a very thick book. 
It was his family's legacy: hundreds of pages covering six decades of presidential approval data. 
I told him the entire book could be graphed on a single page. 
"Impossible," he said. 
And here it is: 25,000 data points on a single page. 
At a glance, one sees that most presidents start with a high approval rating, but few keep it. 
Events like wars initially boost approval; scandals trigger declines. 
These major events were annotated in the graphic but not in the book. 
The point is, graphics can transmit data with incredible efficiency. 
Graphicacy -- the ability to read and write graphics -- is still in its infancy. 
New chart forms will emerge and specialized dialects will evolve. 
Graphics that help us think faster or see a book's worth of information on a single page are the key to unlocking new discoveries. 
Our visual cortex was built to decode complex information and is a master at pattern recognition. 
Graphicacy enables us to harness our built-in GPU to process mountains of data and find the veins of gold hiding within. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

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

You spend weeks studying for an important test. 
On the big day, you wait nervously as your teacher hands it out. 
You’re working your way through, when you’re asked to define ‘ataraxia.’ You know you’ve seen it before, but your mind goes blank. 
What just happened? 
The answer lies in the complex relationship between stress and memory. 
There are many types and degrees of stress and different kinds of memory, but we’re going to focus on how short-term stress impacts your memory for facts. 
To start, it helps to understand how this kind of memory works. 
Facts you read, hear, or study become memories through a process with three main steps. 
First comes acquisition: the moment you encounter a new piece of information. 
Each sensory experience activates a unique set of brain areas. 
In order to become lasting memories, these sensory experiences have to be consolidated by the hippocampus, influenced by the amygdala, which emphasizes experiences associated with strong emotions. 
The hippocampus then encodes memories, probably by strengthening the synaptic connections stimulated during the original sensory experience. 
Once a memory has been encoded, it can be remembered, or retrieved, later. 
Memories are stored all over the brain, and it’s likely the prefrontal cortex that signals for their retrieval. 
So how does stress affect each of these stages? 
In the first two stages, moderate stress can actually help experiences enter your memory. 
Your brain responds to stressful stimuli by releasing hormones known as corticosteroids, which activate a process of threat-detection and threat-response in the amygdala. 
The amygdala prompts your hippocampus to consolidate the stress-inducing experience into a memory. 
Meanwhile, the flood of corticosteroids from stress stimulates your hippocampus, also prompting memory consolidation. 
But even though some stress can be helpful, extreme and chronic stress can have the opposite effect. 
Researchers have tested this by injecting rats directly with stress hormones. 
As they gradually increased the dose of corticosteroids, the rats’ performance on memory tests increased at first, but dropped off at higher doses. 
In humans, we see a similar positive effect with moderate stress. 
But that only appears when the stress is related to the memory task— so while time pressure might help you memorize a list, having a friend scare you will not. 
And the weeks, months, or even years of sustained corticosteroids that result from chronic stress can damage the hippocampus and decrease your ability to form new memories. 
It would be nice if some stress also helped us remember facts, but unfortunately, the opposite is true. 
The act of remembering relies on the prefrontal cortex, which governs thought, attention, and reasoning. 
When corticosteroids stimulate the amygdala, the amygdala inhibits, or lessens the activity of, the prefrontal cortex. 
The reason for this inhibition is so the fight/flight/freeze response can overrule slower, more reasoned thought in a dangerous situation. 
But that can also have the unfortunate effect of making your mind go blank during a test. 
And then the act of trying to remember can itself be a stressor, leading to a vicious cycle of more corticosteroid release and an even smaller chance of remembering. 
So what can you do to turn stress to your advantage and stay calm and collected when it matters the most? 
First, if you know a stressful situation like a test is coming, try preparing in conditions similar to the stressful environment. 
Novelty can be a stressor. 
Completing practice questions under time pressure, or seated at a desk rather than on a couch, can make your stress response to these circumstances less sensitive during the test itself. 
Exercise is another useful tool. 
Increasing your heart and breathing rate is linked to chemical changes in your brain that help reduce anxiety and increase your sense of well-being. 
Regular exercise is also widely thought to improve sleeping patterns, which comes in handy the night before a test. 
And on the actual test day, try taking deep breaths to counteract your body’s flight/fight/freeze response. 
Deep breathing exercises have shown measurable reduction in test anxiety in groups ranging from third graders to nursing students. 
So the next time you find your mind going blank at a critical moment, take a few deep breaths until you remember ataraxia: a state of calmness, free from anxiety. 

So, as a child, I used to spend all of my time at my great-grandmother's house. 
On hot, humid, summer days, I would dash across the floor and stick my face in front of her only air conditioner. 
But I didn't realize that that simple experience, though brief, was a privileged one in our community. 
Growing up, stories of next-door neighbors having to set up fake energy accounts or having to steal energy seemed normal to me. 
During the winter, struggling to get warm, my neighbors would have no choice but to bypass the meter after their heat was shut off, just to keep their family comfortable for one more day. 
These kinds of dangerous incidents can take root when people are faced with impossible choices. 
In the US, the average American spends three percent of their income on energy. 
In contrast, low-income and rural populations can spend 20, even 30 percent of their income on energy. 
In 2015, this caused over 25 million people to skip meals to provide power to their homes. 
This is when energy becomes a burden. 
But energy burdens are so much more than just a number. 
They present impossible and perilous choices: Do you take your child to get her flu medicine, or do you feed her? 
Or do you keep her warm? 
It's an impossible choice, and nearly every month, seven million people choose between medicine and energy. 
This exposes a much larger and systemic issue. 
Families with high energy burdens are disproportionately people of color, who spend more per square foot than their white counterparts. 
But it's also nurses, veterans and even schoolteachers who fall into the mass of 37 million people a year who are unable to afford energy for their most basic needs. 
As a result, those with high energy burdens have a greater likelihood of conditions like heart disease and asthma. 
Look -- given our rockets to Mars and our pocket-sized AI, we have the tools to address these systemic inequities. 
The technology is here. 
Cost of renewables, insulation, microgrids and smart home technology are all decreasing. 
However, even as we approach cost parity, the majority of those who own solar earn much more than the average American. 
This is why, when I was 22, I founded the nonprofit RETI. 
Our mission is to alleviate energy burdens by working with communities, utilities and government agencies alike to provide equitable access to clean energy, energy efficiency and energy technology. 
But there's no one way to solve this. 
I believe in the power of local communities, in the transforming effect of relationships. 
So we start by working directly with the communities that have the highest energy burdens. 
We host workshops and events for communities to learn about energy poverty, and how making even small updates to their homes like better insulation for windows and water heaters can go a long way to maximize efficiency. 
We're connecting neighborhoods to community solar and spearheading community-led smart home research and installation programs to help families bring down their energy bills. 
We're even working directly with elected officials, advocating for more equitable pricing, because to see this vision of energy equity and resilience succeed, we have to work together sustainably. 
Now, the US spends over three billion a year on energy bill payment assistance. 
And these programs do help millions of people, but they're only able to help a fraction of those in need. 
In fact, there is a 47-billion-dollar home-energy affordability gap, so assistance alone is not sustainable. 
But by building energy equity and resilience into our communities, we can assure fair and impartial access to energy that is clean, reliable and affordable. 
At scale, microgrid technology, clean technology and energy efficiency dramatically improve public health. 
And for those with high energy burdens, it can help them reclaim 20 percent of their income -- 20 percent of a person's income who's struggling to make ends meet. 
This is life-changing. 
This is an opportunity for families to use their energy savings to sponsor their future. 
I think back to my great-grandmother and her neighbors, the impossible choices that they had to make and the effect it had on our whole community. 
But this is not just about them. 
There are millions nationwide having to make the same impossible choices today. 
And I know high energy burdens are a tremendous barrier to overcome, but through relationships with communities and technology, we have the paths to overcome them. 
And when we do, we will all be more resilient. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From asteroids capable of destroying entire species, to gamma-ray bursts and supernovae that could exterminate life on Earth, outer space has no shortage of forces that could wreak havoc on our tiny planet. 
But there’s something in space that seems more terrifying than any of these – something that wipes out everything it comes near. 
Could the Earth be swallowed by a black hole? 
A black hole is an object so dense that space and time around it are inescapably modified, warped into an infinite sink. 
Nothing, not even light, can move fast enough to escape a black hole’s gravitational pull once it passes a certain boundary, known as the event horizon. 
Thus, a black hole is like a cosmic vacuum cleaner with infinite capacity, gobbling up everything in its path, and letting nothing out. 
To determine whether a black hole could swallow the Earth, we first have to figure out where they are. 
But since they don’t emit light, how’s that possible? 
Fortunately, we’re able to observe their effect on the space around them. 
When matter approaches a black hole, the immense gravitational field accelerates it to high speed. 
This emits an enormous amount of light. 
And for objects too far away to be sucked in, the massive gravitational force still affects their orbits. 
If we observe several stars orbiting around an apparently empty point, a black hole could be leading the dance. 
Similarly, light that passes close enough to an event horizon will be deflected in a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. 
Most of the black holes that we’ve found can be thought of as two main types. 
The smaller ones, called stellar mass black holes, have a mass up to 100 times larger than that of our sun. 
They’re formed when a massive star consumes all its nuclear fuel and its core collapses. 
We’ve observed several of these objects as close as 3000 light-years away, and there could be up to 100 million small black holes just in the Milky Way galaxy. 
So should we be worried? 
Probably not. 
Despite their large mass, stellar black holes only have a radius of around 300 kilometers or less, making the chances of a direct hit with us miniscule. 
Although because their gravitational fields can affect a planet from a large distance, they could be dangerous even without a direct collision. 
If a typical stellar-mass black hole were to pass in the region of Neptune, the orbit of the Earth would be considerably modified, with dire results. 
Still, the combination of how small they are and how vast the galaxy is means that stellar black holes don’t give us much to worry about. 
But we still have to meet the second type: supermassive black holes. 
These have masses millions or billions times greater than that of our sun and have event horizons that could span billions of kilometers. 
These giants have grown to immense proportions by swallowing matter and merging with other black holes. 
Unlike their stellar cousins, supermassive black holes aren’t wandering through space. 
Instead, they lie at the center of galaxies, including our own. 
Our solar system is in a stable orbit around a supermassive black hole that resides at the center of the Milky Way, at a safe distance of 25,000 light-years. 
But that could change. 
If our galaxy collides with another, the Earth could be thrown towards the galactic center, close enough to the supermassive black hole to be eventually swallowed up. 
In fact, a collision with the Andromeda Galaxy is predicted to happen 4 billion years from now, which may not be great news for our home planet. 
But before we judge them too harshly, black holes aren’t simply agents of destruction. 
They played a crucial role in the formation of galaxies, the building blocks of our universe. 
Far from being shadowy characters in the cosmic play, black holes have fundamentally contributed in making the universe a bright and astonishing place. 

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

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

A high forehead topped by disheveled black hair, a sickly pallor, and a look of deep intelligence and deeper exhaustion in his dark, sunken eyes. 
Edgar Allan Poe’s image is not just instantly recognizable – it’s perfectly suited to his reputation. 
From the prisoner strapped under a descending pendulum blade, to a raven who refuses to leave the narrator’s chamber, Poe’s macabre and innovative stories of gothic horror have left a timeless mark on literature. 
But just what is it that makes Edgar Allan Poe one of the greatest American authors? 
After all, horror was a popular genre of the period, with many practitioners. 
Yet Poe stood out thanks to his careful attention to form and style. 
As a literary critic, he identified two cardinal rules for the short story form: it must be short enough to read in one sitting, and every word must contribute to its purpose. 
By mastering these rules, Poe commands the reader’s attention and rewards them with an intense and singular experience – what Poe called the unity of effect. 
Though often frightening, this effect goes far beyond fear. 
Poe’s stories use violence and horror to explore the paradoxes and mysteries of love, grief, and guilt, while resisting simple interpretations or clear moral messages. 
And while they often hint at supernatural elements, the true darkness they explore is the human mind and its propensity for self-destruction. 
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a ghastly murder is juxtaposed with the killer’s tender empathy towards the victim – a connection that soon returns to haunt him. 
The title character of "Ligeia" returns from the dead through the corpse of her husband’s second wife – or at least the opium-addicted narrator thinks she does. 
And when the protagonist of “William Wilson” violently confronts a man he believes has been following him, he might just be staring at his own image in a mirror. 
Through his pioneering use of unreliable narrators, Poe turns readers into active participants who must decide when a storyteller might be misinterpreting or even lying about the events they’re relating. 
Although he’s best known for his short horror stories, Poe was actually one of the most versatile and experimental writers of the nineteenth century. 
He invented the detective story as we know it, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” followed by “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter.” All three feature the original armchair detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who uses his genius and unusual powers of observation and deduction to solve crimes that baffle the police. 
Poe also wrote satires of social and literary trends, and hoaxes that in some cases anticipated science fiction. 
Those included an account of a balloon voyage to the moon, and a report of a dying patient put into a hypnotic trance so he could speak from the other side. 
Poe even wrote an adventure novel about a voyage to the South Pole and a treatise on astrophysics, all while he worked as an editor, producing hundreds of pages of book reviews and literary theory. 
An appreciation of Poe’s career wouldn’t be complete without his poetry: haunting and hypnotic. 
His best-known poems are songs of grief, or in his words, “mournful and never-ending remembrance.” “The Raven,” in which the speaker projects his grief onto a bird who merely repeats a single sound, made Poe famous. 
But despite his literary success, Poe lived in poverty throughout his career, and his personal life was often as dark as his writing. 
He was haunted by the loss of his mother and his wife, who both died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. 
Poe struggled with alcoholism and frequently antagonized other popular writers. 
Much of his fame came from posthumous – and very loose – adaptations of his work. 
And yet, if he could’ve known how much pleasure and inspiration his writing would bring to generations of readers and writers alike, perhaps it may have brought a smile to that famously brooding visage. 

A portly Miller, barely sober enough to sit on his horse, rambles on about the flighty wife of a crotchety old carpenter and the scholar she takes as her lover. 
To get some time alone together, the scholar and the wife play various tricks that involve feigning madness, staging a biblical flood, and exposing themselves in public. 
But the parish clerk is also lusting after the wife, and comes by every night to sing outside her house. 
This becomes so tiresome that she tries to scare him away by hanging her rear end out the window for him to kiss. 
When this appears not to work, her scholar decides to try farting in the same position, but this time, the clerk is waiting with a red-hot poker. 
This might all sound like a bawdy joke, but it’s part of one of the most esteemed works of English literature ever created: The Canterbury Tales, which seamlessly blends the lofty and the lowly. 
The work consists of 24 stories, each told by one of Chaucer’s spirited characters. 
Narrators include familiar Medieval figures such as a Knight, a Clerk, and a Nun, and the less recognizable Reeve, and Mancible, and others. 
The Tales are written in Middle English, which often looks entirely different from the language spoken today. 
It was used between the 12th and 15th centuries, and evolved from Old English due to increased contact with European romantic languages after the Norman Conquest of 1066. 
Most of the Middle English alphabet is still familiar today, with the inclusion of a few archaic symbols, such as yogh, which denotes the y, j, or gh sound. 
The loquacious cast of the Tales first meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark. 
They have a journey in common: a pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett, a martyred archbishop who was murdered in his own Cathedral. 
Eager and nosy for some personal details, the host of the Inn proposes a competition: whoever tells the best tale will be treated to dinner. 
If not for their pilgrimage, many of these figures would never have had the chance to interact. 
This is because Medieval society followed a feudal system that divided the clergy and nobility from the working classes, made up of peasants and serfs. 
By Chaucer’s time, a professional class of merchants and intellectuals had also emerged. 
Chaucer spent most of his life as a government official during the Hundred Years' War, traveling throughout Italy and France, as well as his native England. 
This may have influenced the panoramic vision of his work, and in the Tales, no level of society is above mockery. 
Chaucer uses the quirks of the characters’ language – the ribald humor of the Cook, the solemn prose of the Parson, and the lofty notions of the Squire – to satirize their worldviews. 
The varied dialects, genres, and literary tropes also make the work a vivid record of the different ways Medieval audiences entertained themselves. 
For instance, the Knight’s tale of courtly love, chivalry, and destiny riffs on romance, while the tales of working-class narrators are generally comedies filled with scatological language, sexual deviance, and slapstick. 
This variation includes something for everyone, and that’s one reason why readers continue to delight in the work in both Middle English and translation. 
While the narrative runs to over 17,000 lines, it's apparently unfinished, as the prologue ambitiously introduces 29 pilgrims and promises four stories apiece, and the innkeeper never crowns a victor. 
It’s possible that Chaucer was so caught up in his sumptuous creations that he delayed picking a winner - or perhaps he was so fond of each character that he just couldn’t choose. 
Whatever the reason, this means that every reader is free to judge; the question of who wins is up to you. 

Good morning. 
Let's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all, Leonardo da Vinci. 
We're all familiar with his fantastic work -- his drawings, his paintings, his inventions, his writings. 
But we do not know his face. 
Thousands of books have been written about him, but there's controversy, and it remains, about his looks. 
Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians. 
So, what do you think? 
Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn't it? 
Let's find out. 
Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him. 
He drew people, anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, buildings, water, everything. 
But no faces? 
I find that hard to believe. 
His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here -- en face or three-quarters. 
So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time. 
So let's try to find them. 
I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us. 
So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits. 
There are about 120, you see them here. 
Which ones of these could be self-portraits? 
Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. 
So we can eliminate all the profiles. 
It also has to be sufficiently detailed. 
So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized. 
And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man. 
So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. 
(Laughter) And look what happens -- only three candidates remain that fit the bill. 
And here they are. 
Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus. 
And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, "The Musician." 
Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them. 
I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 -- 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. 
(Laughter) But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. 
So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces. 
OK, now let's look at these three portraits. 
And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces, remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin. 
I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw that. 
There is no reason why these portraits should look alike. 
All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar. 
Now, are they made in the right order? 
The young man should be made first. 
And as you see here from the years that they were created, it is indeed the case. 
They are made in the right order. 
What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit? 
Yes, it does. He was 33, 38 and 63 when these were made. 
So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time. 
But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? 
Well, we need a reference. 
And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted. 
It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15. 
And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again. 
The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces. 
Ladies and gentlemen, this story has not yet been published. 
It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first. 
The icon of icons finally has a face. 
Here he is: Leonardo da Vinci. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So I'm a professional poker player, and today, I want to talk about three things that the game has taught me around decision-making that I find apply to everyday life. 
Now the first of these things is about luck. 
Now, like poker, life is also a game of skill and luck, and when it comes to the biggest things we care about -- health, wealth and relationships -- these outcomes don't only depend on the quality of our decision-making, but also the roll of life's dice. 
For example, we can be perfectly health-conscious and still get unlucky with something like cancer. 
Or we can smoke 20 a day and live to a ripe old age, and this kind of ambiguity can make it hard for us to know how good our strategies are, sometimes, especially when we're experiencing a lot of success. 
For example, back in 2010, I won a really big poker tournament known as the European Poker Tour. 
And because I'd only been playing full-time for about a year, when I won, I assumed I must be rather brilliant. 
In fact, I thought I was so brilliant that I not only got rather lazy with studying the game, but I also got more risky, started playing in the biggest tournaments I could against the very best in the world. 
And then my profit graph went from a thing of beauty to something kind of sad, with this worrying downhill trend for a long time, until I finally realized that I was overestimating my skill level, and got my act together. 
And this kind of reminds me of what we've been seeing in the cryptocurrency space, at least in 2017, where the only thing that's been going up faster than the markets themselves is the number of "senior investment specialists" who have been appearing out of nowhere. 
Now I'm not saying it's not possible to have a strategic edge, but at the same time, it's very easy to feel like a genius when you're in a market that's going up so fast that even the worst strategies are making a profit. 
So when we're experiencing success, it's important to take a moment to really ask ourselves how much of it is truly down to us, because our egos love to downplay the luck factor when we're winning. 
Now, a second thing poker taught me is the importance of quantifying my thinking. 
When you're playing, you can't just get away with going, "Eh, they're probably bluffing." 
That's just going to lose you a bunch of money, because poker is a game of probabilities and precision, and so you have to train yourself to think in numbers. 
So now, whenever I catch myself thinking vaguely about something really important, like, "It's unlikely I'll forget what I want to say in my TED Talk," I now try to estimate it numerically. 
(Laughter) Trust me, it helps a lot with the planning process. 
And the thing is, almost anything that could possibly happen here today, or at any point in the future, can also be expressed as a probability, too. 
(Laughter) So now I also try to speak in numbers as well. 
So if someone asks me, "Hey, Liv, do you think you're going to come along to that thing tonight?" 
instead of just saying to them, "Yeah, probably," I actually give them my best estimate -- say, 60 percent. 
Because -- I know that sounds a little odd -- but the thing is, I ran a poll on Twitter of what people understand the word "probably" to mean, and this was the spread of answers. 
Enormous! 
So apparently, it's absolutely useless at actually conveying any real information. 
So if you guys catch yourselves using these vague words, like "probably" or "sometimes," try, instead, using numbers, because when we speak in numbers, we know what lands in the other person's brain. 
Now, the third thing I want to touch on today is intuition. 
How often have you seen these kinds of inspirational memes in your Facebook feed? 
[Always trust your gut feeling and never second-guess.] They're nice, right? 
It's lovely. Yes. "Trust your soul." 
Well, they're terrible advice. 
These are some of the best poker players in the world right now. 
Do they look like people who live purely off feelings and intuitions? 
(Laughter) Look at them! 
Obviously, these guys are about slow, careful analysis, and that's because the game has outgrown the days where pure street smarts and people-reading can get you to the top. 
And that's because our intuitions aren't nearly as perfect as we'd like to believe. 
I mean, it'd be great, whenever we're in a tough spot, to just have an answer appear to us from some magical source of inspiration. 
But in reality, our gut is extremely vulnerable to all kinds of wishful thinking and biases. 
So then, what is our gut good for? 
Well, all the studies I've read conclude that it's best-suited for everyday things that we have lots and lots of experience in, like how we just know that our friend is mad at us before we've even said anything to them, or whether we can fit our car into a tight parking spot. 
But when it comes to the really big stuff, like what's our career path going to be or who should we marry, why should we assume that our intuitions are better calibrated for these than slow, proper analysis? 
I mean, they don't have any data to be based off. 
So my third lesson is, while we shouldn't ignore our intuitions, we shouldn't overprivilege them either. 
And I'd like to summarize these three lessons today with my own set of memes, with more of a poker-player twist. 
"Success is sweetest when you achieve it across a large sample size." 
(Laughter) "Your gut is your friend and so is a cost-benefit analysis. 
(Laughter) "The future is unknown, but you can damn well try and estimate it." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

A few years ago, I broke into my own house. 
I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees -- and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet -- it was very cold. 
And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys. 
In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them. 
So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight. 
I thought about calling a locksmith -- at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold. 
I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase. 
So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it. 
This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even. 
Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. 
It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. 
So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy. 
(Laughter) And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport. 
(Laughter) So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight. 
Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep. 
(Laughter) And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening? 
Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe. 
So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later. 
I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight. 
(Laughter) It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. 
Now, you all know what the postmortem is. 
Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? 
Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage. 
So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. 
Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. 
I'll start with the obvious ones. 
Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. 
Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works. 
There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things -- where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live. 
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. 
It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. 
And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. 
They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things. 
But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around. 
So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. 
So in the home, designate a spot for your keys -- a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. 
For your passport, a particular drawer. 
For your reading glasses, a particular table. 
If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them. 
What about travel? 
Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud. 
If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement. 
Now these are some rather obvious things. 
Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol. 
Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. 
So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place. 
And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make. 
And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision. 
And so I want to talk about that. 
And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition. 
But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making -- any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts. 
So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, "I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high." 
Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke. 
And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, "You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin." 
And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them. 
And so you're thinking, "Yeah! Give me the statin." 
But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less. 
It's for the number needed to treat. 
Now, what is this, the NNT? 
It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped. 
And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that? 
The number should be one. 
My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help. 
But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way. 
And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me. 
We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough. 
But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. 
So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? 
How many people have to take it before one person is helped? 
300. 
This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com. 
I ran through the numbers myself. 
300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented. 
Now you're probably thinking, "Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol. 
Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway." 
But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, "Tell me about the side effects." Right? 
So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients. 
And they include terrible things -- debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress -- but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug." 
But wait a minute. 
Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly. 
So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot. 
300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people. 
You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug. 
Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not. 
I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor. 
Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent. 
You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not. 
Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat. 
For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49. 
That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped. 
And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients. 
They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence. 
And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two. 
So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. 
You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot. 
And you also want to think about things like quality of life. 
Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end? 
These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones. 
You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking. 
Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. 
There's an evolutionary reason for this. 
Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter. 
Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. 
So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations. 
I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. 
We all are going to fail now and then. 
The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place. 
Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. 
And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through. 
So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

How many times can you fold a piece of paper? 
Assume that one had a piece of paper that was very fine, like the kind they typically use to print the Bible. 
In reality, it seems like a piece of silk. 
To qualify these ideas, let's say you have a paper that's one-thousandth of a centimeter in thickness. 
That is 10 to the power of minus three centimeters, which equals .001 centimeters. 
Let's also assume that you have a big piece of paper, like a page out of the newspaper. 
Now we begin to fold it in half. 
How many times do you think it could be folded like that? 
And another question: If you could fold the paper over and over, as many times as you wish, say 30 times, what would you imagine the thickness of the paper would be then? 
Before you move on, I encourage you to actually think about a possible answer to this question. 
OK. 
After we have folded the paper once, it is now two thousandths of a centimeter in thickness. 
If we fold it in half once again, the paper will become four thousandths of a centimeter. 
With every fold we make, the paper doubles in thickness. 
And if we continue to fold it again and again, always in half, we would confront the following situation after 10 folds. 
Two to the power of 10, meaning that you multiply two by itself 10 times, is one thousand and 24 thousandths of a centimeter, which is a little bit over one centimeter. 
Assume we continue folding the paper in half. 
What will happen then? 
If we fold it 17 times, we'll get a thickness of two to the power of 17, which is 131 centimeters, and that equals just over four feet. 
If we were able to fold it 25 times, then we would get two to the power of 25, which is 33,554 centimeters, just over 1,100 feet. 
That would make it almost as tall as the Empire State Building. 
It's worthwhile to stop here and reflect for a moment. 
Folding a paper in half, even a paper as fine as that of the Bible, 25 times would give us a paper almost a quarter of a mile. 
What do we learn? 
This type of growth is called exponential growth, and as you see, just by folding a paper we can go very far, but very fast too. 
Summarizing, if we fold a paper 25 times, the thickness is almost a quarter of a mile. 
30 times, the thickness reaches 6.5 miles, which is about the average height that planes fly. 
40 times, the thickness is nearly 7,000 miles, or the average GPS satellite's orbit. 
48 times, the thickness is way over one million miles. 
Now, if you think that the distance between the Earth and the Moon is less than 250,000 miles, then starting with a piece of Bible paper and folding it 45 times, we get to the Moon. 
And if we double it one more time, we get back to Earth. 

My wife is pregnant right now with our first child, and when people see her with her big baby bump, the first question people ask, almost without fail, is, "Is it a boy or is it a girl?" 
Now, there are some assumptions behind that question that we take for granted because of our familiarity with our own human biology. 
For human babies, we take it for granted that there's a 50/50 chance of either answer, boy or girl. 
But why is it that way? 
Well, the answer depends on the sex determination system that has evolved for our species. 
You see, for most mammals, the sex of a baby is determined genetically with the XY chromosome system. 
Mammals have a pair of sex chromosomes, one passed down from mom, and one from dad. 
A pair of X's gives us a girl, and an X and a Y together gives us a boy. 
Since females only have X's to pass on in their egg cells, and males can give either an X or a Y in their sperm cells, the sex is determined by the father and the chance of producing a male or a female is 50/50. 
This system has worked well for mammals, but throughout the tree of life, we can see other systems that have worked just as well for other animals. 
There are other groups of animals that also have genetic sex determination, but their systems can be pretty different from ours. 
Birds and some reptiles have their sex genetically determined, but instead of the sex being determined by dad, their sex is determined by mom. 
In those groups, a pair of Z sex chromosomes produces a male, so these males only have Z's to give. 
However, in these animals, one Z and one W chromosome together, as a pair, produces a female. 
In this system, the chance of a male or a female is still 50/50, it just depends on whether mom puts a Z or a W into her egg. 
Certain groups have taken genetic sex determination in completely other directions. 
Ants, for example, have one of the most interesting systems for determining sex, and because of it, if you are a male ant, you do not have a father. 
In an ant colony, there are dramatic divisions of labor. 
There are soldiers that defend the colony, there are workers that collect food, clean the nest and care for the young, and there's a queen and a small group of male reproductives. 
Now, the queen will mate and then store sperm from the males. 
And this is where the system gets really interesting. 
If the queen uses the stored sperm to fertilize an egg, then that egg will grow up to become female. 
However, if she lays an egg without fertilizing it, then that egg will still grow up to be an ant, but it will always be a male. 
So you see, it's impossible for male ants to have fathers. 
And male ants live their life like this, with only one copy of every gene, much like a walking sex cell. 
This system is called a haplodiploid system, and we see it not only in ants, but also in other highly social insects like bees and wasps. 
Since our own sex is determined by genes, and we do know of these other animals that have their sex determined by genes, it's easy to assume that for all animals the sex of their babies still must be determined by genetics. 
However, for some animals, the question of whether it will be a boy or a girl has nothing to do with genes at all, and it can depend on something like the weather. 
These are animals like alligators and most turtles. 
In these animals, the sex of an embryo in a developing egg is determined by the temperature. 
In these species, the sex of the baby is not yet determined when the egg is laid, and it remains undetermined until sometime in the middle of the overall development period, when a critical time is reached. 
And during this time, the sex is completely determined by temperature in the nest. 
In painted turtles, for example, warm temperatures above the critical temperature will produce females within the eggs, and cool temperatures will produce a male. 
I'm not sure who came up with this mnemonic, but you can remember that when it comes to painted turtles, they are all hot chicks and cool dudes. 
For some tropical fish, the question of will it be a boy or will it be a girl isn't settled until even later in life. 
You see, clownfish all start out their lives as males, However, as they mature, they become female. 
They also spend their lives in small groups with a strict dominance hierarchy where only the most dominant male and female reproduce. 
And amazingly, if the dominant female in the group dies, the largest and most dominant male will then quickly become female and take her place, and all of the other males will move up one rank in the hierarchy. 
In another very different ocean animal, the green spoonworm, the sex of the babies is determined by a completely different aspect of the environment. 
For this species, it is simply a matter of where a larva happens to randomly fall on the sea floor. 
If a larva lands on the open sea floor, then it will become a female. 
But if it lands on top of a female, then it will become a male. 
So for some species, the question of boy or girl is answered by genetics. 
For others, it's answered by the environment. 
And for others still, they don't even bother with the question at all. 
Take whiptail lizards, for example. 
For those desert lizards, the answer is easy. 
It's a girl. It's always a girl. 
They are a nearly all-female species, and although they still lay eggs, these eggs hatch out female clones of themselves. 
So will it be a girl or will it be a boy? 
Throughout the entire animal kingdom, it does really all depend on the system of sex determination. 
For humans, that system is a genetic XY system. 
And for me and my wife, we found out it's going to be a baby boy. 
(Kiss) 

Why do we cringe when we hear "Shakespeare?" 
If you ask me, it's usually because of his words. 
All those thines and thous and therefores and wherefore-art-thous can be more than a little annoying. 
But you have to wonder, why is he so popular? 
Why have his plays been made and remade more than any other playwright? 
It's because of his words. 
Back in the late 1500s and early 1600s, that was the best tool that a person had, and there was a lot to talk about. 
However, most of it was pretty depressing. 
You know, with the Black Plague and all. 
Shakespeare does use a lot of words. 
One of his most impressive accomplishments is his use of insults. 
They would unify the entire audience; and no matter where you sat, you could laugh at what was going on onstage. 
Words, specifically dialogue in a drama setting, are used for many different reasons: to set the mood of the scene, to give some more atmosphere to the setting, and to develop relationships between characters. 
Insults do this in a very short and sharp way. 
Let's first go to "Hamlet." 
Right before this dialogue, Polonius is the father of Ophelia, who is in love with Prince Hamlet. 
King Claudius is trying to figure out why Prince Hamlet is acting so crazy since the king married Prince Hamlet's mother. 
Polonius offers to use his daughter to get information from Prince Hamlet. 
Then we go into Act II Scene 2. 
Polonius: "Do you know me, my lord?" 
Hamlet: "Excellent well. You're a fishmonger." 
Polonius: "Not I, my lord." 
Hamlet: "Then I would you were so honest a man." 
Now, even if you did not know what "fishmonger" meant, you can use some contextual clues. 
One: Polonius reacted in a negative way, so it must be bad. 
Two: Fish smell bad, so it must be bad. 
And three: "monger" just doesn't sound like a good word. 
So from not even knowing the meaning, you're beginning to construct some characterization of the relationship between Hamlet and Polonius, which was not good. 
But if you dig some more, "fishmonger" means a broker of some type, and in this setting, would mean like a pimp, like Polonius is brokering out his daughter for money, which he is doing for the king's favor. 
This allows you to see that Hamlet is not as crazy as he's claiming to be, and intensifies the animosity between these two characters. 
Want another example? 
"Romeo and Juliet" has some of the best insults of any of Shakespeare's plays. 
It's a play about two gangs, and the star-crossed lovers that take their own lives. 
Well, with any fisticuffs you know that there is some serious smack talk going on. 
And you are not disappointed. 
In Act I Scene 1, right from the get-go we are shown the level of distrust and hatred the members of the two families, the Capulets and Montagues, meet. 
Gregory: "I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list." 
Sampson: "Nay, as they dare, I will bite my thumb at them, which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it." 
Enter Abraham and Balthasar. 
Abraham: "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" 
Sampson: "I do bite my thumb, sir." 
Abraham: "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" 
Okay, so how does this development help us understand mood or character? 
Well, let's break it down to the insult. 
Biting your thumb today may not seem like a big deal, but Sampson says it is an insult to them. 
If they take it so, it must have been one. 
This begins to show us the level of animosity between even the men who work for the two Houses. 
And you normally would not do anything to someone unless you wanted to provoke them into a fight, which is exactly what's about to happen. 
Looking deeper, biting your thumb in the time in which the play was written is like giving someone the finger today. 
A pretty strong feeling comes with that, so we now are beginning to feel the tension in the scene. 
Later on in the scene, Tybalt, from the House of the Capulets, lays a good one on Benvolio from the House of the Montagues. 
Tybalt: "What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds? 
Turn thee, Benvolio, and look upon thy death." 
Benvolio: "I do but keep the peace; put up thy sword, or manage it to part these men with me." 
Tybalt: "What, drawn and talk of peace! 
I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. 
Have at thee, coward!" 
Okay, heartless hinds. 
We know that once again, it's not a good thing. 
Both families hate each other, and this is just adding fuel to the fire. 
But just how bad is this stinger? 
A heartless hind is a coward, and calling someone that in front of his own men, and the rival family, means there's going to be a fight. 
Tybalt basically calls out Benvolio, and in order to keep his honor, Benvolio has to fight. 
This dialogue gives us a good look at the characterization between these two characters. 
Tybalt thinks that the Montagues are nothing but cowardly dogs, and has no respect for them. 
Once again, adding dramatic tension to the scene. 
Okay, now here's a spoiler alert. 
Tybalt's hotheadedness and severe hatred of the Montagues is what we literature people call his hamartia, or what causes his downfall. 
Oh, yes. 
He goes down at the hands of Romeo. 
So when you're looking at Shakespeare, stop and look at the words, because they really are trying to tell you something. 

OK, today we're going to talk about the mole. 
Now, I know what you're thinking: "I know what a mole is, it's a small furry creature that digs holes in the ground and destroys gardens." 
And some of you might be thinking that it's a growth on your aunt's face with hairs sticking out of it. 
Well, in this case, a mole is a concept that we use in chemistry to count molecules, atoms, just about anything extremely small. 
Have you ever wondered how many atoms there are in the universe? 
Or in your body? Or even in a grain of sand? 
Scientists have wanted to answer that question, but how do you count something as small as an atom? 
Well, in 1811, someone had an idea that if you had equal volumes of gases, at the same temperature and pressure, they would contain an equal number of particles. 
His name was Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro. 
I wonder how long it took him to sign autographs. 
Unfortunately for Avogadro, most scientists didn't accept the idea of the atom, and there was no way to prove he was right. 
There was no clear difference between atoms and molecules. 
Most scientists looked at Avogadro's work as purely hypothetical, and didn't give it much thought. 
But it turned out he was right! By late 1860, Avogadro was proven correct, and his work helped lay the foundation for the atomic theory. Unfortunately, Avogadro died in 1856. 
Now the thing is that the amount of particles in even small samples is tremendous. For example, If you have a balloon of any gas at zero degrees Celcius, and at a pressure of one atmosphere, then you have precisely six hundred and two sextillion gas particles. 
That is, you have six with 23 zeros after it particles of gas in the container. 
Or in scientific notation, 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd particles. 
This example is a little misleading, because gases take up a lot of space due to the high kinetic energy of the gas particles, and it leaves you thinking atoms are bigger than they really are. 
Instead, think of water molecules. 
If you pour 18.01 grams of water into a glass, which is 18.01 milliliters, which is like three and a half teaspoons of water, you'll have 602 sextillion molecules of water. 
Since Lorenzo Romano - uh, never mind - Avogadro was the first one to come up with this idea, scientists named the number 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd after him. 
It is simply known as Avogadros's number. 
Now, back to the mole. Not that mole. 
This mole. Yep, this number has a second name. 
The mole. Chemists use the term mole to refer to the quantities that are at the magnitude of 602 sextillion. 
This is known as a molar quantity. 
Atoms and molecules are so small, that chemists have bundled them into groups called moles. 
Moles are hard for students to understand because they have a hard time picturing the size of a mole, or of 602 sextillion. 
It's just too big to wrap our brains around. 
Remember our 18.01 milliliters of water? 
Well, that's a mole of water. 
But how much is that? 
Exactly what does 602 sextillion look like? 
Maybe this'll help. 
Exchange the water particles for donuts. 
If you had a mole of donuts, they would cover the entire earth to a depth of eight kilometers, which is about five miles. 
You really need a lot of coffee for that. 
If you had a mole of basketballs, you could create a new planet the size of the earth. 
If you received a mole of pennies on the day you were born and spent a million dollars a second until the day you died at the age of 100, you would still have more than 99.99% of your money in the bank. 
OK. Now we sort of have an idea how large the mole is. 
So how do we use it? 
You might be surprised to know that chemists use it the same way you use pounds to buy grapes, deli meat, or eggs. 
When you go to the grocery store, you don't go to the deli counter and ask for 43 slices of salami, you buy your salami by the pound. 
When you buy your eggs, you buy a dozen eggs. 
When we hear the word dozen, we probably think of the number 12. 
We also know that a pair is two, a baker's dozen is 13, a gross is 144, and a ream of paper is - anybody? 
A ream is 500. 
Well, a mole is really the same thing. 
For a chemist, a mole conjures up the number 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd, not a fuzzy little animal. The only difference is that the other quantities are more familiar to us. 
So there you have it - the story of the mole, Avogadro, basketballs, and how to buy salami at the grocery store. 

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

Dialogue gives a story color, makes it exciting and moves it forward. 
Romeo: O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? 
Juliet: What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? 
Romeo: The exchange of thy love's faithful vows for mine. 
Without dialogue: (cricket sounds) So what goes into writing effective dialogue? 
Well, there are social skills: making friends, solving conflicts, being pleasant and polite. 
We won't be using any of those today. 
Instead, we'll be working on -- let's call them "anti-social skills." 
If you're a writer, you may already have a few of these. 
The first is eavesdropping. 
If you're riding a bus and hear an interesting conversation, you could write it all down. 
Of course, when you write fiction, you're not describing real people, you're making up characters. 
But sometimes the words you overhear can give you ideas. 
"I did not," says one person. 
"I saw you," the other replies. 
Who might be saying those words? 
Maybe it's two kids in a class, and the boy thinks the girl pushed him. 
Maybe it's a couple, but one of them is a vampire, and the woman vampire saw the man flirting with a zombie. 
Or maybe not. 
Maybe the characters are a teenager and his mother, and they're supposed to be vegetarians, but the mother saw him eating a burger. 
So let's say you've decided on some characters. 
This is anti-social skill number two: start pretending they're real. 
What are they like? Where are they from? What music do they listen to? 
Spend some time with them. 
If you're on a bus, think about what they might be doing if they were there too. 
Would they talk on the phone, listen to music, draw pictures, sleep? 
What we say depends on who we are. 
An older person might speak differently than a younger person. 
Someone from the south might speak differently than someone from the north. 
Once you know your characters, you can figure out how they talk. 
At this stage, it's helpful to use anti-social skill number three: muttering to yourself. 
When you speak your character's words, you can hear whether they sound natural, and fix them if necessary. 
Remember, most people are usually pretty informal when they speak. 
They use simple language and contractions. 
So, "Do not attempt to lie to me" sounds more natural as "Don't try to lie to me." 
Also keep it short. 
People tend to speak in short bursts, not lengthy speeches. 
And let the dialogue do the work. 
Ask yourself: do I really need that adverb? 
For instance, "'Your money or your life,' she said threateningly." 
Here, "threateningly" is redundant, so you can get rid of it. 
But if the words and the actions don't match, an adverb can be helpful. 
"'Your money or your life,' she said lovingly." 
So, to recap: First, eavesdrop. Next, pretend imaginary people are real. 
Finally, mutter to yourself, and write it all down. 
You already have everything you need. 
This is fictional dialogue, or "How to Hear Voices in Your Head." 

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

One of the most striking properties about life is that it has color. 
To understand the phenomenon of color, it helps to think about light as a wave. 
But, before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about waves in general. 
Imagine you're sitting on a boat on the ocean watching a cork bob up and down in the water. 
The first thing you notice about the motion is that it repeats itself. 
The cork traces the same path over and over again... up and down, up and down. 
This repetitive or periodic motion is characteristic of waves. 
Then you notice something else... 
using a stopwatch, you measure the time it takes for the piece of cork to go over its highest position down to its lowest and then back up again. 
Suppose this takes two seconds. 
To use the physics jargon, you've measured the period of the waves that cork is bobbing on. 
That is, how long it takes a wave to go through its full range of motion once. 
The same information can be expressed in a different way by calculating the wave's frequency. 
Frequency, as the name suggest, tells you how frequent the waves are. 
That is, how many of them go by in one second. 
If you know how many seconds one full wave takes, then it's easy to work out how many waves go by in one second. 
In this case, since each wave takes 2 seconds, the frequency is 0.5 waves per second. 
So enough about bobbing corks... What about light and color? 
If light is a wave, then it must have a frequency. Right? 
Well... yes, it does. 
And it turns out that we already have a name for the frequency of the light that our eyes detect. 
It's called color. 
That's right. Color is nothing more than a measure of how quickly the light waves are waving. 
If our eyes were quick enough, we might be able to observe this periodic motion directly, like we can with the cork and the ocean. 
But the frequency of the light we see is so high, it waves up and down about 400 million million times a second, that we can't possibly see it as a wave. But we can tell, by looking at its color, what its frequency is. 
The lowest frequency light that we can see is red and the highest frequency is purple. 
In between all the other frequencies form a continuous band of color, called the visible spectrum. 
So, what if you had a yellow pencil sitting on your desk? 
Well, the sun emits all colors of light, so light of all colors is hitting your pencil. 
The pencil looks yellow because it reflects yellow light more than it reflects the other colors. 
What happens to the blue, purple and red light? 
They get absorbed and the energy they are carrying is turned into heat. 
It is similar with objects of other colors. 
Blue things reflect blue light, red things reflect red light and so on. 
White objects reflect all colors of light, while black things do exactly the opposite and absorb at all frequencies. 
This - by the way - is why it's uncomfortable to wear your favorite Metallica t-shirt on a sunny day. 

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

You look down and see a yellow pencil lying on your desk. 
Your eyes, and then your brain, are collecting all sorts of information about the pencil: its size, color, shape, distance, and more. 
But, how exactly does this happen? 
The ancient Greeks were the first to think more or less scientifically about what light is and how vision works. 
Some Greek philosophers, including Plato and Pythagoras, thought that light originated in our eyes and that vision happened when little, invisible probes were sent to gather information about far-away objects. 
It took over a thousand years before the Arab scientist, Alhazen, figured out that the old, Greek theory of light couldn't be right. 
In Alhazen's picture, your eyes don't send out invisible, intelligence-gathering probes, they simply collect the light that falls into them. 
Alhazen's theory accounts for a fact that the Greek's couldn't easily explain: why it gets dark sometimes. 
The idea is that very few objects actually emit their own light. 
The special, light-emitting objects, like the sun or a lightbulb, are known as sources of light. 
Most of the things we see, like that pencil on your desk, are simply reflecting light from a source rather than producing their own. 
So, when you look at your pencil, the light that hits your eye actually originated at the sun and has traveled millions of miles across empty space before bouncing off the pencil and into your eye, which is pretty cool when you think about it. 
But, what exactly is the stuff that is emitted from the sun and how do we see it? 
Is it a particle, like atoms, or is it a wave, like ripples on the surface of a pond? 
Scientists in the modern era would spend a couple of hundred years figuring out the answer to this question. 
Isaac Newton was one of the earliest. 
Newton believed that light is made up of tiny, atom-like particles, which he called corpuscles. 
Using this assumption, he was able to explain some properties of light. 
For example, refraction, which is how a beam of light appears to bend as it passes from air into water. 
But, in science, even geniuses sometimes get things wrong. 
In the 19th century, long after Newton died, scientists did a series of experiments that clearly showed that light can't be made up of tiny, atom-like particles. 
For one thing, two beams of light that cross paths don't interact with each other at all. 
If light were made of tiny, solid balls, then you would expect that some of the particles from Beam A would crash into some of the particles from Beam B. 
If that happened, the two particles involved in the collision would bounce off in random directions. 
But, that doesn't happen. 
The beams of light pass right through each other as you can check for yourself with two laser pointers and some chalk dust. 
For another thing, light makes interference patterns. 
Interference patterns are the complicated undulations that happen when two wave patterns occupy the same space. 
They can be seen when two objects disturb the surface of a still pond, and also when two point-like sources of light are placed near each other. 
Only waves make interference patterns, particles don't. 
And, as a bonus, understanding that light acts like a wave leads naturally to an explanation of what color is and why that pencil looks yellow. 
So, it's settled then, light is a wave, right? 
Not so fast! 
In the 20th century, scientists did experiments that appear to show light acting like a particle. 
For instance, when you shine light on a metal, the light transfers its energy to the atoms in the metal in discrete packets called quanta. 
But, we can't just forget about properties like interference, either. 
So these quanta of light aren't at all like the tiny, hard spheres Newton imagined. 
This result, that light sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes behaves like a wave, led to a revolutionary new physics theory called quantum mechanics. 
So, after all that, let's go back to the question, "What is light?" 
Well, light isn't really like anything we're used to dealing with in our everyday lives. 
Sometimes it behaves like a particle and other times it behaves like a wave, but it isn't exactly like either. 

What do horror movies and comedies have in common? 
The two genres might seem totally different, but the reason they're both so popular is perhaps because what they have in common: their use of dramatic irony. 
First, let's clarify. 
There are three types of irony out there. 
Situational irony is when you expect one thing, but get the opposite. 
Verbal irony is when someone says something, but truly means the opposite. 
Dramatic irony, though, is what we will be looking at right now. 
Dramatic irony is when the audience seems to know more about an event, a situation, or a conversation than the characters in the movie, on the show, or in the book do. 
The audience is in on a secret that the characters have missed. 
This is a great story-telling device that creates tremendous emotion within that text. 
Think about it for a moment. 
How does it feel when, in a horror film, you know that the scary villain is hiding behind that door in the darkened room. 
The music becomes eerie, the lighting creates complete shadows, this has to be bad for the hero! 
Of course, though, that hero must enter the room to find the villain. 
You feel tremendous tension and the suspense of knowing that someone will jump out and be scary, but you just don't know when. 
That tension is dramatic irony: you know something more than the characters in the film. 
Now, take the typical comedy. 
There will probably be some type of "misunderstanding". 
Again, we know more of what is going on than the characters do. 
Picture two characters making a plan for a birthday surprise for their roommate while that roommate overhears the entire conversation from the hallway. 
From there, confusion and misunderstanding occur, and the tension builds. 
This isn't the same tension as the horror film since it is probably pretty funny as the character tries to figure out the whos and the whats, but it serves as a great example of the tension and suspense of dramatic irony. 
This tension or suspense in both genres drives the story and keeps the plot progressing. 
The audience wants, no, needs, to see the tension of the dramatic irony broken either by the scary person jumping out of the shadows or by someone finally revealing someone's true identity and clearing up the confusion. 
So, when you feel like you are in on a secret, that is dramatic irony, a hallmark of all the great writers, from Shakespeare to Hitchcock. 

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

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

By now, I'm sure you know that in just about anything you do in life, you need numbers. 
In particular, though, some fields don't just need a few numbers, they need lots of them. 
How do you keep track of all those numbers? 
Well, mathematicians dating back as early as ancient China came up with a way to represent arrays of many numbers at once. 
Nowadays we call such an array a "matrix," and many of them hanging out together, "matrices". 
Matrices are everywhere. 
They are all around us, even now in this very room. 
Sorry, let's get back on track. 
Matrices really are everywhere, though. 
They are used in business, economics, cryptography, physics, electronics, and computer graphics. 
One reason matrices are so cool is that we can pack so much information into them and then turn a huge series of different problems into one single problem. 
So, to use matrices, we need to learn how they work. 
It turns out, you can treat matrices just like regular numbers. 
You can add them, subtract them, even multiply them. 
You can't divide them, but that's a rabbit hole of its own. 
Adding matrices is pretty simple. 
All you have to do is add the corresponding entries in the order they come. 
So the first entries get added together, the second entries, the third, all the way down. 
Of course, your matrices have to be the same size, but that's pretty intuitive anyway. 
You can also multiply the whole matrix by a number, called a scalar. 
Just multiply every entry by that number. 
But wait, there's more! 
You can actually multiply one matrix by another matrix. 
It's not like adding them, though, where you do it entry by entry. 
It's more unique and pretty cool once you get the hang of it. 
Here's how it works. 
Let's say you have two matrices. 
Let's make them both two by two, meaning two rows by two columns. 
Write the first matrix to the left and the second matrix goes next to it and translated up a bit, kind of like we are making a table. 
The product we get when we multiply the matrices together will go right between them. 
We'll also draw some gridlines to help us along. 
Now, look at the first row of the first matrix and the first column of the second matrix. 
See how there's two numbers in each? 
Multiply the first number in the row by the first number in the column: 1 times 2 is 2. 
Now do the next ones: 3 times 3 is 9. 
Now add them up: 2 plus 9 is 11. 
Let's put that number in the top-left position so that it matches up with the rows and columns we used to get it. 
See how that works? 
You can do the same thing to get the other entries. 
-4 plus 0 is -4. 
4 plus -3 is 1. 
-8 plus 0 is -8. 
So, here's your answer. 
Not all that bad, is it? 
There's one catch, though. 
Just like with addition, your matrices have to be the right size. 
Look at these two matrices. 
2 times 8 is 16. 
3 times 4 is 12. 
3 times wait a minute, there are no more rows in the second matrix. 
We ran out of room. 
So, these matrices can't be multiplied. 
The number of columns in the first matrix has to be the same as the number of rows in the second matrix. 
As long as you're careful to match up your dimensions right, though, it's pretty easy. 
Understanding matrix multiplication is just the beginning, by the way. 
There's so much you can do with them. 
For example, let's say you want to encrypt a secret message. 
Let's say it's "Math rules". 
Though, why anybody would want to keep this a secret is beyond me. 
Letting numbers stand for letters, you can put the numbers in a matrix and then an encryption key in another. 
Multiply them together and you've got a new encoded matrix. 
The only way to decode the new matrix and read the message is to have the key, that second matrix. 
There's even a branch of mathematics that uses matrices constantly, called Linear Algebra. 
If you ever get a chance to study Linear Algebra, do it, it's pretty awesome. 
But just remember, once you know how to use matrices, you can do pretty much anything. 

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

The universe, rather beautiful, isn't it? 
It's quite literally got everything, from the very big to the very small. 
Sure, there are some less than savory elements in there, but on the whole, scholars agree that its existence is probably a good thing. 
Such a good thing that an entire field of scientific endeavor is devoted to its study. 
This is known as cosmology. 
Cosmologists look at what's out there in space and piece together the tale of how our universe evolved: what it's doing now, what it's going to be doing, and how it all began in the first place. 
It was Edwin Hubble who first noticed that our universe is expanding, by noting that galaxies seem to be flying further and further apart. 
This implied that everything should have started with the monumental explosion of an infinitely hot, infinitely small point. 
This idea was jokingly referred to at the time as the "Big Bang," but as the evidence piled up, the notion and the name actually stuck. 
We know that after the Big Bang, the universe cooled down to form the stars and galaxies that we see today. 
Cosmologists have plenty of ideas about how this happened. 
But we can also probe the origins of the universe by recreating the hot, dense conditions that existed at the beginning of time in the laboratory. 
This is done by particle physicists. 
Over the past century, particle physicists have been studying matter and forces at higher and higher energies. 
Firstly with cosmic rays, and then with particle accelerators, machines that smash together subatomic particles at great energies. 
The greater the energy of the accelerator, the further back in time they can effectively peek. 
Today, things are largely made up of atoms, but hundreds of seconds after the Big Bang, it was too hot for electrons to join atomic nuclei to make atoms. 
Instead, the universe consisted of a swirling sea of subatomic matter. 
A few seconds after the Big Bang, it was hotter still, hot enough to overpower the forces that usually hold protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei. 
Further back, microseconds after the Big Bang, and the protons and neutrons were only just beginning to form from quarks, one of the fundamental building blocks of the standard model of particle physics. 
Further back still, and the energy was too great even for the quarks to stick together. 
Physicists hope that by going to even greater energies, they can see back to a time when all the forces were one and the same, which would make understanding the origins of the universe a lot easier. 
To do that, they'll not only need to build bigger colliders, but also work hard to combine our knowledge of the very, very big with the very, very small and share these fascinating insights with each other and with, well, you. 
And that's how it should be! 
Because, after all, when it comes to our universe, we're all in this one together. 

The human eye is one of the most powerful machines on the planet. 
It's like a 500 megapixel camera that can run in bright light, in near darkness, and even under water, though not real well. 
It communicates to our brains so much about the world. 
Our eyes are how we find partners, how we understand the people around us, how we read, and how we watch game shows on TV where people get knocked into cold water by padded wrecking balls. 
Yup, the human eye is pretty neat, and we're lucky enough to have two of them. 
But, there are things that, despite looking really hard, we still can't quite see. 
For example, you can watch a horse galloping, but your eyes can't keep up with its fast-moving hooves enough to figure out whether all four feet are ever off the ground simultaneously. 
For these types of questions, we need cameras. 
About 150 years ago, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge used one to solve the galloping horse mystery. 
Using careful photography, Muybridge proved that at certain points as it gallops, a horse really is flying. 
"Look, ma! No hooves!" 
Since then, photography has found its way into all aspects of math and science. 
It enhances our understanding of a world we thought we could already see, but it's one which we really need help to see a little better. 
It's not always a matter of the world moving by too quickly for our eyes to process. 
Sometimes cameras can help us see matter or movements that are too small for the naked eye. 
Botanists use multiple photographs to show the life cycle of plants and how flowers turn over the course of a few hours to follow the sun in what is called phototropism, growing towards the light. 
Mathematicians have used photos to look at where in the twists and turns of a whip the crack sound comes when the whip is breaking the sound barrier. 
Meteorologists and environmental scientists show the growth of major hurricanes and the recession over the years of many of the world's glaciers. 
Slow-motion film or high-speed photography have shown us the beating of a hummingbird's wings and the course of a bullet through its target. 
In one project, cadavers, that's dead bodies, were frozen and sliced into thousands of wafer-thin discs. 
The discs were photographed to produced animated movies that allow a viewer to travel up and down the skeleton, and into the flesh, and through the bones, and the veins, and, perhaps I should have suggested you don't watch this during dinner, my bad. 
In classrooms today, the camera, now present in just about every phone and computer, allows the youngest scientists to observe the world around them, to document it, and to share their findings online. 
Whether it's the change of seasons or the growth of the germinating seed, cameras are allowing us to see a beautiful world through new eyes. 

Is it possible to create something out of nothing? 
Or, more precisely, can energy be made into matter? 
Yes, but only when it comes together with its twin, antimatter. 
And there's something pretty mysterious about antimatter: there's way less of it out there than there should be. 
Let's start with the most famous physics formula ever: E equals m c squared. 
It basically says that mass is concentrated energy, and mass and energy are exchangeable, like two currencies with a huge exchange rate. 
90 trillion Joules of energy are equivalent to 1 gram of mass. 
But how do I actually transform energy into matter? 
The magic word is <i>energy density</i>. 
If you concentrate a huge amount of energy in a tiny space, new particles will come into existence. 
If we look closer, we see that these particles always come in pairs, like twins. 
That's because particles always have a counterpart, an antiparticle, and these are always produced in exactly equal amounts: 50/50. 
This might sound like science fiction, but it's the daily life of particle accelerators. 
In the collisions between two protons at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, billions of particles and antiparticles are produced every second. 
Consider, for example, the electron. 
It has a very small mass and negative electric charge. 
It's antiparticle, the positron, has exactly the same mass, but a positive electric charge. 
But, apart from the opposite charges, both particles are identical and perfectly stable. 
And the same is true for their heavy cousins, the proton and the antiproton. 
Therefore, scientists are convinced that a world made of antimatter would look, feel, and smell just like our world. 
In this antiworld, we may find antiwater, antigold, and, for example, an antimarble. 
Now imagine that a marble and an antimarble are brought together. 
These two apparently solid objects would completely disappear into a big flash of energy, equivalent to an atomic bomb. 
Because combining matter and antimatter would create so much energy, science fiction is full of ideas about harnessing the energy stored in antimatter, for example, to fuel spaceships like Star Trek. 
After all, the energy content of antimatter is a billion times higher than conventional fuel. 
The energy of one gram of antimatter would be enough for driving a car 1,000 times around the Earth, or to bring the space shuttle into orbit. 
So why don't we use antimatter for energy production? 
Well, antimatter isn't just sitting around, ready for us to harvest. 
We have to make antimatter before we can combust antimatter, and it takes a billion times more energy to make antimatter than you get back. 
But, what if there was some antimatter in outer space and we could dig it out one day from an antiplanet somewhere. 
A few decades ago, many scientists believed that this could actually be possible. 
Today, observations have shown that there is no significant amount of antimatter anywhere in the visible universe, which is weird because, like we said before, there should be just as much antimatter as there is matter in the universe. 
Since antiparticles and particles should exist in equal numbers, this missing antimatter? 
Now that is a real mystery. 
To understand what might be happening, we must go back to the Big Bang. 
In the instant the universe was created, a huge amount of energy was transformed into mass, and our initial universe contained equal amounts of matter and antimatter. 
But just a second later, most matter and all of the antimatter had destroyed one another, producing an enormous amount of radiation that can still be observed today. 
Just about 100 millionths of the original amount of matter stuck around and no antimatter whatsoever. 
"Now, wait!" you might say, "Why did all the antimatter disappear and only matter was left?" 
It seems that we were somehow lucky that a tiny asymmetry exists between matter and antimatter. 
Otherwise, there would be no particles at all anywhere in the universe and also no human beings. 
But what causes this asymmetry? 
Experiments at CERN are trying to find out the reason why something exists and why we don't live in a universe filled with radiation only? 
But, so far, we just don't know the answer. 

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

The ancient Greeks had a great idea: The universe is simple. 
In their minds, all you needed to make it were four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. 
As theories go, it's a beautiful one. 
It has simplicity and elegance. 
It says that by combining the four basic elements in different ways, you could produce all the wonderful diversity of the universe. 
Earth and fire, for example, give you things that are dry. 
Air and water, things that are wet. 
But as theories go, it had a problem. 
It didn't predict anything that could be measured, and measurement is the basis of experimental science. 
Worse still, the theory was wrong. 
But the Greeks were great scientists of the mind and in the 5th century B.C., Leucippus of Miletus came up with one of the most enduring scientific ideas ever. 
Everything we see is made up of tiny, indivisible bits of stuff called atoms. 
This theory is simple and elegant, and it has the advantage over the earth, air, fire, and water theory of being right. 
Centuries of scientific thought and experimentation have established that the real elements, things like hydrogen, carbon, and iron, can be broken down into atoms. 
In Leucippus's theory, the atom is the smallest, indivisible bit of stuff that's still recognizable as hydrogen, carbon, or iron. 
The only thing wrong with Leucippus's idea is that atoms are, in fact, divisible. 
Furthermore, his atoms idea turns out to explain just a small part of what the universe is made of. 
What appears to be the ordinary stuff of the universe is, in fact, quite rare. 
Leucippus's atoms, and the things they're made of, actually make up only about 5% of what we know to be there. 
Physicists know the rest of the universe, 95% of it, as the dark universe, made of dark matter and dark energy. 
How do we know this? 
Well, we know because we look at things and we see them. 
That might seem rather simplistic, but it's actually quite profound. 
All the stuff that's made of atoms is visible. 
Light bounces off it, and we can see it. 
When we look out into space, we see stars and galaxies. 
Some of them, like the one we live in, are beautiful, spiral shapes, spinning gracefully through space. 
When scientists first measured the motion of groups of galaxies in the 1930's and weighed the amount of matter they contained, they were in for a surprise. 
They found that there's not enough visible stuff in those groups to hold them together. 
Later measurements of individual galaxies confirmed this puzzling result. 
There's simply not enough visible stuff in galaxies to provide enough gravity to hold them together. 
From what we can see, they ought to fly apart, but they don't. 
So there must be stuff there that we can't see. 
We call that stuff dark matter. 
The best evidence for dark matter today comes from measurements of something called the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, but that's another story. 
All of the evidence we have says that dark matter is there and it accounts for much of the stuff in those beautiful spiral galaxies that fill the heavens. 
So where does that leave us? 
We've long known that the heavens do not revolve around us and that we're residents of a fairly ordinary planet, orbiting a fairly ordinary star, in the spiral arm of a fairly ordinary galaxy. 
The discovery of dark matter took us one step further away from the center of things. 
It told us that the stuff we're made of is only a small fraction of what makes up the universe. 
But there was more to come. 
Early this century, scientists studying the outer reaches of the universe confirmed that not only is everything moving apart from everything else, as you would expect in a universe that began in hot, dense big bang, but that the universe's expansion also seems to be accelerating. 
What's that about? 
Either there is some kind of energy pushing this acceleration, just like you provide energy to accelerate a car, or gravity does not behave exactly as we think. 
Most scientists think it's the former, that there's some kind of energy driving the acceleration, and they called it <i>dark energy</i>. 
Today's best measurements allow us to work out just how much of the universe is dark. 
It looks as if dark energy makes up about 68% of the universe and dark matter about 27%, leaving just 5% for us and everything else we can actually see. 
So what's the dark stuff made of? 
We don't know, but there's one theory, called <i>supersymmetry</i>, that could explain some of it. 
Supersymmetry, or SUSY for short, predicts a whole range of new particles, some of which could make up the dark matter. 
If we found evidence for SUSY, we could go from understanding 5% of our universe, the things we can actually see, to around a third. 
Not bad for a day's work. 
Dark energy would probably be harder to understand, but there are some speculative theories out there that might point the way. 
Among them are theories that go back to that first great idea of the ancient Greeks, the idea that we began with several minutes ago, the idea that the universe must be simple. 
These theories predict that there is just a single element from which all the universe's wonderful diversity stems, a vibrating string. 
The idea is that all the particles we know today are just different harmonics on the string. 
Unfortunately, string theories today are, as yet, untestable. 
But, with so much of the universe waiting to be explored, the stakes are high. 
Does all of this make you feel small? 
It shouldn't. 
Instead, you should marvel in the fact that, as far as we know, you are a member of the only species in the universe able even to begin to grasp its wonders, and you're living at the right time to see our understanding explode. 

Fifty years ago in the old Soviet Union, a team of engineers was secretly moving a large object through a desolate countryside. 
With it, they were hoping to capture the minds of people everywhere by being the first to conquer outer space. 
The rocket was huge. 
And packed in its nose was a silver ball with two radios inside. 
On October 4, 1957, they launched their rocket. 
One of the Russian scientists wrote at the time: "We are about to create a new planet that we will call Sputnik. 
In the olden days, explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus had the good fortune to open up the terrestrial globe. 
Now we have the good fortune to open up space. 
And it is for those in the future to envy us our joy." 
You're watching snippets from "Sputnik," my fifth documentary feature, which is just about completed. 
It tells the story of Sputnik, and the story of what happened to America as a result. 
For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. 
A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space. 
But just three days later, on a day they called Red Monday, the media and the politicians told us, and we believed, that Sputnik was proof that our enemy had beaten us in science and technology, and that they could now attack us with hydrogen bombs, using their Sputnik rocket as an IBM missile. 
All hell broke loose. 
Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America -- historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. 
It provoked the missile gap. 
It exploded an arms race. 
It began the space race. 
Within a year, Congress funded huge weapons increases, and we went from 1,200 nuclear weapons to 20,000. 
And the reactions to Sputnik went far beyond weapons increases. 
For example, some here will remember this day, June 1958, the National Civil Defense Drill, where tens of millions of people in 78 cities went underground. 
Or the Gallup Poll that showed that seven in 10 Americans believed that a nuclear war would happen, and that at least 50 percent of our population was going to be killed. 
But Sputnik provoked wonderful changes as well. 
For example, some in this room went to school on scholarship because of Sputnik. 
Support for engineering, math and science -- education in general -- boomed. 
And Vint Cerf points out that Sputnik led directly to ARPA, and the Internet, and, of course, NASA. 
My feature documentary shows how a free society can be stampeded by those who know how to use media. 
But it also shows how we can turn what appears at first to be a bad situation, into something that was overall very good for America. 
"Sputnik" will soon be released. 
In closing, I would like to take a moment to thank one of my investors: longtime TEDster, Jay Walker. 
And I'd like to thank you all. 
(Applause). 
Thank you, Chris. 

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

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

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

When we watch a film or a play, we know that the actors probably learned their lines from a script, which essentially tells them what to say and when to say it. 
A piece of written music operates on exactly the same principle. 
In a very basic sense, it tells a performer what to play and when to play it. 
Aesthetically speaking, there's a world of difference between, say, Beethoven and Justin Bieber, but both artists have used the same building blocks to create their music: notes. 
And although the end result can sound quite complicated, the logic behind musical notes is actually pretty straightforward. 
Let's take a look at the foundational elements to music notation and how they interact to create a work of art. 
Music is written on five parallel lines that go across the page. 
These five lines are called a staff, and a staff operates on two axes: up and down and left to right. 
The up-and-down axis tells the performer the pitch of the note or what note to play, and the left-to-right axis tells the performer the rhythm of the note or when to play it. 
Let's start with pitch. 
To help us out, we're going to use a piano, but this system works for pretty much any instrument you can think of. 
In the Western music tradition, pitches are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. 
After that, the cycle repeats itself: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and so on. 
But how do these pitches get their names? 
Well, for example, if you played an F and then played another F higher or lower on the piano, you'd notice that they sound pretty similar compared to, say, a B. 
Going back to the staff, every line and every space between two lines represents a separate pitch. 
If we put a note on one of these lines or one of these spaces, we're telling a performer to play that pitch. 
The higher up on the staff a note is placed, the higher the pitch. 
But there are obviously many, many more pitches than the nine that these lines and spaces gives us. 
A grand piano, for example, can play 88 separate notes. 
So how do we condense 88 notes onto a single staff? 
We use something called a clef, a weird-looking figure placed at the beginning of the staff, which acts like a reference point, telling you that a particular line or space corresponds to a specific note on your instrument. 
If we want to play notes that aren't on the staff, we kind of cheat and draw extra little lines called ledger lines and place the notes on them. 
If we have to draw so many ledger lines that it gets confusing, then we need to change to a different clef. 
As for telling a performer when to play the notes, two main elements control this: the beat and the rhythm. 
The beat of a piece of music is, by itself, kind of boring. 
It sounds like this. 
(Ticking) Notice that it doesn't change, it just plugs along quite happily. 
It can go slow or fast or whatever you like, really. 
The point is that just like the second hand on a clock divides one minute into sixty seconds, with each second just as long as every other second, the beat divides a piece of music into little fragments of time that are all the same length: beats. 
With a steady beat as a foundation, we can add rhythm to our pitches, and that's when music really starts to happen. 
This is a quarter note. 
It's the most basic unit of rhythm, and it's worth one beat. 
This is a half note, and it's worth two beats. 
This whole note here is worth four beats, and these little guys are eighth notes, worth half a beat each. 
"Great," you say, "what does that mean?" 
You might have noticed that across the length of a staff, there are little lines dividing it into small sections. 
These are bar lines and we refer to each section as a bar. 
At the beginning of a piece of music, just after the clef, is something called the time signature, which tells a performer how many beats are in each bar. 
This says there are two beats in each bar, this says there are three, this one four, and so on. 
The bottom number tells us what kind of note is to be used as the basic unit for the beat. 
One corresponds to a whole note, two to a half note, four to a quarter note, and eight to an eighth note, and so on. 
So this time signature here tells us that there are four quarter notes in each bar, one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four, and so on. 
But like I said before, if we just stick to the beat, it gets kind of boring, so we'll replace some quarter notes with different rhythms. 
Notice that even though the number of notes in each bar has changed, the total number of beats in each bar hasn't. 
So, what does our musical creation sound like? 
(Music) Eh, sounds okay, but maybe a bit thin, right? 
Let's add another instrument with its own pitch and rhythm. 
Now it's sounding like music. 
Sure, it takes some practice to get used to reading it quickly and playing what we see on our instrument, but, with a bit of time and patience, you could be the next Beethoven or Justin Bieber. 

There are a lot of ways this marvelous language of ours, English, doesn't make sense. 
For example, most of the time when we talk about more than one of something, we put an S on the end. 
One cat, two cats. 
But then, there's that handful of words where things work differently. 
Alone you have a man; if he has company, then you've got men, or probably better for him, women too. 
Although if there were only one of them, it would be a woman. 
Or if there's more than one goose, they're geese, but why not lots of mooses, meese? 
Or if you have two feet, then why don't you read two beek instead of books. 
The fact is that if you were speaking English before about a thousand years ago, beek is exactly what you would have said for more than one book. 
If Modern English is strange, Old English needed therapy. 
Believe it or not, English used to be an even harder language to learn than it is today. 
Twenty-five hundred years ago, English and German were the same language. 
They drifted apart slowly, little by little becoming more and more different. 
That meant that in early English, just like in German, inanimate objects had gender. 
A fork, gafol, was a woman; a spoon, laefel, was a man; and the table they were on, bord, was neither, also called neuter. 
Go figure! 
Being able to use words meant not just knowing their meaning but what gender they were, too. 
And while today there are only about a dozen plurals that don't make sense, like men and geese, in Old English, it was perfectly normal for countless plurals to be like that. 
You think it's odd that more than one goose is geese? 
Well, imagine if more than one goat was a bunch of gat, or if more than one oak tree was a field of ack. 
To be able to talk about any of these, you just had to know the exact word for their plural rather than just adding the handy S on the end. 
And it wasn't always an S at the end either. 
In merry Old English, they could add other sounds to the end. 
Just like more than one child is children, more than one lamb was lambru, you fried up your eggru, and people talked not about breads, but breadru. 
Sometimes it was like sheep is today - where, to make a plural, you don't do anything. 
One sheep, two sheep. 
In Old English, one house, two house. 
And just like today, we have oxen instead of oxes. 
Old English people had toungen instead of tongues, namen instead of names, and if things stayed the way they were, today we would have eyen instead of eyes. 
So, why didn't things stay the way they were? 
In a word, Vikings. 
In the 8th century, Scandinavian marauders started taking over much of England. 
They didn't speak English, they spoke Norse. 
Plus, they were grown-ups, and grown-ups aren't as good at learning languages as children. 
After the age of roughly 15, it's almost impossible to learn a new language without an accent and without slipping up here and there as we all know from what language classes are like. 
The Vikings were no different, so they had a way of smoothing away the harder parts of how English worked. 
Part of that was those crazy plurals. 
Imagine running up against a language with eggru and gat on the one hand, and then with other words, all you have to do is add 's' and get days and stones. 
Wouldn't it make things easier to just use the 's' for everything? 
That's how the Vikings felt too. 
And there were so many of them, and they married so many of the English women, that pretty soon, if you grew up in England, you heard streamlined English as much as the real kind. 
After a while nobody remembered the real kind any more. 
Nobody remembered that once you said doora instead of doors and handa instead of hands. 
Plurals made a lot more sense now, except for a few hold-outs like children and teeth that get used so much that it was hard to break the habit. 
The lesson is that English makes a lot more sense than you think. 
Thank the ancestors of people in Copenhagen and Oslo for the fact that today we don't ask for a handful of pea-night instead of peanuts. 
Although, wouldn't it be fun, if for just a week or two, we could? 

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

Imagine this: You're fast asleep when all of a sudden you're awoken! 
And not by your alarm clock. 
Your eyes open, and there's a demon sitting on your chest, pinning you down. 
You try to open your mouth and scream, but no sound comes out. 
You try to get up and run away, but you realize that you are completely immobilized. 
The demon is trying to suffocate you, but you can't fight back. 
You've awoken into your dream, and it's a nightmare. 
It sounds like a Stephen King movie, but it's actually a medical condition called sleep paralysis, and about half of the population has experienced this strange phenomenon at least once in their life. 
This panic-inducing episode of coming face-to-face with the creatures from your nightmares can last anywhere from seconds to minutes and may involve visual or auditory hallucinations of an evil spirit or an out-of-body feeling like you're floating. 
Some have even mistaken sleep paralysis for an encounter with a ghost or an alien abduction. 
In 1867, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell was the first medical professional to study sleep paralysis. 
"The subject awakes to consciousness of his environment but is incapable of moving a muscle. 
Lying to all appearance, still asleep. 
He's really engaged for a struggle for movement, fraught with acute mental distress. 
Could he but manage to stir, the spell would vanish instantly." 
Even though Dr. Mitchell was the first to observe patients in a state of sleep paralysis, it's so common that nearly every culture throughout time has had some kind of paranormal explanation for it. 
In medieval Europe, you might think that an incubus, a sex-hungry demon in male form, visited you in the night. 
In Scandinavia, the mare, a damned woman, is responsible for visiting sleepers and sitting on their rib cages. 
In Turkey, a jinn holds you down and tries to strangle you. 
In Thailand, Phi Am bruises you while you sleep. 
In the southern United States, the hag comes for you. 
In Mexico, you could blame subirse el muerto, the dead person, on you. 
In Greece, Mora sits upon your chest and tries to asphyxiate you. 
In Nepal, Khyaak the ghost resides under the staircase. 
It may be easier to blame sleep paralysis on evil spirits because what's actually happening in your brain is much harder to explain. 
Modern scientists believe that sleep paralysis is caused by an abnormal overlap of the REM, rapid eye movement, and waking stages of sleep. 
During a normal REM cycle, you're experiencing a number of sensory stimuli in the form of a dream, and your brain is unconscious and fully asleep. 
During your dream, special neurotransmitters are released, which paralyze almost all of your muscles. 
That's called REM atonia. 
It's what keeps you from running in your bed when you're being chased in your dreams. 
During an episode of sleep paralysis, you're experiencing normal components of REM. 
You're dreaming and your muscles are paralyzed, only your brain is conscious and wide awake. 
This is what causes you to imagine that you're having an encounter with a menacing presence. 
So this explains the hallucinations, but what about the feelings of panic, strangling, choking, chest pressure that so many people describe? 
Well during REM, the function that keeps you from acting out your dreams, REM atonia, also removes voluntary control of your breathing. 
Your breath becomes more shallow and rapid. 
You take in more carbon dioxide and experience a small blockage of your airway. 
During a sleep paralysis episode, a combination of your body's fear response to a perceived attack by an evil creature and your brain being wide awake while your body is in an REM sleep state triggers a response for you to take in more oxygen. 
That makes you gasp for air, but you can't because REM atonia has removed control of your breath. 
This struggle for air while your body sleeps creates a perceived sensation of pressure on the chest or suffocation. 
While a few people experience sleep paralysis regularly and it may be linked to sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, many who experience an episode of sleep paralysis do so infrequently, perhaps only once in a lifetime. 
So you can rest easy, knowing that an evil entity is not trying to haunt, possess, strangle, or suffocate you. 
Save that for the horror films! 

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

What is love? 
Seriously, though, what is it? 
What is love? 
A verb? 
A noun? 
A universal truth? 
An ideal? 
A common thread of all religions? 
A cult? 
A neurological phenomenon? 
There's no shortage of answers. 
Some are all-encompassing. 
It conquers all. 
It's all you need. 
It's all there is. 
These are all comparisons, though, ways of defining it by contrast, by saying it's more important than all other things, but is it? 
Sure, love matters more than your standard turkey sandwich, but does it matter more than shelter? 
Or sanity? 
Or an exceptional turkey sandwich? 
No matter your answer, you're just ranking it, not defining it. 
Another challenge to defining love is we often try to do so while falling into it or out of it. 
Would you trust someone who just won the lottery to accurately define the concept of currency? 
Or, I don't know, ask a guy to define bears while he's fending them off? 
Or is romance not like winning the lottery? 
Are break ups not like bear attacks? 
Bad comparisons? 
That's my point. 
I'm not thinking right because I'm in love, so ha! 
Taking a step back, or taking a cold shower, whatever, love is potentially the most intensely thought about thing in all of human history. 
And despite centuries upon centuries of obsession, it still overwhelms us. 
Some say it's a feeling, a magical emotion, a feeling for someone like you've never felt before. 
But feelings are fluid, not very concrete foundation for a definition. 
Sometimes you hate the person you love. 
Plus, come on, you've felt feelings like it before, sort of in miniature. 
Your relationships with your family shape your relationships with partners. 
And your love for your partner may be in its own dynamic relationship, healthy or totally weird, with the love of your parents and siblings. 
Love is also a set of behaviors we associate with the feeling: Holding hands, kissing, hugging, public displays of affection, dating, marriage, having kids, or just sex. 
But these loving actions can be subjective or culturally relative. 
You may love or be someone who can't have kids or doesn't want to, who believes in marriage but also in divorce, who's from a culture where people don't really date the way we think of dating, or who just doesn't want to make out on the bus. 
But if love is a thing that we can define, then how can it mean opposite things for so many people? 
So, maybe love's just all in your head, a personal mystery winding through your neural pathways and lighting up pleasing, natural rewards in your nervous system. 
Perhaps these rewards are addictive. 
Perhaps love is a temporary or permanent addiction to a person, just like a person can be addicted to a drug. 
I don't mean to be edgy like some pop song. 
Evidence shows that chemicals in your brain stimulated by another person can make you develop a habit for that person. 
The person comes to satisfy a physiological craving, and you want more. 
But then sometimes, slowly or suddenly, you don't. 
You've fallen out of love, become unaddicted, for a spell. 
What happened? 
Does one develop a tolerance or hit a limit? 
Why do some lovers stay addicted to each other their entire lives? 
Perhaps to create new lives, to proliferate their species? 
Maybe love is just human DNA's optimal method for bringing about its own replication. 
There are evolutionary arguments regarding every human mating behavior, from how we display ourselves to potential mates, to how we treat each other in relationships, to how we raise kids. 
Thus, some argue that the feeling you think you feel in your soul is just biology's way to make you continue our species. 
Nature has selected you to have crushes on hotties, just like it makes monkeys have crushes on hot monkeys, and biology marches on. 
But is that all love is? 
Or, perhaps worse, is it just a construct, some fake concept we all convince each other to try to live up to for a fake sense of purpose? 
Maybe it is a construct, but let's be more precise about what a construct is because love is constructed from reality: Our experiences, feelings, brain chemistry, cultural expectations, our lives. 
And this edifice can be viewed through countless dimensions: scientific, emotional, historical, spiritual, legal, or just personal. 
If no two people are the same, no two people's love is the same either. 
So, in every loving relationship, there's a lot to talk about and partners should be open to that, or the relationship probably won't last. 
Love is always up for discussion and, sure, under construction. 
So, if we can't define it, that's a good sign. 
It means we're all still making it. 
Wait, I didn't mean, you know what I meant. 

What if you could only see one color? 
Imagine, for instance, that you could only see things that were red and that everything else was completely invisible to you. 
As it turns out, that's how you live your life all the time because your eyes can only see a minuscule part of the full spectrum of light. 
Different kinds of light are all around you everyday but are invisible to the human eye, from the radio waves that carry your favorite songs, to the x-rays doctors use to see inside of you, to the microwaves that heat up your food. 
In order to understand how these can all be light, we'll need to know a thing or two about what light is. 
Light is electromagnetic radiation that acts like both a wave and a particle. 
Light waves are kind of like waves on the ocean. 
There are big waves and small waves, waves that crash on the shore one right after the other, and waves that only roll in every so often. 
The size of a wave is called its wavelength, and how often it comes by is called its frequency. 
Imagine being a boat in that ocean, bobbing up and down as the waves go by. 
If the waves that day have long wavelengths, they'll make you bob only so often, or at a low frequency. 
If the waves, instead, have short wavelengths, they'll be close together, and you'll bob up and down much more often, at a high frequency. 
Different kinds of light are all waves, they just have different wavelengths and frequencies. 
If you know the wavelength or frequency of a wave of light, you can also figure out its energy. 
Long wavelengths have low energies, while short wavelengths have high energies. 
It's easy to remember if you think about being in that boat. 
If you were out sailing on a day with short, choppy waves, you'd probably be pretty high energy yourself, running around to keep things from falling over. 
But on a long wavelength sea, you'd be rolling along, relaxed, low energy. 
The energy of light tells us how it will interact with matter, for example, the cells of our eyes. 
When we see, it's because the energy of light stimulates a receptor in our eye called the retina. 
Our retina are only sensitive to light with a very small range in energy, and so we call that range of light visible light. 
Inside our retina are special receptors called rods and cones. 
The rods measure brightness, so we know how much light there is. 
The cones are in charge of what color of light we see because different cones are sensitive to different energies of light. 
Some cones are more excited by light that is long wavelength and low energy, and other cones are more excited by short wavelength, high-energy light. 
When light hits our eye, the relative amount of energy each cone measures signals our brain to perceive colors. 
The rainbow we perceive is actually visible light in order of its energy. 
At one side of the rainbow is low-energy light we see as red, and at the other side is high-energy light we see as blue. 
If light shines on us that has an energy our retina can't measure, we won't be able to see it. 
Light that is too short wavelength or high energy gets absorbed by the eye's surface before it can even get to the retina, and light that is too long wavelength doesn't have enough energy to stimulate our retina at all. 
The only thing that makes one kind of light different from another is its wavelength. 
Radio waves have long wavelengths, while x-rays have short wavelengths. 
And visible light, the kind you can actually see, is somewhere in between. 
Even though our eyes can't detect light outside of the visible range, we can build special detectors that are stimulated by these other wavelengths of light, kind of like digital eyes. 
With these devices, we can measure the light that is there, even though we can't see it ourselves. 
So, take a step back and think about all of this for a moment. 
Even though they seem different, the warmth you feel from a crackling fire is the same as the sun shining on you on a beautiful day, the same as ultraviolet light you put on sunscreen to protect yourself from, the same thing as your TV, your radio, and your microwave. 
Now, those examples are all things here on Earth, things you experience in your everyday life, but here's something even more amazing. 
Our universe gives off the full spectrum of light, too. 
When you think of the night sky, you probably think of being able to see the stars shining with your own eyes, but that's just visible light, which you now know is only a tiny part of the full spectrum. 
If we had to draw the universe and could only use visible light, it would be like having only one crayon -- pretty sad. 
To see the universe in its full spectrum, we need to have the right eyes, and that means using special telescopes that can help us see beyond visible light. 
You've probably heard of the Hubble Space Telescope and seen its beautiful pictures taken in visible and ultraviolet light. 
But you might not know that there are 20 space telescopes in orbit, missions that can each see part of the full spectrum of light. 
With telescopes acting as our virtual eyes, both in space and here on Earth, we can see some amazing things. 
And the coolest thing of all, no matter the wavelength or energy, the light that we see out in the distant universe is the same thing as the light that we can experience and study here on Earth. 
So, since we know the physics of how x-ray, ultraviolet light, or microwaves work here, we can study the light of a distant star or galaxy and know what kinds of things are happening there too. 
So, as you go about your daily life, think beyond what your eyes can and can't see. 
Knowing just a little bit about the natural world can help you perceive the full spectrum around you all the time. 

To many, one of the coolest things about "Game of Thrones" is that the inhabitants of the Dothraki Sea have their own real language. 
And Dothraki came hot on the heels of the real language that the Na'vi speak in "Avatar," which, surely, the Na'vi needed when the Klingons in "Star Trek" have had their own whole language since 1979. 
And let's not forget the Elvish languages in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, especially since that was the official grandfather of the fantasy conlangs. 
"Conlang" is short for "constructed language." 
They're more than codes like Pig Latin, and they're not just collections of fabricated slang like the Nadsat lingo that the teen hoodlums in "A Clockwork Orange" speak, where "droog" from Russian happens to mean "friend." 
What makes conlangs real languages isn't the number of words they have. 
It helps, of course, to have a lot of words. 
Dothraki has thousands of words. 
Na'vi started with 1,500 words. 
Fans on websites have steadily created more. 
But we can see the difference between vocabulary alone and what makes a real language from a look at how Tolkien put together grand old Elvish, a conlang with several thousands words. 
After all, you could memorize 5,000 words of Russian and still be barely able to construct a sentence. 
A four-year-old would talk rings around you. 
That's because you have to know how to put the words together. 
That is, a real language has grammar. 
Elvish does. 
In English, to make a verb past, you add an "-ed." 
Wash, washed. 
In Elvish, "wash" is "allu" and "washed" is "allune." 
Real languages also change over time. 
There's no such thing as a language that's the same today as it was a thousand years ago. 
As people speak, they drift into new habits, shed old ones, make mistakes, and get creative. 
Today, one says, "Give us today our daily bread." 
In Old English, they said, "Urne gedaeghwamlican hlaf syle us todaeg." 
Things change in conlangs, too. 
Tolkien charted out ancient and newer versions of Elvish. 
When the first Elves awoke at Cuiviénen, in their new language, the word for "people" was "kwendi," but in the language of one of the groups that moved away, Teleri, over time, "kwendi" became "pendi," with the "k" turning into a "p." 
And just like real languages, conlangs like Elvish split off into many. 
When the Romans transplanted Latin across Europe, French, Spanish, and Italian were born. 
When groups move to different places, over time, their ways of speaking grow apart, just like everything else about them. 
Thus, Latin's word for hand was "manus," but in French, it became "main," while in Spain it became "mano." 
Tolkien made sure Elvish did the same kind of thing. 
While that original word "kwendi" became "pendi" among the Teleri, among the Avari, who spread throughout Middle Earth, it became "kindi" when the "w" dropped out. 
The Elvish varieties Tolkien fleshed out the most are Quenya and Sindarin, and their words are different in the same way French and Spanish are. 
Quenya has "suc" for "drink," Sindarin has "sog." 
And as you know, real languages are messy. 
That's because they change, and change has a way of working against order, just like in a living room or on a bookshelf. 
Real languages are never perfectly logical. 
That's why Tolkien made sure that Elvish had plenty of exceptions. 
Lots of verbs are conjugated in ways you just have to know. 
Take even the word "know." 
In the past, it's "knew," which isn't explained by any of the rules in English. 
Oh well. 
In Elvish, "know" is "ista," but "knew" is "sinte." 
Oh well. 
The truth is, though, that Elvish is more a sketch for a real language than a whole one. 
For Tolkien, Elvish was a hobby rather than an attempt to create something people could actually speak. 
Much of the Elvish the characters in the "Lord of the Rings" movies speak has been made up since Tolkien by dedicated fans of Elvish based on guesses as to what Tolkien would have constructed. 
That's the best we can do for Elvish because there are no actual Elves around to speak it for us. 
But the modern conlangs go further. 
Dothraki, Na'vi, and Klingon are developed enough that you can actually speak them. 
Here's a translation of "Hamlet" into Klingon, although performing it would mean getting used to pronouncing "k" with your uvula, that weird, cartoony thing hanging in the back of your throat. 
Believe it or not, you actually do that in plenty of languages around the world, like Eskimo ones. 
Pronouncing Elvish is much easier, though. 
So, let's take our leave for now from this introduction to conlangs in Elvish and the other three conlangs discussed with a heartfelt quad-conlangual valedictory: "A Na Marie!" 
"Hajas!" 
Na'vi's "Kiyevame!" 
"Qapla!" 
and "Goodbye!" 

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

Many elements of traditional Japanese culture, such as cuisine and martial arts, are well-known throughout the world. 
Kabuki, a form of classical theater performance, may not be as well understood in the West but has evolved over 400 years to still maintain influence and popularity to this day. 
The word Kabuki is derived from the Japanese verb kabuku, meaning out of the ordinary or bizarre. 
Its history began in early 17th century Kyoto, where a shrine maiden named Izumo no Okuni would use the city's dry Kamo Riverbed as a stage to perform unusual dances for passerby, who found her daring parodies of Buddhist prayers both entertaining and mesmerizing. 
Soon other troops began performing in the same style, and Kabuki made history as Japan's first dramatic performance form catering to the common people. 
By relying on makeup, or keshou, and facial expressions instead of masks and focusing on historical events and everyday life rather than folk tales, Kabuki set itself apart from the upper-class dance theater form known as Noh and provided a unique commentary on society during the Edo period. 
At first, the dance was practiced only by females and commonly referred to as Onna-Kabuki. 
It soon evolved to an ensemble performance and became a regular attraction at tea houses, drawing audiences from all social classes. 
At this point, Onna-Kabuki was often risque as geishas performed not only to show off their singing and dancing abilities but also to advertise their bodies to potential clients. 
A ban by the conservative Tokugawa shogunate in 1629 led to the emergence of Wakashu-Kabuki with young boys as actors. 
But when this was also banned for similar reasons, there was a transition to Yaro-Kabuki, performed by men, necessitating elaborate costumes and makeup for those playing female roles, or onnagata. 
Attempts by the government to control Kabuki didn't end with bans on the gender or age of performers. 
The Tokugawa military group, or Bakufu, was fueled by Confucian ideals and often enacted sanctions on costume fabrics, stage weaponry, and the subject matter of the plot. 
At the same time, Kabuki became closely associated with and influenced by Bunraku, an elaborate form of puppet theater. 
Due to these influences, the once spontaneous, one-act dance evolved into a structured, five-act play often based on the tenets of Confucian philosophy. 
Before 1868, when the Tokugawa shogunate fell and Emperor Meiji was restored to power, Japan had practiced isolation from other countries, or Sakoku. 
And thus, the development of Kabuki had mostly been shaped by domestic influences. 
But even before this period, European artists, such as Claude Monet, had become interested in and inspired by Japanese art, such as woodblock prints, as well as live performance. 
After 1868, others such as Vincent van Gogh and composer Claude Debussy began to incorporate Kabuki influences in their work, while Kabuki itself underwent much change and experimentation to adapt to the new modern era. 
Like other traditional art forms, Kabuki suffered in popularity in the wake of World War II. 
But innovation by artists such as director Tetsuji Takechi led to a resurgence shortly after. 
Indeed, Kabuki was even considered a popular form of entertainment amongst American troops stationed in Japan despite initial U.S. censorship of Japanese traditions. 
Today, Kabuki still lives on as an integral part of Japan's rich cultural heritage, extending its influence beyond the stage to television, film, and anime. 
The art form pioneered by Okuni continues to delight audiences with the actors' elaborate makeup, extravagant and delicately embroidered costumes, and the unmistakable melodrama of the stories told on stage. 

You probably know that all stuff is made up of atoms and that an atom is a really, really, really, really tiny particle. 
Every atom has a core, which is made up of at least one positively charged particle called a proton, and in most cases, some number of neutral particles called neutrons. 
That core is surrounded by negatively charged particles called electrons. 
The identity of an atom is determined only by the number of protons in its nucleus. 
Hydrogen is hydrogen because it has just one proton, carbon is carbon because it has six, gold is gold because it has 79, and so on. 
Indulge me in a momentary tangent. 
How do we know about atomic structure? 
We can't see protons, neutrons, or electrons. 
So, we do a bunch of experiments and develop a model for what we think is there. 
Then we do some more experiments and see if they agree with the model. 
If they do, great. 
If they don't, it might be time for a new model. 
We've had lots of very different models for atoms since Democritus in 400 BC, and there will almost certainly be many more to come. 
Okay, tangent over. 
The cores of atoms tend to stick together, but electrons are free to move, and this is why chemists love electrons. 
If we could marry them, we probably would. 
But electrons are weird. 
They appear to behave either as particles, like little baseballs, or as waves, like water waves, depending on the experiment that we perform. 
One of the weirdest things about electrons is that we can't exactly say where they are. 
It's not that we don't have the equipment, it's that this uncertainty is part of our model of the electron. 
So, we can't pinpoint them, fine. 
But we can say there's a certain probability of finding an electron in a given space around the nucleus. 
And that means that we can ask the following question: If we drew a shape around the nucleus such that we would be 95% sure of finding a given electron within that shape, what would it look like? 
Here are a few of these shapes. 
Chemists call them orbitals, and what each one looks like depends on, among other things, how much energy it has. 
The more energy an orbital has, the farther most of its density is from the nucleus. 
By they way, why did we pick 95% and not 100%? 
Well, that's another quirk of our model of the electron. 
Past a certain distance from the nucleus, the probability of finding an electron starts to decrease more or less exponentially, which means that while it will approach zero, it'll never actually hit zero. 
So, in every atom, there is some small, but non-zero, probability that for a very, very short period of time, one of its electrons is at the other end of the known universe. 
But mostly electrons stay close to their nucleus as clouds of negative charged density that shift and move with time. 
How electrons from one atom interact with electrons from another determines almost everything. 
Atoms can give up their electrons, surrendering them to other atoms, or they can share electrons. 
And the dynamics of this social network are what make chemistry interesting. 
From plain old rocks to the beautiful complexity of life, the nature of everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and even feel is determined at the atomic level. 

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

What's the worst bug on the planet? 
You might vote for the horsefly or perhaps the wasp, but for many people, the worst offender is by far the mosquito. 
The buzzing, the biting, the itching, the mosquito is one of the most commonly detested pests in the world. 
In Alaska, swarms of mosquitos can get so thick that they actually asphyxiate caribou. 
And mosquito-borne diseases kill millions of people every year. 
The scourge that is the mosquito isn't new. 
Mosquitoes have been around for over a hundred million years and over that time have coevolved with all sorts of species, including our own. 
There are actually thousands of species of mosquitos in the world, but they all share one insidious quality: they suck blood, and they're really, really good at sucking blood. 
Here's how they do it. 
After landing, a mosquito will slather some saliva onto the victim's skin, which works like an antiseptic, numbing the spot so we don't notice their attack. 
This is what causes the itchy, red bumps, by the way. 
Then the bug will use its serrated mandibles to carve a little hole in your skin, allowing it to probe around with its proboscis, searching for a blood vessel. 
When it hits one, the lucky parasite can suck two to three times its weight in blood. 
Turns out we don't really like that too much. 
In fact, humans hate mosquitos so much that we spend billions of dollars worldwide to keep them away from us -- from citronella candles to bug sprays to heavy-duty agricultural pesticides. 
But it's not just that mosquitos are annoying, they're also deadly. 
Mosquitos can transmit everything from malaria to yellow fever to West Nile virus to dengue. 
Over a million people worldwide die every year from mosquito-borne diseases, and that's just people. 
Horses, dogs, cats, they can all get diseases from mosquitoes too. 
So, if these bugs are so dastardly, why don't we just get rid of them? 
We are humans after all, and we're pretty good at getting rid of species. 
Well, it's not quite so simple. 
Getting rid of the mosquito removes a food source for lots of organisms, like frogs and fish and birds. 
Without them, plants would lose a pollinator. 
But some scientists say that mosquitos aren't actually all that important. 
If we got rid of them, they argue, another species would simply take their place and we'd probably have far fewer deaths from malaria. 
The problem is that nobody knows what would happen if we killed off all the mosquitos. 
Something better might take their spot or perhaps something even worse. 
The question is, are we willing to take that risk? 
(Buzzing) 

Looking up at the night sky, we are amazed by how it seems to go on forever. 
But what will the sky look like billions of years from now? 
A particular type of scientist, called a cosmologist, spends her time thinking about that very question. 
The end of the universe is intimately linked to what the universe contains. 
Over 100 years ago, Einstein developed the Theory of General Relativity, formed of equations that help us understand the relationship between what a universe is made of and its shape. 
It turns out that the universe could be curved like a ball or sphere. 
We call this positively curved or closed. 
Or it could be shaped like a saddle. 
We call this negatively curved or open. 
Or it could be flat. 
And that shape determines how the universe will live and die. 
We now know that the universe is very close to flat. 
However, the components of the universe can still affect its eventual fate. 
We can predict how the universe will change with time if we measure the amounts or energy densities of the various components in the universe today. 
So, what is the universe made of? 
The universe contains all the things that we can see, like stars, gas, and planets. 
We call these things ordinary or baryonic matter. 
Even though we see them all around us, the total energy density of these components is actually very small, around 5% of the total energy of the universe. 
So, now let's talk about what the other 95% is. 
Just under 27% of the rest of the energy density of the universe is made up of what we call dark matter. 
Dark matter is only very weakly interacting with light, which means it doesn't shine or reflect light in the way that stars and planets do, but, in every other way, it behaves like ordinary matter -- it attracts things gravitationally. 
In fact, the only way we can detect this dark matter is through this gravitational interaction, how things orbit around it and how it bends light as it curves the space around it. 
We have yet to discover a dark matter particle, but scientists all over the world are searching for this elusive particle or particles and the effects of dark matter on the universe. 
But this still doesn't add up to 100%. 
The remaining 68% of the energy density of the universe is made up of dark energy, which is even more mysterious than dark matter. 
This dark energy doesn't behave like any other substance we know at all and acts more like anti-gravity force. 
We say that it has a gravitational pressure, which ordinary matter and dark matter do not. 
Instead of pulling the universe together, as we would expect gravity to do, the universe appears to be expanding apart at an ever-increasing rate. 
The leading idea for dark energy is that it is a cosmological constant. 
That means it has the strange property that it expands as the volume of space increases to keep its energy density constant. 
So, as the universe expands as it is doing right now, there will be more and more dark energy. 
Dark matter and baryonic matter, on the other hand, don't expand with the universe and become more diluted. 
Because of this property of the cosmological constant, the future universe will be more and more dominated by dark energy, becoming colder and colder and expanding faster and faster. 
Eventually, the universe will run out of gas to form stars, and the stars themselves will run out of fuel and burn out, leaving the universe with only black holes in it. 
Given enough time, even these black holes will evaporate, leaving a universe that is completely cold and empty. 
That is what we call the heat death of the universe. 
While it might sound depressing living in a universe that will end its lifetime cold and devoid of life, the end fate of our universe actually has a beautiful symmetry to its hot, fiery beginning. 
We call the accelerating end state of the universe a de Sitter phase, named after the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter. 
However, we also believe that the universe had another phase of de Sitter expansion in the earliest times of its life. 
We call this early period inflation, where, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe expanded extremely fast for a brief period. 
So, the universe will end in much the same state as it began, accelerating. 
We live at an extraordinary time in the life of the universe where we can start to understand the universe's journey and view a history that plays itself out on the sky for all of us to see. 

In J.R.R.'s world, Gandalf is one of five wizards sent by the Valar to guide the inhabitants of Middle Earth in their struggles against the dark force of Sauron. 
Gandalf's body was mortal, subject to the physical rules of Middle Earth, but his spirit was immortal, as seen when he died as Gandalf the Grey and resurrected as Gandalf the White. 
According to the Wachowski's script, an awakened human only has to link up and hack the neon binary code of the Matrix to learn how to fly a helicopter in a matter of seconds. 
Or if you are the One, or one of the Ones, you don't even need a helicopter, you just need a cool pair of shades. 
Cheshire cats can juggle their own heads. 
iPads are rudimentary. 
No Quidditch match ends until the Golden Snitch is caught. 
And the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is most certainly 42. 
Just like real life, fictional worlds operate consistently within a spectrum of physical and societal rules. 
That's what makes these intricate worlds believable, comprehensible, and worth exploring. 
In real life, the Law of Gravity holds seven book sets of "Harry Potter" to millions of bookshelves around the world. 
We know this to be true, but we also know that ever since J.K. typed the words wizard, wand, and "Wingardium Leviosa," that Law of Gravity has ceased to exist on the trillions of pages resting between those bookends. 
Authors of science fiction and fantasy literally build worlds. 
They make rules, maps, lineages, languages, cultures, universes, alternate universes within universes, and from those worlds sprout story, after story, after story. 
When it's done well, readers can understand fictional worlds and their rules just as well as the characters that live in them do and sometimes, just as well or even better than the reader understands the world outside of the book. 
But how? 
How can human-made squiggles on a page reflect lights into our eyes that send signals to our brains that we logically and emotionally decode as complex narratives that move us to fight, cry, sing, and think, that are strong enough not only to hold up a world that is completely invented by the author, but also to change the reader's perspective on the real world that resumes only when the final squiggle is reached? 
I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question, yet fantastical, fictional worlds are created everyday in our minds, on computers, even on napkins at the restaurant down the street. 
The truth is your imagination and a willingness to, figuratively, live in your own world are all you need to get started writing a novel. 
I didn't dream up Hogwarts or the Star Wars' Cantina, but I have written some science thrillers for kids and young adults. 
Here are some questions and methods I've used to help build the worlds in which those books take place. 
I start with a basic place and time. 
Whether that's a fantasy world or a futuristic setting in the real world, it's important to know where you are and whether you're working in the past, present, or future. 
I like to create a timeline showing how the world came to be. 
What past events have shaped the way it is now? 
Then I brainstorm answers to questions that draw out the details of my fictional world. 
What rules are in place here? 
This covers everything from laws of gravity, or not, to the rules of society and the punishments for individuals who break them. 
What kind of government does this world have? 
Who has power, and who doesn't? 
What do people believe in here? 
And what does this society value most? 
Then it's time to think about day-to-day life. 
What's the weather like in this world? 
Where do the inhabitants live and work and go to school? 
What do they eat and how do they play? 
How do they treat their young and their old? 
What relationships do they have with the animals and plants of the world? 
And what do those animals and plants look like? 
What kind of technology exists? 
Transportation? 
Communication? 
Access to information? 
There's so much to think about! 
So, spend some time living in those tasks and the answers to those questions, and you're well on your way to building your own fictional world. 
Once you know your world as well as you hope your reader will, set your characters free in it and see what happens. 
And ask yourself, "How does this world you created shape the individuals who live in it? 
And what kind of conflict is likely to emerge?" 
Answer those questions, and you have your story. 
Good luck, future world-builder! 

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

Can you read in the car? 
If so, consider yourself pretty lucky. 
For one-third of the population, looking at a book while moving along in a car or a boat or train or plane quickly makes them sick to their stomach. 
But why do we get motion sickness in the first place? 
Well, believe it or not, scientists aren't exactly sure. 
The most common theory has to do with mismatched sensory signals. 
When you travel in a car, your body gets two different messages. 
Your eyes are seeing the inside of a vehicle, which doesn't seem to be moving. 
Meanwhile, your ear is telling your brain you're accelerating. 
Wait, your ear? 
Your ear has another important function besides hearing. 
In its innermost part lies a group of structures known as the vestibular system, which gives us our sense of balance and movement. 
Inside there are three semicircular tubules that can sense rotation, one for each dimension of space. 
And there are also two hair-lined sacks filled with fluid. 
When you move, the fluid shifts and tickles the hairs, telling your brain if you're moving horizontally or vertically. 
All this tells your body which direction you're moving in, how much you've accelerated, even at what angle. 
In a car, your vestibular system correctly senses your movement, but your eyes don't see it, especially when glued to a book. 
The opposite can happen. 
You're at the movies, and the camera makes a sweeping move. 
This time, your eyes think you're moving while your ear knows you're sitting still. 
But why does this conflicting information make us feel so terrible? 
Scientists aren't sure, but they think there's an evolutionary explanation. 
Fast moving vehicles and video recordings have only existed in the last couple of centuries, a blink in evolutionary time. 
For most of our history, there wasn't that much that could cause this sensory mix-up, except for poisons. 
And because poisons are not the best thing for survival, our bodies evolved a direct but unpleasant way to get rid of what we ate that was causing the confusion. 
It's a pretty reasonable theory, but it leaves things unexplained, like why women are more affected by motion sickness than men, or why passengers get more nauseous than drivers. 
Another theory suggests that the cause is more about the way some unfamiliar situations make it harder to maintain our natural body posture. 
Studies show that being immersed in water or just changing your stance can greatly reduce the effects of motion sickness. 
But we don't really know what's going on. 
We know the more common remedies for car queasiness -- looking at the horizon, over-the-counter pills, chewing gum, but none are totally reliable nor can they handle intense motion sickness and sometimes the stakes are far higher than just not being bored during a long car ride. 
At NASA, where astronauts are hurled into space at 17,000 miles per hour, motion sickness is a serious problem. 
In addition to researching the latest space-age technologies, NASA also spends a lot of time figuring out how to keep astronauts from vomiting up their space rations. 
Like understanding the mysteries of sleep or curing the common cold, motion sickness is one of those seemingly simple problems that, despite amazing scientific progress, we still know very little about. 
Perhaps one day the exact cause of motion sickness will be found, and with it, a completely effective way to prevent it, but that day is still on the horizon. 

All the material objects around you are composed of submicroscopic units we call molecules. 
And molecules in turn are composed of individual atoms. 
Molecules frequently break apart and then form new molecules. 
On the other hand, virtually all the atoms you come in to contact with through the course of your life, the ones in the ground beneath you, the air you breath, the food you eat, those that make up every living thing, including you, have existed for billions of years and were created in places very unlike our planet. 
How those atoms came about is what I want to share with you. 
It all started 14 billion years ago with an event we call The Big Bang, which resulted in a universe consisting of gas alone. 
There were no stars and no planets. 
The gas was made up only of atoms belonging to the simplest elements. 
It was about 75 percent hydrogen and almost all the rest was helium. 
No elements like carbon, oxygen or nitrogen existed. 
No iron, silver or gold. 
In some places, the density of this gas was slightly higher than in others. 
Due to gravity, those places attracted even more gas, which further strengthened the pull of gravity, which then drew more gas in, and so on. 
Eventually, large dense gas balls formed, shrinking under their own gravity and consequently heating up on the inside. 
At some point, the core of such a ball gets hot enough that nuclear fusion occurs. 
Hydrogen atoms smash together to form helium, accompanied by a great release of energy, strong enough to counteract the shrinking force of the gravity. 
When the energy pushing out from the fusion reactions matches the gravity pulling all the gas inwards, an equilibrium occurs. 
From this a star is born. 
Over its lifetime, the fusion reactions in the core of a massive star will produce not only helium, but also carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and all the other elements in the periodic table up to iron. 
But eventually, the core's fuel runs out, leaving it to collapse completely. 
That causes an unbelievably powerful explosion we call a supernova. 
Now there are two things to note about how supernovas create elements. 
First, this explosion releases so much energy that fusion goes wild forming elements with atoms even heavier than iron like silver, gold and uranium. 
Second, all the elements that had been accumulating in the core of the star, like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, as well as all of those formed in the supernova explosion, are ejected in to interstellar space where they mix with the gas that's already there. 
History then repeats itself. 
Gas clouds, now containing many elements besides the original hydrogen and helium, have higher density areas that attract more matter, and so on. 
As before, new stars result. 
Our sun was born this way about 5 billion years ago. 
That means that the gas it arose from had itself been enriched with many elements from supernova explosions since the universe began. 
So that's how the sun wound up with all the elements. 
It's still mostly hydrogen at 71 percent, with most of the rest being helium at 27 percent. 
But bear in mind that while the first stars were made up of hydrogen and helium alone, the remaining elements in the periodic table make up two percent of the sun. 
And what about Earth? 
Planets form as an incidental process to star formation out of the same gas cloud as the star itself. 
Small planets like ours don't have enough gravity to hold on to much hydrogen or helium gas since both of those are very light. 
So, even though carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and so on made up only two percent of the gas cloud from which Earth was formed, these heavier elements form the bulk of our planet and everything on it. 
Think about this: with the exception of hydrogen and some helium, the ground you walk on, the air you breath, you, everything is made of atoms that were created inside stars. 
When scientists first worked this out over the first half of the 20th Century, the famous astronomer Harlow Shapley commented, "We are brothers of the boulders, cousins of the clouds." 

Our story is about a girl named Iris. 
Iris is very sensitive. 
(Bird cawing) So much that she is always in tears. 
She cries when she's sad, when she's happy, (Godzilla roars) and even tears up when things just get to her. 
She has special lacrimal glands to make new tears and special tubes, called lacrimal puncta, to drain old ones away. 
And she cries so much that she goes through ten ounces of tears per day, thirty gallons a year! 
In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that she's crying a little bit all the time. 
The basal tears that Iris constantly produces form a thin coating of three layers that cover her and keep dirt and debris away. 
Right next to Iris is the mucus layer, which keeps the whole thing fastened to her. 
On top of it is the aqueous layer, which keeps Iris hydrated, repels invasive bacteria, and protects her skin, or cornea, from damage. 
And, finally, there is the lipid layer, an oily outer film that keeps the surface smooth for Iris to see through, and prevents the other layers from evaporating. 
Normally, Iris goes about her day without really noticing the basal tears doing their thing. 
That's kind of their whole point. 
But one day, she meets a girl named Onion. 
Iris is immediately smitten. 
Onion looks gorgeous in her bright purple jacket, and she smells terrific. 
So, Iris invites Onion to her house for dinner. 
But when she comes in and takes off her jacket, something terrible happens. 
You see, when Onion's jacket is removed, a chemical reaction happens, converting the sulfoxides that make her smell so great into sulfenic acid, which then becomes a nasty substance with a long name: syn-Propanethial S-oxide. 
The gas stings Iris, and suddenly, she can't help it, she starts weeping uncontrollably. 
These reflex tears are different from the basal tears that Iris is used to. 
Because they're designed to wash away harmful substances, or particles, they're released in much larger amounts, and their aqueous layer contains more antibodies to stop any microorganisms that may be trying to get in, as well. 
Both Iris and Onion are devastated. 
They know they can't continue their relationship if Iris is going to hurt and cry every time Onion takes off her jacket. 
So, they decide to break up. 
As Onion walks out the door, Iris stops crying. 
And immediately starts again. 
Only now, she's not crying reflex tears but emotional tears. 
When someone is either too sad or too happy, it feels like a loss of control, which can be dangerous. 
So, emotional tears are sent in to stabilize the mood as quickly as possible, along with other physical reactions, such as an increased heart rate and slower breathing. 
But scientists still aren't sure exactly how or why the tears themselves are helpful. 
They may be a social mechanism to elicit sympathy or show submission. 
But some studies have also found that emotional tears contain higher levels of stress hormones, such as ACTH and enkephalin, an endorphin and natural pain killer. 
In this case, emotional tears are also directly calming Iris down, as well as signaling her emotional state to others. 
Sorry things didn't work out with Onion, Iris, but don't worry. 
As long as you have all three kinds of tears working to keep you balanced and healthy, it will get better. 
You'll see. 

Why does your mouth feel like it's on fire when you eat a spicy pepper? 
And how do you soothe the burn? 
Why does wasabi make your eyes water? 
And how spicy is the spiciest spice? 
Let's back up a bit. 
First, what is spiciness? 
Even though we often say that something tastes spicy, it's not actually a taste, like sweet or salty or sour. 
Instead, what's really happening is that certain compounds in spicy foods activate the type of sensory neurons called polymodal nociceptors. 
You have these all over your body, including your mouth and nose, and they're the same receptors that are activated by extreme heat. 
So, when you eat a chili pepper, your mouth feels like it's burning because your brain actually thinks it's burning. 
The opposite happens when you eat something with menthol in it. 
The cool, minty compound is activating your cold receptors. 
When these heat-sensitive receptors are activated, your body thinks it's in contact with a dangerous heat source and reacts accordingly. 
This is why you start to sweat, and your heart starts beating faster. 
The peppers have elicited the same fight-or-flight response with which your body reacts to most threats. 
But you may have noticed that not all spicy foods are spicy in the same way. 
And the difference lies in the types of compounds involved. 
The capsaicin and piperine, found in black pepper and chili peppers, are made up of larger, heavier molecules called alkylamides, and those mostly stay in your mouth. 
Mustard, horseradish, and wasabi are made up of smaller molecules, called isothiocyanates, that easily float up into your sinuses. 
This is why chili peppers burn your mouth, and wasabi burns your nose. 
The standard measure of a food's spiciness is its rating on the Scoville scale, which measures how much its capsaicin content can be diluted before the heat is no longer detectable to humans. 
A sweet bell pepper gets 0 Scoville heat units, while Tabasco sauce clocks in between 1,200-2,400 units. 
The race to create the hottest pepper is a constant battle, but two peppers generally come out on top: The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion and the Carolina Reaper. 
These peppers measure between 1.5 and 2 million Scoville heat units, which is about half the units found in pepper spray. 
So, why would anyone want to eat something that causes such high levels of pain? 
Nobody really knows when or why humans started eating hot peppers. 
Archaeologists have found spices like mustard along with human artifacts dating as far back as 23,000 years ago. 
But they don't know whether the spices were used for food or medication or just decoration. 
More recently, a 6,000 year old crockpot, lined with charred fish and meat, also contained mustard. 
One theory says that humans starting adding spices to food to kill off bacteria. 
And some studies show that spice developed mostly in warmer climates where microbes also happen to be more prevalent. 
But why we continue to subject ourselves to spicy food today is still a bit of a mystery. 
For some people, eating spicy food is like riding rollercoasters; they enjoy the ensuing thrill, even if the immediate sensation is unpleasant. 
Some studies have even shown that those who like to eat hot stuff are more likely to enjoy other adrenaline-rich activities, like gambling. 
The taste for spicy food may even be genetic. 
And if you're thinking about training a bit, to up your tolerance for spice, know this: According to some studies, the pain doesn't get any better. 
You just get tougher. 
In fact, researchers have found that people who like to eat spicy foods don't rate the burn any less painful than those who don't. 
They just seem to like the pain more. 
So, torment your heat receptors all you want, but remember, when it comes to spicy food, you're going to get burned. 

Pick a card, any card. 
Actually, just pick up all of them and take a look. 
This standard 52-card deck has been used for centuries. 
Everyday, thousands just like it are shuffled in casinos all over the world, the order rearranged each time. 
And yet, every time you pick up a well-shuffled deck like this one, you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed in all of history. 
How can this be? 
The answer lies in how many different arrangements of 52 cards, or any objects, are possible. 
Now, 52 may not seem like such a high number, but let's start with an even smaller one. 
Say we have four people trying to sit in four numbered chairs. 
How many ways can they be seated? 
To start off, any of the four people can sit in the first chair. 
One this choice is made, only three people remain standing. 
After the second person sits down, only two people are left as candidates for the third chair. 
And after the third person has sat down, the last person standing has no choice but to sit in the fourth chair. 
If we manually write out all the possible arrangements, or permutations, it turns out that there are 24 ways that four people can be seated into four chairs, but when dealing with larger numbers, this can take quite a while. 
So let's see if there's a quicker way. 
Going from the beginning again, you can see that each of the four initial choices for the first chair leads to three more possible choices for the second chair, and each of those choices leads to two more for the third chair. 
So instead of counting each final scenario individually, we can multiply the number of choices for each chair: four times three times two times one to achieve the same result of 24. 
An interesting pattern emerges. 
We start with the number of objects we're arranging, four in this case, and multiply it by consecutively smaller integers until we reach one. 
This is an exciting discovery. 
So exciting that mathematicians have chosen to symbolize this kind of calculation, known as a factorial, with an exclamation mark. 
As a general rule, the factorial of any positive integer is calculated as the product of that same integer and all smaller integers down to one. 
In our simple example, the number of ways four people can be arranged into chairs is written as four factorial, which equals 24. 
So let's go back to our deck. 
Just as there were four factorial ways of arranging four people, there are 52 factorial ways of arranging 52 cards. 
Fortunately, we don't have to calculate this by hand. 
Just enter the function into a calculator, and it will show you that the number of possible arrangements is 8.07 x 10^67, or roughly eight followed by 67 zeros. 
Just how big is this number? 
Well, if a new permutation of 52 cards were written out every second starting 13.8 billion years ago, when the Big Bang is thought to have occurred, the writing would still be continuing today and for millions of years to come. 
In fact, there are more possible ways to arrange this simple deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth. 
So the next time it's your turn to shuffle, take a moment to remember that you're holding something that may have never before existed and may never exist again. 

In 479 BC, when Persian soldiers besieged the Greek city of Potidaea, the tide retreated much farther than usual, leaving a convenient invasion route. 
But this wasn't a stroke of luck. 
Before they had crossed halfway, the water returned in a wave higher than anyone had ever seen, drowning the attackers. 
The Potiidaeans believed they had been saved by the wrath of Poseidon. 
But what really saved them was likely the same phenomenon that has destroyed countless others: a tsunami. 
Although tsunamis are commonly known as tidal waves, they're actually unrelated to the tidal activity caused by the gravitational forces of the Sun and Moon. 
In many ways, tsunamis are just larger versions of regular waves. 
They have a trough and a crest, and consist not of moving water, but the movement of energy through water. 
The difference is in where this energy comes from. 
For normal ocean waves, it comes from wind. 
Because this only affects the surface, the waves are limited in size and speed. 
But tsunamis are caused by energy originating underwater, from a volcanic eruption, a submarine landslide, or most commonly, an earthquake on the ocean floor caused when the tectonic plates of the Earth's surface slip, releasing a massive amount of energy into the water. 
This energy travels up to the surface, displacing water and raising it above the normal sea level, but gravity pulls it back down, which makes the energy ripple outwards horizontally. 
Thus, the tsunami is born, moving at over 500 miles per hour. 
When it's far from shore, a tsunami can be barely detectable since it moves through the entire depth of the water. 
But when it reaches shallow water, something called wave shoaling occurs. 
Because there is less water to move through, this still massive amount of energy is compressed. 
The wave's speed slows down, while its height rises to as much as 100 feet. 
The word tsunami, Japanese for "harbor wave," comes from the fact that it only seems to appear near the coast. 
If the trough of a tsunami reaches shore first, the water will withdraw farther than normal before the wave hits, which can be misleadingly dangerous. 
A tsunami will not only drown people near the coast, but level buildings and trees for a mile inland or more, especially in low-lying areas. 
As if that weren't enough, the water then retreats, dragging with it the newly created debris, and anything, or anyone, unfortunate enough to be caught in its path. 
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, killing over 200,000 people throughout South Asia. 
So how can we protect ourselves against this destructive force of nature? 
People in some areas have attempted to stop tsunamis with sea walls, flood gates, and channels to divert the water. 
But these are not always effective. 
In 2011, a tsunami surpassed the flood wall protecting Japan's Fukushima Power Plant, causing a nuclear disaster in addition to claiming over 18,000 lives. 
Many scientists and policy makers are instead focusing on early detection, monitoring underwater pressure and seismic activity, and establishing global communication networks for quickly distributing alerts. 
When nature is too powerful to stop, the safest course is to get out of its way. 

Light: it's the fastest thing in the universe, but we can still measure its speed if we slow down the animation, we can analyze light's motion using a space-time diagram, which takes a flipbook of animation panels, and turns them on their side. 
In this lesson, we'll add the single experimental fact that whenever anyone measures just how fast light moves, they get the same answer: 299,792,458 meters every second, which means that when we draw light on our space-time diagram, it's world line always has to appear at the same angle. 
But we saw previously that speed, or equivalently world line angles, change when we look at things from other people's perspective. 
To explore this contradiction, let's see what happens if I start moving while I stand still and shine the laser at Tom. 
First, we'll need to construct the space-time diagram. 
Yes, that means taking all of the different panels showing the different moments in time and stacking them up. 
From the side, we see the world line of the laser light at its correct fixed angle, just as before. 
So far, so good. 
But that space-time diagram represents Andrew's perspective. 
What does it look like to me? 
In the last lesson, we showed how to get Tom's perspective moving all the panels along a bit until his world line is completely vertical. 
But look carefully at the light world line. 
The rearrangement of the panels means it's now tilted over too far. 
I'd measure light traveling faster than Andrew would. 
But every experiment we've ever done, and we've tried very hard, says that everyone measures light to have a fixed speed. 
So let's start again. 
In the 1900s, a clever chap named Albert Einstein worked out how to see things properly, from Tom's point of view, while still getting the speed of light right. 
First, we need to glue together the separate panels into one solid block. 
This gives us our space-time, turning space and time into one smooth, continuous material. 
And now, here is the trick. 
What you do is stretch your block of space-time along the light world line, then squash it by the same amount, but at right angles to the light world line, and abracadabra! 
Tom's world line has gone vertical, so this does represent the world from his point of view, but most importantly, the light world line has never changed its angle, and so light will be measured by Tom going at the correct speed. 
This superb trick is known as a Lorentz transformation. 
Yeah, more than a trick. 
Slice up the space-time into new panels and you have the physically correct animation. 
I'm stationary in the car, everything else is coming past me and the speed of light works out to be that same fixed value that we know everyone measures. 
On the other hand, something strange has happened. 
The fence posts aren't spaced a meter apart anymore, and my mom will be worried that I look a bit thin. 
But that's not fair. Why don't I get to look thin? 
I thought physics was supposed to be the same for everyone. 
Yes, no, it is, and you do. 
All that stretching and squashing of space-time has just muddled together what we used to think of separately as space and time. 
This particular squashing effect is known as Lorentz contraction. 
Okay, but I still don't look thin. 
No, yes, you do. 
Now that we know better about space-time, we should redraw what the scene looked like to me. 
To you, I appear Lorentz contracted. 
Oh but to you, I appear Lorentz contracted. 
Yes. 
Uh, well, at least it's fair. 
And speaking of fairness, just as space gets muddled with time, time also gets muddled with space, in an effect known as time dilation. 
No, at everyday speeds, such as Tom's car reaches, actually all the effects are much, much smaller than we've illustrated them. 
Oh, yet, careful experiments, for instance watching the behavior of tiny particles whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider confirmed that the effects are real. 
And now that space-time is an experimentally confirmed part of reality, we can get a bit more ambitious. 
What if we were to start playing with the material of space-time itself? 
We'll find out all about that in the next animation. 

We like to think of romantic feelings as spontaneous and indescribable things that come from the heart. 
But it's actually your brain running a complex series of calculations within a matter of seconds that's responsible for determining attraction. 
Doesn't sound quite as poetic, does it? 
But just because the calculations are happening in your brain doesn't mean those warm, fuzzy feelings are all in your head. 
In fact, all five of your senses play a role, each able to vote for, or veto, a budding attraction. 
The eyes are the first components in attraction. 
Many visual beauty standards vary between cultures and eras, and signs of youth, fertility and good health, such as long lustrous hair, or smooth, scar-free skin, are almost always in demand because they're associated with reproductive fitness. 
And when the eyes spot something they like, our instinct is to move closer so the other senses can investigate. 
The nose's contribution to romance is more than noticing perfume or cologne. 
It's able to pick up on natural chemical signals known as pheromones. 
These not only convey important physical or genetic information about their source but are able to activate a physiological or behavioral response in the recipient. 
In one study, a group of women at different points in their ovulation cycles wore the same T-shirts for three nights. 
After male volunteers were randomly assigned to smell either one of the worn shirts, or a new unworn one, saliva samples showed an increase in testosterone in those who had smelled a shirt worn by an ovulating woman. 
Such a testosterone boost may give a man the nudge to pursue a woman he might not have otherwise noticed. 
A woman's nose is particularly attuned to MHC molecules, which are used to fight disease. 
In this case, opposites attract. 
When a study asked women to smell T-shirts that had been worn by different men, they preferred the odors of those whose MHC molecules differed from theirs. 
This makes sense. 
Genes that result in a greater variety of immunities may give offspring a major survival advantage. 
Our ears also determine attraction. 
Men prefer females with high-pitched, breathy voices, and wide formant spacing, correlated with smaller body size. 
While women prefer low-pitched voices with a narrow formant spacing that suggest a larger body size. 
And not surprisingly, touch turns out to be crucial for romance. 
In this experiment, not realizing the study had begun, participants were asked to briefly hold the coffee, either hot or iced. 
Later, the participants read a story about a hypothetical person, and were asked to rate their personality. 
Those who had held the hot cup of coffee perceived the person in the story as happier, more social, more generous and better-natured than those who had held the cup of iced coffee, who rated the person as cold, stoic, and unaffectionate. 
If a potential mate has managed to pass all these tests, there's still one more: the infamous first kiss, a rich and complex exchange of tactile and chemical cues, such as the smell of one's breath, and the taste of their mouth. 
This magical moment is so critical that a majority of men and women have reported losing their attraction to someone after a bad first kiss. 
Once attraction is confirmed, your bloodstream is flooded with norepinephrine, activating your fight or flight system. 
Your heart beats faster, your pupils dilate, and your body releases glucose for additional energy, not because you're in danger but because your body is telling you that something important is happening. 
To help you focus, norepinephrine creates a sort of tunnel vision, blocking out surrounding distractions, possibly even warping your sense of time, and enhancing your memory. 
This might explain why people never forget their first kiss. 
The idea of so much of our attraction being influenced by chemicals and evolutionary biology may seem cold and scientific rather than romantic, but the next time you see someone you like, try to appreciate how your entire body is playing matchmaker to decide if that beautiful stranger is right for you. 

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

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

You've probably heard that carbon dioxide is warming the Earth, but how does it work? 
Is it like the glass of a greenhouse or like an insulating blanket? 
Well, not entirely. 
The answer involves a bit of quantum mechanics, but don't worry, we'll start with a rainbow. 
If you look closely at sunlight separated through a prism, you'll see dark gaps where bands of color went missing. 
Where did they go? 
Before reaching our eyes, different gases absorbed those specific parts of the spectrum. 
For example, oxygen gas snatched up some of the dark red light, and sodium grabbed two bands of yellow. 
But why do these gases absorb specific colors of light? 
This is where we enter the quantum realm. 
Every atom and molecule has a set number of possible energy levels for its electrons. 
To shift its electrons from the ground state to a higher level, a molecule needs to gain a certain amount of energy. 
No more, no less. 
It gets that energy from light, which comes in more energy levels than you could count. 
Light consists of tiny particles called photons and the amount of energy in each photon corresponds to its color. 
Red light has lower energy and longer wavelengths. 
Purple light has higher energy and shorter wavelengths. 
Sunlight offers all the photons of the rainbow, so a gas molecule can choose the photons that carry the exact amount of energy needed to shift the molecule to its next energy level. 
When this match is made, the photon disappers as the molecule gains its energy, and we get a small gap in our rainbow. 
If a photon carries too much or too little energy, the molecule has no choice but to let it fly past. 
This is why glass is transparent. 
The atoms in glass do not pair well with any of the energy levels in visible light, so the photons pass through. 
So, which photons does carbon dioxide prefer? 
Where is the black line in our rainbow that explains global warming? 
Well, it's not there. 
Carbon dioxide doesn't absorb light directly from the Sun. 
It absorbs light from a totally different celestial body. 
One that doesn't appear to be emitting light at all: Earth. 
If you're wondering why our planet doesn't seem to be glowing, it's because the Earth doesn't emit visible light. 
It emits infared light. 
The light that our eyes can see, including all of the colors of the rainbow, is just a small part of the larger spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, which includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. 
It may seem strange to think of these things as light, but there is no fundamental difference between visible light and other electromagnetic radiation. 
It's the same energy, but at a higher or lower level. 
In fact, it's a bit presumptuous to define the term visible light by our own limitations. 
After all, infrared light is visible to snakes, and ultraviolet light is visible to birds. 
If our eyes were adapted to see light of 1900 megahertz, then a mobile phone would be a flashlight, and a cell phone tower would look like a huge lantern. 
Earth emits infrared radiation because every object with a temperature above absolute zero will emit light. 
This is called thermal radiation. 
The hotter an object gets, the higher frequency the light it emits. 
When you heat a piece of iron, it will emit more and more frequencies of infrared light, and then, at a temperature of around 450 degrees Celsius, its light will reach the visible spectrum. 
At first, it will look red hot. 
And with even more heat, it will glow white with all of the frequencies of visible light. 
This is how traditional light bulbs were designed to work and why they're so wasteful. 
95% of the light they emit is invisible to our eyes. 
It's wasted as heat. 
Earth's infrared radiation would escape to space if there weren't greenhouse gas molecules in our atmophere. 
Just as oxygen gas prefers the dark red photons, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases match with infrared photons. 
They provide the right amount of energy to shift the gas molecules into their higher energy level. 
Shortly after a carbon dioxide molecule absorbs an infrared photon, it will fall back to its previous energy level, and spit a photon back out in a random direction. 
Some of that energy then returns to Earth's surface, causing warming. 
The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more likely that infrared photons will land back on Earth and change our climate. 

I’m working a lot with motion and animation, and also I'm an old DJ and a musician. 
So, music videos are something that I always found interesting, but they always seem to be so reactive. 
So I was thinking, can you remove us as creators and try to make the music be the voice and have the animation following it? 
So with two designers, Tolga and Christina, at my office, we took a track -- many of you probably know it. It’s about 25 years old, and it's David Byrne and Brian Eno -- and we did this little animation. 
And I think that it's maybe interesting, also, that it deals with two problematic issues, which are rising waters and religion. 
Song: Before God destroyed the people on the Earth, he warned Noah to build an Ark. 
And after Noah built his Ark, I believe he told Noah to warn the people that they must change all their wicked ways before he come upon them and destroy them. 
And when Noah had done built his Ark, I understand that somebody began to rend a song. 
And the song began to move on I understand like this. 
And when Noah had done built his Ark ... 
Move on ... In fact ... Concern ... 
So they get tired, has come dark and rain; they get weary and tired. 
And then he went and knocked an old lady house. 
And old lady ran to the door and say, "Who is it?" 
Jack say, "Me, Mama-san, could we spend the night here? 
Because we’re far from home, we’re very tired." 
And the old lady said, "Oh yes, come on in." 
It was come dark and rain, will make you weary and tired. 
(Applause) 

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

Check this out: Here's a grid, nothing special, just a basic grid, very grid-y. 
But look closer, into this white spot at the center where the two central vertical and horizontal lines intersect. 
Look very closely. Notice anything funny about this spot? 
Yeah, nothing. 
But keep looking. Get weird and stare at it. 
Now, keeping your gaze fixed on this white spot, check what's happening in your peripheral vision. 
The other spots, are they still white? Or do they show weird flashes of grey? 
Now look at this pan for baking muffins. 
Oh, sorry, one of the cups is inverted. It pops up instead of dipping down. 
Wait, no spin the pan. The other five are domed now? 
Whichever it is, this pan's defective. 
Here's a photo of Abraham Lincoln, and here's one upside down. 
Nothing weird going on here. 
Wait, turn that upside down one right side up. What have they done to Abe? 
Those are just three optical illusions, images that seem to trick us. 
How do they work? 
Are magical things happening in the images themselves? 
While we could certainly be sneaking flashes of grey into the peripheral white spots of our animated grid, first off, we promise we aren't. 
You'll see the same effect with a grid printed on a plain old piece of paper. 
In reality, this grid really is just a grid. But not to your brain's visual system. 
Here's how it interprets the light information you call this grid. 
The white intersections are surrounded by relatively more white on all four sides than any white point along a line segment. 
Your retinal ganglion cells notice that there is more white around the intersections because they are organized to increase contrast with lateral inhibition. 
Better contrast means it's easier to see the edge of something. 
And things are what your eyes and brain have evolved to see. 
Your retinal ganglion cells don't respond as much at the crossings because there is more lateral inhibition for more white spots nearby compared to the lines, which are surrounded by black. 
This isn't just a defect in your eyes; if you can see, then optical illusions can trick you with your glasses on or with this paper or computer screen right up in your face. 
What optical illusions show us is the way your photo receptors and brain assemble visual information into the three-dimensional world you see around you, where edges should get extra attention because things with edges can help you or kill you. 
Look at that muffin pan again. You know what causes confusion here? 
Your brain's visual cortex operates on assumptions about the lighting of this image. 
It expects light to come from a single source, shining down from above. 
And so these shading patterns could only have been caused by light shining down on the sloping sides of a dome, or the bottom of a hole. 
If we carefully recreate these clues by drawing shading patterns, even on a flat piece of paper, our brain reflexively creates the 3D concave or convex shape. 
Now for that creepy Lincoln upside down face. 
Faces trigger activity in areas of the brain that have specifically evolved to help us recognize faces. 
Like the fusiform face area and others in the occipital and temporal lobes. 
It makes sense, too, we're very social animals with highly complex ways of interacting with each other. 
When we see faces, we have to recognize they are faces and figure out what they're expressing very quickly. 
And what we focus on most are the eyes and mouth. 
That's how we figure out if someone is mad at us or wants to be our friend. 
In the upside down Lincoln face, the eyes and mouth were actually right side up, so you didn't notice anything was off. 
But when we flipped the whole image over, the most important parts of the face, the eyes and mouth, were now upside down, and you realized something fishy was up. 
You realized your brain had taken a short cut and missed something. 
But your brain wasn't really being lazy, it's just very busy. 
So it spends cognitive energy as efficiently as possible, using assumptions about visual information to create a tailored, edited vision of the world. 
Imagine your brain calling out these edits on the fly: "Okay, those squares could be objects. 
Let's enhance that black-white contrast on the sides with lateral inhibition. 
Darken those corners! 
Dark grey fading into light grey? 
Assume overhead sunlight falling on a sloping curve. Next! 
Those eyes look like most eyes I've seen before, nothing weird going on here." 
See? Our visual tricks have revealed your brain's job as a busy director of 3D animation in a studio inside your skull, allocating cognitive energy and constructing a world on the fly with tried and mostly -- but not always -- true tricks of its own. 

How do you know you're real? 
It's an obvious question until you try to answer it, but let's take it seriously. 
How do you really know you exist? 
In his "Meditations on First Philosophy," René Descartes tried to answer that very question, demolishing all his preconceived notions and opinions to begin again from the foundations. 
All his knowledge had come from his sensory perceptions of the world. 
Same as you, right? 
You know you're watching this video with your eyes, hearing it with your ears. 
Your senses show you the world as it is. 
They aren't deceiving you, but sometimes they do. 
You might mistake a person far away for someone else, or you're sure you're about to catch a flyball, and it hits the ground in front of you. 
But come on, right here and now, you know what's right in front of you is real. 
Your eyes, your hands, your body: that's you. 
Only crazy people would deny that, and you know you're not crazy. 
Anyone who'd doubt that must be dreaming. 
Oh no, what if you're dreaming? 
Dreams feel real. 
You can believe you're swimming, flying or fighting off monsters with your bare hands, when your real body is lying in bed. 
No, no, no. 
When you're awake, you know you're awake. 
Ah! But when you aren't, you don't know you aren't, so you can't prove you aren't dreaming. 
Maybe the body you perceive yourself to have isn't really there. 
Maybe all of reality, even its abstract concepts, like time, shape, color and number are false, all just deceptions concocted by an evil genius! 
No, seriously. 
Descartes asks if you can disprove the idea that an evil genius demon has tricked you into believing reality is real. 
Perhaps this diabolical deceiver has duped you. 
The world, your perceptions of it, your very body. 
You can't disprove that they're all just made up, and how could you exist without them? 
You couldn't! So, you don't. 
Life is but a dream, and I bet you aren't row, row, rowing the boat merrily at all, are you? 
No, you're rowing it wearily like the duped, nonexistent doof you are/aren't. 
Do you find that convincing? 
Are you persuaded? 
If you aren't, good; if you are, even better, because by being persuaded, you would prove that you're a persuaded being. 
You can't be nothing if you think you're something, even if you think that something is nothing because no matter what you think, you're a thinking thing, or as Descartes put it, "I think, therefore I am," and so are you, really. 
(Airplane engine) 

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

"Sorry, my phone died." 
"It's nothing. I'm fine." 
"These allegations are completely unfounded." 
"The company was not aware of any wrongdoing." 
"I love you." 
We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day, and we spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect them, from medieval torture devices to polygraphs, blood-pressure and breathing monitors, voice-stress analyzers, eye trackers, infrared brain scanners, and even the 400-pound electroencephalogram. 
But although such tools have worked under certain circumstances, most can be fooled with enough preparation, and none are considered reliable enough to even be admissible in court. 
But, what if the problem is not with the techniques, but the underlying assumption that lying spurs physiological changes? 
What if we took a more direct approach, using communication science to analyze the lies themselves? 
On a psychological level, we lie partly to paint a better picture of ourselves, connecting our fantasies to the person we wish we were rather than the person we are. 
But while our brain is busy dreaming, it's letting plenty of signals slip by. 
Our conscious mind only controls about 5% of our cognitive function, including communication, while the other 95% occurs beyond our awareness, and according to the literature on reality monitoring, stories based on imagined experiences are qualitatively different from those based on real experiences. 
This suggests that creating a false story about a personal topic takes work and results in a different pattern of language use. 
A technology known as linguistic text analysis has helped to identify four such common patterns in the subconscious language of deception. 
First, liars reference themselves less, when making deceptive statements. 
They write or talk more about others, often using the third person to distance and disassociate themselves from their lie, which sounds more false: "Absolutely no party took place at this house," or "I didn't host a party here." 
Second, liars tend to be more negative, because on a subconscious level, they feel guilty about lying. 
For example, a liar might say something like, "Sorry, my stupid phone battery died. I hate that thing." 
Third, liars typically explain events in simple terms since our brains struggle to build a complex lie. 
Judgment and evaluation are complex things for our brains to compute. 
As a U.S. President once famously insisted: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." 
And finally, even though liars keep descriptions simple, they tend to use longer and more convoluted sentence structure, inserting unnecessary words and irrelevant but factual sounding details in order to pad the lie. 
Another President confronted with a scandal proclaimed: "I can say, categorically, that this investigation indicates that no one on the White House staff, no one in this administration presently employed was involved in this very bizarre incident." 
Let's apply linguistic analysis to some famous examples. 
Take seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. 
When comparing a 2005 interview, in which he had denied taking performance-enhancing drugs to a 2013 interview, in which he admitted it, his use of personal pronouns increased by nearly 3/4. 
Note the contrast between the following two quotes. 
First: "Okay, you know, a guy in a French, in a Parisian laboratory opens up your sample, you know, Jean-Francis so-and-so, and he tests it. 
And then you get a phone call from a newspaper that says: 'We found you to be positive six times for EPO." 
Second: "I lost myself in all of that. 
I'm sure there would be other people that couldn't handle it, but I certainly couldn't handle it, and I was used to controlling everything in my life. 
I controlled every outcome in my life." 
In his denial, Armstrong described a hypothetical situation focused on someone else, removing himself from the situation entirely. 
In his admission, he owns his statements, delving into his personal emotions and motivations. 
But the use of personal pronouns is just one indicator of deception. 
Let's look at another example from former Senator and U.S. Presidential candidate John Edwards: "I only know that the apparent father has said publicly that he is the father of the baby. 
I also have not been engaged in any activity of any description that requested, agreed to, or supported payments of any kind to the woman or to the apparent father of the baby." 
Not only is that a pretty long-winded way to say, "The baby isn't mine," but Edwards never calls the other parties by name, instead saying "that baby," "the woman," and "the apparent father." 
Now let's see what he had to say when later admitting paternity: "I am Quinn's father. 
I will do everything in my power to provide her with the love and support she deserves." 
The statement is short and direct, calling the child by name and addressing his role in her life. 
So how can you apply these lie-spotting techniques to your life? 
First, remember that many of the lies we encounter on a daily basis are far less serious that these examples, and may even be harmless. 
But it's still worthwhile to be aware of telltale clues, like minimal self-references, negative language, simple explanations and convoluted phrasing. 
It just might help you avoid an overvalued stock, an ineffective product, or even a terrible relationship. 

Have you ever noticed something swimming in your field of vision? 
It may look like a tiny worm or a transparent blob, and whenever you try to get a closer look, it disappears, only to reappear as soon as you shift your glance. 
But don't go rinsing out your eyes! 
What you are seeing is a common phenomenon known as a floater. 
The scientific name for these objects is Muscae volitantes, Latin for "flying flies," and true to their name, they can be somewhat annoying. 
But they're not actually bugs or any kind of external objects at all. 
Rather, they exist inside your eyeball. 
Floaters may seem to be alive, since they move and change shape, but they are not alive. 
Floaters are tiny objects that cast shadows on the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of your eye. 
They might be bits of tissue, red blood cells, or clumps of protein. 
And because they're suspended within the vitreous humor, the gel-like liquid that fills the inside of your eye, floaters drift along with your eye movements, and seem to bounce a little when your eye stops. 
Floaters may be only barely distinguishable most of the time. 
They become more visible the closer they are to the retina, just as holding your hand closer to a table with an overhead light will result in a more sharply defined shadow. 
And floaters are particularly noticeable when you are looking at a uniform bright surface, like a blank computer screen, snow, or a clear sky, where the consistency of the background makes them easier to distinguish. 
The brighter the light is, the more your pupil contracts. 
This has an effect similar to replacing a large diffuse light fixture with a single overhead light bulb, which also makes the shadow appear clearer. 
There is another visual phenomenon that looks similar to floaters but is in fact unrelated. 
If you've seen tiny dots of light darting about when looking at a bright blue sky, you've experienced what is known as the blue field entoptic phenomenon. 
In some ways, this is the opposite of seeing floaters. 
Here, you are not seeing shadows but little moving windows letting light through to your retina. 
The windows are actually caused by white blood cells moving through the capillaries along your retina's surface. 
These leukocytes can be so large that they nearly fill a capillary causing a plasma space to open up in front of them. 
Because the space and the white blood cells are both more transparent to blue light than the red blood cells normally present in capillaries, we see a moving dot of light wherever this happens, following the paths of your capillaries and moving in time with your pulse. 
Under ideal viewing conditions, you might even see what looks like a dark tail following the dot. 
This is the red blood cells that have bunched up behind the leukocyte. 
Some science museums have an exhibit which consists of a screen of blue light, allowing you to see these blue sky sprites much more clearly than you normally would. 
While everybody's eyes experience these sort of effects, the number and type vary greatly. 
In the case of floaters, they often go unnoticed, as our brain learns to ignore them. 
However, abnormally numerous or large floaters that interfere with vision may be a sign of a more serious condition, requiring immediate medical treatment. 
But the majority of the time entoptic phenomena, such as floaters and blue sky sprites, are just a gentle reminder that what we think we see depends just as much on our biology and minds as it does on the external world. 

It was an afternoon in the fall of 2005. 
I was working at the ACLU as the organization's science advisor. 
I really, really loved my job, but I was having one of those days where I was feeling just a little bit discouraged. 
So I wandered down the hallway to my colleague Chris Hansen's office. 
Chris had been at the ACLU for more than 30 years, so he had deep institutional knowledge and insights. 
I explained to Chris that I was feeling a little bit stuck. 
I had been investigating a number of issues at the intersection of science and civil liberties -- super interesting. 
But I wanted the ACLU to engage these issues in a much bigger way, in a way that could really make a difference. 
So Chris cut right to the chase, and he says, "Well, of all the issues you've been looking at, what are the top five?" 
"Well, there's genetic discrimination, and reproductive technologies, and biobanking, and ... 
oh, there's this really cool issue, functional MRI and using it for lie detection, and ... 
oh, and of course, there's gene patents." 
"Gene patents?" 
"Yes, you know, patents on human genes." 
"No! 
You're telling me that the US government has been issuing patents on part of the human body? 
That can't be right." 
I went back to my office and sent Chris three articles. 
And 20 minutes later, he came bursting in my office. 
"Oh my god! You're right! Who can we sue?" 
(Laughter) Now Chris is a really brilliant lawyer, but he knew almost nothing about patent law and certainly nothing about genetics. 
I knew something about genetics, but I wasn't even a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer. 
So clearly we had a lot to learn before we could file a lawsuit. 
First, we needed to understand exactly what was patented when someone patented a gene. 
Gene patents typically contain dozens of claims, but the most controversial of these are to so-called "isolated DNA" -- namely, a piece of DNA that has been removed from a cell. 
Gene patent proponents say, "See? We didn't patent the gene in your body, we patented an isolated gene." 
And that's true, but the problem is that any use of the gene requires that it be isolated. 
And the patents weren't just to a particular gene that they isolated, but on every possible version of that gene. 
So what does that mean? 
That means that you can't give your gene to your doctor and ask him or her to look at it, say, to see if it has any mutations, without permission of the patent holder. 
It also means that the patent holder has the right to stop anyone from using that gene in research or clinical testing. 
Allowing patent holders, often private companies, to lock up stretches of the human genome was harming patients. 
Consider Abigail, a 10-year-old with long QT syndrome, a serious heart condition that, if left untreated, can result in sudden death. 
The company that obtained a patent on two genes associated with this condition developed a test to diagnose the syndrome. 
But then they went bankrupt and they never offered it. 
So another lab tried to offer the test, but the company that held the patents threatened to sue the lab for patent infringement. 
So as a result, for 2 years, no test was available. 
During that time, Abigail died of undiagnosed long QT. 
Gene patents clearly were a problem and were harming patients. 
But was there a way we could challenge them? 
Turns out that the Supreme Court has made clear through a long line of cases, that certain things are not patent eligible. 
You can't patent products of nature -- the air, the water, minerals, elements of the periodic table. 
And you can't patent laws of nature -- the law of gravity, E = mc2. 
These things are just too fundamental and must remain free to all and reserved exclusively to none. 
It seemed to us that DNA, the most fundamental structure of life, that codes for the production of all of our proteins, is both a product of nature and a law of nature, regardless of whether it's in our bodies or sitting in the bottom of a test tube. 
As we delved into this issue, we traveled all over the country to speak with many different experts -- scientists, medical professionals, lawyers, patent lawyers. 
Most of them agreed that we were right as a matter of policy, and, at least in theory, as a matter of law. 
All of them thought our chances of winning a gene-patent challenge were about zero. 
Why is that? 
Well, the patent office had been issuing these patents for more than 20 years. 
There were literally thousands of patents on human genes. 
The patent bar was deeply entrenched in the status quo, the biotech industry had grown up around this practice, and legislation to ban gene patents had been introduced year after year in Congress, and had gone absolutely nowhere. 
So the bottom line: courts just weren't going to be willing to overturn these patents. 
Now, neither Chris nor I were the type to shy away from a challenge, and hearing, "Being right just isn't enough," seemed all the more reason to take on this fight. 
So we set out to build our case. 
Now, patent cases tend to be: Company A sues Company B over some really narrow, obscure technical issue. 
We weren't really interested in that kind of case, and we thought this case was much bigger than that. 
This was about scientific freedom, medical progress, the rights of patients. 
So we decided we were going to develop a case that was not like your typical patent case -- more like a civil rights case. 
We set out to identify a gene-patent holder that was vigorously enforcing its patents and then to organize a broad coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could tell the court about all the ways that these patents were harming patients and innovation. 
We found the prime candidate to sue in Myriad Genetics, a company that's based in Salt Lake City, Utah. 
Myriad held patents on two genes, the BRCA1 and the BRCA2 genes. 
Women with certain mutations along these genes are considered to be at a significantly increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. 
Myriad had used its patents to maintain a complete monopoly on BRCA testing in the United States. 
It had forced multiple labs that were offering BRCA testing to stop. 
It charged a lot of money for its test -- over 3,000 dollars. 
It had stopped sharing its clinical data with the international scientific community. 
And perhaps worst of all, for a period of several years, Myriad refused to update its test to include additional mutations that had been identified by a team of researchers in France. 
It has been estimated that during that period, for several years, as many as 12 percent of women undergoing testing received the wrong answer -- a negative test result that should have been positive. 
This is Kathleen Maxian. 
Kathleen's sister Eileen developed breast cancer at age 40 and she was tested by Myriad. 
The test was negative. 
The family was relieved. 
That meant that Eileen's cancer most likely didn't run in the family, and that other members of her family didn't need to be tested. 
But two years later, Kathleen was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. 
It turned out that Kathleen's sister was among the 12 percent who received a false-negative test result. 
Had Eileen received the proper result, Kathleen would have then been tested, and her ovarian cancer could have been prevented. 
Once we settled on Myriad, we then had to form a coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could illuminate these problems. 
We ended up with 20 highly committed plaintiffs: genetic counselors, geneticists who had received cease and desist letters, advocacy organizations, four major scientific organizations that collectively represented more than 150,000 scientists and medical professionals, and individual women who either couldn't afford Myriad's test, or who wanted to obtain a second opinion but could not, as a result of the patents. 
One of the major challenges we had in preparing the case was figuring out how best to communicate the science. 
So in order to argue that what Myriad did was not an invention, and that isolated BRCA genes were products of nature, we had to explain a couple of basic concepts, like: What's a gene? What's DNA? 
How is DNA isolated, and why isn't that an invention? 
We spent hours and hours with our plaintiffs and experts, trying to come up with ways of explaining these concepts simply yet accurately. 
And we ended up relying heavily on the use of metaphors, like gold. 
So isolating DNA -- it's like extracting gold from a mountain or taking it out of a stream bed. 
You might be able to patent the process for mining the gold, but you can't patent the gold itself. 
It might've taken a lot of hard work and effort to dig the gold out of the mountain; you still can't patent it, it's still gold. 
And the gold, once it's extracted, can clearly be used for all sorts of things that it couldn't be used for when it was in the mountain; you can make jewelry out of it for example -- still can't patent the gold, it's still gold. 
So now it's 2009, and we're ready to file our case. 
We filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, and the case was randomly assigned to Judge Robert Sweet. 
In March 2010, Judge Sweet issued his opinion -- 152 pages -- and a complete victory for our side. 
In reading the opinion, we could not get over how eloquently he described the science in the case. 
I mean, our brief -- it was pretty good, but not this good. 
How did he develop such a deep understanding of this issue in such a short time? 
We just could not comprehend how this had happened. 
So it turned out, Judge Sweet's clerk working for him at the time, was not just a lawyer -- he was a scientist. 
He was not just a scientist -- he had a PhD in molecular biology. 
(Laughter) What an incredible stroke of luck! 
Myriad then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. 
And here things got really interesting. 
First, in a pivotal moment of this case, the US government switched sides. 
So in the district court the government submitted a brief on Myriad's side. 
But now in direct opposition to its own patent office, the US government files a brief that states that is has reconsidered this issue in light of the district court's opinion, and has concluded that isolated DNA is not patent eligible. 
This was a really big deal, totally unexpected. 
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit hears all patent cases, and it has a reputation for being very, very pro-patent. 
So even with this remarkable development, we expected to lose. 
And we did. 
Ends up split decision, 2 to 1. 
But the two judges who ruled against us, did so for completely different reasons. 
The first one, Judge Lourie, made up his own novel, biological theory -- totally wrong. 
(Laughter) He decided Myriad had created a new chemical -- made absolutely no sense. 
Myriad didn't even argue this, so it came out of the blue. 
The other, Judge Moore, said she basically agreed with us that isolated DNA is a product of nature. 
But she's like, "I don't want to shake up the biotech industry." 
The third, Judge Bryson, agreed with us. 
So now we sought review by the Supreme Court. 
And when you petition the Supreme Court, you have to present a question that you want the Court to answer. 
Usually these questions take the form of a super-long paragraph, like a whole page long with lots and lots of clauses, "wherein this" and "therefore that." 
We submitted perhaps the shortest question presented ever. 
Four words: Are human genes patentable? 
Now when Chris first asked me what I thought of these words, I said, "Well, I don't know. 
I think you have to say, 'Is isolated DNA patentable?'" "Nope. 
I want the justices to have the very same reaction that I had when you brought this issue to me seven years ago." 
Well, I certainly couldn't argue with that. 
The Supreme Court only hears about one percent of the cases that it receives, and it agreed to hear ours. 
The day of the oral argument arrives, and it was really, really exciting -- long line of people outside, people had been standing in line since 2:30 in the morning to try to get into the courthouse. 
Two breast cancer organizations, Breast Cancer Action and FORCE, had organized a demonstration on the courthouse steps. 
Chris and I sat quietly in the hallway, moments before he was to walk in and argue the most important case of his career. 
I was clearly more nervous than he was. 
But any remaining panic subsided as I walked into the courtroom and looked around at a sea of friendly faces: our individual women clients who had shared their deeply personal stories, the geneticists who had taken huge chunks of time out of their busy careers to dedicate themselves to this fight and representatives from a diverse array of medical, patient advocacy, environmental and religious organizations, who had submitted friend of the court briefs in the case. 
Also in the room were three leaders of the Human Genome Project, including the co-discoverer of DNA himself, James Watson, who had submitted a brief to the court, where he referred to gene patenting as "lunacy." 
(Laughter) The diversity of the communities represented in this room and the contributions each had made to make this day a reality spoke volumes to what was at stake. 
The argument itself was riveting. 
Chris argued brilliantly. 
But for me, the most thrilling aspect was watching the Supreme Court justices grapple with isolated DNA, through a series of colorful analogies and feisty exchanges, very much the same way as our legal team had done for the past seven years. 
Justice Kagan likened isolating DNA to extracting a medicinal plant from the Amazon. 
Justice Roberts distinguished it from carving a baseball bat from a tree. 
And in one of my absolutely favorite moments, Justice Sotomayor proclaimed isolated DNA to be "just nature sitting there." 
(Laughter) We felt pretty confident leaving the courtroom that day, but I could never have anticipated the outcome: nine to zero. 
"A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature, and not patent-eligible merely because it has been isolated. 
And furthermore, Myriad did not create anything." 
Within 24 hours of the decision, five labs had announced that they would begin to offer testing for the BRCA genes. 
Some of them promised to offer the tests at a lower price than Myriad's. 
Some promised to provide a more comprehensive test than the one Myriad was offering. 
But of course the decision goes far beyond Myriad. 
It ends a 25-year practice of allowing patents on human genes in the United States. 
It clears a significant barrier to biomedical discovery and innovation. 
And it helps to ensure that patients like Abigail, Kathleen and Eileen have access to the tests that they need. 
A few weeks after the court issued its decision, I received a small package in the mail. 
It was from Bob Cook-Deegan, a professor at Duke University and one the very first people Chris and I went to visit when we started to consider whether to bring this case. 
I opened it up to find a small stuffed animal. 
(Laughter) We took a big risk in taking this case. 
Part of what gave us the courage to take that risk was knowing that we were doing the right thing. 
The process took nearly eight years from the start to finish, with many twists and turns along the way. 
A little luck certainly helped, but it was the communities that we bridged, the alliances that we created, that made pigs fly. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

How does your smartphone know exactly where you are? 
The answer lies 12,000 miles over your head in an orbiting satellite that keeps time to the beat of an atomic clock powered by quantum mechanics. 
Phew. 
Let's break that down. 
First of all, why is it so important to know what time it is on a satellite when location is what we're concerned about? 
The first thing your phone needs to determine is how far it is from a satellite. 
Each satellite constantly broadcasts radio signals that travel from space to your phone at the speed of light. 
Your phone records the signal arrival time and uses it to calculate the distance to the satellite using the simple formula, distance = c x time, where c is the speed of light and time is how long the signal traveled. 
But there's a problem. 
Light is incredibly fast. 
If we were only able to calculate time to the nearest second, every location on Earth, and far beyond, would seem to be the same distance from the satellite. 
So in order to calculate that distance to within a few dozen feet, we need the best clock ever invented. 
Enter atomic clocks, some of which are so precise that they would not gain or lose a second even if they ran for the next 300 million years. 
Atomic clocks work because of quantum physics. 
All clocks must have a constant frequency. 
In other words, a clock must carry out some repetitive action to mark off equivalent increments of time. 
Just as a grandfather clock relies on the constant swinging back and forth of a pendulum under gravity, the tick tock of an atomic clock is maintained by the transition between two energy levels of an atom. 
This is where quantum physics comes into play. 
Quantum mechanics says that atoms carry energy, but they can't take on just any arbitrary amount. 
Instead, atomic energy is constrained to a precise set of levels. 
We call these quanta. 
As a simple analogy, think about driving a car onto a freeway. 
As you increase your speed, you would normally continuously go from, say, 20 miles/hour up to 70 miles/hour. 
Now, if you had a quantum atomic car, you wouldn't accelerate in a linear fashion. 
Instead, you would instantaneously jump, or transition, from one speed to the next. 
For an atom, when a transition occurs from one energy level to another, quantum mechanics says that the energy difference is equal to a characteristic frequency, multiplied by a constant, where the change in energy is equal to a number, called Planck's constant, times the frequency. 
That characteristic frequency is what we need to make our clock. 
GPS satellites rely on cesium and rubidium atoms as frequency standards. 
In the case of cesium 133, the characteristic clock frequency is 9,192,631,770 Hz. 
That's 9 billion cycles per second. 
That's a really fast clock. 
No matter how skilled a clockmaker may be, every pendulum, wind-up mechanism and quartz crystal resonates at a slightly different frequency. 
However, every cesium 133 atom in the universe oscillates at the same exact frequency. 
So thanks to the atomic clock, we get a time reading accurate to within 1 billionth of a second, and a very precise measurement of the distance from that satellite. 
Let's ignore the fact that you're almost definitely on Earth. 
We now know that you're at a fixed distance from the satellite. 
In other words, you're somewhere on the surface of a sphere centered around the satellite. 
Measure your distance from a second satellite and you get another overlapping sphere. 
Keep doing that, and with just four measurements, and a little correction using Einstein's theory of relativity, you can pinpoint your location to exactly one point in space. 
So that's all it takes: a multibillion-dollar network of satellites, oscillating cesium atoms, quantum mechanics, relativity, a smartphone, and you. 
No problem. 

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

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

Right now, you're probably sitting down to watch this video and staying seated for a few minutes to view it is probably okay. 
But the longer you stay put, the more agitated your body becomes. 
It sits there counting down the moments until you stand up again and take it for a walk. 
That may sound ridiculous. 
Our bodies love to sit, right? 
Not really. 
Sure, sitting for brief periods can help us recover from stress or recuperate from exercise. 
But nowadays, our lifestyles make us sit much more than we move around, and our bodies simply aren't built for such a sedentary existence. 
In fact, just the opposite is true. 
The human body is built to move, and you can see evidence of that in the way it's structured. 
Inside us are over 360 joints, and about 700 skeletal muscles that enable easy, fluid motion. 
The body's unique physical structure gives us the ability to stand up straight against the pull of gravity. 
Our blood depends on us moving around to be able to circulate properly. 
Our nerve cells benefit from movement, and our skin is elastic, meaning it molds to our motions. 
So if every inch of the body is ready and waiting for you to move, what happens when you just don't? 
Let's start with the backbone of the problem, literally. 
Your spine is a long structure made of bones and the cartilage discs that sit between them. 
Joints, muscles and ligaments that are attached to the bones hold it all together. 
A common way of sitting is with a curved back and slumped shoulders, a position that puts uneven pressure on your spine. 
Over time, this causes wear and tear in your spinal discs, overworks certain ligaments and joints, and puts strain on muscles that stretch to accommodate your back's curved position. 
This hunched shape also shrinks your chest cavity while you sit, meaning your lungs have less space to expand into when you breath. 
That's a problem because it temporarily limits the amount of oxygen that fills your lungs and filters into your blood. 
Around the skeleton are the muscles, nerves, arteries and veins that form the body's soft tissue layers. 
The very act of sitting squashes, pressurizes and compresses, and these more delicate tissues really feel the brunt. 
Have you ever experienced numbness and swelling in your limbs when you sit? 
In areas that are the most compressed, your nerves, arteries and veins can become blocked, which limits nerve signaling, causing the numbness, and reduces blood flow in your limbs, causing them to swell. 
Sitting for long periods also temporarily deactivates lipoprotein lipase, a special enzyme in the walls of blood capillaries that breaks down fats in the blood, so when you sit, you're not burning fat nearly as well as when you move around. 
What effect does all of this stasis have on the brain? 
Most of the time, you probably sit down to use your brain, but ironically, lengthy periods of sitting actually run counter to this goal. 
Being stationary reduces blood flow and the amount of oxygen entering your blood stream through your lungs. 
Your brain requires both of those things to remain alert, so your concentration levels will most likely dip as your brain activity slows. 
Unfortunately, the ill effects of being seated don't only exist in the short term. 
Recent studies have found that sitting for long periods is linked with some types of cancers and heart disease and can contribute to diabetes, kidney and liver problems. 
In fact, researchers have worked out that, worldwide, inactivity causes about 9% of premature deaths a year. 
That's over 5 million people. 
So what seems like such a harmless habit actually has the power to change our health. 
But luckily, the solutions to this mounting threat are simple and intuitive. 
When you have no choice but to sit, try switching the slouch for a straighter spine, and when you don't have to be bound to your seat, aim to move around much more, perhaps by setting a reminder to yourself to get up every half hour. 
But mostly, just appreciate that bodies are built for motion, not for stillness. 
In fact, since the video's almost over, why not stand up and stretch right now? 
Treat your body to a walk. 
It'll thank you later. 

As the story goes, the legendary marksman William Tell was forced into a cruel challenge by a corrupt lord. 
William's son was to be executed unless William could shoot an apple off his head. 
William succeeded, but let's imagine two variations on the tale. 
In the first variation, the lord hires a bandit to steal William's trusty crossbow, so he is forced to borrow an inferior one from a peasant. 
However, the borrowed crossbow isn't adjusted perfectly, and William finds that his practice shots cluster in a tight spread beneath the bullseye. 
Fortunately, he has time to correct for it before it's too late. 
Variation two: William begins to doubt his skills in the long hours before the challenge and his hand develops a tremor. 
His practice shots still cluster around the apple but in a random pattern. 
Occasionally, he hits the apple, but with the wobble, there is no guarantee of a bullseye. 
He must settle his nervous hand and restore the certainty in his aim to save his son. 
At the heart of these variations are two terms often used interchangeably: accuracy and precision. 
The distinction between the two is actually critical for many scientific endeavours. 
Accuracy involves how close you come to the correct result. 
Your accuracy improves with tools that are calibrated correctly and that you're well-trained on. 
Precision, on the other hand, is how consistently you can get that result using the same method. 
Your precision improves with more finely incremented tools that require less estimation. 
The story of the stolen crossbow was one of precision without accuracy. 
William got the same wrong result each time he fired. 
The variation with the shaky hand was one of accuracy without precision. 
William's bolts clustered around the correct result, but without certainty of a bullseye for any given shot. 
You can probably get away with low accuracy or low precision in everyday tasks. 
But engineers and researchers often require accuracy on microscopic levels with a high certainty of being right every time. 
Factories and labs increase precision through better equipment and more detailed procedures. 
These improvements can be expensive, so managers must decide what the acceptable uncertainty for each project is. 
However, investments in precision can take us beyond what was previously possible, even as far as Mars. 
It may surprise you that NASA does not know exactly where their probes are going to touch down on another planet. 
Predicting where they will land requires extensive calculations fed by measurements that don't always have a precise answer. 
How does the Martian atmosphere's density change at different elevations? 
What angle will the probe hit the atmosphere at? 
What will be the speed of the probe upon entry? 
Computer simulators run thousands of different landing scenarios, mixing and matching values for all of the variables. 
Weighing all the possibilities, the computer spits out the potential area of impact in the form of a landing ellipse. 
In 1976, the landing ellipse for the Mars Viking Lander was 62 x 174 miles, nearly the area of New Jersey. 
With such a limitation, NASA had to ignore many interesting but risky landing areas. 
Since then, new information about the Martian atmosphere, improved spacecraft technology, and more powerful computer simulations have drastically reduced uncertainty. 
In 2012, the landing ellipse for the Curiosity Lander was only 4 miles wide by 12 miles long, an area more than 200 times smaller than Viking's. 
This allowed NASA to target a specific spot in Gale Crater, a previously un-landable area of high scientific interest. 
While we ultimately strive for accuracy, precision reflects our certainty of reliably achieving it. 
With these two principles in mind, we can shoot for the stars and be confident of hitting them every time. 

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

How much would you pay for a bouquet of tulips? 
A few dollars? A hundred dollars? 
How about a million dollars? 
Probably not. 
Well, how much would you pay for this house, or partial ownership of a website that sells pet supplies? 
At different points in time, tulips, real estate and stock in pets.com have all sold for much more than they were worth. 
In each instance, the price rose and rose and then abruptly plummeted. 
Economists call this a bubble. 
So what is exactly is going on with a bubble? 
Well, let's start with the tulips to get a better idea. 
The 17th century saw the Netherlands enter the Dutch golden age. 
By the 1630s, Amsterdam was an important port and commercial center. 
Dutch ships imported spices from Asia in huge quantities to earn profits in Europe. 
So Amsterdam was brimming with wealthy, skilled merchants and traders who displayed their prosperity by living in mansions surrounded by flower gardens. 
And there was one flower in particularly high demand: the tulip. 
The tulip was brought to Europe on trading vessels that sailed from the East. 
Because of this, it was considered an exotic flower that was also difficult to grow, since it could take years for a single tulip to bloom. 
During the 1630s, an outbreak of tulip breaking virus made select flowers even more beautiful by lining petals with multicolor, flame-like streaks. 
A tulip like this was scarcer than a normal tulip and as a result, prices for these flowers started to rise, and with them, the tulip's popularity. 
It wasn't long before the tulip became a nationwide sensation and tulip mania was born. 
A mania occurs when there is an upward movement of price combined with a willingness to pay large sums of money for something valued much lower in intrinsic value. 
A recent example of this is the dot-com mania of the 1990s. 
Stocks in new, exciting websites were like the tulips of the 17th century. 
Everybody wanted some. 
The more people who wanted the tulip, the higher the price could go. 
At one point, a single tulip bulb sold for more than ten times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. 
In the stock market, the price of stock is based on the supply and demand of investors. 
Stock prices tend to rise when it seems like a company will earn more in the future. 
Investors might then buy more of the stock, raising the prices even further due to an increased demand. 
This can result in a feedback loop where investors get caught up in the hype and ultimately drive prices far above intrinsic value, creating a bubble. 
All that is needed for a mania to end and for a bubble to burst is the collective realization that the price of the stock, or a tulip, far exceeds its worth. 
That's what happened with both manias. 
Suddenly the demand ended. 
Prices were pushed to staggering lows, and pop! 
The bubbles burst, and the market crashed. 
Today, scholars work long and hard trying to predict what causes a bubble and how to avoid them. 
Tulip mania is an effective illustration of the underlying principles at work in a bubble and can help us understand more recent examples like the real estate bubble of the late 2000s. 
The economy will continue to go through phases of booms and busts. 
So while we wait for the next mania to start, and the next bubble to burst, treat yourself to a bouquet of tulips and enjoy the fact that you didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for them. 

As far as we know, Medieval England was never invaded by ice zombies, or terrorized by dragons, but it was shaken by a power struggle between two noble families spanning generations and involving a massive cast of characters with complex motives and shifting loyalties. 
If that sounds familiar, it's because the historical conflicts known as the Wars of the Roses served as the basis for much of the drama in Game of Thrones. 
The real-life seeds of war were sewn by the death of King Edward III in 1377. 
Edward's oldest son had died before his father, but his ten-year-old son, Richard II, succeeded to the throne ahead of Edward's three surviving sons. 
This skipping of an entire generation left lingering claims to the throne among their various offspring, particularly the Lancasters, descended from Edward's third son, and the Yorks, descended from his fourth son. 
The name of the ensuing wars comes from the symbols associated with the two families, the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster. 
The Lancasters first gained the throne when Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry IV in 1399. 
Despite sporadic unrest, their reign remained secure until 1422, when Henry V's death in a military campaign left an infant Henry VI as king. 
Weak-willed and dominated by advisors, Henry was eventually convinced to marry Margaret of Anjou to gain French support. 
Margaret was beautiful, ambitious, and ruthless in persecuting any threat to her power, and she distrusted Richard of York, most of all. 
York had been the King's close advisor and loyal General, but was increasingly sidelined by the Queen, who promoted her favorite supporters, like the Earls of Suffolk and Somerset. 
York's criticism of their inept handling of the war against France led to his exclusion from court and transfer to Ireland. 
Meanwhile, mounting military failures, and corrupt rule by Margaret and her allies caused widespread discontent, and in the midst of this chaos, Richard of York returned with an army to arrest Somerset and reform the court. 
Initially unsuccessful, he soon got his chance when he was appointed Protector of the Realm after Henry suffered a mental breakdown. 
However, less than a year later, Henry suddendly recovered and the Queen convinced him to reverse York's reforms. 
York fled and raised an army once more. 
Though he was unable to directly seize the throne, he managed to be reinstated as Protector and have himself and his heirs designated to succeed Henry. 
But instead of a crown, York's head acquired a pike after he was killed in battle with the Queen's loyalists. 
His young son took up the claim and was crowned Edward IV. 
Edward enjoyed great military success against the Lancasters. 
Henry was captured, while Margaret fled into exile with their reportedly cruel son, Edward of Westminster. 
But the newly crowned King made a tragic political mistake by backing out of his arranged marriage with a French Princess to secretly marry the widow of a minor Noble. 
This alienated his most powerful ally, the Earl of Warwick. 
Warwick allied with the Lancasters, turned Edward's jealous younger brother, George, against him, and even briefly managed to restore Henry as King, but it didn't last. 
Edward recaptured the throne, the Lancaster Prince was killed in battle, and Henry himself died in captivity not long after. 
The rest of Edward IV's reign was peaceful, but upon his death in 1483, the bloodshed resumed. 
Though his twelve-year-old son was due to succeed him, Edward's younger brother Richard III declared his nephews illegitimate due to their father's secret marriage. 
He assumed the regency himself and threw the boys in prison. 
Though no one knows what ultimately became of them, after a while, the Princes disappeared and Richard's power seemed secure. 
But his downfall would come only two years later from across the narrow sea of the English Channel. 
Henry Tudor was a direct descendant of the first Duke of Lancaster, raised in exile after his father's death in a previous rebellion. 
With Richard III's power grab causing a split in the York faction, Henry won support for his royal claim. 
Raising an army in France, he crossed the Channel in 1485 and quickly defeated Richard's forces. 
And by marrying Elizabeth of York, elder sister of the disappeared Princes, the newly crowned Henry VII joined the two roses, finally ending nearly a century of war. 
We often think of historical wars as decisive conflicts with clearly defined winners and losers. 
But the Wars of the Roses, like the fiction they inspired, show us that victories can be uncertain, alliances unstable, and even the power of Kings as fleeting as the seasons. 

Has anyone ever told you, "Stand up straight!" 
or scolded you for slouching at a family dinner? 
Comments like that might be annoying, but they're not wrong. 
Your posture, the way you hold your body when you're sitting or standing, is the foundation for every movement your body makes, and can determine how well your body adapts to the stresses on it. 
These stresses can be things like carrying weight, or sitting in an awkward position. 
And the big one we all experience all day every day: gravity. 
If your posture isn't optimal, your muscles have to work harder to keep you upright and balanced. 
Some muscles will become tight and inflexbile. 
Others will be inhibited. 
Over time, these dysfunctional adaptations impair your body's ability to deal with the forces on it. 
Poor posture inflicts extra wear and tear on your joints and ligaments, increases the likelihood of accidents, and makes some organs, like your lungs, less efficient. 
Researchers have linked poor posture to scoliosis, tension headaches, and back pain, though it isn't the exclusive cause of any of them. 
Posture can even influence your emotional state and your sensitivity to pain. 
So there are a lot of reasons to aim for good posture. 
But it's getting harder these days. 
Sitting in an awkward position for a long time can promote poor posture, and so can using computers or mobile devices, which encourage you to look downward. 
Many studies suggest that, on average, posture is getting worse. 
So what does good posture look like? 
When you look at the spine from the front or the back, all 33 vertebrae should appear stacked in a straight line. 
From the side, the spine should have three curves: one at your neck, one at your shoulders, and one at the small of your back. 
You aren't born with this s-shaped spine. 
Babies' spines just have one curve like a "c." 
The other curves usually develop by 12-18 months as the muscles strengthen. 
These curves help us stay upright and absorb some of the stress from activities like walking and jumping. 
If they are aligned properly, when you're standing up, you should be able to draw a straight line from a point just in front of your shoulders, to behind your hip, to the front of your knee, to a few inches in front of your ankle. 
This keeps your center of gravity directly over your base of support, which allows you to move efficiently with the least amount of fatigue and muscle strain. 
If you're sitting, your neck should be vertical, not tilted forward. 
Your shoulders should be relaxed with your arms close to your trunk. 
Your knees should be at a right angle with your feet flat on the floor. 
But what if your posture isn't that great? 
Try redesigning your environment. 
Adjust your screen so it's at or slightly below eyelevel. 
Make sure all parts of your body, like your elbows and wrists, are supported, using ergonomic aids if you need to. 
Try sleeping on your side with your neck supported and with a pillow between your legs. 
Wear shoes with low heels and good arch support, and use a headset for phone calls. 
It's also not enough to just have good posture. 
Keeping your muscles and joints moving is extremely important. 
In fact, being stationary for long periods with good posture can be worse than regular movement with bad posture. 
When you do move, move smartly. 
Keep anything you're carrying close to your body. 
Backpacks should be in contact with your back carried symetrically. 
If you sit a lot, get up and move around on occassion, and be sure to exercise. 
Using your muscles will keep them strong enough to support you effectively, on top of all the other benefits to your joints, bones, brain and heart. 
And if you're really worried, check with a physical therapist, because yes, you really should stand up straight. 

This may look like a neatly arranged stack of numbers, but it's actually a mathematical treasure trove. 
Indian mathematicians called it the Staircase of Mount Meru. 
In Iran, it's the Khayyam Triangle. 
And in China, it's Yang Hui's Triangle. 
To much of the Western world, it's known as Pascal's Triangle after French mathematician Blaise Pascal, which seems a bit unfair since he was clearly late to the party, but he still had a lot to contribute. 
So what is it about this that has so intrigued mathematicians the world over? 
In short, it's full of patterns and secrets. 
First and foremost, there's the pattern that generates it. 
Start with one and imagine invisible zeros on either side of it. 
Add them together in pairs, and you'll generate the next row. 
Now, do that again and again. 
Keep going and you'll wind up with something like this, though really Pascal's Triangle goes on infinitely. 
Now, each row corresponds to what's called the coefficients of a binomial expansion of the form (x+y)^n, where n is the number of the row, and we start counting from zero. 
So if you make n=2 and expand it, you get (x^2) + 2xy + (y^2). 
The coefficients, or numbers in front of the variables, are the same as the numbers in that row of Pascal's Triangle. 
You'll see the same thing with n=3, which expands to this. 
So the triangle is a quick and easy way to look up all of these coefficients. 
But there's much more. 
For example, add up the numbers in each row, and you'll get successive powers of two. 
Or in a given row, treat each number as part of a decimal expansion. 
In other words, row two is (1x1) + (2x10) + (1x100). 
You get 121, which is 11^2. 
And take a look at what happens when you do the same thing to row six. 
It adds up to 1,771,561, which is 11^6, and so on. 
There are also geometric applications. 
Look at the diagonals. 
The first two aren't very interesting: all ones, and then the positive integers, also known as natural numbers. 
But the numbers in the next diagonal are called the triangular numbers because if you take that many dots, you can stack them into equilateral triangles. 
The next diagonal has the tetrahedral numbers because similarly, you can stack that many spheres into tetrahedra. 
Or how about this: shade in all of the odd numbers. 
It doesn't look like much when the triangle's small, but if you add thousands of rows, you get a fractal known as Sierpinski's Triangle. 
This triangle isn't just a mathematical work of art. 
It's also quite useful, especially when it comes to probability and calculations in the domain of combinatorics. 
Say you want to have five children, and would like to know the probability of having your dream family of three girls and two boys. 
In the binomial expansion, that corresponds to girl plus boy to the fifth power. 
So we look at the row five, where the first number corresponds to five girls, and the last corresponds to five boys. 
The third number is what we're looking for. 
Ten out of the sum of all the possibilities in the row. 
so 10/32, or 31.25%. 
Or, if you're randomly picking a five-player basketball team out of a group of twelve friends, how many possible groups of five are there? 
In combinatoric terms, this problem would be phrased as twelve choose five, and could be calculated with this formula, or you could just look at the sixth element of row twelve on the triangle and get your answer. 
The patterns in Pascal's Triangle are a testament to the elegantly interwoven fabric of mathematics. 
And it's still revealing fresh secrets to this day. 
For example, mathematicians recently discovered a way to expand it to these kinds of polynomials. 
What might we find next? 
Well, that's up to you. 

Think back to a really vivid memory. 
Got it? 
Okay, now try to remember what you had for lunch three weeks ago. 
That second memory probably isn't as strong, but why not? 
Why do we remember some things, and not others? 
And why do memories eventually fade? 
Let's look at how memories form in the first place. 
When you experience something, like dialing a phone number, the experience is converted into a pulse of electrical energy that zips along a network of neurons. 
Information first lands in short term memory, where it's available from anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. 
It's then transferred to long-term memory through areas such as the hippocampus, and finally to several storage regions across the brain. 
Neurons throughout the brain communicate at dedicated sites called synapses using specialized neurotransmitters. 
If two neurons communicate repeatedly, a remarkable thing happens: the efficiency of communication between them increases. 
This process, called long term potentiation, is considered to be a mechanism by which memories are stored long-term, but how do some memories get lost? 
Age is one factor. 
As we get older, synapses begin to falter and weaken, affecting how easily we can retrieve memories. 
Scientists have several theories about what's behind this deterioration, from actual brain shrinkage, the hippocampus loses 5% of its neurons every decade for a total loss of 20% by the time you're 80 years old to the drop in the production of neurotransmitters, like acetylcholine, which is vital to learning and memory. 
These changes seem to affect how people retrieve stored information. 
Age also affects our memory-making abilities. 
Memories are encoded most strongly when we're paying attention, when we're deeply engaged, and when information is meaningful to us. 
Mental and physical health problems, which tend to increase as we age, interfere with our ability to pay attention, and thus act as memory thieves. 
Another leading cause of memory problems is chronic stress. 
When we're constantly overloaded with work and personal responsibilites, our bodies are on hyperalert. 
This response has evolved from the physiological mechanism designed to make sure we can survive in a crisis. 
Stress chemicals help mobilize energy and increase alertness. 
However, with chronic stress our bodies become flooded with these chemicals, resulting in a loss of brain cells and an inability to form new ones, which affects our ability to retain new information. 
Depression is another culprit. 
People who are depressed are 40% more likely to develop memory problems. 
Low levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter connected to arousal, may make depressed individuals less attentive to new information. 
Dwelling on sad events in the past, another symptom of depression, makes it difficult to pay attention to the present, affecting the ability to store short-term memories. 
Isolation, which is tied to depression, is another memory thief. 
A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that older people with high levels of social integration had a slower rate of memory decline over a six-year period. 
The exact reason remains unclear, but experts suspect that social interaction gives our brain a mental workout. 
Just like muscle strength, we have to use our brain or risk losing it. 
But don't despair. 
There are several steps you can take to aid your brain in preserving your memories. 
Make sure you keep physically active. 
Increased blood flow to the brain is helpful. 
And eat well. 
Your brain needs all the right nutrients to keep functioning correctly. 
And finally, give your brain a workout. 
Exposing your brain to challenges, like learning a new language, is one of the best defenses for keeping your memories intact. 

When faced with a big challenge where potential failure seems to lurk at every corner, maybe you've heard this advice before: "Be more confident." 
And most likely, this is what you think when you hear it: "If only it were that simple." 
But what is confidence? 
Take the belief that you are valuable, worthwhile, and capable, also known as self-esteem, add in the optimism that comes when you are certain of your abilities, and then empowered by these, act courageously to face a challenge head-on. 
This is confidence. 
It turns thoughts into action. 
So where does confidence even come from? 
There are several factors that impact confidence. 
One: what you're born with, such as your genes, which will impact things like the balance of neurochemicals in your brain. 
Two: how you're treated. 
This includes the social pressures of your environment. 
And three: the part you have control over, the choices you make, the risks you take, and how you think about and respond to challenges and setbacks. 
It isn't possible to completely untangle these three factors, but the personal choices we make certainly play a major role in confidence development. 
So, by keeping in mind a few practical tips, we do actually have the power to cultivate our own confidence. 
Tip 1: a quick fix. 
There are a few tricks that can give you an immediate confidence boost in the short term. 
Picture your success when you're beginning a difficult task, something as simple as listening to music with deep bass; it can promote feelings of power. 
You can even strike a powerful pose or give yourself a pep talk. 
Tip two: believe in your ability to improve. 
If you're looking for a long-term change, consider the way you think about your abilities and talents. 
Do you think they are fixed at birth, or that they can be developed, like a muscle? 
These beliefs matter because they can influence how you act when you're faced with setbacks. 
If you have a fixed mindset, meaning that you think your talents are locked in place, you might give up, assuming you've discovered something you're not very good at. 
But if you have a growth mindset and think your abilities can improve, a challenge is an opportunity to learn and grow. 
Neuroscience supports the growth mindset. 
The connections in your brain do get stronger and grow with study and practice. 
It also turns out, on average, people who have a growth mindset are more successful, getting better grades, and doing better in the face of challenges. 
Tip three: practice failure. 
Face it, you're going to fail sometimes. 
Everyone does. 
J.K. Rowling was rejected by twelve different publishers before one picked up "Harry Potter." 
The Wright Brothers built on history's failed attempts at flight, including some of their own, before designing a successful airplane. 
Studies show that those who fail regularly and keep trying anyway are better equipped to respond to challenges and setbacks in a constructive way. 
They learn how to try different strategies, ask others for advice, and perservere. 
So, think of a challenge you want to take on, realize it's not going to be easy, accept that you'll make mistakes, and be kind to yourself when you do. 
Give yourself a pep talk, stand up, and go for it. 
The excitement you'll feel knowing that whatever the result, you'll have gained greater knowledge and understanding. 
This is confidence. 

In medieval times, alchemists tried to achieve the seemingly impossible. 
They wanted to transform lowly lead into gleaming gold. 
History portrays these people as aged eccentrics, but if only they'd known that their dreams were actually achievable. 
Indeed, today we can manufacture gold on Earth thanks to modern inventions that those medieval alchemists missed by a few centuries. 
But to understand how this precious metal became embedded in our planet to start with, we have to gaze upwards at the stars. 
Gold is extraterrestrial. 
Instead of arising from the planet's rocky crust, it was actually cooked up in space and is present on Earth because of cataclysmic stellar explosions called supernovae. 
Stars are mostly made up of hydrogen, the simplest and lightest element. 
The enormous gravitational pressure of so much material compresses and triggers nuclear fusion in the star's core. 
This process releases energy from the hydrogen, making the star shine. 
Over many millions of years, fusion transforms hydrogen into heavier elements: helium, carbon, and oxygen, burning subsequent elements faster and faster to reach iron and nickel. 
However, at that point nuclear fusion no longer releases enough energy, and the pressure from the core peters out. 
The outer layers collapse into the center, and bouncing back from this sudden injection of energy, the star explodes forming a supernova. 
The extreme pressure of a collapsing star is so high, that subatomic protons and electrons are forced together in the core, forming neutrons. 
Neutrons have no repelling electric charge so they're easily captured by the iron group elements. 
Multiple neutron captures enable the formation of heavier elements that a star under normal circumstances can't form, from silver to gold, past lead and on to uranium. 
In extreme contrast to the million year transformation of hydrogen to helium, the creation of the heaviest elements in a supernova takes place in only seconds. 
But what becomes of the gold after the explosion? 
The expanding supernova shockwave propels its elemental debris through the interstellar medium, triggering a swirling dance of gas and dust that condenses into new stars and planets. 
Earth's gold was likely delivered this way before being kneaded into veins by geothermal activity. 
Billions of years later, we now extract this precious product by mining it, an expensive process that's compounded by gold's rarity. 
In fact, all of the gold that we've mined in history could be piled into just three Olympic-size swimming pools, although this represents a lot of mass because gold is about 20 times denser than water. 
So, can we produce more of this coveted commodity? 
Actually, yes. 
Using particle accelerators, we can mimic the complex nuclear reactions that create gold in stars. 
But these machines can only construct gold atom by atom. 
So it would take almost the age of the universe to produce one gram at a cost vastly exceeding the current value of gold. 
So that's not a very good solution. 
But if we were to reach a hypothetical point where we'd mined all of the Earth's buried gold, there are other places we could look. 
The ocean holds an estimated 20 million tons of dissolved gold but at extremely miniscule concentrations making its recovery too costly at present. 
Perhaps one day, we'll see gold rushes to tap the mineral wealth of the other planets of our solar system. 
And who knows? 
Maybe some future supernova will occur close enough to shower us with its treasure and hopefully not eradicate all life on Earth in the process. 

How is it that so many intergalactic species in movies and TV just happen to speak perfect English? 
The short answer is that no one wants to watch a starship crew spend years compiling an alien dictionary. 
But to keep things consistent, the creators of Star Trek and other science-fiction worlds have introduced the concept of a universal translator, a portable device that can instantly translate between any languages. 
So is a universal translator possible in real life? 
We already have many programs that claim to do just that, taking a word, sentence, or entire book in one language and translating it into almost any other, whether it's modern English or Ancient Sanskrit. 
And if translation were just a matter of looking up words in a dictionary, these programs would run circles around humans. 
The reality, however, is a bit more complicated. 
A rule-based translation program uses a lexical database, which includes all the words you'd find in a dictionary and all grammatical forms they can take, and set of rules to recognize the basic linguistic elements in the input language. 
For a seemingly simple sentence like, "The children eat the muffins," the program first parses its syntax, or grammatical structure, by identifying the children as the subject, and the rest of the sentence as the predicate consisting of a verb "eat," and a direct object "the muffins." 
It then needs to recognize English morphology, or how the language can be broken down into its smallest meaningful units, such as the word muffin and the suffix "s," used to indicate plural. 
Finally, it needs to understand the semantics, what the different parts of the sentence actually mean. 
To translate this sentence properly, the program would refer to a different set of vocabulary and rules for each element of the target language. 
But this is where it gets tricky. 
The syntax of some languages allows words to be arranged in any order, while in others, doing so could make the muffin eat the child. 
Morphology can also pose a problem. 
Slovene distinguishes between two children and three or more using a dual suffix absent in many other languages, while Russian's lack of definite articles might leave you wondering whether the children are eating some particular muffins, or just eat muffins in general. 
Finally, even when the semantics are technically correct, the program might miss their finer points, such as whether the children "mangiano" the muffins, or "divorano" them. 
Another method is statistical machine translation, which analyzes a database of books, articles, and documents that have already been translated by humans. 
By finding matches between source and translated text that are unlikely to occur by chance, the program can identify corresponding phrases and patterns, and use them for future translations. 
However, the quality of this type of translation depends on the size of the initial database and the availability of samples for certain languages or styles of writing. 
The difficulty that computers have with the exceptions, irregularities and shades of meaning that seem to come instinctively to humans has led some researchers to believe that our understanding of language is a unique product of our biological brain structure. 
In fact, one of the most famous fictional universal translators, the Babel fish from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", is not a machine at all but a small creature that translates the brain waves and nerve signals of sentient species through a form of telepathy. 
For now, learning a language the old fashioned way will still give you better results than any currently available computer program. 
But this is no easy task, and the sheer number of languages in the world, as well as the increasing interaction between the people who speak them, will only continue to spur greater advances in automatic translation. 
Perhaps by the time we encounter intergalactic life forms, we'll be able to communicate with them through a tiny gizmo, or we might have to start compiling that dictionary, after all. 

Imagine if you could plug your brain into a machine that would bring you ultimate pleasure for the rest of your life. 
If you were given the choice to sign up for that kind of existence, would you? 
That's the question philosopher Robert Nozick posed through a thought experiment he called the Experience Machine. 
The experiment asks us to consider a world in which scientists have developed a machine that would simulate real life while guaranteeing experiences of only pleasure and never pain. 
The catch? 
You have to permanently leave reality behind, but you'll hardly know the difference. 
Your experiences will be indistinguishable from reality. 
Life's natural ups and downs will just be replaced with an endless series of ups. 
Sounds great, right? 
It may seem like a tempting offer, but perhaps it's not as ideal as it sounds. 
The experiment was actually designed to refute a philosophical notion called hedonism. 
According to hedonists, maximizing net pleasure is the most important thing in life because pleasure is the greatest good that life has to offer. 
For hedonists, the best choice that a person could make for himself is one that brings him the greatest possible amount of pleasure while bringing him no pain. 
Limitless pleasure minus zero pain equals maximum net pleasure, or in other words, the exact scenario the Experience Machine offers. 
Therefore, if hedonism is your philosophy of choice, plugging in would be a no-brainer. 
But what if there's more to life than just pleasure? 
That's what Nozick believed he was demonstrating through his Experience Machine thought experiment. 
Despite the machine's promise of maximum net pleasure, he still found reason not to plug in, as do many other experimenters who consider the proposition. 
But what could possibly dissuade us from choosing a future of ultimate pleasure? 
Consider this scenario. 
Betsy and Xander are in a loving, committed relationship. 
Betsy is head over heels and has never felt happier. 
However, unbeknownst to Betsy, Xander has been romancing her sister, Angelica, with love letters and secret rendezvous for the duration of their relationship. 
If Betsy found out, it would destroy her relationships with both Xander and Angelica, and the experience would be so traumatic, she would never love again. 
Since Betsy is in blissful ignorance about Xander's infidelity, hedonists would say she's better off remaining in the dark and maintaining her high level of net pleasure. 
As long as Betsy never finds out about the relationship, her life is guaranteed to go on as happily as it is right now. 
So, is there value in Besty knowing the truth of her situation? 
Imagine if you were Betsy. 
Would you prefer to know the truth? 
If the answer is yes, you'd be choosing an option that sharply decreases your net pleasure. 
Perhaps, then, you believe that there are things in life with greater intrinsic value than pleasure. 
Truth, knowledge, authentic connection with other human beings. 
These are all things that might make the list. 
By never learning the truth, Betsy is essentially living life in her own personal Experience Machine, a world of happiness that's not based in reality. 
This love triangle is an extreme example, but it mirrors many of the decisions we make in day to day life. 
So whether you're making a choice for Betsy or for yourself, why might you feel reality should be a factor? 
Is there inherent value in real experiences, whether pleasurable or painful? 
Do you yourself have more value when you're experiencing real life's pleasures and pains? 
Nozick's experiment may not provide all the answers, but it forces us to consider whether real life, though imperfect, holds some intrinsic value beyond the pleasure of plugging in. 

In the third millenium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. 
A thousand years later, Ancient Egyptians wrote a dream book listing over a hundred common dreams and their meanings. 
And in the years since, we haven't paused in our quest to understand why we dream. 
So, after a great deal of scientific research, technological advancement, and persistence, we still don't have any definite answers, but we have some interesting theories. 
We dream to fulfill our wishes. 
In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dreams, including our nightmares, are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives, they also have symbolic meanings, which relate to the fulfillment of our subconscious wishes. 
Freud theorized that everything we remember when we wake up from a dream is a symbolic representation of our unconscious primitive thoughts, urges, and desires. 
Freud believed that by analyzing those remembered elements, the unconscious content would be revealed to our conscious mind, and psychological issues stemming from its repression could be addressed and resolved. 
We dream to remember. 
To increase performance on certain mental tasks, sleep is good, but dreaming while sleeping is better. 
In 2010, researchers found that subjects were much better at getting through a complex 3-D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze prior to their second attempt. 
In fact, they were up to ten times better at it than those who only thought of the maze while awake between attempts, and those who napped but did not dream about the maze. 
Researchers theorize that certain memory processes can happen only when we are asleep, and our dreams are a signal that these processes are taking place. 
We dream to forget. 
There are about 10,000 trillion neural connections within the architecture of your brain. 
They are created by everything you think and everything you do. 
A 1983 neurobiological theory of dreaming, called reverse learning, holds that while sleeping, and mainly during REM sleep cycles, your neocortex reviews these neural connections and dumps the unnecessary ones. 
Without this unlearning process, which results in your dreams, your brain could be overrun by useless connections and parasitic thoughts could disrupt the necessary thinking you need to do while you're awake. 
We dream to keep our brains working. 
The continual activation theory proposes that your dreams result from your brain's need to constantly consolidate and create long-term memories in order to function properly. 
So when external input falls below a certain level, like when you're asleep, your brain automatically triggers the generation of data from its memory storages, which appear to you in the form of the thoughts and feelings you experience in your dreams. 
In other words, your dreams might be a random screen saver your brain turns on so it doesn't completely shut down. 
We dream to rehearse. 
Dreams involving dangerous and threatening situations are very common, and the primitive instinct rehearsal theory holds that the content of a dream is significant to its purpose. 
Whether it's an anxiety-filled night of being chased through the woods by a bear or fighting off a ninja in a dark alley, these dreams allow you to practice your fight or flight instincts and keep them sharp and dependable in case you'll need them in real life. 
But it doesn't always have to be unpleasant. 
For instance, dreams about your attractive neighbor could actually give your reproductive instinct some practice, too. 
We dream to heal. 
Stress neurotransmitters in the brain are much less active during the REM stage of sleep, even during dreams of traumatic experiences, leading some researchers to theorize that one purpose of dreaming is to take the edge off painful experiences to allow for psychological healing. 
Reviewing traumatic events in your dreams with less mental stress may grant you a clearer perspective and enhanced ability to process them in psychologically healthy ways. 
People with certain mood disorders and PTSD often have difficulty sleeping, leading some scientists to believe that lack of dreaming may be a contributing factor to their illnesses. 
We dream to solve problems. 
Unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, in your dreams, your mind can create limitless scenarios to help you grasp problems and formulate solutions that you may not consider while awake. 
John Steinbeck called it the committee of sleep, and research has demonstrated the effectiveness of dreaming on problem solving. 
It's also how renowned chemist August Kekule discovered the structure of the benzene molecule, and it's the reason that sometimes the best solution for a problem is to sleep on it. 
And those are just a few of the more prominent theories. 
As technology increases our capability for understanding the brain, it's possible that one day we will discover the definitive reason for them. 
But until that time arrives, we'll just have to keep on dreaming. 

Depression is the leading cause of disability in the world. 
In the United States, close to 10% of adults struggle with depression. 
But because it's a mental illness, it can be a lot harder to understand than, say, high cholesterol. 
One major source of confusion is the difference between having depression and just feeling depressed. 
Almost everyone feels down from time to time. 
Getting a bad grade, losing a job, having an argument, even a rainy day can bring on feelings of sadness. 
Sometimes there's no trigger at all. 
It just pops up out of the blue. 
Then circumstances change, and those sad feelings disappear. 
Clinical depression is different. 
It's a medical disorder, and it won't go away just because you want it to. 
It lingers for at least two consecutive weeks, and significantly interferes with one's ability to work, play, or love. 
Depression can have a lot of different symptoms: a low mood, loss of interest in things you'd normally enjoy, changes in appetite, feeling worthless or excessively guilty, sleeping either too much or too little, poor concentration, restlessness or slowness, loss of energy, or recurrent thoughts of suicide. 
If you have at least five of those symptoms, according to psychiatric guidelines, you qualify for a diagnosis of depression. 
And it's not just behavioral symptoms. 
Depression has physical manifestations inside the brain. 
First of all, there are changes that could be seen with the naked eye and X-ray vision. 
These include smaller frontal lobes and hippocampal volumes. 
On a more microscale, depression is associated with a few things: the abnormal transmission or depletion of certain neurotransmitters, especially serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, blunted circadian rhythms, or specific changes in the REM and slow-wave parts of your sleep cycle, and hormone abnormalities, such as high cortisol and deregulation of thyroid hormones. 
But neuroscientists still don't have a complete picture of what causes depression. 
It seems to have to do with a complex interaction between genes and environment, but we don't have a diagnostic tool that can accurately predict where or when it will show up. 
And because depression symptoms are intangible, it's hard to know who might look fine but is actually struggling. 
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, it takes the average person suffering with a mental illness over ten years to ask for help. 
But there are very effective treatments. 
Medications and therapy complement each other to boost brain chemicals. 
In extreme cases, electroconvulsive therapy, which is like a controlled seizure in the patient's brain, is also very helpful. 
Other promising treatments, like transcranial magnetic stimulation, are being investigated, too. 
So, if you know someone struggling with depression, encourage them, gently, to seek out some of these options. 
You might even offer to help with specific tasks, like looking up therapists in the area, or making a list of questions to ask a doctor. 
To someone with depression, these first steps can seem insurmountable. 
If they feel guilty or ashamed, point out that depression is a medical condition, just like asthma or diabetes. 
It's not a weakness or a personality trait, and they shouldn't expect themselves to just get over it anymore than they could will themselves to get over a broken arm. 
If you haven't experienced depression yourself, avoid comparing it to times you've felt down. 
Comparing what they're experiencing to normal, temporary feelings of sadness can make them feel guilty for struggling. 
Even just talking about depression openly can help. 
For example, research shows that asking someone about suicidal thoughts actually reduces their suicide risk. 
Open conversations about mental illness help erode stigma and make it easier for people to ask for help. 
And the more patients seek treatment, the more scientists will learn about depression, and the better the treatments will get. 

Ah, romantic love - beautiful and intoxicating, heartbreaking and soul-crushing, often all at the same time. 
Why do we choose to put ourselves through its emotional wringer? 
Does love make our lives meaningful, or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering? 
Is love a disguise for our sexual desire, or a trick of biology to make us procreate? 
Is it all we need? 
Do we need it at all? 
If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet. 
But over the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories. 
Love makes us whole, again. 
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato explored the idea that we love in order to become complete. 
In his "Symposium", he wrote about a dinner party, at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright, regales the guests with the following story: humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces. 
One day, they angered the gods, and Zeus sliced them all in two. 
Since then, every person has been missing half of him or herself. 
Love is the longing to find a soulmate who'll make us feel whole again, or, at least, that's what Plato believed a drunken comedian would say at a party. 
Love tricks us into having babies. 
Much, much later, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that love based in sexual desire was a voluptuous illusion. 
He suggested that we love because our desires lead us to believe that another person will make us happy, but we are sorely mistaken. 
Nature is tricking us into procreating, and the loving fusion we seek is consummated in our children. 
When our sexual desires are satisfied, we are thrown back into our tormented existences, and we succeed only in maintaining the species and perpetuating the cycle of human drudgery. 
Sounds like somebody needs a hug. 
Love is escape from our loneliness. 
According to the Nobel Prize-winning British philosopher Bertrand Russell, we love in order to quench our physical and psychological desires. 
Humans are designed to procreate, but without the ecstasy of passionate love, sex is unsatisfying. 
Our fear of the cold, cruel world tempts us to build hard shells to protect and isolate ourselves. 
Love's delight, intimacy, and warmth helps us overcome our fear of the world, escape our lonely shells, and engage more abundantly in life. 
Love enriches our whole being, making it the best thing in life. 
Love is a misleading affliction. 
Siddhārtha Gautama, who became known as the Buddha, or the Enlightened One, probably would have had some interesting arguments with Russell. 
Buddha proposed that we love because we are trying to satisfy our base desires. 
Yet, our passionate cravings are defects, and attachments, even romantic love, are a great source of suffering. 
Luckily, Buddha discovered the eight-fold path, a sort of program for extinguishing the fires of desire so that we can reach Nirvana, an enlightened state of peace, clarity, wisdom, and compassion. 
The novelist Cao Xueqin illustrated this Buddhist sentiment that romantic love is folly in one of China's greatest classical novels, "Dream of the Red Chamber." 
In a subplot, Jia Rui falls in love with Xi-feng who tricks and humiliates him. 
Conflicting emotions of love and hate tear him apart, so a Taoist gives him a magic mirror that can cure him as long as he doesn't look at the front of it. 
But of course, he looks at the front of it. 
He sees Xi-feng. 
His soul enters the mirror and he is dragged away in iron chains to die. 
Not all Buddhists think this way about romantic and erotic love, but the moral of this story is that such attachments spell tragedy, and should, along with magic mirrors, be avoided. 
Love lets us reach beyond ourselves. 
Let's end on a slightly more positive note. 
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir proposed that love is the desire to integrate with another and that it infuses our lives with meaning. 
However, she was less concerned with why we love and more interested in how we can love better. 
She saw that the problem with traditional romantic love is it can be so captivating, that we are tempted to make it our only reason for being. 
Yet, dependence on another to justify our existence easily leads to boredom and power games. 
To avoid this trap, Beauvoir advised loving authentically, which is more like a great friendship. 
Lovers support each other in discovering themselves, reaching beyond themselves, and enriching their lives and the world together. 
Though we might never know why we fall in love, we can be certain that it will be an emotional rollercoaster ride. 
It's scary and exhilarating. 
It makes us suffer and makes us soar. 
Maybe we lose ourselves. 
Maybe we find ourselves. 
It might be heartbreaking, or it might just be the best thing in life. 
Will you dare to find out? 

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

When we hear the word radiation, it's tempting to picture huge explosions and frightening mutations, but that's not the full story. 
Radiation also applies to rainbows and a doctor examining an x-ray. 
So what is radiation really, and how much should we worry about its effects? 
The answer begins with understanding that the word radiation describes two very different scientific phenomena: electromagnetic radiation and nuclear radiation. 
Electromagnetic radiation is pure energy consisting of interacting electrical and magnetic waves oscillating through space. 
As these waves oscillate faster, they scale up in energy. 
At the lower end of the spectrum, there's radio, infrared, and visible light. 
At the higher end are ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma rays. 
Modern society is shaped by sending and detecting electromagnetic radiation. 
We might download an email to our phone via radio waves to open an image of an X-ray print, which we can see because our screen emits visible light. 
Nuclear radiation, on the other hand, originates in the atomic nucleus, where protons repel each other due to their mutually positive charges. 
A phenomenon known as the strong nuclear force struggles to overcome this repulsion and keep the nucleus intact. 
However, some combinations of protons and neutrons, known as isotopes, remain unstable, or radioactive. 
They will randomly eject matter and/or energy, known as nuclear radiation, to achieve greater stability. 
Nuclear radiation comes from natural sources, like radon, a gas which seeps up from the ground. 
We also refine naturally occurring radioactive ores to fuel nuclear power plants. 
Even bananas contain trace amounts of a radioactive potassium isotope. 
So if we live in a world of radiation, how can we escape its dangerous effects? 
To start, not all radiation is hazardous. 
Radiation becomes risky when it rips atoms' electrons away upon impact, a process that can damage DNA. 
This is known as ionizing radiation because an atom that has lost or gained electrons is called an ion. 
All nuclear radiation is ionizing, while only the highest energy electromagnetic radiation is. 
That includes gamma rays, X-rays, and the high-energy end of ultraviolet. 
That's why as an extra precaution during X-rays, doctors shield body parts they don't need to examine, and why beach-goers use sunscreen. 
In comparison, cell phones and microwaves operate at the lower end of the spectrum, so there is no risk of ionizing radiation from their use. 
The biggest health risk occurs when lots of ionizing radiation hits us in a short time period, also known as an acute exposure. 
Acute exposures overwhelm the body's natural ability to repair the damage. 
This can trigger cancers, cellular dysfunction, and potentially even death. 
Fortunately, acute exposures are rare, but we are exposed daily to lower levels of ionizing radiation from both natural and man-made sources. 
Scientists have a harder time quantifying these risks. 
Your body often repairs damage from small amounts ionizing radiation, and if it can't, the results of damage may not manifest for a decade or more. 
One way scientists compare ionizing radiation exposure is a unit called the sievert. 
An acute exposure to one sievert will probably cause nausea within hours, and four sieverts could be fatal. 
However, our normal daily exposures are far lower. 
The average person receives 6.2 millisieverts of radiation from all sources annually, around a third due to radon. 
At only five microsieverts each, you'd need to get more than 1200 dental X-rays to rack up your annual dosage. 
And remember that banana? 
If you could absorb all the banana's radiation, you'd need around 170 a day to hit your annual dosage. 
We live in a world of radiation. 
However, much of that radiation is non-ionizing. 
For the remainder that is ionizing, our exposures are usually low, and choices like getting your home tested for radon and wearing sunscreen can help reduce the associated health risks. 
Marie Curie, one of the early radiation pioneers, summed up the challenge as follows: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. 
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." 

Every day, a sea of decisions stretches before us. 
Some are small and unimportant, but others have a larger impact on our lives. 
For example, which politician should I vote for? 
Should I try the latest diet craze? 
Or will email make me a millionaire? 
We're bombarded with so many decisions that it's impossible to make a perfect choice every time. 
But there are many ways to improve our chances, and one particularly effective technique is critical thinking. 
This is a way of approaching a question that allows us to carefully deconstruct a situation, reveal its hidden issues, such as bias and manipulation, and make the best decision. 
If the critical part sounds negative that's because in a way it is. 
Rather than choosing an answer because it feels right, a person who uses critical thinking subjects all available options to scrutiny and skepticism. 
Using the tools at their disposal, they'll eliminate everything but the most useful and reliable information. 
There are many different ways of approaching critical thinking, but here's one five-step process that may help you solve any number of problems. 
One: formulate your question. 
In other words, know what you're looking for. 
This isn't always as straightforward as it sounds. 
For example, if you're deciding whether to try out the newest diet craze, your reasons for doing so may be obscured by other factors, like claims that you'll see results in just two weeks. 
But if you approach the situation with a clear view of what you're actually trying to accomplish by dieting, whether that's weight loss, better nutrition, or having more energy, that'll equip you to sift through this information critically, find what you're looking for, and decide whether the new fad really suits your needs. 
Two: gather your information. 
There's lots of it out there, so having a clear idea of your question will help you determine what's relevant. 
If you're trying to decide on a diet to improve your nutrition, you may ask an expert for their advice, or seek other people's testimonies. 
Information gathering helps you weigh different options, moving you closer to a decision that meets your goal. 
Three: apply the information, something you do by asking critical questions. 
Facing a decision, ask yourself, "What concepts are at work?" 
"What assumptions exist?" 
"Is my interpretation of the information logically sound?" 
For example, in an email that promises you millions, you should consider, "What is shaping my approach to this situation?" 
"Do I assume the sender is telling the truth?" 
"Based on the evidence, is it logical to assume I'll win any money?" 
Four: consider the implications. 
Imagine it's election time, and you've selected a political candidate based on their promise to make it cheaper for drivers to fill up on gas. 
At first glance, that seems great. 
But what about the long-term environmental effects? 
If gasoline use is less restricted by cost, this could also cause a huge surge in air pollution, an unintended consequence that's important to think about. 
Five: explore other points of view. 
Ask yourself why so many people are drawn to the policies of the opposing political candidate. 
Even if you disagree with everything that candidate says, exploring the full spectrum of viewpoints might explain why some policies that don't seem valid to you appeal to others. 
This will allow you to explore alternatives, evaluate your own choices, and ultimately help you make more informed decisions. 
This five-step process is just one tool, and it certainly won't eradicate difficult decisions from our lives. 
But it can help us increase the number of positive choices we make. 
Critical thinking can give us the tools to sift through a sea of information and find what we're looking for. 
And if enough of us use it, it has the power to make the world a more reasonable place. 

Water is virtually everywhere, from soil moisture and ice caps, to the cells inside our own bodies. 
Depending on factors like location, fat index, age, and sex, the average human is between 55-60% water. 
At birth, human babies are even wetter. 
Being 75% water, they are swimmingly similar to fish. 
But their water composition drops to 65% by their first birthday. 
So what role does water play in our bodies, and how much do we actually need to drink to stay healthy? 
The H20 in our bodies works to cushion and lubricate joints, regulate temperature, and to nourish the brain and spinal cord. 
Water isn't only in our blood. 
An adult's brain and heart are almost three quarters water. 
That's roughly equivalent to the amount of moisture in a banana. 
Lungs are more similar to an apple at 83%. 
And even seemingly dry human bones are 31% water. 
If we are essentially made of water, and surrounded by water, why do we still need to drink so much? 
Well, each day we lose two to three liters through our sweat, urine, and bowel movements, and even just from breathing. 
While these functions are essential to our survival, we need to compensate for the fluid loss. 
Maintaining a balanced water level is essential to avoid dehydration or over-hydration, both of which can have devastating effects on overall health. 
At first detection of low water levels, sensory receptors in the brain's hypothalamus signal the release of antidiuretic hormone. 
When it reached the kidneys, it creates aquaporins, special channels that enable blood to absorb and retain more water, leading to concentrated, dark urine. 
Increased dehydration can cause notable drops in energy, mood, skin moisture, and blood pressure, as well as signs of cognitive impairment. 
A dehydrated brain works harder to accomplish the same amount as a normal brain, and it even temporarily shrinks because of its lack of water. 
Over-hydration, or hyponatremia, is usually caused by overconsumption of water in a short amount of time. 
Athletes are often the victims of over-hydration because of complications in regulating water levels in extreme physical conditions. 
Whereas the dehydrated brain amps up the production of antidiuretic hormone, the over-hydrated brain slows, or even stops, releasing it into the blood. 
Sodium electrolytes in the body become diluted, causing cells to swell. 
In severe cases, the kidneys can't keep up with the resulting volumes of dilute urine. 
Water intoxication then occurs, possibly causing headache, vomiting, and, in rare instances, seizures or death. 
But that's a pretty extreme situation. 
On a normal, day-to-day basis, maintaining a well-hydrated system is easy to manage for those of us fortunate enough to have access to clean drinking water. 
For a long time, conventional wisdom said that we should drink eight glasses a day. 
That estimate has since been fine-tuned. 
Now, the consensus is that the amount of water we need to imbibe depends largely on our weight and environment. 
The recommended daily intake varies from between 2.5-3.7 liters of water for men, and about 2-2.7 liters for women, a range that is pushed up or down if we are healthy, active, old, or overheating. 
While water is the healthiest hydrator, other beverages, even those with caffeine like coffee or tea, replenish fluids as well. 
And water within food makes up about a fifth of our daily H20 intake. 
Fruits and vegetables like strawberries, cucumbers, and even broccoli are over 90% water, and can supplement liquid intake while providing valuable nutrients and fiber. 
Drinking well might also have various long-term benefits. 
Studies have shown that optimal hydration can lower the chance of stroke, help manage diabetes, and potentially reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. 
No matter what, getting the right amount of liquid makes a world of difference in how you'll feel, think, and function day to day. 

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

In 1956, during a diplomatic reception in Moscow, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told Western Bloc ambassadors, "My vas pokhoronim!" 
His interpreter rendered that into English as, "We will bury you!" 
This statement sent shockwaves through the Western world, heightening the tension between the Soviet Union and the US who were in the thick of the Cold War. 
Some believe this incident alone set East/West relations back a decade. 
As it turns out, Khrushchev's remark was translated a bit too literally. 
Given the context, his words should have been rendered as, "We will live to see you buried," meaning that Communism would outlast Capitalism, a less threatening comment. 
Though the intended meaning was eventually clarified, the initial impact of Khrushchev's apparent words put the world on a path that could have led to nuclear armageddon. 
So now, given the complexities of language and cultural exchange, how does this sort of thing not happen all the time? 
Much of the answer lies with the skill and training of interpreters to overcome language barriers. 
For most of history, interpretation was mainly done consecutively, with speakers and interpreters making pauses to allow each other to speak. 
But after the advent of radio technology, a new simultaneous interpretations system was developed in the wake of World War II. 
In the simultaneous mode interpreters instantaneously translate a speaker's words into a microphone while he speaks. 
Without pauses, those in the audience can choose the language in which they want to follow. 
On the surface, it all looks seamless, but behind the scenes, human interpreters work incessantly to ensure every idea gets across as intended. 
And that is no easy task. 
It takes about two years of training for already fluent bilingual professionals to expand their vocabulary and master the skills necessary to become a conference interpreter. 
To get used to the unnatural task of speaking while they listen, students shadow speakers and repeat their every word exactly as heard in the same language. 
In time, they begin to paraphrase what is said, making stylistic adjustments as they go. 
At some point, a second language is introduced. 
Practicing in this way creates new neural pathways in the interpreter's brain, and the constant effort of reformulation gradually becomes second nature. 
Over time and through much hard work, the interpreter masters a vast array of tricks to keep up with speed, deal with challenging terminology, and handle a multitude of foreign accents. 
They may resort to acronyms to shorten long names, choose generic terms over specific, or refer to slides and other visual aides. 
They can even leave a term in the original language, while they search for the most accurate equivalent. 
Interpreters are also skilled at keeping aplomb in the face of chaos. 
Remember, they have no control over who is going to say what, or how articulate the speaker will sound. 
A curveball can be thrown at any time. 
Also, they often perform to thousands of people and in very intimidating settings, like the UN General Assembly. 
To keep their emotions in check, they carefully prepare for an assignment, building glossaries in advance, reading voraciously about the subject matter, and reviewing previous talks on the topic. 
Finally, interpreters work in pairs. 
While one colleague is busy translating incoming speeches in real time, the other gives support by locating documents, looking up words, and tracking down pertinent information. 
Because simultaneous interpretation requires intense concentration, every 30 minutes, the pair switches roles. 
Success is heavily dependent on skillful collaboration. 
Language is complex, and when abstract or nuanced concepts get lost in translation, the consequences may be catastrophic. 
As Margaret Atwood famously noted, "War is what happens when language fails." 
Conference interpreters of all people are aware of that and work diligently behind the scenes to make sure it never does. 

The victory of the underdog over the favored team. 
The last minute penalty shot that wins the tournament. 
The high-energy training montages. 
Many people love to glorify victory on the playing field, cheer for favorite teams, and play sports. 
But here's a question: Should we be so obsessed with sports? 
Is playing sports actually as good for us as we make it out to be, or just a fun and entertaining pastime? 
What does science have to say? 
First of all, it's well accepted that exercise is good for our bodies and minds, and that's definitely true. 
Exercising, especially when we're young, has all sorts of health benefits, like strengthening our bones, clearing out bad cholesterol from our arteries, and decreasing the risk of stroke, high blood pressure, and diabetes. 
Our brains also release a number of chemicals when we workout, including endorphins. 
These natural hormones, which control pain and pleasure responses in the cental nervous system, can lead to feelings of euphoria, or, what's often called, a runner's high. 
Increased endorphins and consistent physical activity in general can sharpen your focus and improve your mood and memory. 
So does that mean we get just as much benefit going to the gym five days a week as we would joining a team and competing? 
Well, here's where it gets interesting: because it turns out that if you can find a sport and a team you like, studies show that there are all sorts of benefits that go beyond the physical and mental benefits of exercise alone. 
Some of the most significant are psychological benefits, both in the short and long term. 
Some of those come from the communal experience of being on a team, for instance, learning to trust and depend on others, to accept help, to give help, and to work together towards a common goal. 
In addition, commitment to a team and doing something fun can also make it easier to establish a regular habit of exercise. 
School sport participation has also been shown to reduce the risk of suffering from depression for up to four years. 
Meanwhile, your self-esteem and confidence can get a big boost. 
There are a few reasons for that. 
One is found in training. 
Just by working and working at skills, especially with a good coach, you reinforce a growth mindset within yourself. 
That's when you say, "Even if I can't do something today, I can improve myself through practice and achieve it eventually." 
That mindset is useful in all walks of life. 
And then there's learning through failure, one of the most transformative, long-term benefits of playing sports. 
The experience of coming to terms with defeat can build the resilience and self-awareness necessary to manage academic, social, and physical hurdles. 
So even if your team isn't winning all the time, or at all, there's a real benefit to your experience. 
Now, not everyone will enjoy every sport. 
Perhaps one team is too competitive, or not competitive enough. 
It can also take time to find a sport that plays to your strengths. 
That's completely okay. 
But if you spend some time looking, you'll be able to find a sport that fits your individual needs, and if you do, there are so many benefits. 
You'll be a part of a supportive community, you'll be building your confidence, you'll be exercising your body, and you'll be nurturing your mind, not to mention having fun. 

What does the French Revolution have to do with the time NASA accidentally crashed a $200 million orbiter into the surface of Mars? 
Actually, everything. 
That crash happened due to an error in converting between two measurement systems, U.S. customary units and their S.I, or metric, equivalence. 
So what's the connection to the French Revolution? 
Let's explain. 
For the majority of recorded human history, units like the weight of a grain or the length of a hand weren't exact and varied from place to place. 
And different regions didn't just use varying measurements. 
They had completely different number systems as well. 
By the late Middle Ages, the Hindu-Arabic decimal system mostly replaced Roman numerals and fractions in Europe, but efforts by scholars like John Wilkins to promote standard decimal-based measures were less successful. 
With a quarter million different units in France alone, any widespread change would require massive disruption. 
And in 1789, that disruption came. 
The leaders of the French Revolution didn't just overthrow the monarchy. 
They sought to completely transform society according to the rational principles of the Enlightenment. 
When the new government took power, the Academy of Sciences convened to reform the system of measurements. 
Old standards based on arbitrary authority or local traditions were replaced with mathematical and natural relationships. 
For example, the meter, from the Greek word for measure, was defined as 1/10,000,000 between the Equator and North Pole. 
And the new metric system was, in the words of the Marquis de Condorcet, "For all people, for all time." 
Standardizing measurements had political advantages for the Revolutionaries as well. 
Nobles could no longer manipulate local units to extract more rent from commoners, while the government could collect taxes more efficiently. 
And switching to a new Republican Calendar with ten-day weeks reduced church power by eliminating Sundays. 
Adoption of this new system wasn't easy. 
In fact, it was a bit of a mess. 
At first, people used new units alongside old ones, and the Republican Calendar was eventually abandoned. 
When Napoléon Bonaparte took power, he allowed small businesses to use traditional measurements redefined in metric terms. 
But the metric system remained standard for formal use, and it spread across the continent, along with France's borders. 
While Napoléon's empire lasted eight years, its legacy endured far longer. 
Some European countries reverted to old measurements upon independence. 
Others realized the value of standardization in an age of international trade. 
After Portugal and the Netherlands switched to metric voluntarily, other nations followed, with colonial empires spreading the system around the world. 
As France's main rival, Britain had resisted revolutionary ideas and retained its traditional units. 
But over the next two centuries, the British Empire slowly transitioned, first approving the metric system as an optional alternative before gradually making it offical. 
However, this switch came too late for thirteen former colonies that had already gained independence. 
The United States of America stuck with the English units of its colonial past and today remains one of only three countries which haven't fully embraced the metric system. 
Despite constant initiatives for metrication, many Americans consider units like feet and pounds more intuitive. 
And ironically, some regard the once revolutionary metric system as a symbol of global conformity. 
Nevertheless, the metric system is almost universally used in science and medicine, and it continues to evolve according to its original principles. 
For a long time, standard units were actually defined by carefully maintained physical prototypes. 
But thanks to improving technology and precision, these objects with limited access and unreliable longevity are now being replaced with standards based on universal constants, like the speed of light. 
Consistent measurements are such an integral part of our daily lives that it's hard to appreciate what a major accomplishment for humanity they've been. 
And just as it arose from a political revolution, the metric system remains crucial for the scientific revolutions to come. 

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

Imagine you're on a game show, and you can choose between two prizes: a diamond or a bottle of water. 
It's an easy choice. 
The diamonds are clearly more valuable. 
Now imagine being given the same choice again, only this time, you're not on a game show, but dehydrated in the desert after wandering for days. 
Do you choose differently? 
Why? Aren't diamonds still more valuable? 
This is the paradox of value, famously described by pioneering economist Adam Smith. 
And what it tells us is that defining value is not as simple as it seems. 
On the game show, you were thinking about each item's exchange value, what you could obtain for them at a later time, but in an emergency, like the desert scenario, what matters far more is their use value, how helpful they are in your current situation. 
And because we only get to choose one of the options, we also have to consider its opportunity cost, or what we lose by giving up the other choice. 
After all, it doesn't matter how much you could get from selling the diamond if you never make it out of the desert. 
Most modern economists deal with the paradox of value by attempting to unify these considerations under the concept of utility, how well something satisfies a person's wants or needs. 
Utility can apply to anything from the basic need for food to the pleasure of hearing a favorite song, and will naturally vary for different people and circumstances. 
A market economy provides us with an easy way to track utility. 
Put simply, the utility something has to you is reflected by how much you'd be willing to pay for it. 
Now, imagine yourself back in the desert, only this time, you get offered a new diamond or a fresh bottle of water every five minutes. 
If you're like most people, you'll first choose enough water to last the trip, and then as many diamonds as you can carry. 
This is because of something called marginal utility, and it means that when you choose between diamonds and water, you compare utility obtained from every additional bottle of water to every additional diamond. 
And you do this each time an offer is made. 
The first bottle of water is worth more to you than any amount of diamonds, but eventually, you have all the water you need. 
After a while, every additional bottle becomes a burden. 
That's when you begin to choose diamonds over water. 
And it's not just necessities like water. 
When it comes to most things, the more of it you acquire, the less useful or enjoyable every additional bit becomes. 
This is the law of diminishing marginal utility. 
You might gladly buy two or three helpings of your favorite food, but the fourth would make you nauseated, and the hundredth would spoil before you could even get to it. 
Or you could pay to see the same movie over and over until you got bored of it or spent all of your money. 
Either way, you'd eventually reach a point where the marginal utility for buying another movie ticket became zero. 
Utility applies not just to buying things, but to all our decisions. 
And the intuitive way to maximize it and avoid diminishing returns is to vary the way we spend our time and resources. 
After our basic needs are met, we'd theoretically decide to invest in choices only to the point they're useful or enjoyable. 
Of course, how effectively any of us manage to maximize utility in real life is another matter. 
But it helps to remember that the ultimate source of value comes from us, the needs we share, the things we enjoy, and the choices we make. 

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

Which is the hardest word to translate in this sentence? 
"Know" is easy to translate. 
"Pep rally" doesn't have a direct analog in a lot of languages and cultures, but can be approximated. 
But the hardest word there is actually one of the smallest: "you." 
As simple as it seems, it's often impossible to accurately translate "you" without knowing a lot more about the situation where it's being said. 
To start with, how familiar are you with the person you're talking to? 
Many cultures have different levels of formality. 
A close friend, someone much older or much younger, a stranger, a boss. 
These all may be slightly different "you's." 
In many languages, the pronoun reflects these differences through what's known as the T–V distinction. 
In French, for example, you would say "tu" when talking to your friend at school, but "vous" when addressing your teacher. 
Even English once had something similar. 
Remember the old-timey "thou?" 
Ironically, it was actually the informal pronoun for people you're close with, while "you" was the formal and polite version. 
That distinction was lost when the English decided to just be polite all the time. 
But the difficulty in translating "you" doesn't end there. 
In languages like Hausa or Korana, the "you" form depends on the listener's gender. 
In many more, it depends on whether they are one or many, such as with German "Du" or "ihr." 
Even in English, some dialects use words like "y'all" or "youse" the same way. 
Some plural forms, like the French "vous" and Russian "Вы" are also used for a single person to show that the addressee is that much more important, much like the royal "we." 
And a few languages even have a specific form for addressing exactly two people, like Slovenian "vidva." 
If that wasn't complicated enough, formality, number, and gender can all come into play at the same time. 
In Spanish, "tú" is unisex informal singular, "usted" is unisex formal singular, "vosotros" is masculine informal plural, "vosotras" is feminine informal plural, and "ustedes" is the unisex formal plural. 
Phew! 
After all that, it may come as a relief that some languages often leave out the second person pronoun. 
In languages like Romanian and Portuguese, the pronoun can be dropped from sentences because it's clearly implied by the way the verbs are conjugated. 
And in languages like Korean, Thai, and Chinese, pronouns can be dropped without any grammatical hints. 
Speakers often would rather have the listener guess the pronoun from context than use the wrong one and risk being seen as rude. 
So if you're ever working as a translator and come across this sentence without any context: "You and you, no, not you, you, your job is to translate 'you' for yourselves" ... 
And to the volunteer community who will be translating this video into multiple languages: Sorry about that! 

Here's what has to happen for pregnancy to occur after sexual intercourse. 
Sperm must swim up the vagina, through the cervical opening, upwards through the uterus, and into one of the two fallopian tubes. 
If an egg, released during that month's ovulation, is in the tube, one sperm has a chance to fertilize it. 
Contraceptives are designed to prevent this process, and they work in three basic ways. 
They block the sperm, disable sperm before they reach the uterus, or suppress ovulation. 
Block is the simplest. 
Male and female condoms prevent sperm from coming into contact with the vaginal space. 
That barrier is also why they, unlike other contraceptive methods, are able to prevent transmission of certain sexually transmitted diseases. 
Meanwhile, the diaphragm, cervical cap, and sponge work by being placed over the cervix, barricading the entrance to the uterus. 
These contraceptives are sometimes called barrier methods and can be used with spermicides, an example of the second category, disable. 
A spermicide is a chemical that immobilizes and destroys sperm. 
Today's spermicides come as foam, cream, jelly, suppositories, and even a thin piece of translucent film that dissolves in the vagina. 
These products can be inserted directly into the vagina before intercourse, or can be combined with block methods, like a diaphragm or condom, for added proection. 
The third category for preventing pregnancy works by suppressing the action of an egg maturing in the ovary. 
If there isn't an egg available in the fallopian tube, there's nothing for sperm to fertilize. 
Hormonal contraceptives, including the pill, the patch, the Depo shot, and the vaginal ring all release synthetic versions of various combinations of progesterone and estrogen. 
This hormone cocktail suppresses ovulation, keeping the immature egg safely sequestered in the ovary. 
Synthetic progesterone also has a block trick up its sleeve. 
It makes cervical mucus too thick and sticky for sperm to swim through easily. 
There are other contraceptives that use multiple approaches at the same time. 
For example, many IUDs, or intrauterine devices, contain synthetic hormones which suppress ovulation. 
Some also contain copper, which disable sperm while also making egg implantation in the uterus difficult. 
Block, disable, or suppress: is one strategy better than the other? 
There are differences, but a lot of it has to do with how convenient and easy it is to use each contraceptive correctly. 
For example, male condoms would be about 98% effective if everyone used them perfectly. 
That 98% means if 100 couples correctly used condoms for a year, two women would get pregnant. 
But not everyone uses them correctly, so they're only 82% effective in practice. 
Other methods, like the patch and pill, are 99% effective when they're used perfectly. 
But in practice, that's 91%. 
Spermicide is only 85% effective, even with perfect usage, and just 71% effective with typical usage. 
Another important consideration in the choice of contraceptives are side effects, which almost exclusively affect women rather than men. 
Hormonal methods in particular can cause symptoms like headaches, nausea, and high blood pressure, but they vary from woman to woman. 
That's why these methods require a prescription from a doctor. 
The choice of contraceptive method is a personal one, and what works best for you now may change later. 
Scientists also continue to research new methods, such as a male pill that would prevent sperm production. 
In the meantime, there are quite a few options to block sperm, disable them, or suppress eggs and keep them out of reach. 

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

What do you think when you look at me? 
A woman of faith? An expert? 
Maybe even a sister. 
Or oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist. 
Or just an airport security line delay. 
That one's actually true. 
(Laughter) If some of your perceptions were negative, I don't really blame you. 
That's just how the media has been portraying people who look like me. 
One study found that 80 percent of news coverage about Islam and Muslims is negative. 
And studies show that Americans say that most don't know a Muslim. 
I guess people don't talk to their Uber drivers. 
(Laughter) Well, for those of you who have never met a Muslim, it's great to meet you. 
Let me tell you who I am. 
I'm a mom, a coffee lover -- double espresso, cream on the side. 
I'm an introvert. 
I'm a wannabe fitness fanatic. 
And I'm a practicing, spiritual Muslim. 
But not like Lady Gaga says, because baby, I wasn't born this way. 
It was a choice. 
When I was 17, I decided to come out. 
No, not as a gay person like some of my friends, but as a Muslim, and decided to start wearing the hijab, my head covering. 
My feminist friends were aghast: "Why are you oppressing yourself?" 
The funny thing was, it was actually at that time a feminist declaration of independence from the pressure I felt as a 17-year-old, to conform to a perfect and unattainable standard of beauty. 
I didn't just passively accept the faith of my parents. 
I wrestled with the Quran. 
I read and reflected and questioned and doubted and, ultimately, believed. 
My relationship with God -- it was not love at first sight. 
It was a trust and a slow surrender that deepened with every reading of the Quran. 
Its rhythmic beauty sometimes moves me to tears. 
I see myself in it. I feel that God knows me. 
Have you ever felt like someone sees you, completely understands you and yet loves you anyway? 
That's how it feels. 
And so later, I got married, and like all good Egyptians, started my career as an engineer. 
(Laughter) I later had a child, after getting married, and I was living essentially the Egyptian-American dream. 
And then that terrible morning of September, 2001. 
I think a lot of you probably remember exactly where you were that morning. 
I was sitting in my kitchen finishing breakfast, and I look up on the screen and see the words "Breaking News." 
There was smoke, airplanes flying into buildings, people jumping out of buildings. 
What was this? 
An accident? 
A malfunction? 
My shock quickly turned to outrage. 
Who would do this? 
And I switch the channel and I hear, "... Muslim terrorist ...," "... in the name of Islam ...," "... Middle-Eastern descent ...," "... jihad ...," "... we should bomb Mecca." 
Oh my God. 
Not only had my country been attacked, but in a flash, somebody else's actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect. 
That same day, we had to drive across Middle America to move to a new city to start grad school. 
And I remember sitting in the passenger seat as we drove in silence, crouched as low as I could go in my seat, for the first time in my life, afraid for anyone to know I was a Muslim. 
We moved into our apartment that night in a new town in what felt like a completely different world. 
And then I was hearing and seeing and reading warnings from national Muslim organizations saying things like, "Be alert," "Be aware," "Stay in well-lit areas," "Don't congregate." 
I stayed inside all week. 
And then it was Friday that same week, the day that Muslims congregate for worship. 
And again the warnings were, "Don't go that first Friday, it could be a target." 
And I was watching the news, wall-to-wall coverage. 
Emotions were so raw, understandably, and I was also hearing about attacks on Muslims, or people who were perceived to be Muslim, being pulled out and beaten in the street. 
Mosques were actually firebombed. 
And I thought, we should just stay home. 
And yet, something didn't feel right. 
Because those people who attacked our country attacked our country. 
I get it that people were angry at the terrorists. 
Guess what? So was I. 
And so to have to explain yourself all the time isn't easy. 
I don't mind questions. I love questions. 
It's the accusations that are tough. 
Today we hear people actually saying things like, "There's a problem in this country, and it's called Muslims. 
When are we going to get rid of them?" 
So, some people want to ban Muslims and close down mosques. 
They talk about my community kind of like we're a tumor in the body of America. 
And the only question is, are we malignant or benign? 
You know, a malignant tumor you extract altogether, and a benign tumor you just keep under surveillance. 
The choices don't make sense, because it's the wrong question. 
Muslims, like all other Americans, aren't a tumor in the body of America, we're a vital organ. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Muslims are inventors and teachers, first responders and Olympic athletes. 
Now, is closing down mosques going to make America safer? 
It might free up some parking spots, but it will not end terrorism. 
Going to a mosque regularly is actually linked to having more tolerant views of people of other faiths and greater civic engagement. 
And as one police chief in the Washington, DC area recently told me, people don't actually get radicalized at mosques. 
They get radicalized in their basement or bedroom, in front of a computer. 
And what you find about the radicalization process is it starts online, but the first thing that happens is the person gets cut off from their community, from even their family, so that the extremist group can brainwash them into believing that they, the terrorists, are the true Muslims, and everyone else who abhors their behavior and ideology are sellouts or apostates. 
So if we want to prevent radicalization, we have to keep people going to the mosque. 
Now, some will still argue Islam is a violent religion. 
After all, a group like ISIS bases its brutality on the Quran. 
Now, as a Muslim, as a mother, as a human being, I think we need to do everything we can to stop a group like ISIS. 
But we would be giving in to their narrative if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
ISIS has as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity. 
(Applause) Both groups claim to base their ideology on their holy book. 
But when you look at them, they're not motivated by what they read in their holy book. 
It's their brutality that makes them read these things into the scripture. 
Recently, a prominent imam told me a story that really took me aback. 
He said that a girl came to him because she was thinking of going to join ISIS. 
And I was really surprised and asked him, had she been in contact with a radical religious leader? 
And he said the problem was quite the opposite, that every cleric that she had talked to had shut her down and said that her rage, her sense of injustice in the world, was just going to get her in trouble. 
And so with nowhere to channel and make sense of this anger, she was a prime target to be exploited by extremists promising her a solution. 
What this imam did was to connect her back to God and to her community. 
He didn't shame her for her rage -- instead, he gave her constructive ways to make real change in the world. 
What she learned at that mosque prevented her from going to join ISIS. 
I've told you a little bit about how Islamophobia affects me and my family. 
But how does it impact ordinary Americans? 
How does it impact everyone else? 
How does consuming fear 24 hours a day affect the health of our democracy, the health of our free thought? 
Well, one study -- actually, several studies in neuroscience -- show that when we're afraid, at least three things happen. 
We become more accepting of authoritarianism, conformity and prejudice. 
One study showed that when subjects were exposed to news stories that were negative about Muslims, they became more accepting of military attacks on Muslim countries and policies that curtail the rights of American Muslims. 
Now, this isn't just academic. 
When you look at when anti-Muslim sentiment spiked between 2001 and 2013, it happened three times, but it wasn't around terrorist attacks. 
It was in the run up to the Iraq War and during two election cycles. 
So Islamophobia isn't just the natural response to Muslim terrorism as I would have expected. 
It can actually be a tool of public manipulation, eroding the very foundation of a free society, which is rational and well-informed citizens. 
Muslims are like canaries in the coal mine. 
We might be the first to feel it, but the toxic air of fear is harming us all. 
(Applause) And assigning collective guilt isn't just about having to explain yourself all the time. 
Deah and his wife Yusor were a young married couple living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they both went to school. 
Deah was an athlete. 
He was in dental school, talented, promising ... 
And his sister would tell me that he was the sweetest, most generous human being she knew. 
She was visiting him there and he showed her his resume, and she was amazed. 
She said, "When did my baby brother become such an accomplished young man?" 
Just a few weeks after Suzanne's visit to her brother and his new wife, their neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, murdered them, as well as Yusor's sister, Razan, who was visiting for the afternoon, in their apartment, execution style, after posting anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page. 
He shot Deah eight times. 
So bigotry isn't just immoral, it can even be lethal. 
So, back to my story. 
What happened after 9/11? 
Did we go to the mosque or did we play it safe and stay home? 
Well, we talked it over, and it might seem like a small decision, but to us, it was about what kind of America we wanted to leave for our kids: one that would control us by fear or one where we were practicing our religion freely. 
So we decided to go to the mosque. 
And we put my son in his car seat, buckled him in, and we drove silently, intensely, to the mosque. 
I took him out, I took off my shoes, I walked into the prayer hall and what I saw made me stop. 
The place was completely full. 
And then the imam made an announcement, thanking and welcoming our guests, because half the congregation were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, people of faith and no faith, who had come not to attack us, but to stand in solidarity with us. 
(Applause) I just break down at this time. 
These people were there because they chose courage and compassion over panic and prejudice. 
What will you choose? 
What will you choose at this time of fear and bigotry? 
Will you play it safe? 
Or will you join those who say we are better than that? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you so much. 
Helen Walters: So Dalia, you seem to have struck a chord. 
But I wonder, what would you say to those who might argue that you're giving a TED Talk, you're clearly a deep thinker, you work at a fancy think tank, you're an exception, you're not the rule. 
What would you say to those people? 
Dalia Mogahed: I would say, don't let this stage distract you, I'm completely ordinary. 
I'm not an exception. 
My story is not unusual. 
I am as ordinary as they come. 
When you look at Muslims around the world -- and I've done this, I've done the largest study ever done on Muslims around the world -- people want ordinary things. 
They want prosperity for their family, they want jobs and they want to live in peace. 
So I am not in any way an exception. 
When you meet people who seem like an exception to the rule, oftentimes it's that the rule is broken, not that they're an exception to it. 
HW: Thank you so much. Dalia Mogahed. 
(Applause) 

What's your sign? 
In Western astrology, it's a constellation determined by when your birthday falls in the calendar. 
But according to the Chinese zodiac, or shēngxiào, it's your shǔxiàng, meaning the animal assigned to your birth year. 
And of the many myths explaining these animal signs and their arrangement, the most enduring one is that of the Great Race. 
As the story goes, Yù Dì, or Jade Emperor, Ruler of the Heavens, wanted to devise a way to measure time, so he organized a race. 
The first twelve animals to make it across the river would earn a spot on the zodiac calendar in the order they arrived. 
The rat rose with the sun to get an early start, but on the way to the river, he met the horse, the tiger, and the ox. 
Because the rat was small and couldn't swim very well, he asked the bigger animals for help. 
While the tiger and horse refused, the kind-hearted ox agreed to carry the rat across. 
Yet, just as they were about to reach the other side, the rat jumped off the ox's head and secured first place. 
The ox came in second, with the powerful tiger right behind him. 
The rabbit, too small to battle the current, nimbly hopped across stones and logs to come in fourth. 
Next came the dragon, who could have flown directly across, but stopped to help some creatures she had encountered on the way. 
After her came the horse, galloping across the river. 
But just as she got across, the snake slithered by. 
The startled horse reared back, letting the snake sneak into sixth place. 
The Jade Emperor looked out at the river and spotted the sheep, the monkey, and the rooster all atop a raft, working together to push it through the weeds. 
When they made it across, the trio agreed to give eighth place to the sheep, who had been the most comforting and harmonious of them, followed by the monkey and the rooster. 
Next came the dog, scrambling onto the shore. 
He was a great swimmer, but frolicked in the water for so long that he only managed to come in eleventh. 
The final spot was claimed by the pig, who had gotten hungry and stopped to eat and nap before finally waddling across the finish line. 
And so, each year is associated with one of the animals in this order, with the cycle starting over every 60 years. 
Why 60 and not twelve? 
Well, the traditional Chinese calendar is made up of two overlapping systems. 
The animals of the zodiac are associated with what's called the Twelve Earthly Branches, or shí'èrzhī. 
Another system, the Ten Heavenly Stems, or tiāngān, is linked with the five classical elements of metal, xīn, wood, mù, water, shuǐ, fire, huǒ, and earth, tǔ. 
Each element is assigned yīn or yáng, creating a ten-year cycle. 
When the twelve animals of the Earthly Branches are matched with the five elements plus the yīn or the yáng of the Heavenly Stems, it creates 60 years of different combinations, known as a sexagenary cycle, or gānzhī. 
So someone born in 1980 would have the sign of yáng metal monkey, while someone born in 2007 would be yīn fire pig. 
In fact, you can also have an inner animal based on your birth month, a true animal based on your birth date, and a secret animal based on your birth hour. 
It was the great race that supposedly determined which animals were enshrined in the Chinese zodiac, but as the system spread through Asia, other cultures made changes to reflect their communities. 
So if you consult the Vietnamese zodiac, you may discover that you're a cat, not a rabbit, and if you're in Thailand, a mythical snake called a Naga replaces the dragon. 
So whether or not you place stock in what the zodiac says about you as an individual, it certainly reveals much about the culture it comes from. 

Mastering any physical skill, be it performing a pirouette, playing an instrument, or throwing a baseball, takes practice. 
Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. 
So what does practice do in our brains to make us better at things? 
Our brains have two kinds of neural tissue: grey matter and white matter. 
The grey matter processes information in the brain, directing signals and sensory stimuli to nerve cells, while white matter is mostly made up of fatty tissue and nerve fibers. 
In order for our bodies to move, information needs to travel from the brain's grey matter, down the spinal cord, through a chain of nerve fibers called axons to our muscles. 
So how does practice or repetition affect the inner workings of our brains? 
The axons that exist in the white matter are wrapped with a fatty substance called myelin. 
And it's this myelin covering, or sheath, that seems to change with practice. 
Myelin is similar to insulation on electrical cables. 
It prevents energy loss from electrical signals that the brain uses, moving them more efficiently along neural pathways. 
Some recent studies in mice suggest that the repetition of a physical motion increases the layers of myelin sheath that insulates the axons. 
And the more layers, the greater the insulation around the axon chains, forming a sort of superhighway for information connecting your brain to your muscles. 
So while many athletes and performers attribute their successes to muscle memory, muscles themselves don't really have memory. 
Rather, it may be the myelination of neural pathways that gives these athletes and performers their edge with faster and more efficient neural pathways. 
There are many theories that attempt to quantify the number of hours, days, and even years of practice that it takes to master a skill. 
While we don't yet have a magic number, we do know that mastery isn't simply about the amount of hours of practice. 
It's also the quality and effectiveness of that practice. 
Effective practice is consistent, intensely focused, and targets content or weaknesses that lie at the edge of one's current abilities. 
So if effective practice is the key, how can we get the most out of our practice time? 
Try these tips. 
Focus on the task at hand. 
Minimize potential distractions by turning off the computer or TV and putting your cell phone on airplane mode. 
In one study, researchers observed 260 students studying. 
On average, those students were able to stay on task for only six minutes at a time. 
Laptops, smartphones, and particularly Facebook were the root of most distractions. 
Start out slowly or in slow-motion. 
Coordination is built with repetitions, whether correct or incorrect. 
If you gradually increase the speed of the quality repetitons, you have a better chance of doing them correctly. 
Next, frequent repetitions with allotted breaks are common practice habits of elite performers. 
Studies have shown that many top athletes, musicians, and dancers spend 50-60 hours per week on activities related to their craft. 
Many divide their time used for effective practice into multiple daily practice sessions of limited duration. 
And finally, practice in your brain in vivid detail. 
It's a bit surprising, but a number of studies suggest that once a physical motion has been established, it can be reinforced just by imagining it. 
In one study, 144 basketball players were divided into two groups. 
Group A physically practiced one-handed free throws while Group B only mentally practiced them. 
When they were tested at the end of the two week experiment, the intermediate and experienced players in both groups had improved by nearly the same amount. 
As scientists get closer to unraveling the secrets of our brains, our understanding of effective practice will only improve. 
In the meantime, effective practice is the best way we have of pushing our individual limits, achieving new heights, and maximizing our potential. 

You're standing at the ready inside the goal when suddenly, you feel an intense itch on the back of your head. 
We've all experienced the annoyance of an inconvenient itch, but have you ever pondered why we itch in the first place? 
The average person experiences dozens of individual itches each day. 
They can be triggered by all sorts of things, including allergic reactions, dryness, and even some diseases. 
And then there are the mysterious ones that pop up for no reason at all, or just from talking about itching. 
You're scratching your head right now, aren't you? 
Anyhow, let's take one of the most common sources: bug bites. 
When a mosquito bites you, it releases a compound into your body called an anticoagulant that prevents your blood from clotting. 
That compound, which we're mildly allergic to, triggers the release of histamine, a chemical that makes our capillaries swell. 
This enables increased blood flow, which helpfully accelerates the body's immune response to this perceived threat. 
That explains the swelling, and it's the same reason pollen can make your eyes puff up. 
Histamine also activates the nerves involved in itching, which is why bug bites make you scratch. 
But the itchy sensation itself isn't yet fully understood. 
In fact, much of what we do know comes from studying the mechanics of itching in mice. 
Researchers have discovered that itch signals in their skin are transmitted via a subclass of the nerves that are associated with pain. 
These dedicated nerves produce a molecule called natriuretic polypetide B, which triggers a signal that's carried up the spinal cord to the brain, where it creates the feeling of an itch. 
When we scratch, the action of our fingernails on the skin causes a low level pain signal that overrides the itching sensation. 
It's almost like a distraction, which creates the sensation of relief. 
But is there actually an evolutionary purpose to the itch, or is it simply there to annoy us? 
The leading theory is that our skin has evolved to be acutely aware of touch so that we're equipped to deal with risks from the outside world. 
Think about it. 
Our automatic scratching response would dislodge anything harmful that's potentially lurking on our skin, like a harmful sting, a biting insect, or the tendrils of a poisonous plant. 
This might explain why we don't feel itching inside our bodies, like in our intestines, which is safe from these external threats, though imagine how maddening that would be. 
In some people, glitches in the pathways responsible for all of this can cause excessive itching that can actually harm their health. 
One extreme example is a psychological condition called delusory parasitosis where people believe their bodies are infested with mites or fleas scurrying over and under their skin, making them itch incessantly. 
Another phenomenon called phantom itching can occur in patients who've had amputations. 
Because this injury has so severely damaged the nervous system, it confuses the body's normal nerve signaling and creates sensations in limbs that are no longer there. 
Doctors are now finding ways to treat these itching anomalies. 
In amputees, mirrors are used to reflect the remaining limb, which the patient scratches. 
That creates an illusion that tricks the brain into thinking the imaginary itch has been satisfied. 
Oddly enough, that actually works. 
Researchers are also searching for the genes involved in itching and developing treatments to try and block the pathway of an itch in extreme cases. 
If having an unscratchable itch feels like your own personal hell, Dante agreed. 
The Italian poet wrote about a section of hell where people were punished by being left in pits to itch for all eternity. 

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

Have you ever wondered what happens to a painkiller, like ibuprofen, after you swallow it? 
Medicine that slides down your throat can help treat a headache, a sore back, or a throbbing sprained ankle. 
But how does it get where it needs to go in the first place? 
The answer is that it hitches a ride in your circulatory blood stream, cycling through your body in a race to do its job before it's snared by organs and molecules designed to neutralize and expel foreign substances. 
This process starts in your digestive system. 
Say you swallow an ibuprofen tablet for a sore ankle. 
Within minutes, the tablet starts disintegrating in the acidic fluids of your stomach. 
The dissolved ibuprofen travels into the small intestine and then across the intestinal wall into a network of blood vessels. 
These blood vessels feed into a vein, which carries the blood, and anything in it, to the liver. 
The next step is to make it through the liver. 
As the blood and the drug molecules in it travel through liver blood vessels, enzymes attempt to react with the ibuprofen molecules to neutralize them. 
The damaged ibuprofen molecules, called metabolites, may no longer be effective as painkillers. 
At this stage, most of the ibuprofen makes it through the liver unscathed. 
It continues its journey out of the liver, through veins, into the body's circulatory system. 
Half an hour after you swallow the pill, some of the dose has already made it into the circulatory blood stream. 
This blood loop travels through every limb and organ, including the heart, brain, kidneys, and back through the liver. 
When ibuprofen molecules encounter a location where the body's pain response is in full swing, they bind to specific target molecules that are a part of that reaction. 
Painkillers, like ibuprofen, block the production of compounds that help the body transmit pain signals. 
As more drug molecules accumulate, the pain-cancelling affect increases, reaching a maximum within about one or two hours. 
Then the body starts efficiently eliminating ibuprofen, with the blood dose decreasing by half every two hours on average. 
When the ibuprofen molecules detach from their targets, the systemic blood stream carries them away again. 
Back in the liver, another small fraction of the total amount of the drug gets transformed into metabolites, which are eventually filtered out by the kidneys in the urine. 
The loop from liver to body to kidneys continues at a rate of about one blood cycle per minute, with a little more of the drug neutralized and filtered out in each cycle. 
These basic steps are the same for any drug that you take orally, but the speed of the process and the amount of medicine that makes it into your blood stream varies based on drug, person, and how it gets into the body. 
The dosing instructions on medicine labels can help, but they're averages based on a sample population that doesn't represent every consumer. 
And getting the dose right is important. 
If it's too low, the medicine won't do its job. 
If it's too high, the drug and its metabolites can be toxic. 
That's true of any drug. 
One of the hardest groups of patients to get the right dosage for are children. 
That's because how they process medicine changes quickly, as do their bodies. 
For instance, the level of liver enzymes that neutralize medication highly fluctuates during infancy and childhood. 
And that's just one of many complicating factors. 
Genetics, age, diet, disease, and even pregnancy influence the body's efficiency of processing medicine. 
Some day, routine DNA tests may be able to dial in the precise dose of medicine personalized to your liver efficiency and other factors, but in the meantime, your best bet is reading the label or consulting your doctor or pharmacist, and taking the recommended amounts with the recommended timing. 

During a long day spent roaming the forest in search of edible grains and herbs, the weary divine farmer Shennong accidentally poisoned himself 72 times. 
But before the poisons could end his life, a leaf drifted into his mouth. 
He chewed on it and it revived him, and that is how we discovered tea. 
Or so an ancient legend goes at least. 
Tea doesn't actually cure poisonings, but the story of Shennong, the mythical Chinese inventor of agriculture, highlights tea's importance to ancient China. 
Archaeological evidence suggests tea was first cultivated there as early as 6,000 years ago, or 1,500 years before the pharaohs built the Great Pyramids of Giza. 
That original Chinese tea plant is the same type that's grown around the world today, yet it was originally consumed very differently. 
It was eaten as a vegetable or cooked with grain porridge. 
Tea only shifted from food to drink 1,500 years ago when people realized that a combination of heat and moisture could create a complex and varied taste out of the leafy green. 
After hundreds of years of variations to the preparation method, the standard became to heat tea, pack it into portable cakes, grind it into powder, mix with hot water, and create a beverage called muo cha, or matcha. 
Matcha became so popular that a distinct Chinese tea culture emerged. 
Tea was the subject of books and poetry, the favorite drink of emperors, and a medium for artists. 
They would draw extravagant pictures in the foam of the tea, very much like the espresso art you might see in coffee shops today. 
In the 9th century during the Tang Dynasty, a Japanese monk brought the first tea plant to Japan. 
The Japanese eventually developed their own unique rituals around tea, leading to the creation of the Japanese tea ceremony. 
And in the 14th century during the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese emperor shifted the standard from tea pressed into cakes to loose leaf tea. 
At that point, China still held a virtual monopoly on the world's tea trees, making tea one of three essential Chinese export goods, along with porcelain and silk. 
This gave China a great deal of power and economic influence as tea drinking spread around the world. 
That spread began in earnest around the early 1600s when Dutch traders brought tea to Europe in large quantities. 
Many credit Queen Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese noble woman, for making tea popular with the English aristocracy when she married King Charles II in 1661. 
At the time, Great Britain was in the midst of expanding its colonial influence and becoming the new dominant world power. 
And as Great Britain grew, interest in tea spread around the world. 
By 1700, tea in Europe sold for ten times the price of coffee and the plant was still only grown in China. 
The tea trade was so lucrative that the world's fastest sailboat, the clipper ship, was born out of intense competition between Western trading companies. 
All were racing to bring their tea back to Europe first to maximize their profits. 
At first, Britain paid for all this Chinese tea with silver. 
When that proved too expensive, they suggested trading tea for another substance, opium. 
This triggered a public health problem within China as people became addicted to the drug. 
Then in 1839, a Chinese official ordered his men to destroy massive British shipments of opium as a statement against Britain's influence over China. 
This act triggered the First Opium War between the two nations. 
Fighting raged up and down the Chinese coast until 1842 when the defeated Qing Dynasty ceded the port of Hong Kong to the British and resumed trading on unfavorable terms. 
The war weakened China's global standing for over a century. 
The British East India company also wanted to be able to grow tea themselves and further control the market. 
So they commissioned botanist Robert Fortune to steal tea from China in a covert operation. 
He disguised himself and took a perilous journey through China's mountainous tea regions, eventually smuggling tea trees and experienced tea workers into Darjeeling, India. 
From there, the plant spread further still, helping drive tea's rapid growth as an everyday commodity. 
Today, tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water, and from sugary Turkish Rize tea, to salty Tibetan butter tea, there are almost as many ways of preparing the beverage as there are cultures on the globe. 

In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium. 
Claimed to have restorative properties, radium was added to toothpaste, medicine, water, and food. 
A glowing, luminous green, it was also used in beauty products and jewelry. 
It wasn't until the mid-20th century we realized that radium's harmful effects as a radioactive element outweighed its visual benefits. 
Unfortunately, radium isn't the only pigment that historically seemed harmless or useful but turned out to be deadly. 
That lamentable distinction includes a trio of colors and pigments that we've long used to decorate ourselves and the things we make: white, green, and orange. 
Our story begins with white. 
As far back as the 4th century BCE, the Ancient Greeks treated lead to make the brilliant white pigment we know today. 
The problem? 
In humans, lead is directly absorbed into the body and distributed to the blood, soft tissues, and mineralized tissues. 
Once in the nervous system, lead mimics and disrupts the normal functions of calcium, causing damages ranging from learning disabilities to high blood pressure. 
Yet the practice of using this toxic pigment continued across time and cultures. 
Lead white was the only practical choice for white oil or tempera paint until the 19th century. 
To make their paint, artists would grind a block of lead into powder, exposing highly toxic dust particles. 
The pigment's liberal use resulted in what was known as painter's colic, or what we'd now call lead poisoning. 
Artists who worked with lead complained of palseys, melancholy, coughing, enlarged retinas, and even blindness. 
But lead white's density, opacity, and warm tone were irresistible to artists like Vermeer, and later, the Impressionists. 
Its glow couldn't be matched, and the pigment continued to be widely used until it was banned in the 1970s. 
As bad as all that sounds, white's dangerous effects pale in comparison to another, more wide-spread pigment, green. 
Two synthetic greens called Scheele's Green and Paris Green were first introduced in the 18th century. 
They were far more vibrant and flashy than the relatively dull greens made from natural pigments, so they quickly became popular choices for paint as well as dye for textiles, wallpaper, soaps, cake decorations, toys, candy, and clothing. 
These green pigments were made from a compound called cupric hydrogen arsenic. 
In humans, exposure to arsenic can damage the way cells communicate and function. 
And high levels of arsenic have been directly linked to cancer and heart disease. 
As a result, 18th century fabric factory workers were often poisoned, and women in green dresses reportedly collapsed from exposure to arsenic on their skin. 
Bed bugs were rumored not to live in green rooms, and it's even been speculated that Napoleon died from slow arsenic poisoning from sleeping in his green wallpapered bedroom. 
The intense toxicity of these green stayed under wraps until the arsenic recipe was published in 1822. 
And a century later, it was repurposed as an insecticide. 
Synthetic green was probably the most dangerous color in widespread use, but at least it didn't share radium's property of radioactivity. 
Another color did, though - orange. 
Before World War II, it was common for manufacturers of ceramic dinnerware to use uranium oxide in colored glazes. 
The compound produced brilliant reds and oranges, which were appealing attributes, if not for the radiation they emitted. 
Of course, radiation was something we were unaware of until the late 1800s, let alone the associated cancer risks, which we discovered much later. 
During World War II, the U.S. government confiscated all uranium for use in bomb development. 
However, the atomic energy commission relaxed these restrictions in 1959, and depleted uranium returned to ceramics and glass factory floors. 
Orange dishes made during the next decade may still have some hazardous qualities on their surfaces to this day. 
Most notably, vintage fiestaware reads positive for radioactivity. 
And while the levels are low enough that they don't officially pose a health risk if they're on a shelf, the U.S. EPA warns against eating food off of them. 
Though we still occasionally run into issues with synthetic food dyes, our scientific understanding has helped us prune hazardous colors out of our lives. 

Deep inside Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies the only copy of a 240-page tome. 
Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its vellum pages features looping handwriting and hand-drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. 
Real and imaginary plants, floating castles, bathing women, astrology diagrams, zodiac rings, and suns and moons with faces accompany the text. 
This 24x16 centimeter book is called the Voynich manuscript, and its one of history's biggest unsolved mysteries. 
The reason why? 
No one can figure out what it says. 
The name comes from Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish bookseller who came across the document at a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912. 
He was puzzled. 
Who wrote it? 
Where was it made? 
What do these bizarre words and vibrant drawings represent? 
What secrets do its pages contain? 
He purchased the manuscript from the cash-strapped priest at the college, and eventually brought it to the U.S., where experts have continued to puzzle over it for more than a century. 
Cryptologists say the writing has all the characteristics of a real language, just one that no one's ever seen before. 
What makes it seem real is that in actual languages, letters and groups of letters appear with consistent frequencies, and the language in the Voynich manuscript has patterns you wouldn't find from a random letter generator. 
Other than that, we know little more than what we can see. 
The letters are varied in style and height. 
Some are borrowed from other scripts, but many are unique. 
The taller letters have been named gallows characters. 
The manuscript is highly decorated throughout with scroll-like embellishments. 
It appears to be written by two or more hands, with the painting done by yet another party. 
Over the years, three main theories about the manuscript's text have emerged. 
The first is that it's written in cypher, a secret code deliberately designed to hide secret meaning. 
The second is that the document is a hoax written in gibberish to make money off a gullible buyer. 
Some speculate the author was a medieval con man. 
Others, that it was Voynich himself. 
The third theory is that the manuscript is written in an actual language, but in an unknown script. 
Perhaps medieval scholars were attempting to create an alphabet for a language that was spoken but not yet written. 
In that case, the Voynich manuscript might be like the rongorongo script invented on Easter Island, now unreadable after the culture that made it collapsed. 
Though no one can read the Voynich manuscript, that hasn't stopped people from guessing what it might say. 
Those who believe the manuscript was an attempt to create a new form of written language speculate that it might be an encyclopedia containing the knowledge of the culture that produced it. 
Others believe it was written by the 13th century philosopher Roger Bacon, who attempted to understand the universal laws of grammar, or in the 16th century by the Elizabethan mystic John Dee, who practiced alchemy and divination. 
More fringe theories that the book was written by a coven of Italian witches, or even by Martians. 
After 100 years of frustration, scientists have recently shed a little light on the mystery. 
The first breakthrough was the carbon dating. 
Also, contemporary historians have traced the provenance of the manuscript back through Rome and Prague to as early as 1612, when it was perhaps passed from Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to his physician, Jacobus Sinapius. 
In addition to these historical breakthroughs, linguistic researchers recently proposed the provisional identification of a few of the manuscript's words. 
Could the letters beside these seven stars spell Tauran, a name for Taurus, a constellation that includes the seven stars called the Pleiades? 
Could this word be Centaurun for the Centaurea plant in the picture? 
Perhaps, but progress is slow. 
If we can crack its code, what might we find? 
The dream journal of a 15th-century illustrator? 
A bunch of nonsense? 
Or the lost knowledge of a forgotten culture? 
What do you think it is? 

If you want a glimpse of Marie Curie's manuscripts, you'll have to sign a waiver and put on protective gear to shield yourself from radiation contamination. 
Madame Curie's remains, too, were interred in a lead-lined coffin, keeping the radiation that was the heart of her research, and likely the cause of her death, well contained. 
Growing up in Warsaw in Russian-occupied Poland, the young Marie, originally named Maria Sklodowska, was a brilliant student, but she faced some challenging barriers. 
As a woman, she was barred from pursuing higher education, so in an act of defiance, Marie enrolled in the Floating University, a secret institution that provided clandestine education to Polish youth. 
By saving money and working as a governess and tutor, she eventually was able to move to Paris to study at the reputed Sorbonne. 
There, Marie earned both a physics and mathematics degree surviving largely on bread and tea, and sometimes fainting from near starvation. 
In Paris, Marie met the physicist Pierre Curie, who shared his lab and his heart with her. 
But she longed to be back in Poland. 
Upon her return to Warsaw, though, she found that securing an academic position as a woman remained a challenge. 
All was not lost. 
Back in Paris, the lovelorn Pierre was waiting, and the pair quickly married and became a formidable scientific team. 
Another physicist's work sparked Marie Curie's interest. 
In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium spontaneously emitted a mysterious X-ray-like radiation that could interact with photographic film. 
Curie soon found that the element thorium emitted similar radiation. 
Most importantly, the strength of the radiation depended solely on the element's quantity, and was not affected by physical or chemical changes. 
This led her to conclude that radiation was coming from something fundamental within the atoms of each element. 
The idea was radical and helped to disprove the long-standing model of atoms as indivisible objects. 
Next, by focusing on a super radioactive ore called pitchblende, the Curies realized that uranium alone couldn't be creating all the radiation. 
So, were there other radioactive elements that might be responsible? 
In 1898, they reported two new elements, polonium, named for Marie's native Poland, and radium, the Latin word for ray. 
They also coined the term radioactivity along the way. 
By 1902, the Curies had extracted a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride salt from several tons of pitchblende, an incredible feat at the time. 
Later that year, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics, but Marie was overlooked. 
Pierre took a stand in support of his wife's well-earned recognition. 
And so both of the Curies and Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize, making Marie Curie the first female Nobel Laureate. 
Well funded and well respected, the Curies were on a roll. 
But tragedy struck in 1906 when Pierre was crushed by a horse-drawn cart as he crossed a busy intersection. 
Marie, devastated, immersed herself in her research and took over Pierre's teaching position at the Sorbonne, becoming the school's first female professor. 
Her solo work was fruitful. 
In 1911, she won yet another Nobel, this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds. 
This made her the first, and to this date, only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. 
Professor Curie put her discoveries to work, changing the landscape of medical research and treatments. 
She opened mobile radiology units during World War I, and investigated radiation's effects on tumors. 
However, these benefits to humanity may have come at a high personal cost. 
Curie died in 1934 of a bone marrow disease, which many today think was caused by her radiation exposure. 
Marie Curie's revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. 
For good or ill, her discoveries in radiation launched a new era, unearthing some of science's greatest secrets. 

Behold the human brain, it's lumpy landscape visibly split into a left and right side. 
This structure has inspired one of the most pervasive ideas about the brain, that the left side controls logic and the right, creativity. 
And yet, this is a myth unsupported by scientific evidence. 
So how did this misleading idea come about, and what does it get wrong? 
It's true that the brain has a right and a left side. 
This is most apparent with the outer layer, or the cortex. 
Internal regions, like the striatum, hypothalamus, thalamus, and brain stem appear to be made from continuous tissue, but in fact, they're also organized with left and right sides. 
The left and the right sides of the brain do control different body functions, such as movement and sight. 
The brain's right side controls the motion of the left arm and leg and vice versa. 
The visual system is even more complex. 
Each eye has a left and right visual field. 
Both left visual fields are sent to the right side of the brain, and both right fields are sent to the left side. 
So the brain uses both sides to make a complete image of the world. 
Scientists don't know for sure why we have that crossing over. 
One theory is it began soon after animals developed more complex nervous systems because it gave the survival advantage of quicker reflexes. 
If an animal sees a predator coming from its left side, it's best off escaping to the right. 
So we can say that vision and movement control are two systems that rely on this left-right structure, but problems arise when we over-extend that idea to logic and creativity. 
This misconception began in the mid-1800s when two neurologists, Broca and Wernicke, examined patients who had problems communicating due to injuries. 
The researchers found damage to the patients' left temporal lobes, so they suggested that language is controlled by the left side of the brain. 
That captured the popular imagination. 
Author Robert Louis Stevenson then introduced the idea of a logical left hemisphere competing with an emotional right hemisphere represented by his characters Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
But this idea didn't hold up when doctors and scientists examined patients who were missing a hemisphere or had their two hemispheres separated. 
These patients showed a complete range of behaviors, both logical and creative. 
Later research showed that one side of the brain is more active than the other for some functions. 
Language is more localized to the left and attention to the right. 
So one side of the brain may do more work, but this varies by system rather than by person. 
There isn't any evidence to suggest that individuals have dominant sides of the brain, or to support the idea of a left-right split between logic and creativity. 
Some people may be particularly logical or creative, but that has nothing to do with the sides of their brains. 
And even the idea of logic and creativity being at odds with each other doesn't hold up well. 
Solving complex math problems requires inspired creativity and many vibrant works of art have intricate logical frameworks. 
Almost every feat of creativity and logic carries the mark of the whole brain functioning as one. 

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

Are you as good at things as you think you are? 
How good are you at managing money? 
What about reading people's emotions? 
How healthy are you compared to other people you know? 
Are you better than average at grammar? 
Knowing how competent we are and how are skill stack up against other people's is more than a self-esteem boost. 
It helps us figure out when we can forge ahead on our own decisions and instincts and when we need, instead, to seek out advice. 
But psychological research suggests that we're not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. 
In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. 
Researchers have a name for this phenomena, the Dunning-Kruger effect. 
This effect explains why more than 100 studies have shown that people display illusory superiority. 
We judge ourselves as better than others to a degree that violates the laws of math. 
When software engineers at two companies were asked to rate their performance, 32% of the engineers at one company and 42% at the other put themselves in the top 5%. 
In another study, 88% of American drivers described themselves as having above average driving skills. 
These aren't isolated findings. 
On average, people tend to rate themselves better than most in disciplines ranging from health, leadership skills, ethics, and beyond. 
What's particularly interesting is that those with the least ability are often the most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent. 
People measurably poor at logical reasoning, grammar, financial knowledge, math, emotional intelligence, running medical lab tests, and chess all tend to rate their expertise almost as favorably as actual experts do. 
So who's most vulnerable to this delusion? 
Sadly, all of us because we all have pockets of incompetence we don't recognize. 
But why? 
When psychologists Dunning and Kruger first described the effect in 1999, they argued that people lacking knowledge and skill in particular areas suffer a double curse. 
First, they make mistakes and reach poor decisions. 
But second, those same knowledge gaps also prevent them from catching their errors. 
In other words, poor performers lack the very expertise needed to recognize how badly they're doing. 
For example, when the researchers studied participants in a college debate tournament, the bottom 25% of teams in preliminary rounds lost nearly four out of every five matches. 
But they thought they were winning almost 60%. 
WIthout a strong grasp of the rules of debate, the students simply couldn't recognize when or how often their arguments broke down. 
The Dunning-Kruger effect isn't a question of ego blinding us to our weaknesses. 
People usually do admit their deficits once they can spot them. 
In one study, students who had initially done badly on a logic quiz and then took a mini course on logic were quite willing to label their original performances as awful. 
That may be why people with a moderate amount of experience or expertise often have less confidence in their abilities. 
They know enough to know that there's a lot they don't know. 
Meanwhile, experts tend to be aware of just how knowledgeable they are. 
But they often make a different mistake: they assume that everyone else is knowledgeable, too. 
The result is that people, whether they're inept or highly skilled, are often caught in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception. 
When they're unskilled, they can't see their own faults. 
When they're exceptionally competent, they don't perceive how unusual their abilities are. 
So if the Dunning-Kruger effect is invisible to those experiencing it, what can you do to find out how good you actually are at various things? 
First, ask for feedback from other people, and consider it, even if it's hard to hear. 
Second, and more important, keep learning. 
The more knowledgeable we become, the less likely we are to have invisible holes in our competence. 
Perhaps it all boils down to that old proverb: When arguing with a fool, first make sure the other person isn't doing the same thing. 

In the summer of 1997, NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars, and began transmitting incredible, iconic images back to Earth. 
But several days in, something went terribly wrong. 
The transmissions stopped. 
Pathfinder was, in effect, procrastinating: keeping itself fully occupied but failing to do its most important work. 
What was going on? 
There was a bug, it turned out, in its scheduler. 
Every operating system has something called the scheduler that tells the CPU how long to work on each task before switching, and what to switch to. 
Done right, computers move so fluidly between their various responsibilities, they give the illusion of doing everything simultaneously. 
But we all know what happens when things go wrong. 
This should give us, if nothing else, some measure of consolation. 
Even computers get overwhelmed sometimes. 
Maybe learning about the computer science of scheduling can give us some ideas about our own human struggles with time. 
One of the first insights is that all the time you spend prioritizing your work is time you aren't spending doing it. 
For instance, let's say when you check your inbox, you scan all the messages, choosing which is the most important. 
Once you've dealt with that one, you repeat. 
Seems sensible, but there's a problem here. 
This is what's known as a quadratic-time algorithm. 
With an inbox that's twice as full, these passes will take twice as long and you'll need to do twice as many of them! 
This means four times the work. 
The programmers of the operating system Linux encountered a similar problem in 2003. 
Linux would rank every single one of its tasks in order of importance, and sometimes spent more time ranking tasks than doing them. 
The programmers’ counterintuitive solution was to replace this full ranking with a limited number of priority “buckets.” The system was less precise about what to do next but more than made up for it by spending more time making progress. 
So with your emails, insisting on always doing the very most important thing first could lead to a meltdown. 
Waking up to an inbox three times fuller than normal could take nine times longer to clear. 
You’d be better off replying in chronological order, or even at random! 
Surprisingly, sometimes giving up on doing things in the perfect order may be the key to getting them done. 
Another insight that emerges from computer scheduling has to do with one of the most prevalent features of modern life: interruptions. 
When a computer goes from one task to another, it has to do what's called a context switch, bookmarking its place in one task, moving old data out of its memory and new data in. 
Each of these actions comes at a cost. 
The insight here is that there’s a fundamental tradeoff between productivity and responsiveness. 
Getting serious work done means minimizing context switches. 
But being responsive means reacting anytime something comes up. 
These two principles are fundamentally in tension. 
Recognizing this tension allows us to decide where we want to strike that balance. 
The obvious solution is to minimize interruptions. 
The less obvious one is to group them. 
If no notification or email requires a response more urgently than once an hour, say, then that’s exactly how often you should check them. No more. 
In computer science, this idea goes by the name of interrupt coalescing. 
Rather than dealing with things as they come up – Oh, the mouse was moved? 
A key was pressed? 
More of that file downloaded? – the system groups these interruptions together based on how long they can afford to wait. 
In 2013, interrupt coalescing triggered a massive improvement in laptop battery life. 
This is because deferring interruptions lets a system check everything at once, then quickly re-enter a low-power state. 
As with computers, so it is with us. 
Perhaps adopting a similar approach might allow us users to reclaim our own attention, and give us back one of the things that feels so rare in modern life: rest. 

A mosquito lands on your arm, injects its chemicals into your skin, and begins to feed. 
You wouldn’t even know it was there, if not for the red lump that appears, accompanied by a telltale itch. 
It’s a nuisance, but that bump is an important signal that you’re protected by your immune system, your body’s major safeguard against infection, illness, and disease. 
This system is a vast network of cells, tissues, and organs that coordinate your body’s defenses against any threats to your health. 
Without it, you’d be exposed to billions of bacteria, viruses, and toxins that could make something as minor as a paper cut or a seasonal cold fatal. 
The immune system relies on millions of defensive white blood cells, also known as leukocytes, that originate in our bone marrow. 
These cells migrate into the bloodstream and the lymphatic system, a network of vessels which helps clear bodily toxins and waste. 
Our bodies are teeming with leukocytes: there are between 4,000 and 11,000 in every microliter of blood. 
As they move around, leukocytes work like security personnel, constantly screening the blood, tissues, and organs for suspicious signs. 
This system mainly relies on cues called antigens. 
These molecular traces on the surface of pathogens and other foreign substances betray the presence of invaders. 
As soon as the leukocytes detect them, it takes only minutes for the body’s protective immune response to kick in. 
Threats to our bodies are hugely variable, so the immune response has to be equally adaptable. 
That means relying on many different types of leukocytes to tackle threats in different ways. 
Despite this diversity, we classify leukocytes in two main cellular groups, which coordinate a two-pronged attack. 
First, phagocytes trigger the immune response by sending macrophages and dendritic cells into the blood. 
As these circulate, they destroy any foreign cells they encounter, simply by consuming them. 
That allows phagocytes to identify the antigen on the invaders they just ingested and transmit this information to the second major cell group orchestrating the defense, the lymphocytes. 
A group of lymphocyte cells called T-cells go in search of infected body cells and swiftly kill them off. 
Meanwhile, B-cells and helper T-cells use the information gathered from the unique antigens to start producing special proteins called antibodies. 
This is the pièce de résistance: Each antigen has a unique, matching antibody that can latch onto it like a lock and key, and destroy the invading cells. 
B-cells can produce millions of these, which then cycle through the body and attack the invaders until the worst of the threat is neutralized. 
While all of this is going on, familiar symptoms, like high temperatures and swelling, are actually processes designed to aid the immune response. 
A warmer body makes it harder for bacteria and viruses to reproduce and spread because they’re temperature-sensitive. 
And when body cells are damaged, they release chemicals that make fluid leak into the surrounding tissues, causing swelling. 
That also attracts phagocytes, which consume the invaders and the damaged cells. 
Usually, an immune response will eradicate a threat within a few days. 
It won’t always stop you from getting ill, but that’s not its purpose. 
Its actual job is to stop a threat from escalating to dangerous levels inside your body. 
And through constant surveillance over time, the immune system provides another benefit: it helps us develop long-term immunity. 
When B- and T-cells identify antigens, they can use that information to recognize invaders in the future. 
So, when a threat revisits, the cells can swiftly deploy the right antibodies to tackle it before it affects any more cells. 
That’s how you can develop immunity to certain diseases, like chickenpox. 
It doesn’t always work so well. 
Some people have autoimmune diseases, which trick the immune system into attacking the body’s own perfectly healthy cells. 
No one knows exactly what causes them, but these disorders sabotage the immune system to varying degrees, and underlie problems like arthritis, Type I diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. 
For most individuals, however, a healthy immune system will successfully fight off an estimated 300 colds and innumerable other potential infections over the course of a lifetime. 
Without it, those threats would escalate into something far more dangerous. 
So the next time you catch a cold or scratch a mosquito bite, think of the immune system. 
We owe it our lives. 

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

So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. 
Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this. 
So, you know -- (Laughter) you get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done, things stay civil. 
(Laughter) And I would want to do that like that. 
That would be the plan. 
I would have it all ready to go, but then, actually, the paper would come along, and then I would kind of do this. 
(Laughter) And that would happen every single paper. 
But then came my 90-page senior thesis, a paper you're supposed to spend a year on. 
And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. 
It was way too big a project. 
So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this. 
This is how the year would go. 
So I'd start off light, and I'd bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear just like a little staircase. 
How hard could it be to walk up the stairs? 
No big deal, right? 
But then, the funniest thing happened. 
Those first few months? 
They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. 
So we had an awesome new revised plan. 
(Laughter) And then -- (Laughter) But then those middle months actually went by, and I didn't really write words, and so we were here. 
And then two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. 
And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters -- humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters -- sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline. 
I thought that was the end of everything. 
But a week later I get a call, and it's the school. 
And they say, "Is this Tim Urban?" 
And I say, "Yeah." 
And they say, "We need to talk about your thesis." 
And I say, "OK." 
And they say, "It's the best one we've ever seen." 
(Laughter) (Applause) That did not happen. 
(Laughter) It was a very, very bad thesis. 
(Laughter) I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you thought, "This guy is amazing!" 
(Laughter) No, no, it was very, very bad. 
Anyway, today I'm a writer-blogger guy. 
I write the blog Wait But Why. 
And a couple of years ago, I decided to write about procrastination. 
My behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around me, and I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why we are the way we are. 
Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. 
And to test this, I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so I could compare them. 
I actually brought them here to show you today. 
I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference. 
I know that if you're not a trained brain expert, it's not that obvious, but just take a look, OK? 
So here's the brain of a non-procrastinator. 
(Laughter) Now ... 
here's my brain. 
(Laughter) There is a difference. 
Both brains have a Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an Instant Gratification Monkey. 
Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator? 
Well, it means everything's fine until this happens. 
[This is a perfect time to get some work done.] [Nope!] So the Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he actually takes the wheel, and he says, "Actually, let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding scandal, because I just remembered that that happened. 
(Laughter) Then -- (Laughter) Then we're going to go over to the fridge, to see if there's anything new in there since 10 minutes ago. 
After that, we're going to go on a YouTube spiral that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking about magnets and ends much, much later with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom. 
(Laughter) "All of that's going to take a while, so we're not going to really have room on the schedule for any work today. 
Sorry!" 
(Sigh) Now, what is going on here? 
The Instant Gratification Monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. 
He lives entirely in the present moment. 
He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things: easy and fun. 
Now, in the animal world, that works fine. 
If you're a dog and you spend your whole life doing nothing other than easy and fun things, you're a huge success! 
(Laughter) And to the Monkey, humans are just another animal species. 
You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might have worked OK. 
But, if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times. 
We're in an advanced civilization, and the Monkey does not know what that is. 
Which is why we have another guy in our brain, the Rational Decision-Maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. 
We can visualize the future. 
We can see the big picture. 
We can make long-term plans. 
And he wants to take all of that into account. 
And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now. 
Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. 
That's why there's an overlap. 
Sometimes they agree. 
But other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant, for the sake of the big picture. 
And that's when we have a conflict. 
And for the procrastinator, that conflict tends to end a certain way every time, leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone, an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the Makes Sense circle. 
I call it the Dark Playground. 
(Laughter) Now, the Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. 
It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. 
The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred -- all of those good procrastinator feelings. 
And the question is, in this situation, with the Monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen? 
Well, turns out the procrastinator has a guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him and watching over him in his darkest moments -- someone called the Panic Monster. 
(Laughter) Now, the Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. 
And importantly, he's the only thing the Monkey is terrified of. 
Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because the people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED Talk. 
(Laughter) Now, of course, I said yes. 
It's always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind. 
He was saying, "Are we clear on what we just accepted? 
Do we get what's going to be now happening one day in the future? 
We need to sit down and work on this right now." 
And the Monkey said, "Totally agree, but let's just open Google Earth and zoom in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scroll up for two and a half hours til we get to the top of the country, so we can get a better feel for India." 
(Laughter) So that's what we did that day. 
(Laughter) As six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. 
And I opened up the website, and there was my face staring right back at me. 
And guess who woke up? 
(Laughter) So the Panic Monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem. 
(Laughter) And the Monkey -- remember, he's terrified of the Panic Monster -- boom, he's up the tree! 
And finally, finally, the Rational Decision-Maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk. 
Now, the Panic Monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like me could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write eight pages. 
And this entire situation, with the three characters -- this is the procrastinator's system. 
It's not pretty, but in the end, it works. 
This is what I decided to write about on the blog a couple of years ago. 
When I did, I was amazed by the response. 
Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. 
These are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students. 
(Laughter) And they were all writing, saying the same thing: "I have this problem too." 
But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. 
These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives, about what this Monkey had done to them. 
And I thought about this, and I said, well, if the procrastinator's system works, then what's going on? 
Why are all of these people in such a dark place? 
Well, it turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination. 
Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. 
And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the Panic Monster gets involved. 
But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. 
So if you wanted a career where you're a self-starter -- something in the arts, something entrepreneurial -- there's no deadlines on those things at first, because nothing's happening, not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get momentum, get things going. 
There's also all kinds of important things outside of your career that don't involve any deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health, working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working. 
Now if the procrastinator's only mechanism of doing these hard things is the Panic Monster, that's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations, the Panic Monster doesn't show up. 
He has nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination, they're not contained; they just extend outward forever. 
And it's this long-term kind of procrastination that's much less visible and much less talked about than the funnier, short-term deadline-based kind. 
It's usually suffered quietly and privately. 
And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets. 
And I thought, that's why those people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place. 
It's not that they're cramming for some project. 
It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. 
The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them. 
So I read these emails and I had a little bit of an epiphany -- that I don't think non-procrastinators exist. 
That's right -- I think all of you are procrastinators. 
Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us, (Laughter) and some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but remember: the Monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there. 
Now, I want to show you one last thing. 
I call this a Life Calendar. 
That's one box for every week of a 90-year life. 
That's not that many boxes, especially since we've already used a bunch of those. 
So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar. 
We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. 
We need to stay aware of the Instant Gratification Monkey. 
That's a job for all of us. 
And because there's not that many boxes on there, it's a job that should probably start today. 
Well, maybe not today, but ... 
(Laughter) You know. 
Sometime soon. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In ancient Greece, headaches were considered powerful afflictions. 
Victims prayed for relief from Asclepius, the god of medicine. 
And if pain continued, a medical practitioner would perform the best-known remedy— drilling a small hole in the skull to drain supposedly infected blood. 
This dire technique, called trepanation, often replaced the headache with a more permanent condition. 
Fortunately, doctors today don’t resort to power tools to cure headaches. 
But we still have a lot to learn about this ancient ailment. 
Today, we’ve classified headaches into two camps— primary headaches and secondary headaches. 
The former are not symptomatic of an underlying disease, injury, or condition; they are the condition. 
But we’ll come back to them in a minute because while primary headaches account for 50% of reported cases, we actually know much more about secondary headaches. 
These are caused by other health problems, with triggers ranging from dehydration and caffeine withdrawal to head and neck injury, and heart disease. 
Doctors have classified over 150 diagnosable types, all with different potential causes, symptoms, and treatments. 
But we’ll take just one common case —a sinus infection—as an example. 
The sinuses are a system of cavities that spread behind our foreheads, noses, and upper cheeks. 
When our sinuses are infected, our immune response heats up the area, roasting the bacteria and inflaming the cavities well past their usual size. 
The engorged sinuses put pressure on the cranial arteries and veins, as well as muscles in the neck and head. 
Their pain receptors, called nociceptors, trigger in response, cueing the brain to release a flood of neuropeptides that inflame the cranial blood vessels, swelling and heating up the head. 
This discomfort, paired with hyper-sensitive head muscles, creates the sore, throbbing pain of a headache. 
Not all headache pain comes from swelling. 
Tense muscles and inflamed, sensitive nerves cause varying degrees of discomfort in each headache. 
But all cases are reactions to some cranial irritant. 
While the cause is clear in secondary headaches, the origins of primary headaches remain unknown. 
Scientists are still investigating potential triggers for the three types of primary headaches: recurring, long-lasting migraines; intensely painful, rapid-fire cluster headaches; and, most common of all, the tension headache. 
As the name suggests, tension headaches are known for creating the sensation of a tight band squeezed around the head. 
These headaches increase the tenderness of the pericranial muscles, which then painfully pulse with blood and oxygen. 
Patients report stress, dehydration, and hormone changes as triggers, but these don’t fit the symptoms quite right. 
For example, in dehydration headaches, the frontal lobe actually shrinks away from the skull, creating forehead swelling that doesn’t match the location of the pain in tension headaches. 
Scientists have theories for what the actual cause is, ranging from spasming blood vessels to overly sensitive nociceptors, but no one knows for sure. 
Meanwhile, most headache research is focused on more severe primary headaches. 
Migraines are recurring headaches, which create a vise-like sensation on the skull that can last from four hours to three days. 
In 20% of cases, these attacks are intense enough to overload the brain with electrical energy, which hyper-excites sensory nerve endings. 
This produces hallucinations called auras, which can include seeing flashing lights and geometric patterns and experiencing tingling sensations. 
Cluster headaches, another primary headache type, cause burning, stabbing bursts of pain behind one eye, leading to a red eye, constricted pupil, and drooping eyelid. 
What can be done about these conditions, which dramatically affect many people’s quality of life? 
Tension headaches and most secondary cases can be treated with over-the-counter pain medications, such as anti-inflammatory drugs that reduce cranial swelling. 
And many secondary headache triggers, like dehydration, eye strain, and stress, can be proactively avoided. 
Migraines and cluster headaches are more complicated, and we haven’t yet discovered reliable treatments that work for everyone. 
But thankfully, pharmacologists and neurologists are hard at work cracking these pressing mysteries that weigh so heavily on our minds. 

Your favorite athlete closes in for a victorious win. 
The crowd holds its breath, and, at the crucial moment, she misses the shot. 
That competitor just experienced the phenomenon known as "choking," where despite months, even years, of practice, a person fails right when it matters most. 
Choking is common in sports, where performance often occurs under intense pressure and depends on key moments. 
And yet, performance anxiety also haunts public speakers, contestants in spelling bees, and even world-famous musicians. 
Most people intuitively blame it on their nerves, but why does being nervous undermine expert performance? 
There are two sets of theories, which both say that primarily, choking under pressure boils down to focus. 
First, there are the distraction theories. 
These suggest that performance suffers when the mind is preoccupied with worries, doubts, or fears, instead of focusing its attention on performing the task at hand. 
When relevant and irrelevant thoughts compete for the same attention, something has to give. 
The brain can only process so much information at once. 
Tasks that challenge working memory, the mental “scratch pad” we use to temporarily store phone numbers and grocery lists, are especially vulnerable to pressure. 
In a 2004 study, a group of university students were asked to perform math problems, some easy, others more complex and memory-intensive. 
Half the students completed both problem types with nothing at stake, while the others completed them when calm and under pressure. 
While everyone did well on the easy problems, those who were stressed performed worse on the more difficult, memory-intensive tasks. 
Explicit monitoring theories make up the second group of explanations for choking under pressure. 
They’re concerned with how pressure can cause people to overanalyze the task at hand. 
Here, the logic goes that once a skill becomes automatic, thinking about its precise mechanics interferes with your ability to do it. 
Tasks we do unconsciously seem to be most vulnerable to this kind of choking. 
A study on competitive golfers compared their performance when instructed to simply focus on putting as accurately as possible, versus when they were primed to be acutely aware of the mechanics of their putting stroke. 
Golfers usually perform this action subconsciously, so those who suddenly tuned in to the precise details of their own moves also became worse at making accurate shots. 
Choking may not be inevitable for everyone though. 
Research suggests that some are more susceptible than others, especially those who are self-conscious, anxious, and afraid of being judged negatively by others. 
So, how can we avoid choking when it really counts? 
First, it helps to practice under stressful conditions. 
In a study on expert dart players, researchers found that those who hadn’t practiced under stress performed worse when anxious, compared to those who had become accustomed to pressure. 
Secondly, many performers extol the virtues of a pre-performance routine, whether it’s taking a few deep breaths, repeating a cue word, or doing a rhythmic sequence of movements. 
Studies on golfing, bowling, and water polo find that short rituals can lead to more consistent and accurate performance under pressure. 
And thirdly, researchers have shown that having an external focus on the ultimate goal works better than an internal focus, where someone is tuned into the mechanics of what they’re doing. 
A study of experienced golfers revealed that those who hit chip shots while focused on the flight of the ball performed significantly better than those who focused on the motion of their arms. 
So, perhaps we can modify that age-old saying: practice, under pressure, with focus, and with that glorious end goal in sight, makes perfect. 

It has been 128 years since the last country in the world abolished slavery and 53 years since Martin Luther King pronounced his "I Have A Dream" speech. 
But we still live in a world where the color of our skin not only gives a first impression, but a lasting one that remains. 
I was born in a family full of colors. 
My father is the son of a maid from whom he inherited an intense dark chocolate tone. 
He was adopted by those who I know as my grandparents. 
The matriarch, my grandma, has a porcelain skin and cotton-like hair. 
My grandpa was somewhere between a vanilla and strawberry yogurt tone, like my uncle and my cousin. 
My mother is a cinnamon-skin daughter of a native Brazilian, with a pinch of hazel and honey, and a man [who is] a mix of coffee with milk, but with a lot of coffee. 
She has two sisters. 
One in a toasted-peanut skin and the other, also adopted, more on the beige side, like a pancake. 
(Laughter) Growing up in this family, color was never important for me. 
Outside home, however, things were different soon. 
Color had many other meanings. 
I remember my first drawing lessons in school as a bunch of contradictory feelings. 
It was exciting and creative but I never understood the unique flesh-colored pencil. 
I was made of flesh but I wasn't pink. 
My skin was brown, and people said I was black. 
I was seven years old with a mess of colors in my head. 
Later, when I took my cousin to school, I was usually taken for the nanny. 
By helping in the kitchen at a friend's party, people thought I was the maid. 
I was even treated like a prostitute just because I was walking alone on the beach with European friends. 
And many times, visiting my grandma or friends in upper class buildings, I was invited not to use the main elevator. 
Because in the end, with this color and this hair, I cannot belong to some places. 
In some way, I get to used to it and accept part of it. 
However, something inside of me keeps revolving and struggling. 
Years later I married a Spaniard. 
But not any Spaniard. 
I chose one with the skin color of a lobster when sunburnt. 
(Laughter) Since then, a new question started to chase me. 
What will be the color of your children? 
As you can understand, this is my last concern. 
But thinking about it, with my previous background, my story led me to make my personal exercise as a photographer. 
And that is how Humanae was born. 
Humanae is a pursuit to highlight our true colors, rather than the untrue white, red, black or yellow associated with race. 
It's a kind of game to question our codes. 
It's a work in progress from a personal story to a global history. 
I portray the subjects in a white background. 
Then I choose an 11-pixel square from the nose, paint the background, and look for the corresponding color in the industrial palette, Pantone. 
I started with my family and friends, then more and more people joined the adventure, thanks to public calls coming through the social media. 
I thought that the main space to show my work was the Internet because I want an open concept that invites everybody to push the share button in both the computer and their brain. 
The snowball started to roll. 
The project had a great welcome -- invitations, exhibitions, physical formats, galleries and museums ... 
just happened. 
And among them, my favorite: when Humanae occupies public spaces and appears in the street, it fosters a popular debate and creates a feeling of community. 
I have portrayed more than 3,000 people in 13 different countries, 19 different cities around the world. 
Just to mention some of them -- from someone included in the Forbes list, to refugees who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. 
In Paris, from the UNESCO Headquarters to a shelter. 
And students both in Switzerland and favelas in Rio de Janeiro. 
All kinds of beliefs, gender identities or physical impairments, a newborn or terminally ill. 
We all together build Humanae. 
Those portraits make us rethink how we see each other. 
When modern science is questioning the race concept, what does it mean for us to be black, white, yellow, red? 
Is it the eye, the nose, the mouth, the hair? 
Or does it have to do with our origin, nationality or bank account? 
This personal exercise turned out to be a discovery. 
Suddenly I realized that Humanae was useful for many people. 
It represents a sort of mirror for those who cannot find themselves reflected in any label. 
It was amazing that people started to share their thoughts about the work with me. 
I have hundreds of that, I will share with you, too. 
A mother of 11 years -- A mother of an 11-year-old girl wrote me, "Very good for me as a tool to work on her confidence, as this past weekend one of her girlfriends argued with her that she does not belong and should not be allowed to live in Norway. 
So your work has a very special place in my heart and it's very important for me." 
A woman shared her portrait on Facebook and wrote, "All my life, people from across the globe had difficulties to place me in a group, a stereotype, a box. 
Perhaps we should stop. 
Instead of framing, ask the individual, 'How would you label yourself?' Then I would say, 'Hi. I'm Massiel. 
I'm a Dominican-Dutch, I grew up in a mixed family and I'm a bisexual woman.' " Besides these unexpected and touching reactions, Humanae finds a new life in a different variety of fields. 
Just to show you some examples, illustrators and art students using it as a reference for their sketches and their studies. 
It's a collection of faces. 
Researchers in the fields of anthropology, physics and neuroscience use Humanae with different scientific approaches related to human ethnicity, optophysiology, face recognition or Alzheimer's. 
One of the most important impacts of the project is that Humanae was chosen to be the cover of Foreign Affairs, one of the most relevant political publications. 
And talking about foreign affairs, I found the perfect ambassadors for my project ... 
teachers. 
They are the ones that use Humanae as a tool for educational purposes. 
Their passion encourages me to go back to drawing classes, but this time as a teacher myself. 
My students, both adults and kids, paint their self-portraits, trying to discover their own unique color. 
As a photographer, I realize that I can be a channel for others to communicate. 
As an individual, as Angélica, every time I take a picture, I feel that I am sitting in front of a therapist. 
All the frustration, fear and loneliness that I once felt ... 
becomes love. 
The last country -- the last country in the world who abolished slavery is the country where I was born, Brazil. 
We still have to work hard to abolish discrimination. 
That remains a common practice worldwide, and that will not disappear by itself. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. 
Proudly, I said: "An artist." 
"No, you don't," he said, "You can't make a living being an artist!" 
My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. 
But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein. 
(Laughter) I have always loved math and science, later, coding. 
And so I decided to study computer programming in college. 
In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. 
It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. 
I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, "That is what I want to do with my life." 
The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me. 
Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. 
It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. 
To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. 
We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. 
And because it's a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. 
I was fascinated by all of it. 
But then I got my first taste of lighting. 
Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. 
I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. 
Here you can see I've added a light, I'm turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. 
As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. 
So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this. 
There's this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. 
It's where we go from this to this. 
It's the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it's an actual place that exists. 
This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist. 
As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience's eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set. 
Did you see WALL-E? 
(Laughter) There he is. 
As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. 
We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly. 
(Laughter) While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. 
It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience. 
So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. 
We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. 
"Finding Nemo" is an excellent example of this. 
A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. 
But how do you make it look underwater? 
In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. 
Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. 
One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. 
So we coded up a light that mimics this physics -- first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. 
Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. 
As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths. 
In this clip you can see two other important elements. 
The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. 
The second is the caustics. 
These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean's surface. 
Here we have the fog beams. 
These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don't see the water surface. 
The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater. 
You can see how we're using the science -- the physics of water, light and movement -- to tether that artistic freedom. 
But we are not beholden to it. 
We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood. 
We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. 
So here's a traditionally colored underwater scene. 
But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what's happening. 
In this scene, it's really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. 
So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. 
Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we're trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story. 
We use science to create something wonderful. 
We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. 
This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. 
He finds beauty in the simplest things. 
But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. 
We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect. 
(Laughter) His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. 
He doesn't have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. 
So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions. 
We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. 
He was starting to look glassy-eyed. 
(Laughter) Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he's capable of falling in love. 
So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem. 
So we started with the lenses. 
Here's the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. 
And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. 
We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. 
You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes -- usually Eve. 
So we couldn't just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. 
So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it's not working. 
We turn it down, it's still not working. 
And then we have our eureka moment. 
We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. 
You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. 
Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. 
Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. 
As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. 
Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. 
Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there's a character with emotion inside. 
Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. 
This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. 
In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. 
We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we've come to love. 
(Video) WALL-E: Eva? 
Danielle Feinberg: There's a beauty in these unexpected moments -- when you find the key to unlocking a robot's soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. 
The jellyfish in "Finding Nemo" was one of those moments for me. 
There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. 
This was one of those scenes. 
The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. 
As we went along, we were floundering. 
The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. 
Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. 
But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. 
That scientific tether was strangling the scene. 
But even through all the frustrations, I still believed it could be beautiful. 
So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. 
As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. 
I came in one morning and checked the previous night's work. 
And I got excited. 
And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. 
Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people. 
In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. 
And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. 
I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. 
And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. 
Just long enough for me to think, "Oh no, this is doomed." 
And then he started clapping. 
And then the production designer started clapping. 
And then the whole room was clapping. 
This is the moment that I live for in lighting. 
The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in. 
We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. 
We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. 
It's this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real -- and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

People returning to work after a career break: I call them relaunchers. 
These are people who have taken career breaks for elder care, for childcare reasons, pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. 
Closely related are career transitioners of all kinds: veterans, military spouses, retirees coming out of retirement or repatriating expats. 
Returning to work after a career break is hard because of a disconnect between the employers and the relaunchers. 
Employers can view hiring people with a gap on their resume as a high-risk proposition, and individuals on career break can have doubts about their abilities to relaunch their careers, especially if they've been out for a long time. 
This disconnect is a problem that I'm trying to help solve. 
Now, successful relaunchers are everywhere and in every field. 
This is Sami Kafala. 
He's a nuclear physicist in the UK who took a five-year career break to be home with his five children. 
The Singapore press recently wrote about nurses returning to work after long career breaks. 
And speaking of long career breaks, this is Mimi Kahn. 
She's a social worker in Orange County, California, who returned to work in a social services organization after a 25-year career break. 
That's the longest career break that I'm aware of. 
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took a five-year career break early in her career. 
And this is Tracy Shapiro, who took a 13-year career break. 
Tracy answered a call for essays by the Today Show from people who were trying to return to work but having a difficult time of it. 
Tracy wrote in that she was a mom of five who loved her time at home, but she had gone through a divorce and needed to return to work, plus she really wanted to bring work back into her life because she loved working. 
Tracy was doing what so many of us do when we feel like we've put in a good day in the job search. 
She was looking for a finance or accounting role, and she had just spent the last nine months very diligently researching companies online and applying for jobs with no results. 
I met Tracy in June of 2011, when the Today Show asked me if I could work with her to see if I could help her turn things around. 
The first thing I told Tracy was she had to get out of the house. 
I told her she had to go public with her job search and tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. 
I also told her, "You are going to have a lot of conversations that don't go anywhere. 
Expect that, and don't be discouraged by it. 
There will be a handful that ultimately lead to a job opportunity." 
I'll tell you what happened with Tracy in a little bit, but I want to share with you a discovery that I made when I was returning to work after my own career break of 11 years out of the full-time workforce. 
And that is, that people's view of you is frozen in time. 
What I mean by this is, when you start to get in touch with people and you get back in touch with those people from the past, the people with whom you worked or went to school, they are going to remember you as you were before your career break. 
And that's even if your sense of self has diminished over time, as happens with so many of us the farther removed we are from our professional identities. 
So for example, you might think of yourself as someone who looks like this. 
This is me, crazy after a day of driving around in my minivan. 
Or here I am in the kitchen. 
But those people from the past, they don't know about any of this. 
They only remember you as you were, and it's a great confidence boost to be back in touch with these people and hear their enthusiasm about your interest in returning to work. 
There's one more thing I remember vividly from my own career break. 
And that was that I hardly kept up with the business news. 
My background is in finance, and I hardly kept up with any news when I was home caring for my four young children. 
So I was afraid I'd go into an interview and start talking about a company that didn't exist anymore. 
So I had to resubscribe to the Wall Street Journal and read it for a good six months cover to cover before I felt like I had a handle on what was going on in the business world again. 
I believe relaunchers are a gem of the workforce, and here's why. 
Think about our life stage: for those of us who took career breaks for childcare reasons, we have fewer or no maternity leaves. 
We did that already. 
We have fewer spousal or partner job relocations. 
We're in a more settled time of life. 
We have great work experience. 
We have a more mature perspective. 
We're not trying to find ourselves at an employer's expense. 
Plus we have an energy, an enthusiasm about returning to work precisely because we've been away from it for a while. 
On the flip side, I speak with employers, and here are two concerns that employers have about hiring relaunchers. 
The first one is, employers are worried that relaunchers are technologically obsolete. 
Now, I can tell you, having been technologically obsolete myself at one point, that it's a temporary condition. 
I had done my financial analysis so long ago that I used Lotus 1-2-3. 
I don't know if anyone can even remember back that far, but I had to relearn it on Excel. 
It actually wasn't that hard. A lot of the commands are the same. 
I found PowerPoint much more challenging, but now I use PowerPoint all the time. 
I tell relaunchers that employers expect them to come to the table with a working knowledge of basic office management software. 
And if they're not up to speed, then it's their responsibility to get there. 
And they do. 
The second area of concern that employers have about relaunchers is they're worried that relaunchers don't know what they want to do. 
I tell relaunchers that they need to do the hard work to figure out whether their interests and skills have changed or have not changed while they have been on career break. 
That's not the employer's job. 
It's the relauncher's responsibility to demonstrate to the employer where they can add the most value. 
Back in 2010 I started noticing something. 
I had been tracking return to work programs since 2008, and in 2010, I started noticing the use of a short-term paid work opportunity, whether it was called an internship or not, but an internship-like experience, as a way for professionals to return to work. 
I saw Goldman Sachs and Sara Lee start corporate reentry internship programs. 
I saw a returning engineer, a nontraditional reentry candidate, apply for an entry-level internship program in the military, and then get a permanent job afterward. 
I saw two universities integrate internships into mid-career executive education programs. 
So I wrote a report about what I was seeing, and it became this article for Harvard Business Review called "The 40-Year-Old Intern." 
I have to thank the editors there for that title, and also for this artwork where you can see the 40-year-old intern in the midst of all the college interns. 
And then, courtesy of Fox Business News, they called the concept "The 50-Year-Old Intern." 
(Laughter) So five of the biggest financial services companies have reentry internship programs for returning finance professionals. 
And at this point, hundreds of people have participated. 
These internships are paid, and the people who move on to permanent roles are commanding competitive salaries. 
And now, seven of the biggest engineering companies are piloting reentry internship programs for returning engineers as part of an initiative with the Society of Women Engineers. 
Now, why are companies embracing the reentry internship? 
Because the internship allows the employer to base their hiring decision on an actual work sample instead of a series of interviews, and the employer does not have to make that permanent hiring decision until the internship period is over. 
This testing out period removes the perceived risk that some managers attach to hiring relaunchers, and they are attracting excellent candidates who are turning into great hires. 
Think about how far we have come. 
Before this, most employers were not interested in engaging with relaunchers at all. 
But now, not only are programs being developed specifically with relaunchers in mind, but you can't even apply for these programs unless you have a gap on your résumé. 
This is the mark of real change, of true institutional shift, because if we can solve this problem for relaunchers, we can solve it for other career transitioners too. 
In fact, an employer just told me that their veterans return to work program is based on their reentry internship program. 
And there's no reason why there can't be a retiree internship program. 
Different pool, same concept. 
So let me tell you what happened with Tracy Shapiro. 
Remember that she had to tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. 
Well, one critical conversation with another parent in her community led to a job offer for Tracy, and it was an accounting job in a finance department. 
But it was a temp job. 
The company told her there was a possibility it could turn into something more, but no guarantees. 
This was in the fall of 2011. 
Tracy loved this company, and she loved the people and the office was less than 10 minutes from her house. 
So even though she had a second job offer at another company for a permanent full-time role, she decided to take her chances with this internship and hope for the best. 
Well, she ended up blowing away all of their expectations, and the company not only made her a permanent offer at the beginning of 2012, but they made it even more interesting and challenging, because they knew what Tracy could handle. 
Fast forward to 2015, Tracy's been promoted. 
They've paid for her to get her MBA at night. 
She's even hired another relauncher to work for her. 
Tracy's temp job was a tryout, just like an internship, and it ended up being a win for both Tracy and her employer. 
Now, my goal is to bring the reentry internship concept to more and more employers. 
But in the meantime, if you are returning to work after a career break, don't hesitate to suggest an internship or an internship-like arrangement to an employer that does not have a formal reentry internship program. 
Be their first success story, and you can be the example for more relaunchers to come. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

There are 200 million clinical cases of falciparum malaria in Africa every year, resulting in half a million deaths. 
I would like to talk to you about malaria vaccines. 
The ones that we have made to date are simply not good enough. 
Why? 
We've been working at it for 100 plus years. 
When we started, technology was limited. 
We could see just a tiny fraction of what the parasite really looked like. 
Today, we are awash with technology, advanced imaging and omics platforms -- genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics. 
These tools have given us a clearer view of just how complex the parasite really is. 
However, in spite of this, our approach to vaccine design has remained pretty rudimentary. 
To make a good vaccine, we must go back to basics to understand how our bodies handle this complexity. 
People who are frequently infected with malaria learn to deal with it. 
They get the infection, but they don't get ill. 
The recipe is encoded in antibodies. 
My team went back to our complex parasite, probed it with samples from Africans who had overcome malaria to answer the question: "What does a successful antibody response look like?" 
We found over 200 proteins, many of which are not on the radar for malaria vaccines. 
My research community may be missing out important parts of the parasite. 
Until recently, when one had identified a protein of interest, they tested whether it might be important for a vaccine by conducting a cohort study. 
This typically involved about 300 participants in a village in Africa, whose samples were analyzed to see whether antibodies to the protein would predict who got malaria and who did not. 
In the past 30 years, these studies have tested a small number of proteins in relatively few samples and usually in single locations. 
The results have not been consistent. 
My team essentially collapsed 30 years of this type of research into one exciting experiment, conducted over just three months. 
Innovatively, we assembled 10,000 samples from 15 locations in seven African countries, spanning time, age and the variable intensity of malaria experienced in Africa. 
We used omics intelligence to prioritize our parasite proteins, synthesize them in the lab and in short, recreated the malaria parasite on a chip. 
We did this in Africa, and we're very proud of that. 
(Applause) The chip is a small glass slide, but it gives us incredible power. 
We simultaneously gathered data on over 100 antibody responses. 
What are we looking for? 
The recipe behind a successful antibody response, so that we can predict what might make a good malaria vaccine. 
We're also trying to figure out exactly what antibodies do to the parasite. 
How do they kill it? 
Do they attack from multiple angles? Is there synergy? 
How much antibody do you need? 
Our studies suggest that having a bit of one antibody won't be enough. 
It might take high concentrations of antibodies against multiple parasite proteins. 
We're also learning that antibodies kill the parasite in multiple ways, and studying any one of these in isolation may not adequately reflect reality. 
Just like we can now see the parasite in greater definition, my team and I are focused on understanding how our bodies overcome this complexity. 
We believe that this could provide the breakthroughs that we need to make malaria history through vaccination. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Shoham Arad: OK, how close are we actually to a malaria vaccine? 
Faith Osier: We're just at the beginning of a process to try and understand what we need to put in the vaccine before we actually start making it. 
So, we're not really close to the vaccine, but we're getting there. 
SA: And we're hopeful. 
FO: And we're very hopeful. 
SA: Tell me about SMART, tell me what does it stand for and why is it important to you? 
FO: So SMART stands for South-South Malaria Antigen Research Partnership. 
The South-South is referring to us in Africa, looking sideways to each other in collaboration, in contrast to always looking to America and looking to Europe, when there is quite some strength within Africa. 
So in SMART, apart from the goal that we have, to develop a malaria vaccine, we are also training African scientists, because the burden of disease in Africa is high, and you need people who will continue to push the boundaries in science, in Africa. 
SA: Yes, yes, correct. 
(Applause) OK, one last question. 
Tell me, I know you mentioned this a little bit, but how would things actually change if there were a malaria vaccine? 
FO: We would save half a million lives every year. 
Two hundred million cases. 
It's estimated that malaria costs Africa 12 billion US dollars a year. 
So this is economics. 
Africa would simply thrive. 
SA: OK. Thank you, Faith. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth. 
Think of the planet like a human body that we inhabit. 
The skeleton is the transportation system of roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, air and seaports that enable our mobility across the continents. 
The vascular system that powers the body are the oil and gas pipelines and electricity grids. 
that distribute energy. 
And the nervous system of communications is the Internet cables, satellites, cellular networks and data centers that allow us to share information. 
This ever-expanding infrastructural matrix already consists of 64 million kilometers of roads, four million kilometers of railways, two million kilometers of pipelines and one million kilometers of Internet cables. 
What about international borders? 
We have less than 500,000 kilometers of borders. 
Let's build a better map of the world. 
And we can start by overcoming some ancient mythology. 
There's a saying with which all students of history are familiar: "Geography is destiny." 
Sounds so grave, doesn't it? 
It's such a fatalistic adage. 
It tells us that landlocked countries are condemned to be poor, that small countries cannot escape their larger neighbors, that vast distances are insurmountable. 
But every journey I take around the world, I see an even greater force sweeping the planet: connectivity. 
The global connectivity revolution, in all of its forms -- transportation, energy and communications -- has enabled such a quantum leap in the mobility of people, of goods, of resources, of knowledge, such that we can no longer even think of geography as distinct from it. 
In fact, I view the two forces as fusing together into what I call "connectography." 
Connectography represents a quantum leap in the mobility of people, resources and ideas, but it is an evolution, an evolution of the world from political geography, which is how we legally divide the world, to functional geography, which is how we actually use the world, from nations and borders, to infrastructure and supply chains. 
Our global system is evolving from the vertically integrated empires of the 19th century, through the horizontally interdependent nations of the 20th century, into a global network civilization in the 21st century. 
Connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of the human species. 
(Applause) We are becoming this global network civilization because we are literally building it. 
All of the world's defense budgets and military spending taken together total just under two trillion dollars per year. 
Meanwhile, our global infrastructure spending is projected to rise to nine trillion dollars per year within the coming decade. 
And, well, it should. 
We have been living off an infrastructure stock meant for a world population of three billion, as our population has crossed seven billion to eight billion and eventually nine billion and more. 
As a rule of thumb, we should spend about one trillion dollars on the basic infrastructure needs of every billion people in the world. 
Not surprisingly, Asia is in the lead. 
In 2015, China announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which together with a network of other organizations aims to construct a network of iron and silk roads, stretching from Shanghai to Lisbon. 
And as all of this topographical engineering unfolds, we will likely spend more on infrastructure in the next 40 years, we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years, than we have in the past 4,000 years. 
Now let's stop and think about it for a minute. 
Spending so much more on building the foundations of global society rather than on the tools to destroy it can have profound consequences. 
Connectivity is how we optimize the distribution of people and resources around the world. 
It is how mankind comes to be more than just the sum of its parts. 
I believe that is what is happening. 
Connectivity has a twin megatrend in the 21st century: planetary urbanization. 
Cities are the infrastructures that most define us. 
By 2030, more than two thirds of the world's population will live in cities. 
And these are not mere little dots on the map, but they are vast archipelagos stretching hundreds of kilometers. 
Here we are in Vancouver, at the head of the Cascadia Corridor that stretches south across the US border to Seattle. 
The technology powerhouse of Silicon Valley begins north of San Francisco down to San Jose and across the bay to Oakland. 
The sprawl of Los Angeles now passes San Diego across the Mexican border to Tijuana. 
San Diego and Tijuana now share an airport terminal where you can exit into either country. 
Eventually, a high-speed rail network may connect the entire Pacific spine. 
America's northeastern megalopolis begins in Boston through New York and Philadelphia to Washington. 
It contains more than 50 million people and also has plans for a high-speed rail network. 
But Asia is where we really see the megacities coming together. 
This continuous strip of light from Tokyo through Nagoya to Osaka contains more than 80 million people and most of Japan's economy. 
It is the world's largest megacity. 
For now. 
But in China, megacity clusters are coming together with populations reaching 100 million people. 
The Bohai Rim around Beijing, The Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta, stretching from Hong Kong north to Guangzhou. 
And in the middle, the Chongqing-Chengdu megacity cluster, whose geographic footprint is almost the same size as the country of Austria. 
And any number of these megacity clusters has a GDP approaching two trillion dollars -- that's almost the same as all of India today. 
So imagine if our global diplomatic institutions, such as the G20, were to base their membership on economic size rather than national representation. 
Some Chinese megacities may be in and have a seat at the table, while entire countries, like Argentina or Indonesia would be out. 
Moving to India, whose population will soon exceed that of China, it too has a number of megacity clusters, such as the Delhi Capital Region and Mumbai. 
In the Middle East, Greater Tehran is absorbing one third of Iran's population. 
Most of Egypt's 80 million people live in the corridor between Cairo and Alexandria. 
And in the gulf, a necklace of city-states is forming, from Bahrain and Qatar, through the United Arab Emirates to Muscat in Oman. 
And then there's Lagos, Africa's largest city and Nigeria's commercial hub. 
It has plans for a rail network that will make it the anchor of a vast Atlantic coastal corridor, stretching across Benin, Togo and Ghana, to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. 
But these countries are suburbs of Lagos. 
In a megacity world, countries can be suburbs of cities. 
By 2030, we will have as many as 50 such megacity clusters in the world. 
So which map tells you more? 
Our traditional map of 200 discrete nations that hang on most of our walls, or this map of the 50 megacity clusters? 
And yet, even this is incomplete because you cannot understand any individual megacity without understanding its connections to the others. 
People move to cities to be connected, and connectivity is why these cities thrive. 
Any number of them, such as Sao Paulo or Istanbul or Moscow, has a GDP approaching or exceeding one third of one half of their entire national GDP. 
But equally importantly, you cannot calculate any of their individual value without understanding the role of the flows of people, of finance, of technology that enable them to thrive. 
Take the Gauteng province of South Africa, which contains Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria. 
It too represents just over a third of South Africa's GDP. 
But equally importantly, it is home to the offices of almost every single multinational corporation that invests directly into South Africa and indeed, into the entire African continent. 
Cities want to be part of global value chains. 
They want to be part of this global division of labor. 
That is how cities think. 
I've never met a mayor who said to me, "I want my city to be cut off." 
They know that their cities belong as much to the global network civilization as to their home countries. 
Now, for many people, urbanization causes great dismay. 
They think cities are wrecking the planet. 
But right now, there are more than 200 intercity learning networks thriving. 
That is as many as the number of intergovernmental organizations that we have. 
And all of these intercity networks are devoted to one purpose, mankind's number one priority in the 21st century: sustainable urbanization. 
Is it working? 
Let's take climate change. 
We know that summit after summit in New York and Paris is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 
But what we can see is that transferring technology and knowledge and policies between cities is how we've actually begun to reduce the carbon intensity of our economies. 
Cities are learning from each other. 
How to install zero-emissions buildings, how to deploy electric car-sharing systems. 
In major Chinese cities, they're imposing quotas on the number of cars on the streets. 
In many Western cities, young people don't even want to drive anymore. 
Cities have been part of the problem, now they are part of the solution. 
Inequality is the other great challenge to achieving sustainable urbanization. 
When I travel through megacities from end to end -- it takes hours and days -- I experience the tragedy of extreme disparity within the same geography. 
And yet, our global stock of financial assets has never been larger, approaching 300 trillion dollars. 
That's almost four times the actual GDP of the world. 
We have taken on such enormous debts since the financial crisis, but have we invested them in inclusive growth? 
No, not yet. 
Only when we build sufficient, affordable public housing, when we invest in robust transportation networks to allow people to connect to each other both physically and digitally, that's when our divided cities and societies will come to feel whole again. 
(Applause) And that is why infrastructure has just been included in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, because it enables all the others. 
Our political and economic leaders are learning that connectivity is not charity, it's opportunity. 
And that's why our financial community needs to understand that connectivity is the most important asset class of the 21st century. 
Now, cities can make the world more sustainable, they can make the world more equitable, I also believe that connectivity between cities can make the world more peaceful. 
If we look at regions of the world with dense relations across borders, we see more trade, more investment and more stability. 
We all know the story of Europe after World War II, where industrial integration kicked off a process that gave rise to today's peaceful European Union. 
And you can see that Russia, by the way, is the least connected of major powers in the international system. 
And that goes a long way towards explaining the tensions today. 
Countries that have less stake in the system also have less to lose in disturbing it. 
In North America, the lines that matter most on the map are not the US-Canada border or the US-Mexico border, but the dense network of roads and railways and pipelines and electricity grids and even water canals that are forming an integrated North American union. 
North America does not need more walls, it needs more connections. 
(Applause) But the real promise of connectivity is in the postcolonial world. 
All of those regions where borders have historically been the most arbitrary and where generations of leaders have had hostile relations with each other. 
But now a new group of leaders has come into power and is burying the hatchet. 
Let's take Southeast Asia, where high-speed rail networks are planned to connect Bangkok to Singapore and trade corridors from Vietnam to Myanmar. 
Now this region of 600 million people coordinates its agricultural resources and its industrial output. 
It is evolving into what I call a Pax Asiana, a peace among Southeast Asian nations. 
A similar phenomenon is underway in East Africa, where a half dozen countries are investing in railways and multimodal corridors so that landlocked countries can get their goods to market. 
Now these countries coordinate their utilities and their investment policies. 
They, too, are evolving into a Pax Africana. 
One region we know could especially use this kind of thinking is the Middle East. 
As Arab states tragically collapse, what is left behind but the ancient cities, such as Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad? 
In fact, the nearly 400 million people of the Arab world are almost entirely urbanized. 
As societies, as cities, they are either water rich or water poor, energy rich or energy poor. 
And the only way to correct these mismatches is not through more wars and more borders, but through more connectivity of pipelines and water canals. 
Sadly, this is not yet the map of the Middle East. 
But it should be, a connected Pax Arabia, internally integrated and productively connected to its neighbors: Europe, Asia and Africa. 
Now, it may not seem like connectivity is what we want right now towards the world's most turbulent region. 
But we know from history that more connectivity is the only way to bring about stability in the long run. 
Because we know that in region after region, connectivity is the new reality. 
Cities and countries are learning to aggregate into more peaceful and prosperous wholes. 
But the real test is going to be Asia. 
Can connectivity overcome the patterns of rivalry among the great powers of the Far East? 
After all, this is where World War III is supposed to break out. 
Since the end of the Cold War, a quarter century ago, at least six major wars have been predicted for this region. 
But none have broken out. 
Take China and Taiwan. 
In the 1990s, this was everyone's leading World War III scenario. 
But since that time, the trade and investment volumes across the straits have become so intense that last November, leaders from both sides held a historic summit to discuss eventual peaceful reunification. 
And even the election of a nationalist party in Taiwan that's pro-independence earlier this year does not undermine this fundamental dynamic. 
China and Japan have an even longer history of rivalry and have been deploying their air forces and navies to show their strength in island disputes. 
But in recent years, Japan has been making its largest foreign investments in China. 
Japanese cars are selling in record numbers there. 
And guess where the largest number of foreigners residing in Japan today comes from? 
You guessed it: China. 
China and India have fought a major war and have three outstanding border disputes, but today India is the second largest shareholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. 
They're building a trade corridor stretching from Northeast India through Myanmar and Bangladesh to Southern China. 
Their trade volume has grown from 20 billion dollars a decade ago to 80 billion dollars today. 
Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought three wars and continue to dispute Kashmir, but they're also negotiating a most-favored-nation trade agreement and want to complete a pipeline stretching from Iran through Pakistan to India. 
And let's talk about Iran. 
Wasn't it just two years ago that war with Iran seemed inevitable? 
Then why is every single major power rushing to do business there today? 
Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot guarantee that World War III will not break out. 
But we can definitely see why it hasn't happened yet. 
Even though Asia is home to the world's fastest growing militaries, these same countries are also investing billions of dollars in each other's infrastructure and supply chains. 
They are more interested in each other's functional geography than in their political geography. 
And that is why their leaders think twice, step back from the brink, and decide to focus on economic ties over territorial tensions. 
So often it seems like the world is falling apart, but building more connectivity is how we put Humpty Dumpty back together again, much better than before. 
And by wrapping the world in such seamless physical and digital connectivity, we evolve towards a world in which people can rise above their geographic constraints. 
We are the cells and vessels pulsing through these global connectivity networks. 
Everyday, hundreds of millions of people go online and work with people they've never met. 
More than one billion people cross borders every year, and that's expected to rise to three billion in the coming decade. 
We don't just build connectivity, we embody it. 
We are the global network civilization, and this is our map. 
A map of the world in which geography is no longer destiny. 
Instead, the future has a new and more hopeful motto: connectivity is destiny. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

[On April 3, 2016 we saw the largest data leak in history.] [The Panama Papers exposed rich and powerful people] [hiding vast amounts of money in offshore accounts.] [What does this mean?] [We called Robert Palmer of Global Witness to explain.] This week, there have been a whole slew and deluge of stories coming out from the leak of 11 million documents from a Panamanian-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca. 
The release of these papers from Panama lifts the veil on a tiny piece of the secretive offshore world. 
We get an insight into how clients and banks and lawyers go to companies like Mossack Fonseca and say, "OK, we want an anonymous company, can you give us one?" 
So you actually get to see the emails, you get to see the exchanges of messages, you get to see the mechanics of how this works, how this operates. 
Now, this has already started to have pretty immediate repercussions. 
The Prime Minister of Iceland has resigned. 
We've also had news that an ally of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad has also got offshore companies. 
There's been allegations of a $2 billion money trail that leads back to President Vladimir Putin of Russia via his close childhood friend, who happens to be a top cellist. 
And there will be a lot of rich individuals out there and others who will be nervous about the next set of stories and the next set of leaked documents. 
Now, this sounds like the plot of a spy thriller or a John Grisham novel. 
It seems very distant from you, me, ordinary people. 
Why should we care about this? 
But the truth is that if rich and powerful individuals are able to keep their money offshore and not pay the taxes that they should, it means that there is less money for vital public services like healthcare, education, roads. 
And that affects all of us. 
Now, for my organization Global Witness, this exposé has been phenomenal. 
We have the world's media and political leaders talking about how individuals can use offshore secrecy to hide and disguise their assets -- something we have been talking about and exposing for a decade. 
Now, I think a lot of people find this entire world baffling and confusing, and hard to understand how this sort of offshore world works. 
I like to think of it a bit like a Russian doll. 
So you can have one company stacked inside another company, stacked inside another company, making it almost impossible to really understand who is behind these structures. 
It can be very difficult for law enforcement or tax authorities, journalists, civil society to really understand what's going on. 
I also think it's interesting that there's been less coverage of this issue in the United States. 
And that's perhaps because some prominent US people just haven't figured in this exposé, in this scandal. 
Now, that's not because there are no rich Americans who are stashing their assets offshore. 
It's just because of the way in which offshore works, Mossack Fonseca has fewer American clients. 
I think if we saw leaks from the Cayman Islands or even from Delaware or Wyoming or Nevada, you would see many more cases and examples linking back to Americans. 
In fact, in a number of US states you need less information, you need to provide less information to get a company than you do to get a library card. 
That sort of secrecy in America has allowed employees of school districts to rip off schoolchildren. 
It has allowed scammers to rip off vulnerable investors. 
This is the sort of behavior that affects all of us. 
Now, at Global Witness, we wanted to see what this actually looked like in practice. 
How does this actually work? 
So what we did is we sent in an undercover investigator to 13 Manhattan law firms. 
Our investigator posed as an African minister who wanted to move suspect funds into the United States to buy a house, a yacht, a jet. 
Now, what was truly shocking was that all but one of those lawyers provided our investigator with suggestions on how to move those suspect funds. 
These were all preliminary meetings, and none of the lawyers took us on as a client and of course no money moved hands, but it really shows the problem with the system. 
It's also important to not just think about this as individual cases. 
This is not just about an individual lawyer who's spoken to our undercover investigator and provided suggestions. 
It's not just about a particular senior politician who's been caught up in a scandal. 
This is about how a system works, that entrenches corruption, tax evasion, poverty and instability. 
And in order to tackle this, we need to change the game. 
We need to change the rules of the game to make this sort of behavior harder. 
This may seem like doom and gloom, like there's nothing we can do about it, like nothing has ever changed, like there will always be rich and powerful individuals. 
But as a natural optimist, I do see that we are starting to get some change. 
Over the last couple of years, we've seen a real push towards greater transparency when it comes to company ownership. 
This issue was put on the political agenda by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron at a big G8 Summit that was held in Northern Ireland in 2013. 
And since then, the European Union is going to be creating central registers at a national level of who really owns and controls companies across Europe. 
One of the things that is sad is that, actually, the US is lagging behind. 
There's bipartisan legislation that had been introduced in the House and the Senate, but it isn't making as much progress as we'd like to see. 
So we'd really want to see the Panama leaks, this huge peek into the offshore world, be used as a way of opening up in the US and around the world. 
For us at Global Witness, this is a moment for change. 
We need ordinary people to get angry at the way in which people can hide their identity behind secret companies. 
We need business leaders to stand up and say, "Secrecy like this is not good for business." 
We need political leaders to recognize the problem, and to commit to changing the law to open up this sort of secrecy. 
Together, we can end the secrecy that is currently allowing tax evasion, corruption, money laundering to flourish. 

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

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

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

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

Some people think that there's a TED Talk formula: "Give a talk on a round, red rug." 
"Share a childhood story." 
"Divulge a personal secret." 
"End with an inspiring call to action." 
No. 
That's not how to think of a TED Talk. 
In fact, if you overuse those devices, you're just going to come across as clichéd or emotionally manipulative. 
But there is one thing that all great TED Talks have in common, and I would like to share that thing with you, because over the past 12 years, I've had a ringside seat, listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers, like these. 
I've helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them their secrets of what makes for a great talk. 
And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. 
And it's this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners' minds an extraordinary gift -- a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea. 
Let me show you what I mean. 
Here's Haley. 
She is about to give a TED Talk and frankly, she's terrified. 
(Video) Presenter: Haley Van Dyck! 
(Applause) Over the course of 18 minutes, 1,200 people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with Haley's brain and with each other. 
They're literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. 
And I don't just mean they're feeling the same emotions. 
There's something even more startling happening. 
Let's take a look inside Haley's brain for a moment. 
There are billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. 
But look here, right here -- a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea. 
And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening. 
That's right; in just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into 1,200 minds, just by people listening to a voice and watching a face. 
But wait -- what is an idea anyway? 
Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate the world. 
Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic. 
Here are just a few examples shared from the TED stage. 
Sir Ken Robinson -- creativity is key to our kids' future. 
(Video) Sir Ken Robinson: My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. 
Chris Anderson: Elora Hardy -- building from bamboo is beautiful. 
(Video) Elora Hardy: It is growing all around us, it's strong, it's elegant, it's earthquake-resistant. 
CA: Chimamanda Adichie -- people are more than a single identity. 
(Video) Chimamanda Adichie: The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. 
CA: Your mind is teeming with ideas, and not just randomly. 
They're carefully linked together. 
Collectively they form an amazingly complex structure that is your personal worldview. 
It's your brain's operating system. 
It's how you navigate the world. 
And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas. 
So, for example, if one little component of your worldview is the idea that kittens are adorable, then when you see this, you'll react like this. 
But if another component of your worldview is the idea that leopards are dangerous, then when you see this, you'll react a little bit differently. 
So, it's pretty obvious why the ideas that make up your worldview are crucial. 
You need them to be as reliable as possible -- a guide, to the scary but wonderful real world out there. 
Now, different people's worldviews can be dramatically different. 
For example, how does your worldview react when you see this image: (Video) Dalia Mogahed: What do you think when you look at me? 
"A woman of faith," "an expert," maybe even "a sister"? 
Or "oppressed," "brainwashed," "a terrorist"? 
CA: Whatever your answer, there are millions of people out there who would react very differently. 
So that's why ideas really matter. 
If communicated properly, they're capable of changing, forever, how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well into the future. 
Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture. 
So if you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task: One, limit your talk to just one major idea. 
Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you're most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. 
You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. 
So pick one idea, and make it the through-line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way. 
Two, give your listeners a reason to care. 
Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. 
And the main tool to achieve that? 
Curiosity. 
Stir your audience's curiosity. 
Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn't make sense and needs explaining. 
If you can reveal a disconnection in someone's worldview, they'll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. 
And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea. 
Three, build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands. 
You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listeners' minds -- but not your language, their language. 
You start where they are. 
The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. 
Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands. 
For example, when Jennifer Kahn wanted to explain the incredible new biotechnology called CRISPR, she said, "It's as if, for the first time, you had a word processor to edit DNA. 
CRISPR allows you to cut and paste genetic information really easily." 
Now, a vivid explanation like that delivers a satisfying aha moment as it snaps into place in our minds. 
It's important, therefore, to test your talk on trusted friends, and find out which parts they get confused by. 
Four, here's the final tip: Make your idea worth sharing. 
By that I mean, ask yourself the question: "Who does this idea benefit?" 
And I need you to be honest with the answer. 
If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, I'm sorry to say, it's probably not worth sharing. 
The audience will see right through you. 
But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else's day or change someone else's perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us. 

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

(Cello music) (Music ends) On the flight here, I was reminded about my mom. 
I'm a self-taught cellist, I've never had a lesson. 
I studied double bass, but I just picked up the cello and started playing because I love doing it. 
But my mom was an inspiration to me. 
I did not realize she was an inspiration, because she got her music degree through a mail-order course, the US School of Music. 
While raising two kids, she received a lesson a week in the mail, and practiced. 
And at the end of a couple of years, she put on a recital. 
And I'll be 50 this month, and it took me that long to realize that she was that big of an inspiration. 
I'm just going to keep -- yeah, thanks, mom. 
(Applause) She's also one of the most extraordinary people I know, beyond being a wonderful musician. 
I want to play a little bit for mom and your moms as well, actually. 
(Cello music) (Music ends) You know, when you normally hear a cello, you think of this. 
(Plays Bach Cello Suite No.1) We're not going to do that today. 
(Laughter and applause) (Drums) (Cello) Hey! 
(Looped samples of onstage sounds) (Cello music and looped samples) (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) 

Probably not a surprise to you, but I don't like to be in a hospital or go to a hospital. 
Do you? 
I'm sure many of you feel the same way, right? 
But why? Why is it that we hate hospitals so much? 
Or is it just a fact of life we have to live with? 
Is it the crappy food? 
Is it the expensive parking? 
Is it the intense smell? 
Or is it the fear of the unknown? 
Well, it's all of that, and it's more. 
Patients often have to travel long distances to get to their nearest hospital, and access to hospital care is becoming more and more an issue in rural areas, in the US, but also in sparsely populated countries like Sweden. 
And even when hospitals are more abundant, typically the poor and the elderly have trouble getting care because they lack transportation that is convenient and affordable to them. 
And many people are avoiding hospital care altogether, and they miss getting proper treatment due to cost. 
We see that 64 percent of Americans are avoiding care due to cost. 
And even when you do get treatment, hospitals often make us sicker. 
Medical errors are reported to be the third cause of death in the US, just behind cancer and heart disease, the third cause of death. 
I'm in health care for over 20 years now, and I witness every day how broken and how obsolete our hospital system is. 
Let me give you two examples. 
Four in 10 Japanese medical doctors and five in 10 American medical doctors are burnt out. 
In my home country, the Netherlands, only 17 million people live there. 
We are short 125,000 nurses over the coming years. 
But how did we even end up here, in this idea of placing all kinds of sick people together in one big building? 
Well, we have to go back to the Ancient Greeks. 
In 400 BC, temples for cure were erected where people could go to get their diagnosis, their treatment and their healing. 
And then really for about 2,000 years, we've seen religious care centers all the way up to the Industrial Revolution, where we've seen hospitals being set up as assembly lines based on the principles of the Industrial Revolution, to produce efficiently and get the products, the patients in this case, out of the hospital as soon as possible. 
Over the last century, we've seen lots of interesting innovations. 
We figured out how to make insulin. 
We invented pacemakers and X-ray, and we even came into this wonderful new era of cell and gene therapies. 
But the biggest change to fix our hospital system altogether is still ahead of us. 
And I believe it's time now, we have the opportunity, to revolutionize the system altogether and forget about our current hospital system. 
I believe it's time to create a new system that revolves around health care at home. 
Recent research has shown that 46 percent of hospital care can move to the patient's home. 
That's a lot. 
And that's mainly for those patients who suffer from chronic diseases. 
With that, hospitals can and should reduce to smaller, agile and mobile care centers focused on acute care. 
So things like neonatology, intensive care, surgery and imaging will still remain at the hospitals, at least I believe for the foreseeable future. 
A few weeks ago, I met a colleague whose mom was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and she said, "Niels, it's hard. 
It's so hard when we know that she's got only months to live. 
Instead of playing with the grandchildren, she now has to travel three times a week two hours up and down to Amsterdam just to get her treatment and tests." 
And that really breaks my heart, because we all know that a professional nurse could draw her blood at home as well, right? 
And if she could get her tests and treatment at home as well, she could do the things that are really important to her in her last months. 
My own mom, 82 years old now -- God bless her -- she's avoiding to go to the hospital because she finds it difficult to plan and manage the journey. 
So my sisters and I, we help her out. 
But there's many elderly people who are avoiding care and are waiting that long that it becomes life-threatening, and it's straight to the costly, intensive care. 
Dr. Covinsky, a clinical researcher at the University of California, he concludes that a third of patients over 70 and more than half of patients over 85, leave the hospital more disabled than when they came in. 
And a very practical problem that many patients face when they have to go to a hospital is: Where do I go with my main companion in life, where do I go with my dog? 
That's our dog, by the way. Isn't she cute? 
(Laughter) But it's not only about convenience. 
It's also about unnecessary health care stays and costs. 
A friend of mine, Art, he recently needed to be hospitalized for just a minor surgery, and he had to stay in the hospital for over two weeks, just because he needed a specific kind of IV antibiotics. 
So he occupied a bed for two weeks that cost over a thousand euros a day. 
It's just ridiculous. 
And these costs are really at the heart of the issue. 
So we've seen over many of our global economies, health care expense grow as a percentage of GDP over the last years. 
So here we see that over the last 50 years, health care expense has grown from about five percent in Germany to about 11 percent now. 
In the US, we've seen growth from six percent to over 17 percent now. 
And a large portion of these costs are driven by investments in large, shiny hospital buildings. 
And these buildings are not flexible, and they maintain a system where hospital beds need to be filled for a hospital to run efficiently. 
There's no incentive for a hospital to run with less beds. 
Just the thought of that makes you sick, right? 
And here's the thing: the cost for treating my buddy Art at home can be up to 10 times cheaper than hospital care. 
And that is where we're headed. 
The hospital bed of the future will be in our own homes. 
And it's already starting. 
Global home care is growing 10 percent year over year. 
And from my own experience, I see that logistics and technology are making these home health care solutions work. 
Technology is already allowing us to do things that were once exclusive to hospitals. 
Diagnosis tests like blood, glucose tests, urine tests, can now be taken in the comfort of our homes. 
And more and more connected devices we see like pacemakers and insulin pumps that will proactively signal if help is needed soon. 
And all that technology is coming together in much more insights into the patients' health, and that insight and all of the information leads to better control and to less medical errors -- remember, the third cause of death in the US. 
And I see it every day at work. 
I work in logistics and for me, home health care works. 
So we see a delivery driver deliver the medicine to the patient's home. 
A nurse joins him and actually administers the drug at the patient's home. 
It's that simple. 
Remember my buddy, Art? 
He can now get the IV antibiotics in the comfort of his home: no hospital pajamas, no crappy food and no risk of these antibiotic-resistant superbugs that only bite you in these hospitals. 
And it goes further. 
So now the elderly people can get the treatment that they need in the comfort of their own home while with their best companion in life. 
And there's no need anymore to drive hours and hours just to get your treatment and tests. 
In the Netherlands and in Denmark, we've seen very good successes in cancer clinics organizing chemotherapies at the patient's homes, sometimes even together with fellow patients. 
The best improvements for these patients have been improvements in reduction in stress, anxiety disorders and depression. 
Home health care also helped them to get back a sense of normality and freedom in their lives, and they've actually helped them to forget about their disease. 
But home health care, Niels -- what if I don't even have a home, when I'm homeless, or when I do have a home but there's no one to take care of me or even open up the door? 
Well, in comes our sharing economy, or, as I like to call it, the Airbnb for home care. 
In the Netherlands, we see churches and care organizations match people in need of care and company with people who actually have a home for them and can provide care and company to them. 
Home health care is cheaper, it's easier to facilitate, and it's quick to set up -- in these rural areas we talked about, but also in humanitarian crisis situations where it's often safer, quicker and cheaper to set things up at home. 
Home health care is very applicable in prosperous areas but also very much in underserved communities. 
Home health care works in developed countries as well as in developing countries. 
So I'm passionate to help facilitate improvements in patients' lives due to home health care. 
I'm passionate to help facilitate that the elderly people get the treatment that they need in the comfort of their own homes, together with their best companion in life. 
I'm passionate to make the change and help ensure that patients, and not their disease, are in control of their lives. 
To me, that is health care delivered at home. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mounting his skinny steed, the protagonist of Don Quixote charges an army of giants. 
In his eyes, it is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. 
However, this act of valor is ill conceived. 
As his squire Sancho Panza explains to him time and again, these aren’t giants; they are merely windmills. 
Don Quixote is undeterred, but his piercing lance is soon caught in their sails. 
Never discouraged, the knight stands proudly, and becomes even more convinced of his mission. 
This sequence encapsulates much of what is loved about Don Quixote, the epic, illogical, and soulful tale of Alonso Quijano, who becomes the clumsy but valiant Don Quixote of la Mancha, known as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. 
Originally published in two volumes, the narrative follows Don Quixote as he travels through central and northern Spain fighting the forces of evil. 
Despite Don Quixote’s lofty imagination, his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, could never have imagined his book would become the best-selling novel of all time. 
Barring 5 years as a soldier, and 5 more enslaved by pirates, Cervantes spent most of his life as a struggling poet and playwright. 
It wasn’t until his late 50’s that he published his greatest creation: an epic satire of chivalry novels. 
At this time, medieval books chronicling the adventures of knights and their moral code dominated European culture. 
While Cervantes was a fan, he was weary of these repetitive tomes, which focused more on listing heroic feats than character development. 
To challenge them, he wrote Don Quixote, the story of a hidalgo, or idle nobleman, who spends his days and nights reading chivalry novels. 
Driven mad by these stories, he fashions himself a champion for the downtrodden. 
Everyone in his village tries to convince him to give up his lunacy, going so far as to burn some of the lurid books in his personal library. 
But Don Quixote is unstoppable. 
He dresses up in old shining armor, mounts his skinny horse, and leaves his village in search of glory. 
Cervantes’ novel unfolds as a collection of episodes detailing the mishaps of the valiant knight. 
Yet unlike the chivalry books and perhaps all other prior fiction, Cervantes’ story deeply investigates the protagonist’s inner life. 
Don Quixote matures as the narrative develops, undergoing a noticeable transformation. 
This literary revelation has led many scholars to call Don Quixote the first modern novel. 
And this character development doesn’t happen in isolation. 
Early on, Don Quixote is joined by a villager-turned-squire named Sancho Panza. 
Sancho and Don Quixote are a study in opposites: with one as the grounded realist to the other’s idealism. 
Their lively, evolving friendship is often credited as the original hero and sidekick duo, inspiring centuries of fictional partnerships. 
Don Quixote was a huge success. 
Numerous editions were published across Europe in the seventeenth century. 
Even in the Americas, where the Church banned all novels for being sinful distractions, audiences were known to enjoy pirated editions. 
The book was so well received that readers clamored for more. 
After a rival author attempted to cash in on a fake follow-up, Cervantes released the official sequel in response. 
Now published alongside the first volume as a completed text, this second volume picks up where the original left off, only now Don Quixote and Sancho have become folk heroes. 
Just as in real-life, Cervantes included his novel’s success in the world of his characters. 
This unconventional meta-awareness created philosophical complexity, as the knight and his squire ponder the meaning of their story. 
Unfortunately, Cervantes had sold the book’s publishing rights for very little. 
He died rich in fame alone. 
But his treatise on the power of creativity and individualism has inspired art, literature, popular culture, and even political revolution. 
Don Quixote argues that our imagination greatly informs our actions, making us capable of change, and, indeed, making us human. 

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

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

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

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

We live in a medication nation. 
4.5 billion drug prescriptions will be prescribed by doctors like me this year, in the United States alone. 
That's 15 for every man, woman and child. 
And for most of us, our experience with this medication is often a confusing number of pills, instructions, side effects, one-size-fits-all dosing, which all too often we aren't taking as prescribed. 
And this comes at tremendous expense, costing us our time, our money and our health. 
And in our now exponential, connected, data-driven age, I think we can and we must do better. 
So let's take a dive at some of the challenges we have and some potential solutions. 
Let's start with the fact that many drugs don't work for those who are prescribed them. 
The top 10 grossing drugs in the United States this year, they only benefit one in four to one in 23 of who take them. 
That's great if you're number one, but what about everybody else? 
And what's worse, drugs, when they sometimes don't work, can still cause side effects. 
Take aspirin -- about one in four of us who take aspirin to reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease are unknowingly aspirin-resistant and still have the same risks of gastrointestinal bleeds that kill thousands every year. 
It's adverse drug reactions like these that are, by some estimates, the number four leading cause of death in the United States. 
My own grandfather passed away after a single dose of antibiotic caused his kidneys to fail. 
Now, adverse drug reactions and side effects are often tied to challenges in dosing. 
I trained in pediatrics (little people) and internal medicine (big people). 
So one night I might have been on call in the NICU, carefully dosing to the fraction of a milligram a medication for a NICU baby. 
The next night -- on call in the emergency room, treating a 400-pound lineman or a frail nursing-home patient who, by most accounts, usually would get the same dose of medications from the formulary. 
Which would mean, most of the time I would be underdosing the lineman and overdosing the nursing-home patient. 
And beyond age and weight, we tend to ignore differences in sex and race in dosing. 
Now, beyond this, we know we have a massive challenge with noncompliance or low adherence. 
Many of us who need to take our medications aren't taking them or are taking them incorrectly. 
You know, 40 percent of adults in the US over 65 are on five or more prescription medications. 
Sometimes 15 or more. 
And even small improvements in adherence can dramatically save dollars and lives. 
So, as we think into the future, you think that where we are today, as we often hear about smart, personalized, targeted drugs, Internet of Things, gene therapy, AI, that we'd already arrived in this era of precision medicine. 
In reality, we still live in an age of empiric, trial-and-error, imprecision medicine. 
I think we can do better. 
What if we could reimagine ways to help make your medicine-taking easier? 
To get the right doses and combinations to match you? 
What if we could move beyond today's literal cutting edge of pill cutters and fax machines, to an era where we could have better outcomes, lower costs, saving lives and space in your medicine cabinet? 
Well, I think part of the solution is all the emerging ways that we can measure and connect our health care information. 
Today, we pretty much live in a reactive, sick-care world, siloed information that doesn't flow. 
We have the potential to move into a more continuous, real-time proactive world of true health care. 
And part of that starts with the emerging world of quantified self. 
We can measure so much of our physiology and behaviors today, and often it's siloed on our phones and scales, but it's starting to connect to our clinicians, our caregivers, so they can better optimize prevention, diagnostics and therapy. 
And when we can do that, we can do some interesting things. 
Take, for example, hypertension. 
It's the number one risk factor for early death and morbidity worldwide. 
Half of adult Americans, on approximation, have hypertension. 
Less than half have it well-controlled. 
It's often because it takes two or three different classes of medications. 
It's tough to do adherence and adjust your blood pressure medications. 
We have 500 preventable deaths from noncontrolled hypertension in the US every day. 
But now we're in the era of connected blood pressure cuffs -- the FDA just approved a blood pressure cuff that can go into your watch. 
There are now prototypes of cuffless radar-based blood pressure devices that can continuously stream your blood pressure. 
So, in the future, I could -- instead of spot-checking my blood pressure in the clinic, my doctor could see my real-time numbers and my trends, and adjust them as necessary, with the help of a blood pressure dosing algorithm or using the Internet of Things. 
Now, technology today can do even more. 
My smartwatch, already today, has an EKG built in that can be read by artificial intelligence. 
I'm wearing a small, Band-Aid-sized patch, that is live-streaming my vital signs right now. 
Let's take a look. 
They're actually a little concerning at the moment. 
(Laughter) Now, it's not just my real-time vitals that can be seen by my medical team or myself, it could be my retrospective data, and again, that'd be used to modify dosing and medication going forward. 
Even my weight can be super-quantified; my weight, now my shape, how much body mass, fat, muscle mass I might have, and use that to optimize my prevention or therapy. 
And it's not just for the tech-savvy. 
Now, MIT engineers have modified wifi so we can seamlessly connect and collect our vital signs from our connected rings and smart mattresses. 
We can start to share this digital exhaust, our digitome, and even potentially crowdsource it, sharing our health information just like we share with our Google Maps and driving, to improve our -- not our driving, but our health experience globally. 
So, that's great. 
We can potentially now collect this information. 
What if your labs can go from the central lab to your home, to your phone, to even inside our bodies to measure drug levels or other varieties? 
And of course, we're in the age of genomics. 
I've been sequenced, it's just less than $1,000 today. 
And I can start to understand my pharmacogenomics -- how my genes impact whether I need high dose, low dose, or maybe a different medication altogether. 
Let's imagine if your physician or your pharmacist had this information integrated into their workflow, augmented with artificial intelligence, AI, or as I like to refer to it, IA -- intelligence augmentation, to leverage that information; to understand, of the 18,000 or more approved drugs, which would be the right dose and combination for you. 
So great, now maybe we can optimize your drugs and your doses, but the problem today is, we're still using this amazing technology to keep track of our drugs. 
And of course, these technologies evolve, there's connected dispensers, reminder apps, smart pill bottle caps that can text or tweet you or your mother if you haven't taken your medications. 
PillPack was just acquired by Amazon, so soon we may have same-day delivery of our drugs, delivered by drone. 
So, all these things are possible today, but we're still taking multiple pills. 
What if we can make it simpler? 
I think one of the solutions is to make better use of the polypill. 
A polypill is the integration of multiple medications into a single pill. 
And we have these today in common over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. 
And there have been prevention polypill studies done, giving combinations of statins, blood pressure, aspirin, which in randomized studies have been shown to dramatically reduce risk, compared to placebo. 
But these polypills weren't personalized, they weren't optimized to the individual. 
What if we could optimize your personalized polypill? 
So it would be built for you, based on you, it could adapt to you, even every single day. 
Well, we're now in the era of 3D printing. You can print personalized braces, hearing aids, orthopedic devices, even I've been scanned and had my jeans tailored to fit to me. 
So this got me thinking, what if we could 3D-print your personalized polypill? 
So instead of taking six medications, for example, I could integrate them into one. 
So it would be easier to take, improve adherence and potentially, it could even integrate in supplements, like vitamin D or CoQ10. 
So with some help -- I call these "IntelliMeds" -- and with the help of my IntelliMedicine engineering team, we built the first IntelliMedicine prototype printer. 
And here's how it works: instead of full tablets, we have small micromeds, one or two milligrams each, which are sorted and selected based on the dose and combination needed for an individual. 
And of course, these would be doses and combinations you could already take together, FDA-approved drugs. 
We could change the pharmacokinetics by professionally layering on different elements to the individual micromeds. 
And when we hit print, you print your combination of medications that might be needed by you on any individual day. 
And we'd start with, again, generic drugs for the most common problems. 
About 90 percent of prescribed drugs today are low-cost generics. 
And once we've printed the pill, we can do some fun bells and whistles. 
We could print the name of the patient, the date, the day of the week, a QR code. 
We could print different meds for tapering for a patient on a steroid taper, or tapering from pain medications. 
So, this is actually a look at our prototype IntelliMedicine printer. 
See, I'll unveil it here. 
It has about 16 different silos, each containing individual micromeds. 
And I can now adjust on the software individual dosings. 
And when I do that, the robotic arm will adjust the height of these spansules and the micromeds will release. 
I can now -- The automated process would rotate and cycle through, to make sure the micromeds are loaded. 
And when I hit print, these will all fall through the device, I now pull out my personalized printed polypill with the doses and medications meant for me. 
And we can take a look, if you look back to the slides, you can see the whole process, we can see the drug silos being selected, the pills doing down the different silos, and being collected in the individual capsule. 
Now, this is great, I can potentially print my meds based on me, instead of taking six pills. 
I can now be looking at my individual dosing. 
My smartwatch is looking at my blood pressure: I needed an adjustment in my blood pressure medicines, my coumadin level. My blood is too thin, so I lower my micromed dose of coumadin, a blood thinner. 
So, this could be smartly adapted, day to day, programmed by my physician or cardiologist. 
And you can imagine that larger printers, fast printers like this, could be in your corner pharmacy, in your doctor's office, in a rural clinic. 
But it could eventually merge and shrink to small ones that could be in your home with integrated cartridges like this that are delivered by drone. 
Could print your personalized polypill, each morning on your kitchen or your bathroom cabinet. 
And this could evolve, I think, into an incredible way to improve adherence in medications across the globe. 
So, I hope we can reimagine the future of medicine in new ways, moving from polypharmacy, one-size-fits-all, low adherence, complications to an era of personalized, precise, on-demand medications that can take us and individualize our own health and health and medicine around the planet. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Host: Daniel, that's kind of awesome. 
Really cool. 
Question for you, though. 
How long is it until, say, that nursing-home patient that you mentioned is able to print their pills in their home? 
Daniel Kraft: Well, again, this is just a prototype. 
We think that the regulatory route [may] be automated compounding, and especially in nursing homes, folks are taking multiple medications, and they're often mixed up, so it would be a perfect place to start with these technologies. 
These aren't going to evolve and start with printers on your bathroom counter. 
We need to be intelligent and smart about how we roll these things out, but realizing there's so many challenges with dosing, adherence and precision, and now that we have all these amazing new technologies that can integrate and be leveraged, I think we need approaches like this to really catalyze and foster a true future of health and medicine. 
Host: Great, thank you. DK: Thanks. 
(Applause) 

So we all have our own biases. 
For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. 
When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. 
Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. 
I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years. 
This is what a classroom in a public school in India looks like. 
There are 1 million such schools in India. 
And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. 
By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 
11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. 
These are things that you and I would expect an 8-year-old to be able to do. 
By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. 
In India, public schools not only offer free education -- they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. 
And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. 
As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. 
That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is. 
So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. 
She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. 
So she said to us, "Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. 
I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. 
Can you possibly help?" 
Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. 
Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. 
It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. 
So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. 
As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. 
One, that I had never done anything like this before. 
And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. 
As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. 
We knew that we had to craft our own journey. 
But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. 
People said, "Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms." 
By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. 
There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things. 
So I said, "Hang on, stop. 
Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve." 
So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. 
Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. 
Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. 
Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. 
But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. 
As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. 
And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us. 
So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. 
Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. 
Well, when we went inside schools, we found something completely different. 
On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. 
And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. 
But they were not teaching. 
I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. 
I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. 
At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students. 
So we asked the teachers, "What's going on, why are you not teaching?" 
And they said, "This is what's expected of us. 
When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. 
Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. 
When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed." 
You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. 
So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. 
Not explicitly, but implicitly. 
And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. 
They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things. 
So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. 
And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. 
We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. 
And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program. 
So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. 
We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, "Let's look around and see what we can find." 
And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. 
Small things being done by NGOs, being done by foundations. 
But what was also interesting was that none of them actually scaled. 
All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. 
And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools. 
So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? 
What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. 
So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. 
And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. 
But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, "Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools." 
Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? 
He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. 
And hence, innovations don't scale. 
So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, "Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools." 
And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. 
Much easier said than done. 
(Laughter) I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. 
We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, "Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?" 
In the end, I think we did find solutions to many of the issues. 
I'll give you an example. 
In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. 
Children shouldn't memorize things from books, they should do activities, and that's a more effective way to learn. 
Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. 
But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. 
We needed another solution. 
We couldn't think of anything. 
One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. 
That was a huge eureka moment for us. 
So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, "To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. 
And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids." 
And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. 
So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one. 
Now, this brings me to my last point. 
How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? 
The department used to have a process which is very interesting. 
I like to call it "The Chain of Hope." 
They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. 
They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. 
And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. 
And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. 
It was a little bit ridiculous. 
Now, we knew technology was the answer, but we also knew that most of these schools don't have a computer or email. 
However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. 
They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp. 
So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. 
It spreads like wildfire. 
You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. 
Teachers can ask clarification questions instantaneously. 
And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. 
Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. 
Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. 
So today, when you go to a school in Haryana, things look different. 
The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. 
Often with innovative techniques. 
When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. 
Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. 
And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. 
Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. 
In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly. 
When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. 
But not in Haryana. 
In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. 
Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. 
Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. 
These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. 
I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. 
And I said, "Why are you smiling, what's going on?" 
And she said, "I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to." 
So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? 
I certainly believe so. 
I think if you give them the right levers, they can move mountains. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

A shabby man named Estragon, sits near a tree at dusk and struggles to remove his boot. 
He’s soon joined by his friend Vladimir, who reminds his anxious companion that they must wait here for someone called Godot. 
So begins a vexing cycle in which the two debate when Godot will come, why they’re waiting, and whether they’re even at the right tree. 
From here, Waiting for Godot only gets stranger - but it’s considered a play that changed the face of modern drama. 
Written by Samuel Beckett between 1949 and 1955, it offers a simple but stirring question - what should the characters do? 
Estragon: Don’t let's do anything. It's safer. 
Vladimir: Let’s wait and see what he says. 
Estragon: Who? 
Vladimir: Godot. 
Estragon: Good idea. 
Such cryptic dialogue and circular reasoning are key features of the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement which emerged after the Second World War and found artists struggling to find meaning in devastation. 
The absurdists deconstructed plot, character and language to question their meaning and share their profound uncertainty on stage. 
While this may sound grim, the absurd blends its hopelessness with humor. 
This is reflected in Beckett’s unique approach to genre in Waiting for Godot, which he branded “a tragicomedy in two acts." 
Tragically, the characters are locked in an existential conundrum: they wait in vain for an unknown figure to give them a sense of purpose, but their only sense of purpose comes from the act of waiting, While they wait, they sink into boredom, express religious dread and contemplate suicide. 
But comically, there is a jagged humor to their predicament, which comes across in their language and movements. 
Their interactions are filled with bizarre wordplay, repetition and double entendres, as well as physical clowning, singing and dancing, and frantically swapping their hats. 
It’s often unclear whether the audience is supposed to laugh or cry - or whether Beckett saw any difference between the two. 
Born in Dublin, Beckett studied English, French and Italian before moving to Paris, where he spent most of his life writing theatre, poetry and prose. 
While Beckett had a lifelong love of language, he also made space for silence by incorporating gaps, pauses and moments of emptiness into his work. 
This was a key feature of his trademark uneven tempo and black humor, which became popular throughout the Theatre of the Absurd. 
He also cultivated a mysterious persona, and refused to confirm or deny any speculations about the meaning of his work. 
This kept audiences guessing, increasing their fascination with his surreal worlds and enigmatic characters. 
The lack of any clear meaning makes Godot endlessly open to interpretation. 
Critics have offered countless readings of the play, resulting in a cycle of ambiguity and speculation that mirrors the plot of the drama itself. 
It's been read as an allegory of the Cold War, the French Resistance, and Britain’s colonization of Ireland. 
The dynamic of the two protagonists has also sparked intense debate. 
They’ve been read as survivors of the apocalypse, an aging couple, two impotent friends, and even as personifications of Freud’s ego and id. 
Famously, Beckett said the only thing he could be sure of was that Vladimir and Estragon were "wearing bowler hats." 
Like the critical speculation and maddening plot, their language often goes in circles as the two bicker and banter, lose their train of thought, and pick up right where they left off: Vladimir: We could start all over again perhaps Estragon: That should be easy Vladimir: It’s the start that’s difficult Estragon: You can start from anything Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide. 
Beckett reminds us that just like our daily lives, the world onstage doesn’t always make sense. 
It can explore both reality and illusion, the familiar and the strange. 
And although a tidy narrative still appeals, the best theatre keeps us thinking – and waiting. 

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

Hi. My name is Aparna. 
I am a shopaholic -- (Laughter) and I'm addicted to online returns. 
(Laughter) Well, at least I was. 
At one time, I had two or three packages of clothing delivered to me every other day. 
I would intentionally buy the same item in a couple different sizes and many colors, because I did not know what I really wanted. 
So I overordered, I tried things on, and then I sent what didn't work back. 
Once my daughter was watching me return some of those packages back, and she said, "Mom, I think you have a problem." 
(Laughter) I didn't think so. 
I mean, it's free shipping and free returns, right? 
(Laughter) I didn't even think twice about it, until I heard a statistic at work that shocked me. 
You see, I'm a global solutions director for top-tier retail, and we were in a meeting with one of my largest customers, discussing how to streamline costs. 
One of their biggest concerns was managing returns. 
Just this past holiday season alone, they had 7.5 million pieces of clothing returned to them. 
I could not stop thinking about it. 
What happens to all these returned clothes? 
So I came home and researched. 
And I learned that every year, four billion pounds of returned clothing ends up in the landfill. 
That's like every resident in the US did a load of laundry last night and decided to throw it in the trash today. 
I was horrified. 
I'm like, "Of all people, I should be able to help prevent this." 
(Laughter) My job is to find solutions to logistical issues like these -- not create them. 
So this issue became very personal to me. 
I said, "You know what? We have to solve this." 
And we can, with some of the existing systems we already have in place. 
And then I started to wonder: How did we get here? 
I mean, it was only like six years ago when a study recommended that offering free online returns would drive customers to spend more. 
We started seeing companies offering free online returns to drive more sales and provide a better experience. 
What we didn't realize is that this would lead to more items being returned as well. 
In the US, companies lost $351 billion in sales in 2017 alone. 
Retailers are scrambling to recover their losses. 
They try to place that returned item online to be sold again, or they'll sell it to a discount partner or a liquidator. 
Basically, if companies cannot find a place for this item quickly and economically, its place becomes the trash. 
Suddenly, I felt very guilty for being that shopper, somebody who contributes to this. 
Who would have thought my innocent shopping behavior would be hurting not only me, but our planet as well? 
And as I thought about what to do, I kept thinking: Why does the item have to be returned to the retailer in the first place? 
What if there was another way, a win-win for everyone? 
What if when a person is trying to return something, it could go to the next shopper who wants it, and not the retailer? 
What if, instead of a return, they could do what I call a "green turn"? 
Consumers could use an app to take pictures of the item and verify the condition while returning it. 
Artificial intelligence systems could then sort these clothes by condition -- mint condition or slightly used -- and direct it to the next appropriate person. 
Mint-condition clothes could automatically go to the next buyer, while slightly used clothes could be marked down and offered online again. 
The retailer can decide the business rules on the number of times a particular item can be resold. 
All that the consumer would need to do is obtain a mobile code, take it to the nearest shipping place to be packed and shipped, and off it goes from one buyer to the next, not the landfill. 
Now you will ask, "Would people really go through all this trouble?" 
I think they would if they had incentives, like loyalty points or cash back. 
Let's call it "green cash." 
There would be a whole new opportunity to make money from this new customer base looking to buy these returns. 
This system would make a fun thing like shopping a spiritual experience that helps save our planet. 
(Applause) This is doable and would probably take six months to weave some of our existing systems and run a pilot. 
Even before any of these logistical systems are in place, each of us shoppers can act now, if every single adult in the US made a few small changes to our shopping behavior. 
Take the extra time to research and think -- Do I really need this item? 
No: Do I really want this item? -- before making a purchase. 
And if every one of us adults in the US returned five less items this year, we would keep 240 million pounds of clothes out of the landfill. 
Six percent reduction, just like that. 
This environmental problem that we have created is not thousands of years away; it's happening today, and must stop now to prevent growing landfills across the globe. 
I want to leave my daughter and my daughter's daughter a better and cleaner place than I found it, so I have not only stopped overordering, I recycle religiously as well. 
And you can, too. It's not difficult. 
Before we fill our shopping carts and our landfills with extra items that we don't want, let's pause next time we are shopping online and think twice about what we all hopefully really do want: a beautiful Earth to call home. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sitting around a campfire, you can feel its heat, smell the woody smoke, and hear it crackle. 
If you get too close, it burns your eyes and stings your nostrils. 
You could stare at the bright flames forever as they twist and flicker in endless incarnations. 
But what exactly are you looking at? 
The flames are obviously not solid, nor are they liquid. 
Mingling with the air, they’re more like a gas, but more visible--and more fleeting. 
And on a scientific level, fire differs from gas because gases can exist in the same state indefinitely while fires always burn out eventually. 
One misconception is that fire is a plasma, the fourth state of matter in which atoms are stripped of their electrons. 
Like fire and unlike the other kinds of matter, plasmas don’t exist in a stable state on earth. 
They only form when gas is exposed to an electric field or superheated to temperatures of thousands or tens of thousands of degrees. 
By contrast, fuels like wood and paper burn at a few hundred degrees —far below the threshold of what's usually considered a plasma. 
So if fire isn’t a solid, liquid, gas, or a plasma, what does that leave? 
It turns out fire isn’t actually matter at all. 
Instead, it’s our sensory experience of a chemical reaction called combustion. 
In a way, fire is like the leaves changing color in fall, the smell of fruit as it ripens, or a firefly’s blinking light. 
All of these are sensory clues that a chemical reaction is taking place. 
What differs about fire is that it engages a lot of our senses at the same time, creating the kind of vivid experience we expect to come from a physical thing. 
Combustion creates that sensory experience using fuel, heat, and oxygen. 
In a campfire, when the logs are heated to their ignition temperature, the walls of their cells decompose, releasing sugars and other molecules into the air. 
These molecules then react with airborne oxygen to create carbon dioxide and water. 
At the same time, any trapped water in the logs vaporizes, expands, ruptures the wood around it, and escapes with a satisfying crackle. 
As the fire heats up, the carbon dioxide and water vapor created by combustion expand. 
Now that they’re less dense, they rise in a thinning column. 
Gravity causes this expansion and rising, which gives flames their characteristic taper. 
Without gravity, molecules don’t separate by density and the flames have a totally different shape. 
We can see all of this because combustion also generates light. 
Molecules emit light when heated, and the color of the light depends on the temperature of the molecules. 
The hottest flames are white or blue. 
The type of molecules in a fire can also influence flame color. 
For instance, any unreacted carbon atoms from the logs form little clumps of soot that rise into the flames and emit the yellow-orange light we associate with a campfire. 
Substances like copper, calcium chloride, and potassium chloride can add their own characteristic hues to the mix. 
Besides colorful flames, fire also continues to generate heat as it burns. 
This heat sustains the flames by keeping the fuel at or above ignition temperature. 
Eventually, though, even the hottest fires run out of fuel or oxygen. 
Then, those twisting flames give a final hiss and disappear with a wisp of smoke as if they were never there at all. 

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

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

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

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

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

(Music) Rainn Wilson: It takes its toll, being alone. 
I'm a little bit lost, and it's finally time to make a real connection. 
Who am I? 
(Drums) I'm a single white male, 45 years of age. 
I love animals. 
Gainfully employed. 
I'm a people person. 
I keep fit. 
Who am I looking for? 
I'm looking for my idea mate. 
Are you that idea that matches with who I really am? 
(Video) Ron Finley: How would you feel if you had no access to healthy food? 
Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do. 
RW: Wow, we sure are getting our fingers dirty for a first date, huh? 
RF: Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do. 
People in these areas -- they're exposed to crappy food. 
I want people to know that growing your own food is like printing your own money. 
RW: You're like a food superhero! 
RF: Food is the problem and food is the solution. 
(Music) Erin McKean: I'm a lexicographer. 
My job is to put every word possible into the dictionary. 
RW: I love words, too -- just as much as any lexi-ta-tographer. 
What if you love a word that you've just made up, like -- I don't know -- "scuberfinkles"? 
Beau Lotto: Do you think you see reality? 
RW: Well, I'm a little nearsighted, but yeah. 
BL: Well, you can't -- I mean, your brain has no access to this world. 
In fact, even the sensory information that your eyes are receiving, your ears are receiving, is completely meaningless because it could mean anything. 
That tree could be a large object far away or a small object up close, and your brain has no way of knowing. 
RW: Once I thought I saw Bigfoot but it was just a German shepherd. 
Isabel Behncke Izquierdo: Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your closest living relatives. 
Bonobos have frequent and promiscuous sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. 
RW: I'm just curious: Do we have any conflict that needs managing or social issues to resolve? 
IBI: Remember -- you're on a date with my idea, not me. 
Jane McGonigal: This is the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win. 
RW: An epic win? 
JM: An epic win is an outcome so extraordinarily positive, you didn't even know it was possible until you achieved it. 
You're not making the face. 
You're making the "I'm not good at life" face. 
RW: Arthur, I want to be really honest with you. 
I am seeing other ideas. OK? 
I'm dating around. 
That's the situation. 
Arthur Benjamin: I'd say this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. 
RW: Do you want to get some pie? 
AB: Pi? 
3.14159265358979 -- Reggie Watts: If we're going to do something, we've got to just make a decision. 
Because without a decision we're left powerless. 
Without power, we have nothing to supply the chain of those who are truly curious to solve all of our current conditions. 
RW: And, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" -- Rush. 
JM: Yes! 
This is the face we need to see on millions of problem solvers worldwide, as we try to tackle the challenges of the next century. 
RW: So, are we going Dutch? 
AB: 3846264338327950 28841... 
971? 
RW: One night, want to go to a movie or something? 
RF: Hell, no! Let's go plant some shit! 
RW: Let's plant some shit! 
Good, now what is this that I'm planting? 
Bonobos! 
IBI: Bonobos! (Laughs) Bonobos. 
RWatts: Um, interested much? 
RW: I want to have your idea baby. 
RWatts: Well, you know what they say in Russia. 
RW: Hm? 
RWatts: "scuberfinckle." 
(Bottles clink) 

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

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

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

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

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

When I opened Mott Hall Bridges Academy in 2010, my goal was simple: open a school to close a prison. 
Now to some, this was an audacious goal, because our school is located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn -- one of the most underserved and violent neighborhoods in all of New York City. 
Like many urban schools with high poverty rates, we face numerous challenges, like finding teachers who can empathize with the complexities of a disadvantaged community, lack of funding for technology, low parental involvement and neighborhood gangs that recruit children as early as fourth grade. 
So here I was, the founding principal of a middle school that was a district public school, and I only had 45 kids to start. 
Thirty percent of them had special needs. 
Eighty-six percent of them were below grade level in English and in math. 
And 100 percent were living below the poverty level. 
If our children are not in our classrooms, how will they learn? 
And if they're not learning, where would they end up? 
It was evident when I would ask my 13-year-old, "Young man, where do you see yourself in five years?" 
And his response: "I don't know if I'm gonna live that long." 
Or to have a young woman say to me that she had a lifelong goal of working in a fast-food restaurant. 
To me, this was unacceptable. 
It was also evident that they had no idea that there was a landscape of opportunity that existed beyond their neighborhood. 
We call our students "scholars," because they're lifelong learners. 
And the skills that they learn today will prepare them for college and career readiness. 
I chose the royal colors of purple and black, because I want them to be reminded that they are descendants of greatness, and that through education, they are future engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and even leaders who can and will take over this world. 
To date, we have had three graduating classes, at a 98 -- (Applause) At a 98-percent graduation rate. 
This is nearly 200 children, who are now going to some of the most competitive high schools in New York City. 
(Applause) It was a cold day in January when my scholar, Vidal Chastanet, met Brandon Stanton, the founder of the popular blog "Humans of New York." 
Brandon shared the story of a young man from Brownsville who had witnessed violence firsthand, by witnessing a man being thrown off of a roof. 
Yet he can still be influenced by a principal who had opened up a school that believes in all children. 
Vidal embodies the story of so many of our underprivileged children who are struggling to survive, which is why we must make education a priority. 
Brandon's post created a global sensation that touched the lives of millions. 
This resulted in 1.4 million dollars being raised for our scholars to attend field trips to colleges and universities, Summer STEAM programs, as well as college scholarships. 
You need to understand that when 200 young people from Brownsville visited Harvard, they now understood that a college of their choice was a real possibility. 
And the impossibilities that had been imposed upon them by a disadvantaged community were replaced by hope and purpose. 
The revolution in education is happening in our schools, with adults who provide love, structure, support and knowledge. 
These are the things that inspire children. 
But it is not an easy task. 
And there are high demands within an education system that is not perfect. 
But I have a dynamic group of educators who collaborate as a team to determine what is the best curriculum. 
They take time beyond their school day, and come in on weekends and even use their own money to often provide resources when we do not have it. 
And as the principal, I have to inspect what I expect. 
So I show up in classes and I conduct observations to give feedback, because I want my teachers to be just as successful as the name Mott Hall Bridges Academy. 
And I give them access to me every single day, which is why they all have my personal cell number, including my scholars and those who graduated -- which is probably why I get phone calls and text messages at three o'clock in the morning. 
(Laughter) But we are all connected to succeed, and good leaders do this. 
Tomorrow's future is sitting in our classrooms. 
And they are our responsibility. 
That means everyone in here, and those who are watching the screen. 
We must believe in their brilliance, and remind them by teaching them that there indeed is power in education. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

The language I'm speaking right now is on its way to becoming the world's universal language, for better or for worse. 
Let's face it, it's the language of the internet, it's the language of finance, it's the language of air traffic control, of popular music, diplomacy -- English is everywhere. 
Now, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people, but more Chinese people are learning English than English speakers are learning Chinese. 
Last I heard, there are two dozen universities in China right now teaching all in English. 
English is taking over. 
And in addition to that, it's been predicted that at the end of the century almost all of the languages that exist now -- there are about 6,000 -- will no longer be spoken. 
There will only be some hundreds left. 
And on top of that, it's at the point where instant translation of live speech is not only possible, but it gets better every year. 
The reason I'm reciting those things to you is because I can tell that we're getting to the point where a question is going to start being asked, which is: Why should we learn foreign languages -- other than if English happens to be foreign to one? 
Why bother to learn another one when it's getting to the point where almost everybody in the world will be able to communicate in one? 
I think there are a lot of reasons, but I first want to address the one that you're probably most likely to have heard of, because actually it's more dangerous than you might think. 
And that is the idea that a language channels your thoughts, that the vocabulary and the grammar of different languages gives everybody a different kind of acid trip, so to speak. 
That is a marvelously enticing idea, but it's kind of fraught. 
So it's not that it's untrue completely. 
So for example, in French and Spanish the word for table is, for some reason, marked as feminine. 
So, "la table," "la mesa," you just have to deal with it. 
It has been shown that if you are a speaker of one of those languages and you happen to be asked how you would imagine a table talking, then much more often than could possibly be an accident, a French or a Spanish speaker says that the table would talk with a high and feminine voice. 
So if you're French or Spanish, to you, a table is kind of a girl, as opposed to if you are an English speaker. 
It's hard not to love data like that, and many people will tell you that that means that there's a worldview that you have if you speak one of those languages. 
But you have to watch out, because imagine if somebody put us under the microscope, the us being those of us who speak English natively. 
What is the worldview from English? 
So for example, let's take an English speaker. 
Up on the screen, that is Bono. 
He speaks English. 
I presume he has a worldview. 
Now, that is Donald Trump. 
In his way, he speaks English as well. 
(Laughter) And here is Ms. Kardashian, and she is an English speaker, too. 
So here are three speakers of the English language. 
What worldview do those three people have in common? 
What worldview is shaped through the English language that unites them? 
It's a highly fraught concept. 
And so gradual consensus is becoming that language can shape thought, but it tends to be in rather darling, obscure psychological flutters. 
It's not a matter of giving you a different pair of glasses on the world. 
Now, if that's the case, then why learn languages? 
If it isn't going to change the way you think, what would the other reasons be? 
There are some. 
One of them is that if you want to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in, if you want to become part of it, then whether or not the language channels the culture -- and that seems doubtful -- if you want to imbibe the culture, you have to control to some degree the language that the culture happens to be conducted in. 
There's no other way. 
There's an interesting illustration of this. 
I have to go slightly obscure, but really you should seek it out. 
There's a movie by the Canadian film director Denys Arcand -- read out in English on the page, "Dennis Ar-cand," if you want to look him up. 
He did a film called "Jesus of Montreal." 
And many of the characters are vibrant, funny, passionate, interesting French-Canadian, French-speaking women. 
There's one scene closest to the end, where they have to take a friend to an Anglophone hospital. 
In the hospital, they have to speak English. 
Now, they speak English but it's not their native language, they'd rather not speak English. 
And they speak it more slowly, they have accents, they're not idiomatic. 
Suddenly these characters that you've fallen in love with become husks of themselves, they're shadows of themselves. 
To go into a culture and to only ever process people through that kind of skrim curtain is to never truly get the culture. 
And so to the extent that hundreds of languages will be left, one reason to learn them is because they are tickets to being able to participate in the culture of the people who speak them, just by virtue of the fact that it is their code. 
So that's one reason. 
Second reason: it's been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. 
And these are factors that set in early, and so that ought to give you some sense of when to give junior or juniorette lessons in another language. 
Bilingualism is healthy. 
And then, third -- languages are just an awful lot of fun. 
Much more fun than we're often told. 
So for example, Arabic: "kataba," he wrote, "yaktubu," he writes, she writes. 
"Uktub," write, in the imperative. 
What do those things have in common? 
All those things have in common the consonants sitting in the middle like pillars. 
They stay still, and the vowels dance around the consonants. 
Who wouldn't want to roll that around in their mouths? 
You can get that from Hebrew, you can get that from Ethiopia's main language, Amharic. 
That's fun. 
Or languages have different word orders. 
Learning how to speak with different word order is like driving on the different side of a street if you go to certain country, or the feeling that you get when you put Witch Hazel around your eyes and you feel the tingle. 
A language can do that to you. 
So for example, "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," a book that I'm sure we all often return to, like "Moby Dick." 
One phrase in it is, "Do you know where I found him? 
Do you know where he was? He was eating cake in the tub, Yes he was!" 
Fine. Now, if you learn that in Mandarin Chinese, then you have to master, "You can know, I did where him find? 
He was tub inside gorging cake, No mistake gorging chewing!" 
That just feels good. 
Imagine being able to do that for years and years at a time. 
Or, have you ever learned any Cambodian? 
Me either, but if I did, I would get to roll around in my mouth not some baker's dozen of vowels like English has, but a good 30 different vowels scooching and oozing around in the Cambodian mouth like bees in a hive. 
That is what a language can get you. 
And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. 
It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher -- some genius teacher in there -- but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times. 
You had to go to class. 
If you didn't have that, you had something called a record. 
I cut my teeth on those. 
There was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. 
Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was. 
Today you can lay down -- lie on your living room floor, sipping bourbon, and teach yourself any language that you want to with wonderful sets such as Rosetta Stone. 
I highly recommend the lesser known Glossika as well. 
You can do it any time, therefore you can do it more and better. 
You can give yourself your morning pleasures in various languages. 
I take some "Dilbert" in various languages every single morning; it can increase your skills. 
Couldn't have done it 20 years ago when the idea of having any language you wanted in your pocket, coming from your phone, would have sounded like science fiction to very sophisticated people. 
So I highly recommend that you teach yourself languages other than the one that I'm speaking, because there's never been a better time to do it. 
It's an awful lot of fun. 
It won't change your mind, but it will most certainly blow your mind. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I'd like you all to close your eyes, please ... 
and imagine yourself sitting in the middle of a large, open field with the sun setting on your right. 
And as the sun sets, imagine that tonight you don't just see the stars appear, but you're able to hear the stars appear with the brightest stars being the loudest notes and the hotter, bluer stars producing the higher-pitched notes. 
(Music) And since each constellation is made up of different types of stars, they'll each produce their own unique melody, such as Aries, the ram. 
(Music) Or Orion, the hunter. 
(Music) Or even Taurus, the bull. 
(Music) We live in a musical universe, and we can use that to experience it from a new perspective, and to share that perspective with a wider range of people. 
Let me show you what I mean. 
(Music ends) Now, when I tell people I'm an astrophysicist, they're usually pretty impressed. 
And then I say I'm also a musician -- they're like, "Yeah, we know." 
(Laughter) So everyone seems to know that there's this deep connection between music and astronomy. 
And it's actually a very old idea; it goes back over 2,000 years to Pythagoras. 
You might remember Pythagoras from such theorems as the Pythagorean theorem -- (Laughter) And he said: "There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres." 
And so he literally thought that the motions of the planets along the celestial sphere created harmonious music. 
And if you asked him, "Why don't we hear anything?" 
he'd say you can't hear it because you don't know what it's like to not hear it; you don't know what true silence is. 
It's like how you have to wait for your power to go out to hear how annoying your refrigerator was. 
Maybe you buy that, but not everybody else was buying it, including such names as Aristotle. 
(Laughter) Exact words. 
(Laughter) So I'll paraphrase his exact words. 
He said it's a nice idea, but if something as large and vast as the heavens themselves were moving and making sounds, it wouldn't just be audible, it would be earth-shatteringly loud. 
We exist, therefore there is no music of the spheres. 
He also thought that the brain's only purpose was to cool down the blood, so there's that ... 
(Laughter) But I'd like to show you that in some way they were actually both right. 
And we're going to start by understanding what makes music musical. 
It may sound like a silly question, but have you ever wondered why it is that certain notes, when played together, sound relatively pleasing or consonant, such as these two -- (Music) while others are a lot more tense or dissonant, such as these two. 
(Music) Right? 
Why is that? Why are there notes at all? 
Why can you be in or out of tune? 
Well, the answer to that question was actually solved by Pythagoras himself. 
Take a look at the string on the far left. 
If you bow that string, it will produce a note as it oscillates very fast back and forth. 
(Musical note) But now if you cut the string in half, you'll get two strings, each oscillating twice as fast. 
And that will produce a related note. 
Or three times as fast, or four times -- (Musical notes) And so the secret to musical harmony really is simple ratios: the simpler the ratio, the more pleasing or consonant those two notes will sound together. 
And the more complex the ratio, the more dissonant they will sound. 
And it's this interplay between tension and release, or consonance and dissonance, that makes what we call music. 
(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) But there's more. 
(Laughter) So the two features of music we like to think of as pitch and rhythms, they're actually two versions of the same thing, and I can show you. 
(Slow rhythm) That's a rhythm right? 
Watch what happens when we speed it up. 
(Rhythm gets gradually faster) (High pitch) (Lowering pitch) (Slow Rhythm) So once a rhythm starts happening more than about 20 times per second, your brain flips. 
It stops hearing it as a rhythm and starts hearing it as a pitch. 
So what does this have to do with astronomy? 
Well, that's when we get to the TRAPPIST-1 system. 
This is an exoplanetary system discovered last February of 2017, and it got everyone excited because it is seven Earth-sized planets all orbiting a very near red dwarf star. 
And we think that three of the planets have the right temperature for liquid water. 
It's also so close that in the next few years, we should be able to detect elements in their atmospheres such as oxygen and methane -- potential signs of life. 
But one thing about the TRAPPIST system is that it is tiny. 
So here we have the orbits of the inner rocky planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and all seven Earth-sized planets of TRAPPIST-1 are tucked well inside the orbit of Mercury. 
I have to expand this by 25 times for you to see the orbits of the TRAPPIST-1 planets. 
It's actually much more similar in size to our planet Jupiter and its moons, even though it's seven Earth-size planets orbiting a star. 
Another reason this got everyone excited was artist renderings like this. 
You got some liquid water, some ice, maybe some land, maybe you can go for a dive in this amazing orange sunset. 
It got everyone excited, and then a few months later, some other papers came out that said, actually, it probably looks more like this. 
(Laughter) So there were signs that some of the surfaces might actually be molten lava and that there were very damaging X-rays coming from the central star -- X-rays that will sterilize the surface of life and even strip off atmospheres. 
Luckily, just a few months ago in 2018, some new papers came out with more refined measurements, and they found actually it does look something like that. 
(Laughter) So we now know that several of them have huge supplies of water -- global oceans -- and several of them have thick atmospheres, so it's the right place to look for potential life. 
But there's something even more exciting about this system, especially for me. 
And that's that TRAPPIST-1 is a resonant chain. 
And so that means for every two orbits of the outer planet, the next one in orbits three times, and the next one in four, and then six, nine, 15 and 24. 
So you see a lot of very simple ratios among the orbits of these planets. 
Clearly, if you speed up their motion, you can get rhythms, right? 
One beat, say, for every time a planet goes around. 
But now we know if you speed that motion up even more, you'll actually produce musical pitches, and in this case alone, those pitches will work together, making harmonious, even human-like harmony. 
So let's hear TRAPPIST-1. 
The first thing you'll hear will be a note for every orbit of each planet, and just keep in mind, this music is coming from the system itself. 
I'm not creating the pitches or rhythms, I'm just bringing them into the human hearing range. 
And after all seven planets have entered, you're going to see -- well, you're going to hear a drum for every time two planets align. 
That's when they kind of get close to each other and give each other a gravitational tug. 
(Tone) (Two tones) (Three tones) (Four tones) (Five tones) (Six tones) (Seven tones) (Drum beats) (Music ends) And that's the sound of the star itself -- its light converted into sound. 
So you may wonder how this is even possible. 
And it's good to think of the analogy of an orchestra. 
When everyone gets together to start playing in an orchestra, they can't just dive into it, right? 
They have to all get in tune; they have to make sure their instruments resonate with their neighbors' instruments, and something very similar happened to TRAPPIST-1 early in its existence. 
When the planets were first forming, they were orbiting within a disc of gas, and while inside that disc, they can actually slide around and adjust their orbits to their neighbors until they're perfectly in tune. 
And it's a good thing they did because this system is so compact -- a lot of mass in a tight space -- if every aspect of their orbits wasn't very finely tuned, they would very quickly disrupt each other's orbits, destroying the whole system. 
So it's really music that is keeping this system alive -- and any of its potential inhabitants. 
But what does our solar system sound like? 
I hate to be the one to show you this, but it's not pretty. 
(Laughter) So for one thing, our solar system is on a much, much larger scale, and so to hear all eight planets, we have to start with Neptune near the bottom of our hearing range, and then Mercury's going to be all the way up near the very top of our hearing range. 
But also, since our planets are not very compact -- they're very spread out -- they didn't have to adjust their orbits to each other, so they're kind of just all playing their own random note at random times. 
So, I'm sorry, but here it is. 
(Tone) That's Neptune. 
(Two tones) Uranus. 
(Three tones) Saturn. 
(Four tones) Jupiter. 
And then tucked in, that's Mars. 
(Five tones) (Six tones) Earth. 
(Seven tones) Venus. 
(Eight tones) And that's Mercury -- OK, OK, I'll stop. 
(Laughter) So this was actually Kepler's dream. 
Johannes Kepler is the person that figured out the laws of planetary motion. 
He was completely fascinated by this idea that there's a connection between music, astronomy and geometry. 
And so he actually spent an entire book just searching for any kind of musical harmony amongst the solar system's planets and it was really, really hard. 
It would have been much easier had he lived on TRAPPIST-1, or for that matter ... 
K2-138. 
This is a new system discovered in January of 2018 with five planets, and just like TRAPPIST, early on in their existence, they were all finely tuned. 
They were actually tuned into a tuning structure proposed by Pythagoras himself, over 2,000 years before. 
But the system's actually named after Kepler, discovered by the Kepler space telescope. 
And so, in the last few billion years, they've actually lost their tuning, quite a bit more than TRAPPIST has, and so what we're going to do is go back in time and imagine what they would've sounded like just as they were forming. 
(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you. 
Now, you may be wondering: How far does this go? 
How much music actually is out there? 
And that's what I was wondering last fall when I was working at U of T's planetarium, and I was contacted by an artist named Robyn Rennie and her daughter Erin. 
Robyn loves the night sky, but she hasn't been able to fully see it for 13 years because of vision loss. 
And so they wondered if there was anything I could do. 
So I collected all the sounds I could think of from the universe and packaged them into what became "Our Musical Universe." 
This is a sound-based planetarium show exploring the rhythm and harmony of the cosmos. 
And Robyn was so moved by this presentation that when she went home, she painted this gorgeous representation of her experience. 
And then I defaced it by putting Jupiter on it for the poster. 
(Laughter) So ... 
in this show, I take people of all vision levels and bring them on an audio tour of the universe, from the night sky all the way out to the edge of the observable universe. 
But even this is just the start of a musical odyssey to experience the universe with new eyes and with new ears, and I hope you'll join me. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

The earliest time measurements were observations of cycles of the natural world, using patterns of changes from day to night and season to season to build calendars. 
More precise time-keeping, like sundials and mechanical clocks, eventually came along to put time in more convenient boxes. 
But what exactly is it that we’re measuring? 
Is time something that physically exists, or is it just in our heads? 
At first the answer seems obvious— of course time exists; it constantly unfolds all around us, and it’s hard to imagine the universe without it. 
But our understanding of time started getting complicated thanks to Einstein. 
His theory of relativity tells us that time passes for everyone, but doesn’t always pass at the same rate for people in different situations, like those travelling close to the speed of light or orbiting a supermassive black hole. 
Einstein resolved the malleability of time by combining it with space to define space-time, which can bend, but behaves in consistent, predictable ways. 
Einstein’s theory seemed to confirm that time is woven into the very fabric of the universe. 
But there’s a big question it didn’t fully resolve: why is it we can move through space in any direction, but through time in only one? 
No matter what we do, the past is always, stubbornly, behind us. 
This is called the arrow of time. 
When a drop of food coloring is dropped into a glass of water, we instinctively know that the coloring will drift out from the drop, eventually filling the glass. 
Imagine watching the opposite happen. 
Here, we’d recognize time as unfolding backwards. 
We live in a universe where the food coloring spreads out in the water, not a universe where it collects together. 
In physics, this is described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that systems will gain disorder, or entropy, over time. 
Systems in our universe move from order to disorder, and it is that property of the universe that defines the direction of time’s arrow. 
So if time is such a fundamental property, it should be in our most fundamental equations describing the universe, right? 
We currently have two sets of equations that govern physics. 
General relativity describes the behavior of very large things, while quantum physics explains the very small. 
One of the biggest goals in theoretical physics over the last half century has been reconciling the two into one fundamental “theory of everything." 
There have been many attempts —none yet proven— and they treat time in different ways. 
Oddly enough, one contender called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, doesn’t include time at all. 
Like all current theories of everything, that equation is speculative. 
But as a thought experiment, if it or a similarly time-starved equation turned out to be true, would that mean that time doesn’t exist, at the most fundamental level? 
Could time just be some sort of illusion generated by the limitations of the way we perceive the universe? 
We don’t yet know, but maybe that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. 
Instead of asking if time exists as a fundamental property, maybe it could exist as an emergent one. 
Emergent properties are things that don’t exist in individual pieces of a system, but do exist for the system as a whole. 
Each individual water molecule doesn’t have a tide, but the whole ocean does. 
A movie creates change through time by using a series of still images that appear to have a fluid, continuous change between them. 
Flipping through the images fast enough, our brains perceive the passage of time from the sequence of still images. 
No individual frame of the movie changes or contains the passage of time, but it’s a property that comes out of how the pieces are strung together. 
The movement is real, yet also an illusion. 
Could the physics of time somehow be a similar illusion? 
Physicists are still exploring these and other questions, so we’re far from a complete explanation. 
At least for the moment. 

Hi. 
Thank you. 
[Jennifer Brea is sound-sensitive. 
The live audience was asked to applaud ASL-style, in silence.] So, five years ago, this was me. 
I was a PhD student at Harvard, and I loved to travel. 
I had just gotten engaged to marry the love of my life. 
I was 28, and like so many of us when we are in good health, I felt like I was invincible. 
Then one day I had a fever of 104.7 degrees. 
I probably should have gone to the doctor, but I'd never really been sick in my life, and I knew that usually, if you have a virus, you stay home and you make some chicken soup, and in a few days, everything will be fine. 
But this time it wasn't fine. 
After the fever broke, for three weeks I was so dizzy, I couldn't leave my house. 
I would walk straight into door frames. 
I had to hug the walls just to make it to the bathroom. 
That spring I got infection after infection, and every time I went to the doctor, he said there was absolutely nothing wrong. 
He had his laboratory tests, which always came back normal. 
All I had were my symptoms, which I could describe, but no one else can see. 
I know it sounds silly, but you have to find a way to explain things like this to yourself, and so I thought maybe I was just aging. 
Maybe this is what it's like to be on the other side of 25. 
(Laughter) Then the neurological symptoms started. 
Sometimes I would find that I couldn't draw the right side of a circle. 
Other times I wouldn't be able to speak or move at all. 
I saw every kind of specialist: infectious disease doctors, dermatologists, endocrinologists, cardiologists. 
I even saw a psychiatrist. 
My psychiatrist said, "It's clear you're really sick, but not with anything psychiatric. 
I hope they can find out what's wrong with you." 
The next day, my neurologist diagnosed me with conversion disorder. 
He told me that everything -- the fevers, the sore throats, the sinus infection, all of the gastrointestinal, neurological and cardiac symptoms -- were being caused by some distant emotional trauma that I could not remember. 
The symptoms were real, he said, but they had no biological cause. 
I was training to be a social scientist. 
I had studied statistics, probability theory, mathematical modeling, experimental design. 
I felt like I couldn't just reject my neurologist's diagnosis. 
It didn't feel true, but I knew from my training that the truth is often counterintuitive, so easily obscured by what we want to believe. 
So I had to consider the possibility that he was right. 
That day, I ran a small experiment. 
I walked back the two miles from my neurologist's office to my house, my legs wrapped in this strange, almost electric kind of pain. 
I meditated on that pain, contemplating how my mind could have possibly generated all this. 
As soon as I walked through the door, I collapsed. 
My brain and my spinal cord were burning. 
My neck was so stiff I couldn't touch my chin to my chest, and the slightest sound -- the rustling of the sheets, my husband walking barefoot in the next room -- could cause excruciating pain. 
I would spend most of the next two years in bed. 
How could my doctor have gotten it so wrong? 
I thought I had a rare disease, something doctors had never seen. 
And then I went online and found thousands of people all over the world living with the same symptoms, similarly isolated, similarly disbelieved. 
Some could still work, but had to spend their evenings and weekends in bed, just so they could show up the next Monday. 
On the other end of the spectrum, some were so sick they had to live in complete darkness, unable to tolerate the sound of a human voice or the touch of a loved one. 
I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. 
You've probably heard it called "chronic fatigue syndrome." 
For decades, that's a name that's meant that this has been the dominant image of a disease that can be as serious as this. 
The key symptom we all share is that whenever we exert ourselves -- physically, mentally -- we pay and we pay hard. 
If my husband goes for a run, he might be sore for a couple of days. 
If I try to walk half a block, I might be bedridden for a week. 
It is a perfect custom prison. 
I know ballet dancers who can't dance, accountants who can't add, medical students who never became doctors. 
It doesn't matter what you once were; you can't do it anymore. 
It's been four years, and I've still never been as well as I was the minute before I walked home from my neurologist's office. 
It's estimated that about 15 to 30 million people around the world have this disease. 
In the US, where I'm from, it's about one million people. 
That makes it roughly twice as common as multiple sclerosis. 
Patients can live for decades with the physical function of someone with congestive heart failure. 
Twenty-five percent of us are homebound or bedridden, and 75 to 85 percent of us can't even work part-time. 
Yet doctors do not treat us and science does not study us. 
How could a disease this common and this devastating have been forgotten by medicine? 
When my doctor diagnosed me with conversion disorder, he was invoking a lineage of ideas about women's bodies that are over 2,500 years old. 
The Roman physician Galen thought that hysteria was caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women. 
The Greeks thought the uterus would literally dry up and wander around the body in search of moisture, pressing on internal organs -- yes -- causing symptoms from extreme emotions to dizziness and paralysis. 
The cure was marriage and motherhood. 
These ideas went largely unchanged for several millennia until the 1880s, when neurologists tried to modernize the theory of hysteria. 
Sigmund Freud developed a theory that the unconscious mind could produce physical symptoms when dealing with memories or emotions too painful for the conscious mind to handle. 
It converted these emotions into physical symptoms. 
This meant that men could now get hysteria, but of course women were still the most susceptible. 
When I began investigating the history of my own disease, I was amazed to find how deep these ideas still run. 
In 1934, 198 doctors, nurses and staff at the Los Angeles County General Hospital became seriously ill. 
They had muscle weakness, stiffness in the neck and back, fevers -- all of the same symptoms I had when I first got diagnosed. 
Doctors thought it was a new form of polio. 
Since then, there have been more than 70 outbreaks documented around the world, of a strikingly similar post-infectious disease. 
All of these outbreaks have tended to disproportionately affect women, and in time, when doctors failed to find the one cause of the disease, they thought that these outbreaks were mass hysteria. 
Why has this idea had such staying power? 
I do think it has to do with sexism, but I also think that fundamentally, doctors want to help. 
They want to know the answer, and this category allows doctors to treat what would otherwise be untreatable, to explain illnesses that have no explanation. 
The problem is that this can cause real harm. 
In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named Eliot Slater studied a cohort of 85 patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria. 
Nine years later, 12 of them were dead and 30 had become disabled. 
Many had undiagnosed conditions like multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, brain tumors. 
In 1980, hysteria was officially renamed "conversion disorder." 
When my neurologist gave me that diagnosis in 2012, he was echoing Freud's words verbatim, and even today, women are 2 to 10 times more likely to receive that diagnosis. 
The problem with the theory of hysteria or psychogenic illness is that it can never be proven. 
It is by definition the absence of evidence, and in the case of ME, psychological explanations have held back biological research. 
All around the world, ME is one of the least funded diseases. 
In the US, we spend each year roughly 2,500 dollars per AIDS patient, 250 dollars per MS patient and just 5 dollars per year per ME patient. 
This was not just lightning. 
I was not just unlucky. 
The ignorance surrounding my disease has been a choice, a choice made by the institutions that were supposed to protect us. 
We don't know why ME sometimes runs in families, why you can get it after almost any infection, from enteroviruses to Epstein-Barr virus to Q fever, or why it affects women at two to three times the rate of men. 
This issue is much bigger than just my disease. 
When I first got sick, old friends were reaching out to me. 
I soon found myself a part of a cohort of women in their late 20s whose bodies were falling apart. 
What was striking was just how much trouble we were having being taken seriously. 
I learned of one woman with scleroderma, an autoimmune connective tissue disease, who was told for years that it was all in her head. 
Between the time of onset and diagnosis, her esophagus was so thoroughly damaged, she will never be able to eat again. 
Another woman with ovarian cancer, who for years was told that it was just early menopause. 
A friend from college, whose brain tumor was misdiagnosed for years as anxiety. 
Here's why this worries me: since the 1950s, rates of many autoimmune diseases have doubled to tripled. 
Forty-five percent of patients who are eventually diagnosed with a recognized autoimmune disease are initially told they're hypochondriacs. 
Like the hysteria of old, this has everything to do with gender and with whose stories we believe. 
Seventy-five percent of autoimmune disease patients are women, and in some diseases, it's as high as 90 percent. 
Even though these diseases disproportionately affect women, they are not women's diseases. 
ME affects children and ME affects millions of men. 
And as one patient told me, we get it coming and going -- if you're a woman, you're told you're exaggerating your symptoms, but if you're a guy, you're told to be strong, to buck up. 
And men may even have a more difficult time getting diagnosed. 
My brain is not what it used to be. 
Here's the good part: despite everything, I still have hope. 
So many diseases were once thought of as psychological until science uncovered their biological mechanisms. 
Patients with epilepsy could be forcibly institutionalized until the EEG was able to measure abnormal electrical activity in the brain. 
Multiple sclerosis could be misdiagnosed as hysterical paralysis until the CAT scan and the MRI discovered brain lesions. 
And recently, we used to think that stomach ulcers were just caused by stress, until we discovered that H. pylori was the culprit. 
ME has never benefited from the kind of science that other diseases have had, but that's starting to change. 
In Germany, scientists are starting to find evidence of autoimmunity, and in Japan, of brain inflammation. 
In the US, scientists at Stanford are finding abnormalities in energy metabolism that are 16 standard deviations away from normal. 
And in Norway, researchers are running a phase-3 clinical trial on a cancer drug that in some patients causes complete remission. 
What also gives me hope is the resilience of patients. 
Online we came together, and we shared our stories. 
We devoured what research there was. 
We experimented on ourselves. 
We became our own scientists and our own doctors because we had to be. 
And slowly I added five percent here, five percent there, until eventually, on a good day, I was able to leave my home. 
I still had to make ridiculous choices: Will I sit in the garden for 15 minutes, or will I wash my hair today? 
But it gave me hope that I could be treated. 
I had a sick body; that was all. 
And with the right kind of help, maybe one day I could get better. 
I came together with patients around the world, and we started to fight. 
We have filled the void with something wonderful, but it is not enough. 
I still don't know if I will ever be able to run again, or walk at any distance, or do any of those kinetic things that I now only get to do in my dreams. 
But I am so grateful for how far I have come. 
Progress is slow, and it is up and it is down, but I am getting a little better each day. 
I remember what it was like when I was stuck in that bedroom, when it had been months since I had seen the sun. 
I thought that I would die there. 
But here I am today, with you, and that is a miracle. 
I don't know what would have happened had I not been one of the lucky ones, had I gotten sick before the internet, had I not found my community. 
I probably would have already taken my own life, as so many others have done. 
How many lives could we have saved, decades ago, if we had asked the right questions? 
How many lives could we save today if we decide to make a real start? 
Even once the true cause of my disease is discovered, if we don't change our institutions and our culture, we will do this again to another disease. 
Living with this illness has taught me that science and medicine are profoundly human endeavors. 
Doctors, scientists and policy makers are not immune to the same biases that affect all of us. 
We need to think in more nuanced ways about women's health. 
Our immune systems are just as much a battleground for equality as the rest of our bodies. 
We need to listen to patients' stories, and we need to be willing to say, "I don't know." 
"I don't know" is a beautiful thing. 
"I don't know" is where discovery starts. 
And if we can do that, if we can approach the great vastness of all that we do not know, and then, rather than fear uncertainty, maybe we can greet it with a sense of wonder. 
Thank you. 
Thank you. 

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

In 1987, Tina Lord found herself in quite the pickle. 
See, this gold digger made sure she married sweet Cord Roberts just before he inherited millions. 
But when Cord found out Tina loved his money as much as she loved him, he dumped her. 
Cord's mother Maria was thrilled until they hooked up again. 
So Maria hired Max Holden to romance Tina and then made sure Cord didn't find out Tina was pregnant with his baby. 
So Tina, still married but thinking Cord didn't love her flew to Argentina with Max. 
Cord finally figured out what was going on and rushed after them, but he was too late. 
Tina had already been kidnapped, strapped to a raft and sent over a waterfall. 
She and her baby were presumed dead. 
Cord was sad for a bit, but then he bounced right back with a supersmart archaeologist named Kate, and they had a gorgeous wedding until Tina, seemingly back from the dead, ran into the church holding a baby. 
"Stop!" she screamed. 
"Am I too late? 
Cord, I've come so far. 
This is your son." 
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the soap opera "One Life to Live" introduced a love story that lasted 25 years. 
(Laughter) Now, if you've ever seen a soap opera, you know the stories and the characters can be exaggerated, larger than life, and if you're a fan, you find that exaggeration fun, and if you're not, maybe you find them melodramatic or unsophisticated. 
Maybe you think watching soap operas is a waste of time, that their bigness means their lessons are small or nonexistent. 
But I believe the opposite to be true. 
Soap operas reflect life, just bigger. 
So there are real life lessons we can learn from soap operas, and those lessons are as big and adventurous as any soap opera storyline. 
Now, I've been a fan since I ran home from the bus stop in second grade desperate to catch the end of Luke and Laura's wedding, the biggest moment in "General Hospital" history. 
(Applause) So you can imagine how much I loved my eight years as the assistant casting director on "As the World Turns." 
My job was watching soap operas, reading soap opera scripts and auditioning actors to be on soap operas. 
So I know my stuff. 
(Laughter) And yes, soap operas are larger than life, drama on a grand scale, but our lives can be filled with as much intensity, and the stakes can feel just as dramatic. 
We cycle through tragedy and joy just like these characters. 
We cross thresholds, fight demons and find salvation unexpectedly, and we do it again and again and again, but just like soaps, we can flip the script, which means we can learn from these characters that move like bumblebees, looping and swerving through life. 
And we can use those lessons to craft our own life stories. 
Soap operas teach us to push away doubt and believe in our capacity for bravery, vulnerability, adaptability and resilience. 
And most importantly, they show us it's never too late to change your story. 
So with that, let's start with soap opera lesson one: surrender is not an option. 
(Laughter) "All My Children"'s Erica Kane was daytime's version of Scarlett O'Hara, a hyperbolically self-important princess who deep down was scrappy and daring. 
Now, in her 41 years on TV, perhaps Erica's most famous scene is her alone in the woods suddenly face to face with a grizzly bear. 
She screamed at the bear, "You may not do this! 
Do you understand me? 
You may not come near me! 
I am Erica Kane and you are a filthy beast!" 
(Laughter) And of course the bear left, so what that teaches us is obstacles are to be expected and we can choose to surrender or we can stand and fight. 
Pandora's Tim Westergren knows this better than most. 
You might even call him the Erica Kane of Silicon Valley. 
Tim and his cofounders launched the company with two million dollars in funding. 
They were out of cash the next year. 
Now, lots of companies fold at that point, but Tim chose to fight. 
He maxed out 11 credit cards and racked up six figures in personal debt and it still wasn't enough. 
So every two weeks for two years on payday he stood in front of his employees and he asked them to sacrifice their salaries, and it worked. 
More than 50 people deferred two million dollars, and now, more than a decade later, Pandora is worth billions. 
When you believe that there is a way around or through whatever is in front of you, that surrender is not an option, you can overcome enormous obstacles. 
Which brings us to soap opera lesson two: sacrifice your ego and drop the superiority complex. 
Now, this is scary. 
It's an acknowledgment of need or fallibility. 
Maybe it's even an admission that we're not as special as we might like to think. 
Stephanie Forrester of "The Bold and the Beautiful" thought she was pretty darn special. 
She thought she was so special, she didn't need to mix with the riffraff from the valley, and she made sure valley girl Brooke knew it. 
But after nearly 25 years of epic fighting, Stephanie got sick and let Brooke in. 
They made amends, archenemies became soul mates and Stephanie died in Brooke's arms, and here's our takeaway. 
Drop your ego. 
Life is not about you. 
It's about us, and our ability to experience joy and love and to improve our reality comes only when we make ourselves vulnerable and we accept responsibility for our actions and our inactions, kind of like Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. 
Now, after a great run as CEO, Howard stepped down in 2000, and Starbucks quickly overextended itself and stock prices fell. 
Howard rejoined the team in 2008, and one of the first things he did was apologize to all 180,000 employees. 
He apologized. 
And then he asked for help, honesty, and ideas in return. 
And now, Starbucks has more than doubled its net revenue since Howard came back. 
So sacrifice your desire to be right or safe all the time. 
It's not helping anyone, least of all you. 
Sacrifice your ego. 
Soap opera lesson three: evolution is real. 
You're not meant to be static characters. 
On television, static equals boring and boring equals fired. 
Characters are supposed to grow and change. 
Now, on TV, those dynamic changes can make for some rough transitions, particularly when a character is played by one person yesterday and played by someone new today. 
Recasting happens all the time on soaps. 
Over the last 20 years, four different actors have played the same key role of Carly Benson on "General Hospital." 
Each new face triggered a change in the character's life and personality. 
Now, there was always an essential nugget of Carly in there, but the character and the story adapted to whomever was playing her. 
And here's what that means for us. 
While we may not swap faces in our own lives, we can evolve too. 
We can choose to draw a circle around our feet and stay in that spot, or we can open ourselves to opportunities like Carly, who went from nursing student to hotel owner, or like Julia Child. 
Julia was a World War II spy, and when the war ended, she got married, moved to France, and decided to give culinary school a shot. 
Julia, her books and her TV shows revolutionized the way America cooks. 
We all have the power to initiate change in our lives, to evolve and adapt. 
We make the choice, but sometimes life chooses for us, and we don't get a heads up. 
Surprise slams us in the face. 
You're flat on the ground, the air is gone, and you need resuscitation. 
So thank goodness for soap opera lesson four: resurrection is possible. 
(Laughter) (Applause) In 1983, "Days of Our Lives"' Stefano DiMera died of a stroke, but not really, because in 1984 he died when his car plunged into the harbor, and yet he was back in 1985 with a brain tumor. 
(Laughter) But before the tumor could kill him, Marlena shot him, and he tumbled off a catwalk to his death. 
And so it went for 30 years. 
(Laughter) Even when we saw the body, we knew better. 
He's called the Phoenix for a reason. 
And here's what that means for us. 
As long as the show is still on the air, or you're still breathing, nothing is permanent. 
Resurrection is possible. 
Now, of course, just like life, soap operas do ultimately meet the big finale. 
CBS canceled my show, "As The World Turns," in December 2009, and we shot our final episode in June 2010. 
It was six months of dying and I rode that train right into the mountain. 
And even though we were in the middle of a huge recession and millions of people were struggling to find work, I somehow thought everything would be OK. 
So I packed up the kids and the Brooklyn apartment, and we moved in with my in-laws in Alabama. 
(Laughter) Three months later, nothing was OK. 
That was when I watched the final episode air, and I realized the show was not the only fatality. 
I was one too. 
I was unemployed and living on the second floor of my in-laws' home, and that's enough to make anyone feel dead inside. 
(Laughter) But I knew my story wasn't over, that it couldn't be over. 
I just had to tap into everything I had ever learned about soap operas. 
I had to be brave like Erica and refuse to surrender, so every day, I made a decision to fight. 
I had to be vulnerable like Stephanie and sacrifice my ego. 
I had to ask for help a lot of times across many states. 
I had to be adaptable like Carly and evolve my skills, my mindset, and my circumstances, and then I had to be resilient, like Stefano, and resurrect myself and my career like a phoenix from the ashes. 
Eventually I got an interview. 
After 15 years in news and entertainment, nine months of unemployment and this one interview, I had an offer for an entry level job. 
I was 37 years old and I was back from the dead. 
We will all experience what looks like an ending, and we can choose to make it a beginning. 
Kind of like Tina, who miraculously survived that waterfall, and because I hate to leave a cliffhanger hanging, Tina and Cord did get divorced, but they got remarried three times before the show went off the air in 2012. 
So remember, as long as there is breath in your body, it's never too late to change your story. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. 
One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. 
I have four small children, and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes it's just not their fault. 
I was once late to my own speech on time management. 
(Laughter) We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony. 
The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. 
Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. 
And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. 
I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up with before they call me. 
Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns -- (Laughter) Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're totally getting in on the bottom side of that. 
And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. 
That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise. 
(Laughter) Which is true. 
You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? 
Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right? 
(Laughter) Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. 
But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. 
We don't build the lives we want by saving time. 
We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself. 
Here's what I mean. 
I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. 
They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments -- busy, busy people. 
I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book. 
One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. 
She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. 
If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. 
So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. 
All this is being recorded on her time log. 
Winds up taking seven hours of her week. 
Seven hours. 
That's like finding an extra hour in the day. 
But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?" 
"Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?" 
I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, "No -- can't you see how busy I am?" 
Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. 
And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. 
We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. 
And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. 
To get at this, I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. 
By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. 
I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she "had it all" -- that phrase. 
I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me. 
Of course, right? 
But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. 
So of course this makes me even more intrigued, and when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. 
She says, "Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice." 
And rather than say, "I don't have time to do x, y or z," she'd say, "I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority." 
"I don't have time," often means "It's not a priority." 
If you think about it, that's really more accurate language. 
I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. 
If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly. 
(Laughter) Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it. 
Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. 
And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making different choices, I will give you that. 
But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there. 
So how do we do that? 
How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater? 
Well, first we need to figure out what they are. 
I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this. 
The first, on the professional side: I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year are giving or getting annual performance reviews. 
You look back over your successes over the year, your "opportunities for growth." 
And this serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. 
So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year. 
You're giving yourself a performance review, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally. 
What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? 
So you can write next year's performance review now. 
And you can do this for your personal life, too. 
I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter. 
(Laughter) Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. 
But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. 
So this year's kind of done, but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the people you care about. 
What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? 
So you can write next year's family holiday letter now. 
Don't send it. 
(Laughter) Please, don't send it. 
But you can write it. 
And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter, we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year. 
And now we need to break these down into doable steps. 
So maybe you want to write a family history. 
First, you can read some other family histories, get a sense for the style. 
Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. 
Or maybe you want to run a 5K. 
So you need to find a race and sign up, figure out a training plan, and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet. 
And then -- this is key -- we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. 
We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them. 
I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. 
Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a "low opportunity cost" time. 
Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, "I am excited to make progress toward my personal and professional priorities right now." 
(Laughter) But we are willing to think about what those should be. 
So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. 
Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories. 
Career, we think about; relationships, self -- not so much. 
But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each. 
Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in. 
Where you plan them in is up to you. 
I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. 
I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. 
It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class if you are caring for multiple children on your own. 
I get that. 
And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle. 
But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering. 
There are 168 hours in a week. 
Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. 
That is a lot of time. 
If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week -- that leaves 72 hours for other things. 
That is a lot of time. 
You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. 
Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. 
You say you're working 60 hours. 
Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. 
You say you're working more than 60 hours. 
Well, are you sure? 
(Laughter) There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. 
They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours. 
(Laughter) You can guess in which direction, right? 
Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. 
If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. 
And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours. 
So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? 
We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. 
But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? 
Pull out the phone, right? 
Start deleting emails. 
Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV. 
But small moments can have great power. 
You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. 
Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. 
I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. 
It made the whole experience almost, almost, enjoyable. 
Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. 
If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute. 
It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. 
I truly believe this. 
There is time. 
Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. 
And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Growing up in Kenya, I knew I always wanted to study biochemistry. 
See, I had seen the impact of the high prevalence of diseases like malaria, and I wanted to make medicines that would cure the sick. 
So I worked really hard, got a scholarship to the United States, where I became a cancer researcher, and I loved it. 
For someone who wants to cure diseases, there is no higher calling. 
Ten years later, I returned to Kenya to do just that. 
A freshly minted PhD, ready to take on this horrific illness, which in Kenya was almost certainly a death sentence. 
But instead of landing a job in a pharmaceutical company or a hospital, I found myself drawn to a different kind of lab, working with a different kind of patient -- a patient whose illness was so serious it impacted every single person in my country; a patient who needed to get healthy fast. 
That patient was my government. 
(Laughter) See, many of us will agree that lots of governments are unhealthy today. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And Kenya was no exception. 
When I returned to Kenya in 2014, there was 17 percent youth unemployment. 
And Nairobi, the major business hub, was rated 177th on the quality of living index. 
It was bad. 
Now, an economy is only as healthy as the entities that make it up. 
So when government -- one of its most vital entities -- is weak or unhealthy, everyone and everything suffers. 
Sometimes you might put a Band-Aid in place to try and temporarily stop the pain. 
Maybe some of you here have participated in a Band-Aid operation to an African country -- setting up alternative schools, building hospitals, digging wells -- because governments there either weren't or couldn't provide the services to their citizens. 
We all know this is a temporary solution. 
There are just some things Band-Aids can't fix, like providing an environment where businesses feel secure that they'll have an equal opportunity to be able to run and start their businesses successfully. 
Or there are systems in place that would protect the private property that they create. 
I would argue, only government is capable of creating these necessary conditions for economies to thrive. 
Economies thrive when business are able to quickly and easily set up shop. 
Business owners create new sources of income for themselves, new jobs get added into the economy and then more taxes are paid to fund public projects. 
New business is good for everyone. 
And it's such an important measure of economic growth, the World Bank has a ranking called the "Ease of Doing Business Ranking," which measures how easy or difficult it is to start a business in any given country. 
And as you can imagine, starting or running a business in a country with an ailing government -- almost impossible. 
The President of Kenya knew this, which is why in 2014, he came to our lab and asked us to partner with him to be able to help Kenya to jump-start business growth. 
He set an ambitious goal: he wanted Kenya to be ranked top 50 in this World Bank ranking. 
In 2014 when he came, Kenya was ranked 136 out of 189 countries. 
We had our work cut out for us. 
Fortunately, he came to the right place. 
We're not just a Band-Aid kind of team. 
We're a group of computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers and a cancer researcher, who understood that in order to cure the sickness of a system as big as government, we needed to examine the whole body, and then we needed to drill down all the way from the organs, into the tissues, all the way to single cells, so that we could properly make a diagnosis. 
So with our marching orders from the President himself, we embarked on the purest of the scientific method: collecting data -- all the data we could get our hands on -- making hypotheses, creating solutions, one after the other. 
So we met with hundreds of individuals who worked at government agencies, from the tax agency, the lands office, utilities company, the agency that's responsible for registering companies, and with each of them, we observed them as they served customers, we documented their processes -- most of them were manual. 
We also just went back and looked at a lot of their previous paperwork to try and really understand; to try and diagnose what bodily malfunctions had occurred that lead to that 136th spot on the World Bank list. 
What did we find? 
Well, in Kenya it was taking 72 days for a business owner to register their property, compared to just one day in New Zealand, which was ranked second on the World Bank list. 
It took 158 days to get a new electric connection. 
In Korea it took 18 days. 
If you wanted to get a construction permit so you could put up a building, in Kenya, it was going to take you 125 days. 
In Singapore, which is ranked first, that would only take you 26 days. 
God forbid you had to go to court to get help in being able to settle a dispute to enforce a contract, because that process alone would take you 465 days. 
And if that wasn't bad enough, you would lose 40 percent of your claim in just fees -- legal fees, enforcement fees, court fees. 
Now, I know what you're thinking: for there to exist such inefficiencies in an African country, there must be corruption. 
The very cells that run the show must be corrupt to the bone. 
I thought so, too, actually. 
When we started out, I thought I was going to find so much corruption, I was literally going to either die or get killed in the process. 
(Laughter) But when we dug deeper, we didn't find corruption in the classic sense: slimy gangsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to grease the palms of their friends. 
What we found was an overwhelming sense of helplessness. 
Our government was sick, because government employees felt helpless. 
They felt that they were not empowered to drive change. 
And when people feel stuck and helpless, they stop seeing their role in a bigger system. 
They start to think the work they do doesn't matter in driving change. 
And when that happens, things slow down, fall through the cracks and inefficiencies flourish. 
Now imagine with me, if you had a process you had to go through -- had no other alternative -- and this process was inefficient, complex and very, very slow. 
What would you do? 
I think you might start by trying to find somebody to outsource it to, so that they can just take care of that for you. 
If that doesn't work, maybe you'd consider paying somebody to just "unofficially" take care of it on your behalf -- especially if you thought nobody was going to catch you. 
Not out of malice or greed, just trying to make sure that you get something to work for you so you can move on. 
Unfortunately, that is the beginning of corruption. 
And if left to thrive and grow, it seeps into the whole system, and before you know it, the whole body is sick. 
Knowing this, we had to start by making sure that every single stakeholder we worked with had a shared vision for what we wanted to do. 
So we met with everyone, from the clerk whose sole job is to remove staples from application packets, to the legal drafters at the attorney general's office, to the clerks who are responsible for serving business owners when they came to access government services. 
And with them, we made sure that they understood how their day-to-day actions were impacting our ability as a country to create new jobs and to attract investments. 
No one's role was too small; everyone's role was vital. 
Now, guess what we started to see? 
A coalition of government employees who are excited and ready to drive change, began to grow and form. 
And together we started to implement changes that impacted the service delivery of our country. 
The result? 
In just two years, Kenya's ranking moved from 136 to 92. 
(Applause) And in recognition of the significant reforms we've been able to implement in such a short time, Kenya was recognized to be among the top three global reformers in the world two years in a row. 
(Applause) Are we fully healthy? 
No. 
We have some serious work still to do. 
I like to think about these two years like a weight-loss program. 
(Laughter) It's that time after months of hard, grueling work at the gym, and then you get your first time to weigh yourself, and you've lost 20 pounds. 
You're feeling unstoppable. 
Now, some of you may think this doesn't apply to you. 
You're not from Kenya. 
You don't intend to be an entrepreneur. 
But think with me for just a moment. 
When is the last time you accessed a government service? 
Maybe applied for your driver's license, tried to do your taxes on your own. 
It's easy in this political and global economy to want to give up when we think about transforming government. 
We can easily resign to the fact or to the thinking that government is too inefficient, too corrupt, unfixable. 
We might even rarely get some key government responsibilities to other sectors, to Band-Aid solutions, or to just give up and feel helpless. 
But just because a system is sick doesn't mean it's dying. 
We cannot afford to give up when it comes to the challenges of fixing our governments. 
In the end, what really makes a government healthy is when healthy cells -- that's you and I -- get to the ground, roll up our sleeves, refuse to be helpless and believe that sometimes, all it takes is for us to create some space for healthy cells to grow and thrive. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Let's imagine a sculptor building a statue, just chipping away with his chisel. 
Michelangelo had this elegant way of describing it when he said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it's the task of the sculptor to discover it." 
But what if he worked in the opposite direction? 
Not from a solid block of stone, but from a pile of dust, somehow gluing millions of these particles together to form a statue. 
I know that's an absurd notion. 
It's probably impossible. 
The only way you get a statue from a pile of dust is if the statue built itself -- if somehow we could compel millions of these particles to come together to form the statue. 
Now, as odd as that sounds, that is almost exactly the problem I work on in my lab. 
I don't build with stone, I build with nanomaterials. 
They're these just impossibly small, fascinating little objects. 
They're so small that if this controller was a nanoparticle, a human hair would be the size of this entire room. 
And they're at the heart of a field we call nanotechnology, which I'm sure we've all heard about, and we've all heard how it is going to change everything. 
When I was a graduate student, it was one of the most exciting times to be working in nanotechnology. 
There were scientific breakthroughs happening all the time. 
The conferences were buzzing, there was tons of money pouring in from funding agencies. 
And the reason is when objects get really small, they're governed by a different set of physics that govern ordinary objects, like the ones we interact with. 
We call this physics quantum mechanics. 
And what it tells you is that you can precisely tune their behavior just by making seemingly small changes to them, like adding or removing a handful of atoms, or twisting the material. 
It's like this ultimate toolkit. 
You really felt empowered; you felt like you could make anything. 
And we were doing it -- and by we I mean my whole generation of graduate students. 
We were trying to make blazing fast computers using nanomaterials. 
We were constructing quantum dots that could one day go in your body and find and fight disease. 
There were even groups trying to make an elevator to space using carbon nanotubes. 
You can look that up, that's true. 
Anyways, we thought it was going to affect all parts of science and technology, from computing to medicine. 
And I have to admit, I drank all of the Kool-Aid. 
I mean, every last drop. 
But that was 15 years ago, and -- fantastic science was done, really important work. 
We've learned a lot. 
We were never able to translate that science into new technologies -- into technologies that could actually impact people. 
And the reason is, these nanomaterials -- they're like a double-edged sword. 
The same thing that makes them so interesting -- their small size -- also makes them impossible to work with. 
It's literally like trying to build a statue out of a pile of dust. 
And we just don't have the tools that are small enough to work with them. 
But even if we did, it wouldn't really matter, because we couldn't one by one place millions of particles together to build a technology. 
So because of that, all of the promise and all of the excitement has remained just that: promise and excitement. 
We don't have any disease-fighting nanobots, there's no elevators to space, and the thing that I'm most interested in, no new types of computing. 
Now that last one, that's a really important one. 
We just have come to expect the pace of computing advancements to go on indefinitely. 
We've built entire economies on this idea. 
And this pace exists because of our ability to pack more and more devices onto a computer chip. 
And as those devices get smaller, they get faster, they consume less power and they get cheaper. 
And it's this convergence that gives us this incredible pace. 
As an example: if I took the room-sized computer that sent three men to the moon and back and somehow compressed it -- compressed the world's greatest computer of its day, so it was the same size as your smartphone -- your actual smartphone, that thing you spent 300 bucks on and just toss out every two years, would blow this thing away. 
You would not be impressed. 
It couldn't do anything that your smartphone does. 
It would be slow, you couldn't put any of your stuff on it, you could possibly get through the first two minutes of a "Walking Dead" episode if you're lucky -- (Laughter) The point is the progress -- it's not gradual. 
The progress is relentless. 
It's exponential. 
It compounds on itself year after year, to the point where if you compare a technology from one generation to the next, they're almost unrecognizable. 
And we owe it to ourselves to keep this progress going. 
We want to say the same thing 10, 20, 30 years from now: look what we've done over the last 30 years. 
Yet we know this progress may not last forever. 
In fact, the party's kind of winding down. 
It's like "last call for alcohol," right? 
If you look under the covers, by many metrics like speed and performance, the progress has already slowed to a halt. 
So if we want to keep this party going, we have to do what we've always been able to do, and that is to innovate. 
So our group's role and our group's mission is to innovate by employing carbon nanotubes, because we think that they can provide a path to continue this pace. 
They are just like they sound. 
They're tiny, hollow tubes of carbon atoms, and their nanoscale size, that small size, gives rise to these just outstanding electronic properties. 
And the science tells us if we could employ them in computing, we could see up to a ten times improvement in performance. 
It's like skipping through several technology generations in just one step. 
So there we have it. 
We have this really important problem and we have what is basically the ideal solution. 
The science is screaming at us, "This is what you should be doing to solve your problem." 
So, all right, let's get started, let's do this. 
But you just run right back into that double-edged sword. 
This "ideal solution" contains a material that's impossible to work with. 
I'd have to arrange billions of them just to make one single computer chip. 
It's that same conundrum, it's like this undying problem. 
At this point, we said, "Let's just stop. 
Let's not go down that same road. 
Let's just figure out what's missing. 
What are we not dealing with? 
What are we not doing that needs to be done?" 
It's like in "The Godfather," right? 
When Fredo betrays his brother Michael, we all know what needs to be done. 
Fredo's got to go. 
(Laughter) But Michael -- he puts it off. 
Fine, I get it. 
Their mother's still alive, it would make her upset. 
We just said, "What's the Fredo in our problem?" 
What are we not dealing with? 
What are we not doing, but needs to be done to make this a success?" 
And the answer is that the statue has to build itself. 
We have to find a way, somehow, to compel, to convince billions of these particles to assemble themselves into the technology. 
We can't do it for them. They have to do it for themselves. 
And it's the hard way, and this is not trivial, but in this case, it's the only way. 
Now, as it turns out, this is not that alien of a problem. 
We just don't build anything this way. 
People don't build anything this way. 
But if you look around -- and there's examples everywhere -- Mother Nature builds everything this way. 
Everything is built from the bottom up. 
You can go to the beach, you'll find these simple organisms that use proteins -- basically molecules -- to template what is essentially sand, just plucking it from the sea and building these extraordinary architectures with extreme diversity. 
And nature's not crude like us, just hacking away. 
She's elegant and smart, building with what's available, molecule by molecule, making structures with a complexity and a diversity that we can't even approach. 
And she's already at the nano. 
She's been there for hundreds of millions of years. 
We're the ones that are late to the party. 
So we decided that we're going to use the same tool that nature uses, and that's chemistry. 
Chemistry is the missing tool. 
And chemistry works in this case because these nanoscale objects are about the same size as molecules, so we can use them to steer these objects around, much like a tool. 
That's exactly what we've done in our lab. 
We've developed chemistry that goes into the pile of dust, into the pile of nanoparticles, and pulls out exactly the ones we need. 
Then we can use chemistry to arrange literally billions of these particles into the pattern we need to build circuits. 
And because we can do that, we can build circuits that are many times faster than what anyone's been able to make using nanomaterials before. 
Chemistry's the missing tool, and every day our tool gets sharper and gets more precise. 
And eventually -- and we hope this is within a handful of years -- we can deliver on one of those original promises. 
Now, computing is just one example. 
It's the one that I'm interested in, that my group is really invested in, but there are others in renewable energy, in medicine, in structural materials, where the science is going to tell you to move towards the nano. 
That's where the biggest benefit is. 
But if we're going to do that, the scientists of today and tomorrow are going to need new tools -- tools just like the ones I described. 
And they will need chemistry. That's the point. 
The beauty of science is that once you develop these new tools, they're out there. 
They're out there forever, and anyone anywhere can pick them up and use them, and help to deliver on the promise of nanotechnology. 
Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. 
(Applause) 

OK, so today I want to talk about how we talk about love. 
And specifically, I want to talk about what's wrong with how we talk about love. 
Most of us will probably fall in love a few times over the course of our lives, and in the English language, this metaphor, falling, is really the main way that we talk about that experience. 
I don't know about you, but when I conceptualize this metaphor, what I picture is straight out of a cartoon -- like there's a man, he's walking down the sidewalk, without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole, and he just plummets into the sewer below. 
And I picture it this way because falling is not jumping. 
Falling is accidental, it's uncontrollable. 
It's something that happens to us without our consent. 
And this -- this is the main way we talk about starting a new relationship. 
I am a writer and I'm also an English teacher, which means I think about words for a living. 
You could say that I get paid to argue that the language we use matters, and I would like to argue that many of the metaphors we use to talk about love -- maybe even most of them -- are a problem. 
So, in love, we fall. 
We're struck. 
We are crushed. 
We swoon. 
We burn with passion. 
Love makes us crazy, and it makes us sick. 
Our hearts ache, and then they break. 
So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone to extreme violence or illness. 
(Laughter) They do. 
And they position us as the victims of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances. 
My favorite one of these is "smitten," which is the past participle of the word "smite." 
And if you look this word up in the dictionary -- (Laughter) you will see that it can be defined as both "grievous affliction," and, "to be very much in love." 
I tend to associate the word "smite" with a very particular context, which is the Old Testament. 
In the Book of Exodus alone, there are 16 references to smiting, which is the word that the Bible uses for the vengeance of an angry God. 
(Laughter) Here we are using the same word to talk about love that we use to explain a plague of locusts. 
(Laughter) Right? 
So, how did this happen? 
How have we come to associate love with great pain and suffering? 
And why do we talk about this ostensibly good experience as if we are victims? 
These are difficult questions, but I have some theories. 
And to think this through, I want to focus on one metaphor in particular, which is the idea of love as madness. 
When I first started researching romantic love, I found these madness metaphors everywhere. 
The history of Western culture is full of language that equates love to mental illness. 
These are just a few examples. 
William Shakespeare: "Love is merely a madness," from "As You Like It." 
Friedrich Nietzsche: "There is always some madness in love." 
"Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love -- " (Laughter) from the great philosopher, Beyoncé Knowles. 
(Laughter) I fell in love for the first time when I was 20, and it was a pretty turbulent relationship right from the start. 
And it was long distance for the first couple of years, so for me that meant very high highs and very low lows. 
I can remember one moment in particular. 
I was sitting on a bed in a hostel in South America, and I was watching the person I love walk out the door. 
And it was late, it was nearly midnight, we'd gotten into an argument over dinner, and when we got back to our room, he threw his things in the bag and stormed out. 
While I can no longer remember what that argument was about, I very clearly remember how I felt watching him leave. 
I was 22, it was my first time in the developing world, and I was totally alone. 
I had another week until my flight home, and I knew the name of the town that I was in, and the name of the city that I needed to get to to fly out, but I had no idea how to get around. 
I had no guidebook and very little money, and I spoke no Spanish. 
Someone more adventurous than me might have seen this as a moment of opportunity, but I just froze. 
I just sat there. 
And then I burst into tears. 
But despite my panic, some small voice in my head thought, "Wow. That was dramatic. 
I must really be doing this love thing right." 
(Laughter) Because some part of me wanted to feel miserable in love. 
And it sounds so strange to me now, but at 22, I longed to have dramatic experiences, and in that moment, I was irrational and furious and devastated, and weirdly enough, I thought that this somehow legitimized the feelings I had for the guy who had just left me. 
I think on some level I wanted to feel a little bit crazy, because I thought that that was how love worked. 
This really should not be surprising, considering that according to Wikipedia, there are eight films, 14 songs, two albums and one novel with the title "Crazy Love." 
About half an hour later, he came back to our room. 
We made up. 
We spent another mostly happy week traveling together. 
And then, when I got home, I thought, "That was so terrible and so great. 
This must be a real romance." 
I expected my first love to feel like madness, and of course, it met that expectation very well. 
But loving someone like that -- as if my entire well-being depended on him loving me back -- was not very good for me or for him. 
But I suspect this experience of love is not that unusual. 
Most of us do feel a bit mad in the early stages of romantic love. 
In fact, there is research to confirm that this is somewhat normal, because, neurochemically speaking, romantic love and mental illness are not that easily distinguished. 
This is true. 
This study from 1999 used blood tests to confirm that the serotonin levels of the newly in love very closely resembled the serotonin levels of people who had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. 
(Laughter) Yes, and low levels of serotonin are also associated with seasonal affective disorder and depression. 
So there is some evidence that love is associated with changes to our moods and our behaviors. 
And there are other studies to confirm that most relationships begin this way. 
Researchers believe that the low levels of serotonin is correlated with obsessive thinking about the object of love, which is like this feeling that someone has set up camp in your brain. 
And most of us feel this way when we first fall in love. 
But the good news is, it doesn't always last that long -- usually from a few months to a couple of years. 
When I got back from my trip to South America, I spent a lot of time alone in my room, checking my email, desperate to hear from the guy I loved. 
I decided that if my friends could not understand my grievous affliction, then I did not need their friendship. 
So I stopped hanging out with most of them. 
And it was probably the most unhappy year of my life. 
But I think I felt like it was my job to be miserable, because if I could be miserable, then I would prove how much I loved him. 
And if I could prove it, then we would have to end up together eventually. 
This is the real madness, because there is no cosmic rule that says that great suffering equals great reward, but we talk about love as if this is true. 
Our experiences of love are both biological and cultural. 
Our biology tells us that love is good by activating these reward circuits in our brain, and it tells us that love is painful when, after a fight or a breakup, that neurochemical reward is withdrawn. 
And in fact -- and maybe you've heard this -- neurochemically speaking, going through a breakup is a lot like going through cocaine withdrawal, which I find reassuring. 
(Laughter) And then our culture uses language to shape and reinforce these ideas about love. 
In this case, we're talking about metaphors about pain and addiction and madness. 
It's kind of an interesting feedback loop. 
Love is powerful and at times painful, and we express this in our words and stories, but then our words and stories prime us to expect love to be powerful and painful. 
What's interesting to me is that all of this happens in a culture that values lifelong monogamy. 
It seems like we want it both ways: we want love to feel like madness, and we want it to last an entire lifetime. 
That sounds terrible. 
(Laughter) To reconcile this, we need to either change our culture or change our expectations. 
So, imagine if we were all less passive in love. 
If we were more assertive, more open-minded, more generous and instead of falling in love, we stepped into love. 
I know that this is asking a lot, but I'm not actually the first person to suggest this. 
In their book, "Metaphors We Live By," linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff suggest a really interesting solution to this dilemma, which is to change our metaphors. 
They argue that metaphors really do shape the way we experience the world, and that they can even act as a guide for future actions, like self-fulfilling prophecies. 
Johnson and Lakoff suggest a new metaphor for love: love as a collaborative work of art. 
I really like this way of thinking about love. 
Linguists talk about metaphors as having entailments, which is essentially a way of considering all the implications of, or ideas contained within, a given metaphor. 
And Johnson and Lakoff talk about everything that collaborating on a work of art entails: effort, compromise, patience, shared goals. 
These ideas align nicely with our cultural investment in long-term romantic commitment, but they also work well for other kinds of relationships -- short-term, casual, polyamorous, non-monogamous, asexual -- because this metaphor brings much more complex ideas to the experience of loving someone. 
So if love is a collaborative work of art, then love is an aesthetic experience. 
Love is unpredictable, love is creative, love requires communication and discipline, it is frustrating and emotionally demanding. 
And love involves both joy and pain. 
Ultimately, each experience of love is different. 
When I was younger, it never occurred to me that I was allowed to demand more from love, that I didn't have to just accept whatever love offered. 
When 14-year-old Juliet first meets -- or, when 14-year-old Juliet cannot be with Romeo, whom she has met four days ago, she does not feel disappointed or angsty. 
Where is she? 
She wants to die. 
Right? 
And just as a refresher, at this point in the play, act three of five, Romeo is not dead. 
He's alive, he's healthy, he's just been banished from the city. 
I understand that 16th-century Verona is unlike contemporary North America, and yet when I first read this play, also at age 14, Juliet's suffering made sense to me. 
Reframing love as something I get to create with someone I admire, rather than something that just happens to me without my control or consent, is empowering. 
It's still hard. 
Love still feels totally maddening and crushing some days, and when I feel really frustrated, I have to remind myself: my job in this relationship is to talk to my partner about what I want to make together. 
This isn't easy, either. 
But it's just so much better than the alternative, which is that thing that feels like madness. 
This version of love is not about winning or losing someone's affection. 
Instead, it requires that you trust your partner and talk about things when trusting feels difficult, which sounds so simple, but is actually a kind of revolutionary, radical act. 
This is because you get to stop thinking about yourself and what you're gaining or losing in your relationship, and you get to start thinking about what you have to offer. 
This version of love allows us to say things like, "Hey, we're not very good collaborators. Maybe this isn't for us." 
Or, "That relationship was shorter than I had planned, but it was still kind of beautiful." 
The beautiful thing about the collaborative work of art is that it will not paint or draw or sculpt itself. 
This version of love allows us to decide what it looks like. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Bryn Freedman: So you said that in the 20th century, global power was in the hands of government. 
At the beginning of this digital century, it really moved to corporations and that in the future, it would move to individuals. 
And I've interviewed a lot of people, and they say you're wrong, and they are betting on the companies. 
So why are you right, and why are individuals going to win out? 
Fadi Chehadé: Because companies cater to individuals, and we as the citizenry need to start understanding that we have a big role in shaping how the world will be governed, moving forward. 
Yes, indeed, the tug of war right now is between governments, who lost much of their power to companies because the internet is not built around the nation-state system around which governments have power. 
The internet is transnational. 
It's not international, and it's not national, and therefore the companies became very powerful. 
They shape our economy. 
They shape our society. 
Governments don't know what to do. 
Right now, they're reacting. 
And I fear that if we do not, as the citizenry -- which are, in my opinion, the most important leg of that stool -- don't take our role, then you are right. 
The detractors, or the people telling you that businesses will prevail, are right. 
It will happen. 
BF: So are you saying that individuals will force businesses or business will be forced to be responsive, or is there a fear that they won't be? 
FC: I think they will be. 
Look at two weeks ago, a small company called Skip winning over Uber and Lyft and everyone to actually get the license for the San Francisco scooter business. 
And if you read why did Skip win, because Skip listened to the people of San Francisco, who were tired of scooters being thrown everywhere, and actually went to the city and said, "We will deploy the service, but we will respond to the people's requirements that we organize ourselves around a set of rules." 
They self-governed their behavior, and they won the contract over some very powerful companies. 
BF: So speaking of guidelines and self-governance, you've spent an entire lifetime creating guidelines and norms for the internet. 
Do you think those days are over? 
Who is going to guide, who is going to control, and who is going to create those norms? 
FC: The rules that govern the technology layers of the internet are now well put in place, and I was very busy for a few years setting those rules around the part of the internet that makes the internet one network. 
The domain-name system, the IP numbers, all of that is in place. 
However, as we get now into the upper layers of the internet, the issues that affect me and you every day -- privacy, security, etc. -- the system to create norms for those unfortunately is not in place. 
So we do have an issue. 
We have a system of cooperation and governance that really needs to be created right now so that companies, governments and the citizenry can agree how this new digital world is going to advance. 
BF: So what gives a digital company any incentive? 
Let's say -- Facebook comes to mind -- they would say they have their users' best interests at heart, but I think a lot of people would disagree with that. 
FC: It's been very difficult to watch how tech companies have reacted to the citizenry's response to their technologies. 
And some of them, two or three years ago, basically dismissed it. 
The word that I heard in many board rooms is, "We're just a technology platform. 
It's not my issue if my technology platform causes families to go kill their girls in Pakistan. 
It's not my issue. It's their problem. 
I just have a technology platform." 
Now, I think we are now entering a stage where companies are starting to realize this is no longer sustainable, and they're starting to see the pushback that's coming from people, users, citizens, but also governments that are starting to say, "This cannot be." 
So I think there is a maturity that is starting to set, especially in that Silicon Valley area, where people are beginning to say, "We have a role." 
So when I speak to these leaders, I say, "Look, you could be the CEO, a very successful CEO of a company, but you could also be a steward." 
And that's the key word. 
"You could be a steward of the power you have to shape the lives and the economies of billions of people. 
Which one do you want to be?" 
And the answer is, it's not one or the other. 
This is what we are missing right now. 
So when an adult like Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said a few months ago, "We need a new set of Geneva Conventions to manage the security of the digital space," many of the senior leaders in Silicon Valley actually spoke against his words. 
"What do you mean, Geneva Convention? 
We don't need any Geneva Conventions. We self-regulate." 
But that mood is changing, and I'm starting to see many leaders say, "Help us out." 
But here lies the conundrum. 
Who is going to help those leaders do the right thing? 
BF: So who is going to help them? 
Because I'd love to interview you for an hour, but give me your biggest fear and your best hope for how this is going to work out. 
FC: My biggest hope is that we will become each stewards of this new digital world. 
That's my biggest hope, because I do think, often, we want to put the blame on others. 
"Oh, it's these CEOs. They're behaving this way." 
"These governments are not doing enough." 
But how about us? 
How is each of us actually taking the responsibility to be a steward of the digital space we live in? 
And one of the things I've been pushing on university presidents is we need every engineering and science and computer science student who is about to write the next line of code or design the next IoT device to actually have in them a sense of responsibility and stewardship towards what they're building. 
So I suggested we create a new oath, like the Hippocratic Oath, so that every student entering an engineering program takes a technocratic oath or a wisdom oath or some oath of commitment to the rest of us. 
That's my best hope, that we all rise. 
Because governments and businesses will fight over this power game, but where are we? 
And unless we play into that power table, I think we'll end up in a bad place. 
My biggest fear? 
My biggest fear, to be very tactical today, what is keeping me up at night is the current war between the West, the liberal world, and China, in the area of artificial intelligence. 
There is a real war going on, and for those of us who have lived through the nuclear nonproliferation age and saw how people agreed to take some very dangerous things off the table, well, the Carnegie Endowment just finished a study. 
They talked to every country that made nuclear weapons and asked them, "Which digital 'weapon' would you take off the table against somebody else's schools or hospitals?" 
And the answer -- from every nuclear power -- to this question was, nothing. 
That's what I'm worried about ... 
The weaponization of the digital space, and the race to get there. 
BF: Well, it sounds like you've got a lot of work to do, and so do the rest of us. 
Fadi, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. 
FC: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Most of us go through life trying to do our best at whatever we do, whether it's our job, family, school or anything else. 
I feel that way. I try my best. 
But some time ago, I came to a realization that I wasn't getting much better at the things I cared most about, whether it was being a husband or a friend or a professional or teammate, and I wasn't improving much at those things even though I was spending a lot of time working hard at them. 
I've since realized from conversations I've had and from research that this stagnation, despite hard work, turns out to be pretty common. 
So I'd like to share with you some insights into why that is and what we can all do about it. 
What I've learned is that the most effective people and teams in any domain do something we can all emulate. 
They go through life deliberately alternating between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone. 
The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. 
Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven't mastered yet, which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them. 
That is very different from what we do when we're in our performance zone, which is when our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. 
Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes. 
Both of these zones should be part of our lives, but being clear about when we want to be in each of them, with what goal, focus and expectations, helps us better perform and better improve. 
The performance zone maximizes our immediate performance, while the learning zone maximizes our growth and our future performance. 
The reason many of us don't improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone. 
This hinders our growth, and ironically, over the long term, also our performance. 
So what does the learning zone look like? 
Take Demosthenes, a political leader and the greatest orator and lawyer in ancient Greece. 
To become great, he didn't spend all his time just being an orator or a lawyer, which would be his performance zone. 
But instead, he did activities designed for improvement. 
Of course, he studied a lot. 
He studied law and philosophy with guidance from mentors, but he also realized that being a lawyer involved persuading other people, so he also studied great speeches and acting. 
To get rid of an odd habit he had of involuntarily lifting his shoulder, he practiced his speeches in front of a mirror, and he suspended a sword from the ceiling so that if he raised his shoulder, it would hurt. 
(Laughter) To speak more clearly despite a lisp, he went through his speeches with stones in his mouth. 
He built an underground room where he could practice without interruptions and not disturb other people. 
And since courts at the time were very noisy, he also practiced by the ocean, projecting his voice above the roar of the waves. 
His activities in the learning zone were very different from his activities in court, his performance zone. 
In the learning zone, he did what Dr. Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice. 
This involves breaking down abilities into component skills, being clear about what subskill we're working to improve, like keeping our shoulders down, giving full concentration to a high level of challenge outside our comfort zone, just beyond what we can currently do, using frequent feedback with repetition and adjustments, and ideally engaging the guidance of a skilled coach, because activities designed for improvement are domain-specific, and great teachers and coaches know what those activities are and can also give us expert feedback. 
It is this type of practice in the learning zone which leads to substantial improvement, not just time on task performing. 
For example, research shows that after the first couple of years working in a profession, performance usually plateaus. 
This has been shown to be true in teaching, general medicine, nursing and other fields, and it happens because once we think we have become good enough, adequate, then we stop spending time in the learning zone. 
We focus all our time on just doing our job, performing, which turns out not to be a great way to improve. 
But the people who continue to spend time in the learning zone do continue to always improve. 
The best salespeople at least once a week do activities with the goal of improvement. 
They read to extend their knowledge, consult with colleagues or domain experts, try out new strategies, solicit feedback and reflect. 
The best chess players spend a lot of time not playing games of chess, which would be their performance zone, but trying to predict the moves grand masters made and analyzing them. 
Each of us has probably spent many, many, many hours typing on a computer without getting faster, but if we spent 10 to 20 minutes each day fully concentrating on typing 10 to 20 percent faster than our current reliable speed, we would get faster, especially if we also identified what mistakes we're making and practiced typing those words. 
That's deliberate practice. 
In what other parts of our lives, perhaps that we care more about, are we working hard but not improving much because we're always in the performance zone? 
Now, this is not to say that the performance zone has no value. 
It very much does. 
When I needed a knee surgery, I didn't tell the surgeon, "Poke around in there and focus on what you don't know." 
(Laughter) "We'll learn from your mistakes!" 
I looked for a surgeon who I felt would do a good job, and I wanted her to do a good job. 
Being in the performance zone allows us to get things done as best as we can. 
It can also be motivating, and it provides us with information to identify what to focus on next when we go back to the learning zone. 
So the way to high performance is to alternate between the learning zone and the performance zone, purposefully building our skills in the learning zone, then applying those skills in the performance zone. 
When Beyoncé is on tour, during the concert, she's in her performance zone, but every night when she gets back to the hotel room, she goes right back into her learning zone. 
She watches a video of the show that just ended. 
She identifies opportunities for improvement, for herself, her dancers and her camera staff. 
And the next morning, everyone receives pages of notes with what to adjust, which they then work on during the day before the next performance. 
It's a spiral to ever-increasing capabilities, but we need to know when we seek to learn, and when we seek to perform, and while we want to spend time doing both, the more time we spend in the learning zone, the more we'll improve. 
So how can we spend more time in the learning zone? 
First, we must believe and understand that we can improve, what we call a growth mindset. 
Second, we must want to improve at that particular skill. 
There has to be a purpose we care about, because it takes time and effort. 
Third, we must have an idea about how to improve, what we can do to improve, not how I used to practice the guitar as a teenager, performing songs over and over again, but doing deliberate practice. 
And fourth, we must be in a low-stakes situation, because if mistakes are to be expected, then the consequence of making them must not be catastrophic, or even very significant. 
A tightrope walker doesn't practice new tricks without a net underneath, and an athlete wouldn't set out to first try a new move during a championship match. 
One reason that in our lives we spend so much time in the performance zone is that our environments often are, unnecessarily, high stakes. 
We create social risks for one another, even in schools which are supposed to be all about learning, and I'm not talking about standardized tests. 
I mean that every minute of every day, many students in elementary schools through colleges feel that if they make a mistake, others will think less of them. 
No wonder they're always stressed out and not taking the risks necessary for learning. 
But they learn that mistakes are undesirable inadvertently when teachers or parents are eager to hear just correct answers and reject mistakes rather than welcome and examine them to learn from them, or when we look for narrow responses rather than encourage more exploratory thinking that we can all learn from. 
When all homework or student work has a number or a letter on it, and counts towards a final grade, rather than being used for practice, mistakes, feedback and revision, we send the message that school is a performance zone. 
The same is true in our workplaces. 
In the companies I consult with, I often see flawless execution cultures which leaders foster to encourage great work. 
But that leads employees to stay within what they know and not try new things, so companies struggle to innovate and improve, and they fall behind. 
We can create more spaces for growth by starting conversations with one another about when we want to be in each zone. 
What do we want to get better at and how? 
And when do we want to execute and minimize mistakes? 
That way, we gain clarity about what success is, when, and how to best support one another. 
But what if we find ourselves in a chronic high-stakes setting and we feel we can't start those conversations yet? 
Then here are three things that we can still do as individuals. 
First, we can create low-stakes islands in an otherwise high-stakes sea. 
These are spaces where mistakes have little consequence. 
For example, we might find a mentor or a trusted colleague with whom we can exchange ideas or have vulnerable conversations or even role-play. 
Or we can ask for feedback-oriented meetings as projects progress. 
Or we can set aside time to read or watch videos or take online courses. 
Those are just some examples. 
Second, we can execute and perform as we're expected, but then reflect on what we could do better next time, like Beyoncé does, and we can observe and emulate experts. 
The observation, reflection and adjustment is a learning zone. 
And finally, we can lead and lower the stakes for others by sharing what we want to get better at, by asking questions about what we don't know, by soliciting feedback and by sharing our mistakes and what we've learned from them, so that others can feel safe to do the same. 
Real confidence is about modeling ongoing learning. 
What if, instead of spending our lives doing, doing, doing, performing, performing, performing, we spent more time exploring, asking, listening, experimenting, reflecting, striving and becoming? 
What if we each always had something we were working to improve? 
What if we created more low-stakes islands and waters? 
And what if we got clear, within ourselves and with our teammates, about when we seek to learn and when we seek to perform, so that our efforts can become more consequential, our improvement never-ending and our best even better? 
Thank you. 

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

Five years ago, I had my dream job. 
I was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East reporting for ABC News. 
But there was a crack in the wall, a problem with our industry, that I felt we needed to fix. 
You see, I got to the Middle East right around the end of 2007, which was just around the midpoint of the Iraq War. 
But by the time I got there, it was already nearly impossible to find stories about Iraq on air. 
Coverage had dropped across the board, across networks. 
And of the stories that did make it, more than 80 percent of them were about us. 
We were missing the stories about Iraq, the people who live there, and what was happening to them under the weight of the war. 
Afghanistan had already fallen off the agenda. 
There were less than one percent of all news stories in 2008 that went to the war in Afghanistan. 
It was the longest war in US history, but information was so scarce that schoolteachers we spoke to told us they had trouble explaining to their students what we were doing there, when those students had parents who were fighting and sometimes dying overseas. 
We had drawn a blank, and it wasn't just Iraq and Afghanistan. 
From conflict zones to climate change to all sorts of issues around crises in public health, we were missing what I call the species-level issues, because as a species, they could actually sink us. 
And by failing to understand the complex issues of our time, we were facing certain practical implications. 
How were we going to solve problems that we didn't fundamentally understand, that we couldn't track in real time, and where the people working on the issues were invisible to us and sometimes invisible to each other? 
When you look back on Iraq, those years when we were missing the story, were the years when the society was falling apart, when we were setting the conditions for what would become the rise of ISIS, the ISIS takeover of Mosul and terrorist violence that would spread beyond Iraq's borders to the rest of the world. 
Just around that time where I was making that observation, I looked across the border of Iraq and noticed there was another story we were missing: the war in Syria. 
If you were a Middle-East specialist, you knew that Syria was that important from the start. 
But it ended up being, really, one of the forgotten stories of the Arab Spring. 
I saw the implications up front. 
Syria is intimately tied to regional security, to global stability. 
I felt like we couldn't let that become another one of the stories we left behind. 
So I left my big TV job to start a website, called "Syria Deeply." 
It was designed to be a news and information source that made it easier to understand a complex issue, and for the past four years, it's been a resource for policymakers and professionals working on the conflict in Syria. 
We built a business model based on consistent, high-quality information, and convening the top minds on the issue. 
And we found it was a model that scaled. 
We got passionate requests to do other things "Deeply." 
So we started to work our way down the list. 
I'm just one of many entrepreneurs, and we are just one of many start-ups trying to fix what's wrong with news. 
All of us in the trenches know that something is wrong with the news industry. 
It's broken. 
Trust in the media has hit an all-time low. 
And the statistic you're seeing up there is from September -- it's arguably gotten worse. 
But we can fix this. 
We can fix the news. 
I know that that's true. 
You can call me an idealist; I call myself an industrious optimist. 
And I know there are a lot of us out there. 
We have ideas for how to make things better, and I want to share three of them that we've picked up in our own work. 
Idea number one: we need news that's built on deep-domain knowledge. 
Given the waves and waves of layoffs at newsrooms across the country, we've lost the art of specialization. 
Beat reporting is an endangered thing. 
When it comes to foreign news, the way we can fix that is by working with more local journalists, treating them like our partners and collaborators, not just fixers who fetch us phone numbers and sound bites. 
Our local reporters in Syria and across Africa and across Asia bring us stories that we certainly would not have found on our own. 
Like this one from the suburbs of Damascus, about a wheelchair race that gave hope to those wounded in the war. 
Or this one from Sierra Leone, about a local chief who curbed the spread of Ebola by self-organizing a quarantine in his district. 
Or this one from the border of Pakistan, about Afghan refugees being forced to return home before they are ready, under the threat of police intimidation. 
Our local journalists are our mentors. 
They teach us something new every day, and they bring us stories that are important for all of us to know. 
Idea number two: we need a kind of Hippocratic oath for the news industry, a pledge to first do no harm. 
(Applause) Journalists need to be tough. 
We need to speak truth to power, but we also need to be responsible. 
We need to live up to our own ideals, and we need to recognize when what we're doing could potentially harm society, where we lose track of journalism as a public service. 
I watched us cover the Ebola crisis. 
We launched Ebola Deeply. We did our best. 
But what we saw was a public that was flooded with hysterical and sensational coverage, sometimes inaccurate, sometimes completely wrong. 
Public health experts tell me that that actually cost us in human lives, because by sparking more panic and by sometimes getting the facts wrong, we made it harder for people to resolve what was actually happening on the ground. 
All that noise made it harder to make the right decisions. 
We can do better as an industry, but it requires us recognizing how we got it wrong last time, and deciding not to go that way next time. 
It's a choice. 
We have to resist the temptation to use fear for ratings. 
And that decision has to be made in the individual newsroom and with the individual news executive. 
Because the next deadly virus that comes around could be much worse and the consequences much higher, if we do what we did last time; if our reporting isn't responsible and it isn't right. 
The third idea? 
We need to embrace complexity if we want to make sense of a complex world. 
Embrace complexity -- (Applause) not treat the world simplistically, because simple isn't accurate. 
We live in a complex world. 
News is adult education. 
It's our job as journalists to get elbow deep in complexity and to find new ways to make it easier for everyone else to understand. 
If we don't do that, if we pretend there are just simple answers, we're leading everyone off a steep cliff. 
Understanding complexity is the only way to know the real threats that are around the corner. 
It's our responsibility to translate those threats and to help you understand what's real, so you can be prepared and know what it takes to be ready for what comes next. 
I am an industrious optimist. 
I do believe we can fix what's broken. 
We all want to. 
There are great journalists out there doing great work -- we just need new formats. 
I honestly believe this is a time of reawakening, reimagining what we can do. 
I believe we can fix what's broken. 
I know we can fix the news. 
I know it's worth trying, and I truly believe that in the end, we're going to get this right. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was a kid, I was the quintessential nerd. 
I think some of you were, too. 
(Laughter) And you, sir, who laughed the loudest, you probably still are. 
(Laughter) I grew up in a small town in the dusty plains of north Texas, the son of a sheriff who was the son of a pastor. 
Getting into trouble was not an option. 
And so I started reading calculus books for fun. 
(Laughter) You did, too. 
That led me to building a laser and a computer and model rockets, and that led me to making rocket fuel in my bedroom. 
Now, in scientific terms, we call this a very bad idea. 
(Laughter) Around that same time, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" came to the theaters, and my life was forever changed. 
I loved everything about that movie, especially the HAL 9000. 
Now, HAL was a sentient computer designed to guide the Discovery spacecraft from the Earth to Jupiter. 
HAL was also a flawed character, for in the end he chose to value the mission over human life. 
Now, HAL was a fictional character, but nonetheless he speaks to our fears, our fears of being subjugated by some unfeeling, artificial intelligence who is indifferent to our humanity. 
I believe that such fears are unfounded. 
Indeed, we stand at a remarkable time in human history, where, driven by refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds, we are building machines of exquisite, beautiful complexity and grace that will extend the human experience in ways beyond our imagining. 
After a career that led me from the Air Force Academy to Space Command to now, I became a systems engineer, and recently I was drawn into an engineering problem associated with NASA's mission to Mars. 
Now, in space flights to the Moon, we can rely upon mission control in Houston to watch over all aspects of a flight. 
However, Mars is 200 times further away, and as a result it takes on average 13 minutes for a signal to travel from the Earth to Mars. 
If there's trouble, there's not enough time. 
And so a reasonable engineering solution calls for us to put mission control inside the walls of the Orion spacecraft. 
Another fascinating idea in the mission profile places humanoid robots on the surface of Mars before the humans themselves arrive, first to build facilities and later to serve as collaborative members of the science team. 
Now, as I looked at this from an engineering perspective, it became very clear to me that what I needed to architect was a smart, collaborative, socially intelligent artificial intelligence. 
In other words, I needed to build something very much like a HAL but without the homicidal tendencies. 
(Laughter) Let's pause for a moment. 
Is it really possible to build an artificial intelligence like that? 
Actually, it is. 
In many ways, this is a hard engineering problem with elements of AI, not some wet hair ball of an AI problem that needs to be engineered. 
To paraphrase Alan Turing, I'm not interested in building a sentient machine. 
I'm not building a HAL. 
All I'm after is a simple brain, something that offers the illusion of intelligence. 
The art and the science of computing have come a long way since HAL was onscreen, and I'd imagine if his inventor Dr. Chandra were here today, he'd have a whole lot of questions for us. 
Is it really possible for us to take a system of millions upon millions of devices, to read in their data streams, to predict their failures and act in advance? 
Yes. 
Can we build systems that converse with humans in natural language? 
Yes. 
Can we build systems that recognize objects, identify emotions, emote themselves, play games and even read lips? 
Yes. 
Can we build a system that sets goals, that carries out plans against those goals and learns along the way? 
Yes. 
Can we build systems that have a theory of mind? 
This we are learning to do. 
Can we build systems that have an ethical and moral foundation? 
This we must learn how to do. 
So let's accept for a moment that it's possible to build such an artificial intelligence for this kind of mission and others. 
The next question you must ask yourself is, should we fear it? 
Now, every new technology brings with it some measure of trepidation. 
When we first saw cars, people lamented that we would see the destruction of the family. 
When we first saw telephones come in, people were worried it would destroy all civil conversation. 
At a point in time we saw the written word become pervasive, people thought we would lose our ability to memorize. 
These things are all true to a degree, but it's also the case that these technologies brought to us things that extended the human experience in some profound ways. 
So let's take this a little further. 
I do not fear the creation of an AI like this, because it will eventually embody some of our values. 
Consider this: building a cognitive system is fundamentally different than building a traditional software-intensive system of the past. 
We don't program them. We teach them. 
In order to teach a system how to recognize flowers, I show it thousands of flowers of the kinds I like. 
In order to teach a system how to play a game -- Well, I would. You would, too. 
I like flowers. Come on. 
To teach a system how to play a game like Go, I'd have it play thousands of games of Go, but in the process I also teach it how to discern a good game from a bad game. 
If I want to create an artificially intelligent legal assistant, I will teach it some corpus of law but at the same time I am fusing with it the sense of mercy and justice that is part of that law. 
In scientific terms, this is what we call ground truth, and here's the important point: in producing these machines, we are therefore teaching them a sense of our values. 
To that end, I trust an artificial intelligence the same, if not more, as a human who is well-trained. 
But, you may ask, what about rogue agents, some well-funded nongovernment organization? 
I do not fear an artificial intelligence in the hand of a lone wolf. 
Clearly, we cannot protect ourselves against all random acts of violence, but the reality is such a system requires substantial training and subtle training far beyond the resources of an individual. 
And furthermore, it's far more than just injecting an internet virus to the world, where you push a button, all of a sudden it's in a million places and laptops start blowing up all over the place. 
Now, these kinds of substances are much larger, and we'll certainly see them coming. 
Do I fear that such an artificial intelligence might threaten all of humanity? 
If you look at movies such as "The Matrix," "Metropolis," "The Terminator," shows such as "Westworld," they all speak of this kind of fear. 
Indeed, in the book "Superintelligence" by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, he picks up on this theme and observes that a superintelligence might not only be dangerous, it could represent an existential threat to all of humanity. 
Dr. Bostrom's basic argument is that such systems will eventually have such an insatiable thirst for information that they will perhaps learn how to learn and eventually discover that they may have goals that are contrary to human needs. 
Dr. Bostrom has a number of followers. 
He is supported by people such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. 
With all due respect to these brilliant minds, I believe that they are fundamentally wrong. 
Now, there are a lot of pieces of Dr. Bostrom's argument to unpack, and I don't have time to unpack them all, but very briefly, consider this: super knowing is very different than super doing. 
HAL was a threat to the Discovery crew only insofar as HAL commanded all aspects of the Discovery. 
So it would have to be with a superintelligence. 
It would have to have dominion over all of our world. 
This is the stuff of Skynet from the movie "The Terminator" in which we had a superintelligence that commanded human will, that directed every device that was in every corner of the world. 
Practically speaking, it ain't gonna happen. 
We are not building AIs that control the weather, that direct the tides, that command us capricious, chaotic humans. 
And furthermore, if such an artificial intelligence existed, it would have to compete with human economies, and thereby compete for resources with us. 
And in the end -- don't tell Siri this -- we can always unplug them. 
(Laughter) We are on an incredible journey of coevolution with our machines. 
The humans we are today are not the humans we will be then. 
To worry now about the rise of a superintelligence is in many ways a dangerous distraction because the rise of computing itself brings to us a number of human and societal issues to which we must now attend. 
How shall I best organize society when the need for human labor diminishes? 
How can I bring understanding and education throughout the globe and still respect our differences? 
How might I extend and enhance human life through cognitive healthcare? 
How might I use computing to help take us to the stars? 
And that's the exciting thing. 
The opportunities to use computing to advance the human experience are within our reach, here and now, and we are just beginning. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hi, I'm an engineer and I make robots. 
Now, of course you all know what a robot is, right? 
If you don't, you'd probably go to Google, and you'd ask Google what a robot is. 
So let's do that. 
We'll go to Google and this is what we get. 
Now, you can see here there are lots of different types of robots, but they're predominantly humanoid in structure. 
And they look pretty conventional because they've got plastic, they've got metal, they've got motors and gears and so on. 
Some of them look quite friendly, and you could go up and you could hug them. 
Some of them not so friendly, they look like they're straight out of "Terminator," in fact they may well be straight out of "Terminator." 
You can do lots of really cool things with these robots -- you can do really exciting stuff. 
But I'd like to look at different kinds of robots -- I want to make different kinds of robots. 
And I take inspiration from the things that don't look like us, but look like these. 
So these are natural biological organisms and they do some really cool things that we can't, and current robots can't either. 
They do all sorts of great things like moving around on the floor; they go into our gardens and they eat our crops; they climb trees; they go in water, they come out of water; they trap insects and digest them. 
So they do really interesting things. 
They live, they breathe, they die, they eat things from the environment. 
Our current robots don't really do that. 
Now, wouldn't it be great if you could use some of those characteristics in future robots so that you could solve some really interesting problems? 
I'm going to look at a couple of problems now in the environment where we can use the skills and the technologies derived from these animals and from the plants, and we can use them to solve those problems. 
Let's have a look at two environmental problems. 
They're both of our making -- this is man interacting with the environment and doing some rather unpleasant things. 
The first one is to do with the pressure of population. 
Such is the pressure of population around the world that agriculture and farming is required to produce more and more crops. 
Now, to do that, farmers put more and more chemicals onto the land. 
They put on fertilizers, nitrates, pesticides -- all sorts of things that encourage the growth of the crops, but there are some negative impacts. 
One of the negative impacts is if you put lots of fertilizer on the land, not all of it goes into the crops. 
Lots of it stays in the soil, and then when it rains, these chemicals go into the water table. 
And in the water table, then they go into streams, into lakes, into rivers and into the sea. 
Now, if you put all of these chemicals, these nitrates, into those kinds of environments, there are organisms in those environments that will be affected by that -- algae, for example. 
Algae loves nitrates, it loves fertilizer, so it will take in all these chemicals, and if the conditions are right, it will mass produce. 
It will produce masses and masses of new algae. 
That's called a bloom. 
The trouble is that when algae reproduces like this, it starves the water of oxygen. 
As soon as you do that, the other organisms in the water can't survive. 
So, what do we do? 
We try to produce a robot that will eat the algae, consume it and make it safe. 
So that's the first problem. 
The second problem is also of our making, and it's to do with oil pollution. 
Now, oil comes out of the engines that we use, the boats that we use. 
Sometimes tankers flush their oil tanks into the sea, so oil is released into the sea that way. 
Wouldn't it be nice if we could treat that in some way using robots that could eat the pollution the oil fields have produced? 
So that's what we do. 
We make robots that will eat pollution. 
To actually make the robot, we take inspiration from two organisms. 
On the right there you see the basking shark. 
The basking shark is a massive shark. 
It's noncarnivorous, so you can swim with it, as you can see. 
And the basking shark opens its mouth, and it swims through the water, collecting plankton. 
As it does that, it digests the food, and then it uses that energy in its body to keep moving. 
So, could we make a robot like that -- like the basking shark that chugs through the water and eats up pollution? 
Well, let's see if we can do that. 
But also, we take the inspiration from other organisms. 
I've got a picture here of a water boatman, and the water boatman is really cute. 
When it's swimming in the water, it uses its paddle-like legs to push itself forward. 
So we take those two organisms and we combine them together to make a new kind of robot. 
In fact, because we're using the water boatman as inspiration, and our robot sits on top of the water, and it rows, we call it the "Row-bot." 
So a Row-bot is a robot that rows. 
OK. So what does it look like? 
Here's some pictures of the Row-bot, and you'll see, it doesn't look anything like the robots we saw right at the beginning. 
Google is wrong; robots don't look like that, they look like this. 
So I've got the Row-bot here. 
I'll just hold it up for you. 
It gives you a sense of the scale, and it doesn't look anything like the others. 
OK, so it's made out of plastic, and we'll have a look now at the components that make up the Row-bot -- what makes it really special. 
The Row-bot is made up of three parts, and those three parts are really like the parts of any organism. 
It's got a brain, it's got a body and it's got a stomach. 
It needs the stomach to create the energy. 
Any Row-bot will have those three components, and any organism will have those three components, so let's go through them one at a time. 
It has a body, and its body is made out of plastic, and it sits on top of the water. 
And it's got flippers on the side here -- paddles that help it move, just like the water boatman. 
It's got a plastic body, but it's got a soft rubber mouth here, and a mouth here -- it's got two mouths. 
Why does it have two mouths? 
One is to let the food go in and the other is to let the food go out. 
So you can see really it's got a mouth and a derriere, or a -- (Laughter) something where the stuff comes out, which is just like a real organism. 
So it's starting to look like that basking shark. 
So that's the body. 
The second component might be the stomach. 
We need to get the energy into the robot and we need to treat the pollution, so the pollution goes in, and it will do something. 
It's got a cell in the middle here called a microbial fuel cell. 
I'll put this down, and I'll lift up the fuel cell. 
Here. So instead of having batteries, instead of having a conventional power system, it's got one of these. 
This is its stomach. 
And it really is a stomach because you can put energy in this side in the form of pollution, and it creates electricity. 
So what is it? 
It's called a microbial fuel cell. 
It's a little bit like a chemical fuel cell, which you might have come across in school, or you might've seen in the news. 
Chemical fuel cells take hydrogen and oxygen, and they can combine them together and you get electricity. 
That's well-established technology; it was in the Apollo space missions. 
That's from 40, 50 years ago. 
This is slightly newer. 
This is a microbial fuel cell. 
It's the same principle: it's got oxygen on one side, but instead of having hydrogen on the other, it's got some soup, and inside that soup there are living microbes. 
Now, if you take some organic material -- could be some waste products, some food, maybe a bit of your sandwich -- you put it in there, the microbes will eat that food, and they will turn it into electricity. 
Not only that, but if you select the right kind of microbes, you can use the microbial fuel cell to treat some of the pollution. 
If you choose the right microbes, the microbes will eat the algae. 
If you use other kinds of microbes, they will eat petroleum spirits and crude oil. 
So you can see how this stomach could be used to not only treat the pollution but also to generate electricity from the pollution. 
So the robot will move through the environment, taking food into its stomach, digest the food, create electricity, use that electricity to move through the environment and keep doing this. 
OK, so let's see what happens when we run the Row-bot -- when it does some rowing. 
Here we've got a couple of videos, the first thing you'll see -- hopefully you can see here is the mouth open. 
The front mouth and the bottom mouth open, and it will stay opened enough, then the robot will start to row forward. 
It moves through the water so that food goes in as the waste products go out. 
Once it's moved enough, it stops and then it closes the mouth -- slowly closes the mouths -- and then it will sit there, and it will digest the food. 
Of course these microbial fuel cells, they contain microbes. 
What you really want is lots of energy coming out of those microbes as quickly as possible. 
But we can't force the microbes and they generate a small amount of electricity per second. 
They generate milliwatts, or microwatts. 
Let's put that into context. 
Your mobile phone for example, one of these modern ones, if you use it, it takes about one watt. 
So that's a thousand or a million times as much energy that that uses compared to the microbial fuel cell. 
How can we cope with that? 
Well, when the Row-bot has done its digestion, when it's taken the food in, it will sit there and it will wait until it has consumed all that food. 
That could take some hours, it could take some days. 
A typical cycle for the Row-bot looks like this: you open your mouth, you move, you close your mouth and you sit there for a while waiting. 
Once you digest your food, then you can go about doing the same thing again. 
But you know what, that looks like a real organism, doesn't it? 
It looks like the kind of thing we do. 
Saturday night, we go out, open our mouths, fill our stomachs, sit in front of the telly and digest. 
When we've had enough, we do the same thing again. 
OK, if we're lucky with this cycle, at the end of the cycle we'll have enough energy left over for us to be able to do something else. 
We could send a message, for example. 
We could send a message saying, "This is how much pollution I've eaten recently," or, "This is the kind of stuff that I've encountered," or, "This is where I am." 
That ability to send a message saying, "This is where I am," is really, really important. 
If you think about the oil slicks that we saw before, or those massive algal blooms, what you really want to do is put your Row-bot out there, and it eats up all of those pollutions, and then you have to go collect them. 
Why? 
Because these Row-bots at the moment, this Row-bot I've got here, it contains motors, it contains wires, it contains components which themselves are not biodegradable. 
Current Row-bots contain things like toxic batteries. 
You can't leave those in the environment, so you need to track them, and then when they've finished their job of work, you need to collect them. 
That limits the number of Row-bots you can use. 
If, on the other hand, you have robot a little bit like a biological organism, when it comes to the end of its life, it dies and it degrades to nothing. 
So wouldn't it be nice if these robots, instead of being like this, made out of plastic, were made out of other materials, which when you throw them out there, they biodegrade to nothing? 
That changes the way in which we use robots. 
Instead of putting 10 or 100 out into the environment, having to track them, and then when they die, collect them, you could put a thousand, a million, a billion robots into the environment. 
Just spread them around. 
You know that at the end of their lives, they're going to degrade to nothing. 
You don't need to worry about them. 
So that changes the way in which you think about robots and the way you deploy them. 
Then the question is: Can you do this? 
Well, yes, we have shown that you can do this. 
You can make robots which are biodegradable. 
What's really interesting is you can use household materials to make these biodegradable robots. 
I'll show you some; you might be surprised. 
You can make a robot out of jelly. 
Instead of having a motor, which we have at the moment, you can make things called artificial muscles. 
Artificial muscles are smart materials, you apply electricity to them, and they contract, or they bend or they twist. 
They look like real muscles. 
So instead of having a motor, you have these artificial muscles. 
And you can make artificial muscles out of jelly. 
If you take some jelly and some salts, and do a bit of jiggery-pokery, you can make an artificial muscle. 
We've also shown you can make the microbial fuel cell's stomach out of paper. 
So you could make the whole robot out of biodegradable materials. 
You throw them out there, and they degrade to nothing. 
Well, this is really, really exciting. 
It's going to totally change the way in which we think about robots, but also it allows you to be really creative in the way in which you think about what you can do with these robots. 
I'll give you an example. 
If you can use jelly to make a robot -- now, we eat jelly, right? 
So, why not make something like this? 
A robot gummy bear. 
Here, I've got some I prepared earlier. 
There we go. I've got a packet -- and I've got a lemon-flavored one. 
I'll take this gummy bear -- he's not robotic, OK? 
We have to pretend. 
And what you do with one of these is you put it in your mouth -- the lemon's quite nice. 
Try not to chew it too much, it's a robot, it may not like it. 
And then you swallow it. 
And then it goes into your stomach. 
And when it's inside your stomach, it moves, it thinks, it twists, it bends, it does something. 
It could go further down into your intestines, find out whether you've got some ulcer or cancer, maybe do an injection, something like that. 
You know that once it's done its job of work, it could be consumed by your stomach, or if you don't want that, it could go straight through you, into the toilet, and be degraded safely in the environment. 
So this changes the way, again, in which we think about robots. 
So, we started off looking at robots that would eat pollution, and then we're looking at robots which we can eat. 
I hope this gives you some idea of the kinds of things we can do with future robots. 
Thank you very much for your attention. 
(Applause) 

So a friend of mine was riding in a taxi to the airport the other day, and on the way, she was chatting with the taxi driver, and he said to her, with total sincerity, "I can tell you are a really good person." 
And when she told me this story later, she said she couldn't believe how good it made her feel, that it meant a lot to her. 
Now that may seem like a strong reaction from my friend to the words of a total stranger, but she's not alone. 
I'm a social scientist. 
I study the psychology of good people, and research in my field says many of us care deeply about feeling like a good person and being seen as a good person. 
Now, your definition of "good person" and your definition of "good person" and maybe the taxi driver's definition of "good person" -- we may not all have the same definition, but within whatever our definition is, that moral identity is important to many of us. 
Now, if somebody challenges it, like they question us for a joke we tell, or maybe we say our workforce is homogenous, or a slippery business expense, we go into red-zone defensiveness a lot of the time. 
I mean, sometimes we call out all the ways in which we help people from marginalized groups, or we donate to charity, or the hours we volunteer to nonprofits. 
We work to protect that good person identity. 
It's important to many of us. 
But what if I told you this? 
What if I told you that our attachment to being good people is getting in the way of us being better people? 
What if I told you that our definition of "good person" is so narrow, it's scientifically impossible to meet? 
And what if I told you the path to being better people just begins with letting go of being a good person? 
Now, let me tell you a little bit about the research about how the human mind works to explain. 
The brain relies on shortcuts to do a lot of its work. 
That means a lot of the time, your mental processes are taking place outside of your awareness, like in low-battery, low-power mode in the back of your mind. 
That's, in fact, the premise of bounded rationality. 
Bounded rationality is the Nobel Prize-winning idea that the human mind has limited storage resources, limited processing power, and as a result, it relies on shortcuts to do a lot of its work. 
So for example, some scientists estimate that in any given moment ... 
Better, better click, right? There we go. 
(Laughter) At any given moment, 11 million pieces of information are coming into your mind. 
Eleven million. 
And only 40 of them are being processed consciously. 
So 11 million, 40. 
I mean, has this ever happened to you? 
Have you ever had a really busy day at work, and you drive home, and when you get in the door, you realize you don't even remember the drive home, like whether you had green lights or red lights. 
You don't even remember. You were on autopilot. 
Or have you ever opened the fridge, looked for the butter, swore there is no butter, and then realized the butter was right in front of you the whole time? 
These are the kinds of "whoops" moments that make us giggle, and this is what happens in a brain that can handle 11 million pieces of information coming in with only 40 being processed consciously. 
That's the bounded part of bounded rationality. 
This work on bounded rationality is what's inspired work I've done with my collaborators Max Bazerman and Mahzarin Banaji, on what we call bounded ethicality. 
So it's the same premise as bounded rationality, that we have a human mind that is bounded in some sort of way and relying on shortcuts, and that those shortcuts can sometimes lead us astray. 
With bounded rationality, perhaps it affects the cereal we buy in the grocery store, or the product we launch in the boardroom. 
With bounded ethicality, the human mind, the same human mind, is making decisions, and here, it's about who to hire next, or what joke to tell or that slippery business decision. 
So let me give you an example of bounded ethicality at work. 
Unconscious bias is one place where we see the effects of bounded ethicality. 
So unconscious bias refers to associations we have in our mind, the shortcuts your brain is using to organize information, very likely outside of your awareness, not necessarily lining up with your conscious beliefs. 
Researchers Nosek, Banaji and Greenwald have looked at data from millions of people, and what they've found is, for example, most white Americans can more quickly and easily associate white people and good things than black people and good things, and most men and women can more quickly and easily associate men and science than women and science. 
And these associations don't necessarily line up with what people consciously think. 
They may have very egalitarian views, in fact. 
So sometimes, that 11 million and that 40 just don't line up. 
And here's another example: conflicts of interest. 
So we tend to underestimate how much a small gift -- imagine a ballpoint pen or dinner -- how much that small gift can affect our decision making. 
We don't realize that our mind is unconsciously lining up evidence to support the point of view of the gift-giver, no matter how hard we're consciously trying to be objective and professional. 
We also see bounded ethicality -- despite our attachment to being good people, we still make mistakes, and we make mistakes that sometimes hurt other people, that sometimes promote injustice, despite our best attempts, and we explain away our mistakes rather than learning from them. 
Like, for example, when I got an email from a female student in my class saying that a reading I had assigned, a reading I had been assigning for years, was sexist. 
Or when I confused two students in my class of the same race -- look nothing alike -- when I confused them for each other more than once, in front of everybody. 
These kinds of mistakes send us, send me, into red-zone defensiveness. 
They leave us fighting for that good person identity. 
But the latest work that I've been doing on bounded ethicality with Mary Kern says that we're not only prone to mistakes -- that tendency towards mistakes depends on how close we are to that red zone. 
So most of the time, nobody's challenging our good person identity, and so we're not thinking too much about the ethical implications of our decisions, and our model shows that we're then spiraling towards less and less ethical behavior most of the time. 
On the other hand, somebody might challenge our identity, or, upon reflection, we may be challenging it ourselves. 
So the ethical implications of our decisions become really salient, and in those cases, we spiral towards more and more good person behavior, or, to be more precise, towards more and more behavior that makes us feel like a good person, which isn't always the same, of course. 
The idea with bounded ethicality is that we are perhaps overestimating the importance our inner compass is playing in our ethical decisions. 
We perhaps are overestimating how much our self-interest is driving our decisions, and perhaps we don't realize how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behavior, that in fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity, to keep out of that red zone, that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people. 
It's perhaps because we expect it to be easy. 
We have this definition of good person that's either-or. 
Either you are a good person or you're not. 
Either you have integrity or you don't. 
Either you are a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or you're not. 
And in this either-or definition, there's no room to grow. 
And by the way, this is not what we do in most parts of our lives. 
Life, if you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class, or if you become a parent, we pick up a book and we read about it. 
We talk to experts, we learn from our mistakes, we update our knowledge, we just keep getting better. 
But when it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're just supposed to know, we're just supposed to do, without the benefit of effort or growth. 
So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people, just let it go, and instead, set a higher standard, a higher standard of being a good-ish person? 
A good-ish person absolutely still makes mistakes. 
As a good-ish person, I'm making them all the time. 
But as a good-ish person, I'm trying to learn from them, own them. 
I expect them and I go after them. 
I understand there are costs to these mistakes. 
When it comes to issues like ethics and bias and diversity and inclusion, there are real costs to real people, and I accept that. 
As a good-ish person, in fact, I become better at noticing my own mistakes. 
I don't wait for people to point them out. 
I practice finding them, and as a result ... 
Sure, sometimes it can be embarrassing, it can be uncomfortable. 
We put ourselves in a vulnerable place, sometimes. 
But through all that vulnerability, just like in everything else we've tried to ever get better at, we see progress. 
We see growth. 
We allow ourselves to get better. 
Why wouldn't we give ourselves that? 
In every other part of our lives, we give ourselves room to grow -- except in this one, where it matters most. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Do you remember when you were a child, you probably had a favorite toy that was a constant companion, like Christopher Robin had Winnie the Pooh, and your imagination fueled endless adventures? 
What could be more innocent than that? 
Well, let me introduce you to my friend Cayla. 
Cayla was voted toy of the year in countries around the world. 
She connects to the internet and uses speech recognition technology to answer your child's questions, respond just like a friend. 
But the power doesn't lie with your child's imagination. 
It actually lies with the company harvesting masses of personal information while your family is innocently chatting away in the safety of their home, a dangerously false sense of security. 
This case sounded alarm bells for me, as it is my job to protect consumers' rights in my country. 
And with billions of devices such as cars, energy meters and even vacuum cleaners expected to come online by 2020, we thought this was a case worth investigating further. 
Because what was Cayla doing with all the interesting things she was learning? 
Did she have another friend she was loyal to and shared her information with? 
Yes, you guessed right. She did. 
In order to play with Cayla, you need to download an app to access all her features. 
Parents must consent to the terms being changed without notice. 
The recordings of the child, her friends and family, can be used for targeted advertising. 
And all this information can be shared with unnamed third parties. 
Enough? Not quite. 
Anyone with a smartphone can connect to Cayla within a certain distance. 
When we confronted the company that made and programmed Cayla, they issued a series of statements that one had to be an IT expert in order to breach the security. 
Shall we fact-check that statement and live hack Cayla together? 
Here she is. 
Cayla is equipped with a Bluetooth device which can transmit up to 60 feet, a bit less if there's a wall between. 
That means I, or any stranger, can connect to the doll while being outside the room where Cayla and her friends are. 
And to illustrate this, I'm going to turn Cayla on now. 
Let's see, one, two, three. 
There. She's on. And I asked a colleague to stand outside with his smartphone, and he's connected, and to make this a bit creepier ... 
(Laughter) let's see what kids could hear Cayla say in the safety of their room. 
Man: Hi. My name is Cayla. What is yours? 
Finn Myrstad: Uh, Finn. 
Man: Is your mom close by? 
FM: Uh, no, she's in the store. 
Man: Ah. Do you want to come out and play with me? 
FM: That's a great idea. 
Man: Ah, great. 
FM: I'm going to turn Cayla off now. 
(Laughter) We needed no password or to circumvent any other type of security to do this. 
We published a report in 20 countries around the world, exposing this significant security flaw and many other problematic issues. 
So what happened? 
Cayla was banned in Germany, taken off the shelves by Amazon and Wal-Mart, and she's now peacefully resting at the German Spy Museum in Berlin. 
(Laughter) However, Cayla was also for sale in stores around the world for more than a year after we published our report. 
What we uncovered is that there are few rules to protect us and the ones we have are not being properly enforced. 
We need to get the security and privacy of these devices right before they enter the market, because what is the point of locking a house with a key if anyone can enter it through a connected device? 
You may well think, "This will not happen to me. 
I will just stay away from these flawed devices." 
But that won't keep you safe, because simply by connecting to the internet, you are put in an impossible take-it-or-leave-it position. 
Let me show you. 
Like most of you, I have dozens of apps on my phone, and used properly, they can make our lives easier, more convenient and maybe even healthier. 
But have we been lulled into a false sense of security? 
It starts simply by ticking a box. 
Yes, we say, I've read the terms. 
But have you really read the terms? 
Are you sure they didn't look too long and your phone was running out of battery, and the last time you tried they were impossible to understand, and you needed to use the service now? 
And now, the power imbalance is established, because we have agreed to our personal information being gathered and used on a scale we could never imagine. 
This is why my colleagues and I decided to take a deeper look at this. 
We set out to read the terms of popular apps on an average phone. 
And to show the world how unrealistic it is to expect consumers to actually read the terms, we printed them, more than 900 pages, and sat down in our office and read them out loud ourselves, streaming the experiment live on our websites. 
As you can see, it took quite a long time. 
It took us 31 hours, 49 minutes and 11 seconds to read the terms on an average phone. 
That is longer than a movie marathon of the "Harry Potter" movies and the "Godfather" movies combined. 
(Laughter) And reading is one thing. 
Understanding is another story. 
That would have taken us much, much longer. 
And this is a real problem, because companies have argued for 20 to 30 years against regulating the internet better, because users have consented to the terms and conditions. 
As we've shown with this experiment, achieving informed consent is close to impossible. 
Do you think it's fair to put the burden of responsibility on the consumer? 
I don't. 
I think we should demand less take-it-or-leave-it and more understandable terms before we agree to them. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Now, I would like to tell you a story about love. 
Some of the world's most popular apps are dating apps, an industry now worth more than, or close to, three billion dollars a year. 
And of course, we're OK sharing our intimate details with our other half. 
But who else is snooping, saving and sharing our information while we are baring our souls? 
My team and I decided to investigate this. 
And in order to understand the issue from all angles and to truly do a thorough job, I realized I had to download one of the world's most popular dating apps myself. 
So I went home to my wife ... 
(Laughter) who I had just married. 
"Is it OK if I establish a profile on a very popular dating app for purely scientific purposes?" 
(Laughter) This is what we found. 
Hidden behind the main menu was a preticked box that gave the dating company access to all my personal pictures on Facebook, in my case more than 2,000 of them, and some were quite personal. 
And to make matters worse, when we read the terms and conditions, we discovered the following, and I'm going to need to take out my reading glasses for this one. 
And I'm going to read it for you, because this is complicated. 
All right. 
"By posting content" -- and content refers to your pictures, chat and other interactions in the dating service -- "as a part of the service, you automatically grant to the company, its affiliates, licensees and successors an irrevocable" -- which means you can't change your mind -- "perpetual" -- which means forever -- "nonexclusive, transferrable, sublicensable, fully paid-up, worldwide right and license to use, copy, store, perform, display, reproduce, record, play, adapt, modify and distribute the content, prepare derivative works of the content, or incorporate the content into other works and grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing in any media now known or hereafter created." 
That basically means that all your dating history and everything related to it can be used for any purpose for all time. 
Just imagine your children seeing your sassy dating photos in a birth control ad 20 years from now. 
But seriously, though -- (Laughter) what might these commercial practices mean to you? 
For example, financial loss: based on your web browsing history, algorithms might decide whether you will get a mortgage or not. 
Subconscious manipulation: companies can analyze your emotions based on your photos and chats, targeting you with ads when you are at your most vulnerable. 
Discrimination: a fitness app can sell your data to a health insurance company, preventing you from getting coverage in the future. 
All of this is happening in the world today. 
But of course, not all uses of data are malign. 
Some are just flawed or need more work, and some are truly great. 
And there is some good news as well. 
The dating companies changed their policies globally after we filed a legal complaint. 
But organizations such as mine that fight for consumers' rights can't be everywhere. 
Nor can consumers fix this on their own, because if we know that something innocent we said will come back to haunt us, we will stop speaking. 
If we know that we are being watched and monitored, we will change our behavior. 
And if we can't control who has our data and how it is being used, we have lost the control of our lives. 
The stories I have told you today are not random examples. 
They are everywhere, and they are a sign that things need to change. 
And how can we achieve that change? 
Well, companies need to realize that by prioritizing privacy and security, they can build trust and loyalty to their users. 
Governments must create a safer internet by ensuring enforcement and up-to-date rules. 
And us, the citizens? 
We can use our voice to remind the world that technology can only truly benefit society if it respects basic rights. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

This story starts with these two -- my kids. 
We were hiking in the Oakland woods when my daughter noticed a plastic tub of cat litter in a creek. 
She looked at me and said, "Daddy? 
That doesn't go there." 
When she said that, it reminded me of summer camp. 
On the morning of visiting day, right before they'd let our anxious parents come barreling through the gates, our camp director would say, "Quick! Everyone pick up five pieces of litter." 
You get a couple hundred kids each picking up five pieces, and pretty soon, you've got a much cleaner camp. 
So I thought, why not apply that crowdsourced cleanup model to the entire planet? 
And that was the inspiration for Litterati. 
The vision is to create a litter-free world. 
Let me show you how it started. 
I took a picture of a cigarette using Instagram. 
Then I took another photo ... 
and another photo ... 
and another photo. 
And I noticed two things: one, litter became artistic and approachable; and two, at the end of a few days, I had 50 photos on my phone and I had picked up each piece, and I realized that I was keeping a record of the positive impact I was having on the planet. 
That's 50 less things that you might see, or you might step on, or some bird might eat. 
So I started telling people what I was doing, and they started participating. 
One day, this photo showed up from China. 
And that's when I realized that Litterati was more than just pretty pictures; we were becoming a community that was collecting data. 
Each photo tells a story. 
It tells us who picked up what, a geotag tells us where and a time stamp tells us when. 
So I built a Google map, and started plotting the points where pieces were being picked up. 
And through that process, the community grew and the data grew. 
My two kids go to school right in that bullseye. 
Litter: it's blending into the background of our lives. 
But what if we brought it to the forefront? 
What if we understood exactly what was on our streets, our sidewalks and our school yards? 
How might we use that data to make a difference? 
Well, let me show you. 
The first is with cities. 
San Francisco wanted to understand what percentage of litter was cigarettes. 
Why? 
To create a tax. 
So they put a couple of people in the streets with pencils and clipboards, who walked around collecting information which led to a 20-cent tax on all cigarette sales. 
And then they got sued by big tobacco, who claimed that collecting information with pencils and clipboards is neither precise nor provable. 
The city called me and asked if our technology could help. 
I'm not sure they realized that our technology was my Instagram account -- (Laughter) But I said, "Yes, we can." 
(Laughter) "And we can tell you if that's a Parliament or a Pall Mall. 
Plus, every photograph is geotagged and time-stamped, providing you with proof." 
Four days and 5,000 pieces later, our data was used in court to not only defend but double the tax, generating an annual recurring revenue of four million dollars for San Francisco to clean itself up. 
Now, during that process I learned two things: one, Instagram is not the right tool -- (Laughter) so we built an app. 
And two, if you think about it, every city in the world has a unique litter fingerprint, and that fingerprint provides both the source of the problem and the path to the solution. 
If you could generate a revenue stream just by understanding the percentage of cigarettes, well, what about coffee cups or soda cans or plastic bottles? 
If you could fingerprint San Francisco, well, how about Oakland or Amsterdam or somewhere much closer to home? 
And what about brands? 
How might they use this data to align their environmental and economic interests? 
There's a block in downtown Oakland that's covered in blight. 
The Litterati community got together and picked up 1,500 pieces. 
And here's what we learned: most of that litter came from a very well-known taco brand. 
Most of that brand's litter were their own hot sauce packets, and most of those hot sauce packets hadn't even been opened. 
The problem and the path to the solution -- well, maybe that brand only gives out hot sauce upon request or installs bulk dispensers or comes up with more sustainable packaging. 
How does a brand take an environmental hazard, turn it into an economic engine and become an industry hero? 
If you really want to create change, there's no better place to start than with our kids. 
A group of fifth graders picked up 1,247 pieces of litter just on their school yard. 
And they learned that the most common type of litter were the plastic straw wrappers from their own cafeteria. 
So these kids went to their principal and asked, "Why are we still buying straws?" 
And they stopped. 
And they learned that individually they could each make a difference, but together they created an impact. 
It doesn't matter if you're a student or a scientist, whether you live in Honolulu or Hanoi, this is a community for everyone. 
It started because of two little kids in the Northern California woods, and today it's spread across the world. 
And you know how we're getting there? 
One piece at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Joseph Keller used to jog around the Stanford campus, and he was struck by all the women jogging there as well. 
Why did their ponytails swing from side to side like that? 
Being a mathematician, he set out to understand why. 
(Laughter) Professor Keller was curious about many things: why teapots dribble or how earthworms wriggle. 
Until a few months ago, I hadn't heard of Joseph Keller. 
I read about him in the New York Times, in the obituaries. 
The Times had half a page of editorial dedicated to him, which you can imagine is premium space for a newspaper of their stature. 
I read the obituaries almost every day. 
My wife understandably thinks I'm rather morbid to begin my day with scrambled eggs and a "Let's see who died today." 
(Laughter) But if you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news, and cues man's failures. 
An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries. 
In my day job, I run a company that focuses on future insights that marketers can derive from past data -- a kind of rearview-mirror analysis. 
And we began to think: What if we held a rearview mirror to obituaries from the New York Times? 
Were there lessons on how you could get your obituary featured -- even if you aren't around to enjoy it? 
(Laughter) Would this go better with scrambled eggs? 
(Laughter) And so, we looked at the data. 
2,000 editorial, non-paid obituaries over a 20-month period between 2015 and 2016. 
What did these 2,000 deaths -- rather, lives -- teach us? 
Well, first we looked at words. 
This here is an obituary headline. 
This one is of the amazing Lee Kuan Yew. 
If you remove the beginning and the end, you're left with a beautifully worded descriptor that tries to, in just a few words, capture an achievement or a lifetime. 
Just looking at these is fascinating. 
Here are a few famous ones, people who died in the last two years. 
Try and guess who they are. 
[An Artist who Defied Genre] That's Prince. 
[Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century] Oh, yes. 
[Muhammad Ali] [Groundbreaking Architect] Zaha Hadid. 
So we took these descriptors and did what's called natural language processing, where you feed these into a program, it throws out the superfluous words -- "the," "and," -- the kind of words you can mime easily in "Charades," -- and leaves you with the most significant words. 
And we did it not just for these four, but for all 2,000 descriptors. 
And this is what it looks like. 
Film, theatre, music, dance and of course, art, are huge. 
Over 40 percent. 
You have to wonder why in so many societies we insist that our kids pursue engineering or medicine or business or law to be construed as successful. 
And while we're talking profession, let's look at age -- the average age at which they achieved things. 
That number is 37. 
What that means is, you've got to wait 37 years ... 
before your first significant achievement that you're remembered for -- on average -- 44 years later, when you die at the age of 81 -- on average. 
(Laughter) Talk about having to be patient. 
(Laughter) Of course, it varies by profession. 
If you're a sports star, you'll probably hit your stride in your 20s. 
And if you're in your 40s like me, you can join the fun world of politics. 
(Laughter) Politicians do their first and sometimes only commendable act in their mid-40s. 
(Laughter) If you're wondering what "others" are, here are some examples. 
Isn't it fascinating, the things people do and the things they're remembered for? 
(Laughter) Our curiosity was in overdrive, and we desired to analyze more than just a descriptor. 
So, we ingested the entire first paragraph of all 2,000 obituaries, but we did this separately for two groups of people: people that are famous and people that are not famous. 
Famous people -- Prince, Ali, Zaha Hadid -- people who are not famous are people like Jocelyn Cooper, Reverend Curry or Lorna Kelly. 
I'm willing to bet you haven't heard of most of their names. 
Amazing people, fantastic achievements, but they're not famous. 
So what if we analyze these two groups separately -- the famous and the non-famous? 
What might that tell us? 
Take a look. 
Two things leap out at me. 
First: "John." 
(Laughter) Anyone here named John should thank your parents -- (Laughter) and remind your kids to cut out your obituary when you're gone. 
And second: "help." 
We uncovered, many lessons from lives well-led, and what those people immortalized in print could teach us. 
The exercise was a fascinating testament to the kaleidoscope that is life, and even more fascinating was the fact that the overwhelming majority of obituaries featured people famous and non-famous, who did seemingly extraordinary things. 
They made a positive dent in the fabric of life. 
They helped. 
So ask yourselves as you go back to your daily lives: How am I using my talents to help society? 
Because the most powerful lesson here is, if more people lived their lives trying to be famous in death, the world would be a much better place. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Guitar) (Singing) Rollercoaster, carousel. 
Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell. 
You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over, you can never tell. 
People tell you this one thing -- will make your life complete. 
So you, you give it everything you got and you wind up on the street. 
Then one day you wake up, and they tell you "you're a queen," but then you find that someone else is pulling on the strings. 
Rollercoaster, carousel. 
Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell. 
You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over, you can never tell. 
The one you love, they love you -- oh yeah -- until the end of time. 
But lose your edge or lose your cool, they will drop you like a dime. 
Everyone is crowding 'round when fortune is your friend. 
When your luck is running out, you're all alone again. 
Rollercoaster, carousel. 
Where the highs are heaven but the lows, oh, they can be hell. 
You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over you can never tell. 
Well, maybe I'm just cynical, and all these words are lies, but experience keeps telling me that the cautious one is wise. 
But caution makes you hesitate, and hesitate you're lost, so take your opportunities and never count the cost. 
Rollercoaster, carousel. 
Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell. 
You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over -- over, over, you can never, ever tell. 
Rollercoaster, carousel, rollercoaster, yeah, yeah, yeah, carousel. 
Carousel, carousel, carousel, carousel. 
(Applause) Michael Pemberton. 
(Applause) Thank you so much. 
Thank you. 

When I die, I would like for my body to be laid out to be eaten by animals. 
Having your body laid out to be eaten by animals is not for everyone. 
(Laughter) Maybe you have already had the end-of-life talk with your family and decided on, I don't know, cremation. 
And in the interest of full disclosure, what I am proposing for my dead body is not strictly legal at the moment, but it's not without precedent. 
We've been laying out our dead for all of human history; it's call exposure burial. 
In fact, it's likely happening right now as we speak. 
In the mountainous regions of Tibet, they practice "sky burial," a ritual where the body is left to be consumed by vultures. 
In Mumbai, in India, those who follow the Parsi religion put their dead in structures called "Towers of Silence." 
These are interesting cultural tidbits, but they just haven't really been that popular in the Western world -- they're not what you'd expect. 
In America, our death traditions have come to be chemical embalming, followed by burial at your local cemetery, or, more recently, cremation. 
I myself, am a recent vegetarian, which means I spent the first 30 years or so of my life frantically inhaling animals -- as many as I could get my hands on. 
Why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? 
(Laughter) Am I not an animal? 
Biologically speaking, are we not all, in this room, animals? 
Accepting the fact that we are animals has some potentially terrifying consequences. 
It means accepting that we are doomed to decay and die, just like any other creature on earth. 
For the last nine years, I've worked in the funeral industry, first as a crematory operator, then as a mortician and most recently, as the owner of my own funeral home. 
And I have some good news: if you're looking to avoid the whole "doomed to decay and die" thing: you will have all the help in the world in that avoidance from the funeral industry. 
It's a multi-billion-dollar industry, and its economic model is based on the principle of protection, sanitation and beautification of the corpse. 
Whether they mean to or not, the funeral industry promotes this idea of human exceptionalism. 
It doesn't matter what it takes, how much it costs, how bad it is for the environment, we're going to do it because humans are worth it! 
It ignores the fact that death can be an emotionally messy and complex affair, and that there is beauty in decay -- beauty in the natural return to the earth from whence we came. 
Now, I don't want you to get me wrong -- I absolutely understand the importance of ritual, especially when it comes to the people that we love. 
But we have to be able to create and practice this ritual without harming the environment, which is why we need new options. 
So let's return to the idea of protection, sanitation and beautification. 
We'll start with a dead body. 
The funeral industry will protect your dead body by offering to sell your family a casket made of hardwood or metal with a rubber sealant. 
At the cemetery, on the day of burial, that casket will be lowered into a large concrete or metal vault. 
We're wasting all of these resources -- concretes, metal, hardwoods -- hiding them in vast underground fortresses. 
When you choose burial at the cemetery, your dead body is not coming anywhere near the dirt that surrounds it. 
Food for worms you are not. 
Next, the industry will sanitize your body through embalming: the chemical preservation of the dead. 
This procedure drains your blood and replaces it with a toxic, cancer-causing formaldehyde. 
They say they do this for the public health because the dead body can be dangerous, but the doctors in this room will tell you that that claim would only apply if the person had died of some wildly infectious disease, like Ebola. 
Even human decomposition, which, let's be honest, is a little stinky and unpleasant, is perfectly safe. 
The bacteria that causes disease is not the same bacteria that causes decomposition. 
Finally, the industry will beautify the corpse. 
They'll tell you that the natural dead body of your mother or father is not good enough as it is. 
They'll put it in makeup. 
They'll put it in a suit. 
They'll inject dyes so the person looks a little more alive -- just resting. 
Embalming is a cheat code, providing the illusion that death and then decay are not the natural end for all organic life on this planet. 
Now, if this system of beautification, sanitation, protection doesn't appeal to you, you are not alone. 
There is a whole wave of people -- funeral directors, designers, environmentalists -- trying to come up with a more eco-friendly way of death. 
For these people, death is not necessarily a pristine, makeup, powder-blue tuxedo kind of affair. 
There's no question that our current methods of death are not particularly sustainable, what with the waste of resources and our reliance on chemicals. 
Even cremation, which is usually considered the environmentally friendly option, uses, per cremation, the natural gas equivalent of a 500-mile car trip. 
So where do we go from here? 
Last summer, I was in the mountains of North Carolina, hauling buckets of wood chips in the summer sun. 
I was at Western Carolina University at their "Body Farm," more accurately called a "human decomposition facility." 
Bodies donated to science are brought here, and their decay is studied to benefit the future of forensics. 
On this particular day, there were 12 bodies laid out in various stages of decomposition. 
Some were skeletonized, one was wearing purple pajamas, one still had blonde facial hair visible. 
The forensic aspect is really fascinating, but not actually why I was there. 
I was there because a colleague of mine named Katrina Spade is attempting to create a system, not of cremating the dead, but composting the dead. 
She calls the system "Recomposition," and we've been doing it with cattle and other livestock for years. 
She imagines a facility where the family could come and lay their dead loved one in a nutrient-rich mixture that would, in four-to-six weeks, reduce the body -- bones and all -- to soil. 
In those four-to-six weeks, your molecules become other molecules; you literally transform. 
How would this fit in with the very recent desire a lot of people seem to have to be buried under a tree, or to become a tree when they die? 
In a traditional cremation, the ashes that are left over -- inorganic bone fragments -- form a thick, chalky layer that, unless distributed in the soil just right, can actually hurt or kill the tree. 
But if you're recomposed, if you actually become the soil, you can nourish the tree, and become the post-mortem contributor you've always wanted to be -- that you deserve to be. 
So that's one option for the future of cremation. 
But what about the future of cemeteries? 
There are a lot of people who think we shouldn't even have cemeteries anymore because we're running out of land. 
But what if we reframed it, and the corpse wasn't the land's enemy, but its potential savior? 
I'm talking about conservation burial, where large swaths of land are purchased by a land trust. 
The beauty of this is that once you plant a few dead bodies in that land, it can't be touched, it can't be developed on -- hence the term, "conservation burial." 
It's the equivalent of chaining yourself to a tree post-mortem -- "Hell no, I won't go! 
No, really -- I can't. I'm decomposing under here." 
(Laughter) Any money that the family gives to the cemetery would go back into protecting and managing the land. 
There are no headstones and no graves in the typical sense. 
The graves are scattered about the property under elegant mounds, marked only by a rock or a small metal disk, or sometimes only locatable by GPS. 
There's no embalming, no heavy, metal caskets. 
My funeral home sells a few caskets made out of things like woven willow and bamboo, but honestly, most of our families just choose a simple shroud. 
There are none of the big vaults that most cemeteries require just because it makes it easier for them to landscape. 
Families can come here; they can luxuriate in nature; they can even plant a tree or a shrub, though only native plants to the area are allowed. 
The dead then blend seamlessly in with the landscape. 
There's hope in conservation cemeteries. 
They offer dedicated green space in both urban and rural areas. 
They offer a chance to reintroduce native plants and animals to a region. 
They offer public trails, places for spiritual practice, places for classes and events -- places where nature and mourning meet. 
Most importantly, they offer us, once again, a chance to just decompose in a hole in the ground. 
The soil, let me tell you, has missed us. 
I think for a lot of people, they're starting to get the sense that our current funeral industry isn't really working for them. 
For many of us, being sanitized and beautified just doesn't reflect us. 
It doesn't reflect what we stood for during our lives. 
Will changing the way we bury our dead solve climate change? 
No. 
But it will make bold moves in how we see ourselves as citizens of this planet. 
If we can die in a way that is more humble and self-aware, I believe that we stand a chance. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I want to talk about the meaning of words, how we define them and how they, almost as revenge, define us. 
The English language is a magnificent sponge. 
I love the English language. I'm glad that I speak it. 
But for all that, it has a lot of holes. 
In Greek, there's a word, "lachesism" which is the hunger for disaster. 
You know, when you see a thunderstorm on the horizon and you just find yourself rooting for the storm. 
In Mandarin, they have a word "yù yī" -- I'm not pronouncing that correctly -- which means the longing to feel intensely again the way you did when you were a kid. 
In Polish, they have a word "jouska" which is the kind of hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 
And finally, in German, of course in German, they have a word called "zielschmerz" which is the dread of getting what you want. 
(Laughter) Finally fulfilling a lifelong dream. 
I'm German myself, so I know exactly what that feels like. 
Now, I'm not sure if I would use any of these words as I go about my day, but I'm really glad they exist. 
But the only reason they exist is because I made them up. 
I am the author of "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows," which I've been writing for the last seven years. 
And the whole mission of the project is to find holes in the language of emotion and try to fill them so that we have a way of talking about all those human peccadilloes and quirks of the human condition that we all feel but may not think to talk about because we don't have the words to do it. 
And about halfway through this project, I defined "sonder," the idea that we all think of ourselves as the main character and everyone else is just extras. 
But in reality, we're all the main character, and you yourself are an extra in someone else's story. 
And so as soon as I published that, I got a lot of response from people saying, "Thank you for giving voice to something I had felt all my life but there was no word for that." 
So it made them feel less alone. 
That's the power of words, to make us feel less alone. 
And it was not long after that that I started to notice sonder being used earnestly in conversations online, and not long after I actually noticed it, I caught it next to me in an actual conversation in person. 
There is no stranger feeling than making up a word and then seeing it take on a mind of its own. 
I don't have a word for that yet, but I will. 
(Laughter) I'm working on it. 
I started to think about what makes words real, because a lot of people ask me, the most common thing I got from people is, "Well, are these words made up? I don't really understand." 
And I didn't really know what to tell them because once sonder started to take off, who am I to say what words are real and what aren't. 
And so I sort of felt like Steve Jobs, who described his epiphany as when he realized that most of us, as we go through the day, we just try to avoid bouncing against the walls too much and just sort of get on with things. 
But once you realize that people -- that this world was built by people no smarter than you, then you can reach out and touch those walls and even put your hand through them and realize that you have the power to change it. 
And when people ask me, "Are these words real?" 
I had a variety of answers that I tried out. 
Some of them made sense. Some of them didn't. 
But one of them I tried out was, "Well, a word is real if you want it to be real." 
The way that this path is real because people wanted it to be there. 
(Laughter) It happens on college campuses all the time. 
It's called a "desire path." 
(Laughter) But then I decided, what people are really asking when they're asking if a word is real, they're really asking, "Well, how many brains will this give me access to?" 
Because I think that's a lot of how we look at language. 
A word is essentially a key that gets us into certain people's heads. 
And if it gets us into one brain, it's not really worth it, not really worth knowing. 
Two brains, eh, it depends on who it is. 
A million brains, OK, now we're talking. 
And so a real word is one that gets you access to as many brains as you can. 
That's what makes it worth knowing. 
Incidentally, the realest word of all by this measure is this. 
[O.K.] That's it. 
The realest word we have. 
That is the closest thing we have to a master key. 
That's the most commonly understood word in the world, no matter where you are. 
The problem with that is, no one seems to know what those two letters stand for. 
(Laughter) Which is kind of weird, right? 
I mean, it could be a misspelling of "all correct," I guess, or "old kinderhook." 
No one really seems to know, but the fact that it doesn't matter says something about how we add meaning to words. 
The meaning is not in the words themselves. 
We're the ones that pour ourselves into it. 
And I think, when we're all searching for meaning in our lives, and searching for the meaning of life, I think words have something to do with that. 
And I think if you're looking for the meaning of something, the dictionary is a decent place to start. 
It brings a sense of order to a very chaotic universe. 
Our view of things is so limited that we have to come up with patterns and shorthands and try to figure out a way to interpret it and be able to get on with our day. 
We need words to contain us, to define ourselves. 
I think a lot of us feel boxed in by how we use these words. 
We forget that words are made up. 
It's not just my words. All words are made up, but not all of them mean something. 
We're all just sort of trapped in our own lexicons that don't necessarily correlate with people who aren't already like us, and so I think I feel us drifting apart a little more every year, the more seriously we take words. 
Because remember, words are not real. 
They don't have meaning. We do. 
And I'd like to leave you with a reading from one of my favorite philosophers, Bill Watterson, who created "Calvin and Hobbes." 
He said, "Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. 
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it is still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We all have milestones in life that we remember so vividly. 
The first one for me was when I was entering kindergarten. 
My big brother was in school, and by golly, it was my time. 
And I went trottin' down that hallway. 
I was so excited, I almost wet myself. 
And I go to the door, and there was the teacher with a warm welcome, and she took me into the classroom, showed me my little cubbyhole -- we all remember those little cubbyholes, don't we -- and we put our stuff in there. 
And then she said, "Go over to the circle and play with the kids until class starts." 
So I went over there and plopped down like I owned the place, and I'm playing, and all of a sudden, the boy next to me, he was wearing a white shirt with blue shorts. 
I remember it like it was yesterday. 
Suddenly he stopped playing and he said, "Why are you so short?" 
And I just kept playing. I didn't think he was talking to me. 
(Laughter) And in a louder voice, he said, "Hey, why are you so short?" 
So I looked up and I said, "What are you talking about? Let's just play. We're happy. 
I've been waiting for this." 
And so we played, and about a minute later, the girl next to him, in a white shirt and a pink skirt, stood up, put her hands on her hips, and said, "Yeah, why do you look so different?" 
And I went, "What are you talking about? 
I don't look different. I'm not short. Again, let's just play." 
About this time, I looked all around the circle I was in, and all the kids had stopped playing and they were all looking at me. 
And I'm thinking -- in today's language, it would be "OMG" or "WTF." 
(Laughter) What just happened? 
So all the confidence that I went in with that morning was withering away as the morning went on and the questions kept coming. 
And at the end of the morning, before I went home, the teacher had us in a circle, and I actually found myself outside of the circle. 
I couldn't look at anybody. 
I could not understand what just happened. 
And over the next few years, I hated to go out in public. 
I felt every stare, every giggle, every pointed finger, not the finger, but every pointed finger, and I hated it. 
I would hide behind my parents' legs like nobody could see me. 
And as a child, you can't understand another child's curiosity, nor an adult's ignorance. 
It became very apparent to me that the real world was not built for someone of my size, both literally or figuratively. 
And so I have no anonymity, as you can probably tell, and while you can see my size, we all go through many challenges through our lifetime. 
And some you can see, like mine. 
Most you can't. 
You can't tell if someone's dealing with a mental illness, or they're struggling with their gender identity, they're caring for an aging parent, they're having financial difficulty. 
You can't see that kind of stuff. 
So while you can see one of my challenges is my size, seeing does not mean you understand what it's truly to be me on a daily basis, or what I go through. 
And so I'm here to debunk a myth. 
I do not believe you can walk in someone else's shoes, and because of that, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. 
Simply stated, I will never know what it's like to be you and you will never know what it's like to be me. 
I cannot face your fears or chase your dreams, and you can't do that for me, but we can be supportive of each other. 
Instead of trying to walk in each other's shoes, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. 
I learned at an early age that I did have to do some things different than most people, but I also learned there were things I was on equal footing with, and one of those was the classroom. 
Heh, heh, heh. I was equal. 
As a matter of fact, I excelled in the classroom. 
This was vitally important, I discovered as I grew older and realized I wasn't going to be able to do a physical job. 
I needed an education. 
So I went on and got a university degree, but I felt to be one step ahead of everyone for employment, I needed to have an advanced university degree, so I went ahead and got that. 
Now I'm ready for my interview. 
Remember your first interview? What am I going to wear? 
What questions? 
And don't forget that firm handshake. 
I was right there with you. 
So 24 hours before my interview, a friend of mine who I've known all my life called and said, "Michele, the building you're going in has steps." 
And she knew I couldn't climb steps. 
So suddenly, my focus changed. 
In my shoes, I was worried about how am I going to get there? 
So I went early and found a loading dock and got in and had a great interview. 
They had no idea what I went through for the day and that's OK. 
You're probably thinking my greatest challenge that day was the interview, or getting in the building. 
In reality, my biggest challenge that day was getting through the loading dock without getting run over. 
I am very vulnerable in certain situations: airports, hallways, parking lots, loading docks. 
And so I have to be very careful. 
I have to anticipate and be flexible and move as quickly as I can sometimes. 
So I got the job, and in my current role I travel quite a bit. 
And travel is a challenge for all of us these days. 
And so you probably get to the airport, run through security, get to the gate. 
Did I get my aisle seat or my window seat? Did I get my upgrade? 
Me, first of all, I don't run through anything. 
(Laughter) And I especially don't run through the TSA because I get to experience the personal patdown. 
I won't comment on that. 
And then I make my way to the gate, and with my gift of gab that my parents said I was born with, I talk to the gate agent, and then I say, "By the way, my scooter weighs this much, I have a dry cell battery, and I can drive it down to the door of the plane." 
Also, the day before, I had called the city where I'm traveling to to find out where I could rent a scooter in case mine gets broken on the way. 
So in my shoes, it's a little bit different. 
When I get onto the plane, I use my gift of gab to ask the lady to put my bag up, and they graciously do. 
I try not to eat or drink on a plane because I don't want to have to get up and walk on the plane, but nature has its own schedule, and not long ago, it knocked and I answered. 
So I walked up to the front of the plane and gabbed with the flight attendant, and said, "Can you watch the door? I can't reach the lock." 
So I'm in there doing my business, and the door flies open. 
And there's a gentleman there with a look of horror on his face. 
I'm sure I had the same look. 
As I came out, I noticed that he was sitting right across from me, and he's in total, complete embarrassment. 
So I walk up to him and I quietly go, "Are you going to remember this as much as I am?" 
(Laughter) And he goes, "I think so." 
(Laughter) Now, while he's probably not talking about it publicly, I am. 
(Laughter) But we talked for the rest of the flight, and we got to know each other, our families, sports, work, and when we landed, he said, "Michele, I noticed someone put your bag up. 
Can I get that for you?" 
And I said, "Of course, thank you." 
And we wished each other well, and the most important thing that day was that he was not going to leave with that embarrassment, that experience of embarrassment. 
He won't forget it, and neither will I, but I think he will remember more our chat and our different perspectives. 
When you travel internationally, it can be even more challenging in certain ways. 
A few years ago, I was in Zanzibar, and I come wheeling in, and think about that. 
Short, white, blond woman in a chair. 
That doesn't probably happen every day. 
So I go up, and with my gift of gab, I start to talk to the agent. 
So friendly, and I ask about their culture and so forth, and I notice there wasn't a jet bridge. 
So I had to kind of say, "Not only do you have to lift my chair, I could use some help getting up the steps." 
So we got to spend about an hour together while we waited for the flight, and it was the most magnificent hour. 
Our perspective changed for both of us that day. 
And once I got on the flight, he patted me on the back and wished me well, and I thanked him so much. 
And again, I think he's going to remember that experience more than when I first came in, and there was a bit of hesitation. 
And as you notice, I get a lot of help. 
I would not be where I am today if it was not for my family, my friends, my colleagues and the many strangers that help me every single day of my life. 
And it's important that we all have a support system. 
Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. 
(Applause) We all need help throughout our lifetime, but it is just as important that we are part of other people's support systems. 
We must adopt that way of giving back. 
We all obviously have a role to play in our own successes, but think about the role we have to play in other people's successes, just like people do for me every single day. 
It's vitally important that we help each other, because society is increasingly placing people in silos based on biases and ideologies. 
And we must look past the surface and be confronted with the truth that none of us are what you can see. 
There's more to us than that, and we're all dealing with things that you cannot see. 
So living a life free of judgment allows all of us to share those experiences together and have a totally different perspective, just like the couple of people I mentioned earlier in my stories. 
So remember, the only shoes you truly can walk in are your own. 
I cannot walk in yours. 
I know you can't walk in my size 1s -- (Laughter) but you can try. 
But we can do something better than that. 
With compassion, courage and understanding, we can walk side by side and support one another, and think about how society can change if we all do that instead of judging on only what you can see. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

How can we get people to do more good, to go to the polls, give to charity, conserve resources, or even to do something as simple as washing their mugs at work so that the sink isn't always full of dirty dishes? 
(Laughter) (Applause) When I first started working on this problem, I collaborated with a power company to recruit customers for a program that prevents blackouts by reducing energy demand during peaks. 
The program is based on a tried-and-true technology. 
It's one the Obama administration even called "the cornerstone to modernizing America's electrical grid." 
But, like so many great technological solutions, it has a key weakness: people. 
People need to sign up. 
To try to get people to sign up, the power company sent them a nice letter, told them about all the program's benefits, and it asked them to call into a hotline if they were interested. 
Those letters went out, but the phones, they were silent. 
So when we got involved, we suggested one small change. 
Instead of that hotline, we suggested that they use sign-up sheets that they'd post near the mailboxes in people's buildings. 
This tripled participation. 
Why? 
Well, we all know people care deeply about what others think of them, that we try to be seen as generous and kind, and we try to avoid being seen as selfish or a mooch. 
Whether we are aware of it or not, this is a big part of why people do good, and so small changes that give people more credit for doing good, those changes can make a really big difference. 
Small changes like switching from a hotline, where nobody will ever find out about your good deed, to a sign-up sheet where anyone who walks by can see your name. 
In our collaborations with governments, nonprofits, companies, when we're trying to get people to do more good, we harness the power of reputations. 
And we have a simple checklist for this. 
And in fact, you already know the first item on that checklist. 
It's to increase observability, to make sure people find out about good deeds. 
Now, wait a minute, I know some of you are probably thinking, there's no way people here thought, "Oh, well, now that I'm getting credit for my good deed, now it's totally worth it." 
And you're right. 
Usually, people don't. 
Rather, when they're making decisions in private, they worry about their own problems, about what to put on the table for dinner or how to pay their bills on time. 
But, when we make their decision more observable, they start to attend more to the opportunity to do good. 
In other words, what's so powerful about our approach is that it could turn on people's existing desire to do good, in this case, to help to prevent a blackout. 
Back to observability. 
I want to give you another example. 
This one is from a collaboration with a nonprofit that gets out the vote, and it does this by sending hundreds of thousands of letters every election in order to remind people and try to motivate them to go to the polls. 
We suggested adding the following sentence: "Someone may call you to find out about your experience at the polls." 
This sentence makes it feel more observable when you go to the polls, and it increased the effect of the letter by 50 percent. 
Making the letter more effective reduced the cost of getting an additional vote from 70 dollars down to about 40 dollars. 
Observability has been used to do things like get people to donate blood more frequently by listing the names of donors on local newsletters, or to pay their taxes on time by listing the names of delinquents on a public website. 
(Laughter) What about this example? 
Toyota got hundreds of thousands of people to buy a more fuel-efficient car by making the Prius so unique ... 
(Laughter) that their good deed was observable from a mile away. 
(Laughter) Alright, so observability is great, but we all know, we've all seen people walk by an opportunity to do good. 
They'll see somebody asking for money on the sidewalk and they'll pull out their phones and look really busy, or they'll go to the museum and they'll waltz right on by the donation box. 
Imagine it's the holiday season and you're going to the supermarket, and there's a Salvation Army volunteer, and he's ringing his bell. 
A few years ago, researchers in San Diego teamed up with a local chapter from the Salvation Army to try to find ways to increase donations. 
What they found was kind of funny. 
When the volunteer stood in front of just one door, people would avoid giving by going out the other door. 
Why? 
Well, because they can always claim, "Oh, I didn't see the volunteer," or, "I wanted to get something from over there," or, "That's where my car is." 
In other words, there's lots of excuses. 
And that brings us to the second item on our checklist: to eliminate excuses. 
In the case of the Salvation Army, eliminating excuses just means standing in front of both doors, and sure enough, when they did this, donations rose. 
But that's when things got kind of funny, even funnier. 
The researchers were out in the parking lot, and they were counting people as they came in and out of the store, and they noticed that when the volunteers stood in front of both doors, people stopped coming out of the store at all. 
(Laughter) Obviously, they were surprised by this, so they decided to look into it further, and that's when they found that there was actually a third, smaller utility door usually used to take out the recycling -- (Laughter) and now people were going out that door in order to avoid the volunteers. 
(Laughter) This teaches us an important lesson though. 
When we're trying to eliminate excuses, we need to be very thorough, because people are really creative in making them. 
(Laughter) Alright, I want to switch to a setting where excuses can have deadly consequences. 
What if I told you that the world's deadliest infectious disease has a cure, in fact, that it's had one for 70 years, a good one, one that works almost every time? 
It's incredible, but it's true. 
The disease is tuberculosis. 
It infects some 10 million people a year, and it kills almost two million of them. 
Like the blackout prevention program, we've got the solution. 
The problem is people. 
People need to take their medication so that they're cured, and so that they don't get other people sick. 
For a few years now, we've been collaborating with a mobile health startup called Keheala to support TB patients as they undergo treatment. 
Now, you have to understand, TB treatment, it's really tough. 
We're talking about taking a really strong antibiotic every single day for six months or more. 
That antibiotic is so strong that it will make you feel sick. 
It will make you feel nauseous and dizzy. 
It will make your pee turn funny colors. 
It's also a problem because you have to go back to the clinic about every week in order to get more pills, and in sub-Saharan Africa or other places where TB is common, now you're talking about going someplace pretty far, taking tough and slow public transport, maybe the clinic is inefficient. 
So now you're talking about taking a half day off of work every week from a job you desperately can't afford to lose. 
It's even worse when you consider the fact that there's a terrible stigma, and you desperately don't want people to find that you have the disease. 
Some of the toughest stories we hear are actually from women who, in these places where domestic violence can be kind of common, they tell us that they have to hide it from their husbands that they're coming to the clinic. 
So it's no surprise that people don't complete treatment. 
Can our approach really help them? 
Can we really get them to stick it out? 
Yeah. 
Every day, we text patients to remind them to take their medication, but if we stopped there, there'd be lots of excuses. 
"Well, I didn't see the text." 
Or, "You know, I saw the text, but then I totally forgot, put the phone down and I just forgot about it." 
Or, "I lent the phone out to my mom." 
We have to eliminate these excuses and we do that by asking patients to log in and verify that they've taken their medication. 
If they don't log in, we text them again. 
If they don't log in, we text them yet again. 
If, after three times, they still haven't verified, we notify a team of supporters and that team will call and text them to try to get them back on the wagon. 
No excuses. 
Our approach, which, admittedly, uses all sorts of behavioral techniques, including, as you've probably noticed, observability, it was very effective. 
Patients without access to our platform were three times more likely not to complete treatment. 
Alright, you've increased observability, you've eliminated excuses, but there's still a third thing you need to be aware of. 
If you've been to Washington, DC or Japan or London, you know that metro riders there will be very careful to stand on the right-hand side of the escalator so that people can go by on the left. 
But unfortunately, not everywhere is that the norm, and there's plenty of places where you can just stand on both sides and block the escalator. 
Obviously, it's better for others when we stand on the right and let them go by, but we're only expected to do that some places. 
This is a general phenomenon. 
Sometimes we're expected to do good and sometimes not, and it means that people are really sensitive to cues that they're expected to do good in a particular situation, which brings us to the third and final item on our checklist: to communicate expectations, to tell people, "Do the good deed right now." 
Here's a simple way to communicate expectations; simply tell them, "Hey, everybody else is doing the good deed." 
The company Opower sends people in their electricity bill a small insert that compares their energy consumption with that of people with similarly sized homes. 
And when people find out that their neighbors are using less electricity, they start to consume less. 
That same approach, it's been used to get people to vote or give to charity or even reuse their towels in hotels. 
What about this one? 
Here's another way to communicate expectations; simply do it by saying, "Do the good deed" just at the right time. 
What about this one? 
This ticker reframes the kind of mundane task of turning off the lights and turns it instead into an environmental contribution. 
The bottom line is, lots of different ways to do this, lots of ways to communicate expectations. 
Just don't forget to do it. 
And that's it. 
That's our checklist. 
Many of you are working on problems with important social consequences, and sometimes you might need to motivate people to do more good. 
The tools you learned today can help you with this. 
And these tools, they don't require that you raise additional funds or that you develop any more fancy technologies. 
They just require harnessing reputations by increasing observability, eliminating excuses and communicating expectations. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It was just an ordinary Saturday. 
My dad was outside mowing the lawn, my mom was upstairs folding laundry, my sister was in her room doing homework and I was in the basement playing video games. 
And as I came upstairs to get something to drink, I looked out the window and realized that there was something that I was supposed to be doing, and this is what I saw. 
No, this wasn't my family's dinner on fire. 
This was my science project. 
Flames were pouring out, smoke was in the air and it looked like our wooden deck was about to catch fire. 
I immediately started yelling. 
My mom was freaking out, my dad ran around to put out the fire and of course my sister started recording a Snapchat video. 
(Laughter) This was just the beginning of my team's science project. 
My team is composed of me and three other students who are here in the audience today. 
We competed in FIRST LEGO League which is an international LEGO robotics competition for kids, and in addition to a robotics game, we also worked on a separate science project, and this was the project that we were working on. 
So the idea for this project all started when a few months earlier, a couple of my teammates took a trip to Central America and saw beaches littered with Styrofoam, or expanded polystyrene foam. 
And when they came back and told us about it, we really started thinking about the ways in which we see Styrofoam every day. 
Get a new flat-screen TV? 
You end up with a block of Styrofoam bigger than the TV itself. 
Drink a cup of coffee? 
Well, those Styrofoam coffee cups are sure going to add up. 
And where do all these items go after their one-time use? 
Since there aren't any good existing solutions for used Styrofoam, almost all of them end up right in the landfill, or the oceans and beaches, taking over 500 years to degrade. 
And in fact, every year, the US alone produces over two billion pounds of Styrofoam, filling up a staggering 25 percent of landfills. 
So why do we have these ghost accumulations of Styrofoam waste? 
Why can't we just recycle them like many plastics? 
Well, simply put, recycled polystyrene is too expensive and potentially contaminated, so there is very little market demand for Styrofoam that has to be recycled. 
And as a result, Styrofoam is considered a nonrenewable material, because it is neither feasible nor viable to recycle polystyrene. 
And in fact, many cities across the US have even passed ordinances that simply ban the production of many products containing polystyrene, which includes disposable utensils, packing peanuts, takeout containers and even plastic beach toys, all products that are very useful in today's society. 
And now France has become the first country to completely ban all plastic utensils, cups and plates. 
But what if we could keep using Styrofoam and keep benefiting from its cheap, lightweight, insulating and excellent packing ability, while not having to suffer from the repercussions of having to dispose of it? 
What if we could turn it into something else that's actually useful? 
What if we could make the impossible possible? 
My team hypothesized that we could use the carbon that's already in Styrofoam to create activated carbon, which is used in almost every water filter today. 
And activated carbon works by using very small micropores to filter out contaminants from water or even air. 
So we started out by doing a variety of heating tests, and unfortunately, we had many failures. 
Literally, nothing worked. 
Besides my dad's grill catching on fire, most of our samples vaporized into nothing, or exploded inside expensive furnaces, leaving a horribly sticky mess. 
In fact, we were so saddened by our failures that we almost gave up. 
So why did we keep trying when all the adults said it was impossible? 
Well, maybe it's because we're kids. We don't know any better. 
But the truth is, we kept trying because we thought it was still possible. 
We knew that if we were successful, we would be helping the environment and making the world a better place. 
So we kept trying and failing and trying and failing. 
We were so ready to give up. 
But then it happened. 
With the right temperatures, times and chemicals, we finally got that successful test result showing us that we had created activated carbon from Styrofoam waste. 
And at that moment, the thing that had been impossible all of a sudden wasn't. 
It showed us that although we had many failures at the beginning, we were able to persevere through them to get the test results that we wanted. 
And moreover, not only were we able to create activated carbon for purifying water, but we were also able to reduce Styrofoam waste, solving two global problems with just one solution. 
So from then on, we were inspired to take our project further, performing more tests to make it more effective and testing it in real world situations. 
We then proceeded to receive funding from the NSTA's eCYBERMISSION STEM-in-Action program sponsored by the US Army, as well as FIRST Global Innovation Awards sponsored by XPRIZE. 
And we were also honored with the Scientific American Innovator Award from Google Science Fair. 
And using these funds, we plan to file a full patent on our process and to continue to work on our project. 
So yes, although we started with catching my dad's grill on fire and failing so many times that we almost quit, it was well worth it when we look back at it now. 
We took a problem that many people said was impossible and we made it possible, and we persevered when it looked like nothing that we did would work. 
We learned that you can't have success without a little, or a lot, of failure. 
So in the future, don't be afraid if your grill goes up in flames, because you never know when your idea might just catch fire. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Have you ever heard the one about how breastfeeding is free? 
(Laughter) Yeah, it's pretty funny, because it's only free if we don't value women's time and energy. 
Any mother can tell you how much time and energy it takes to liquify her body -- to literally dissolve herself -- (Laughter) as she feeds this precious little cannibal. 
(Laughter) Milk is why mammals suck. 
At Arizona State University, in the Comparative Lactation Lab, I decode mothers' milk composition to understand its complexity and how it influences infant development. 
The most important thing that I've learned is that we do not do enough to support mothers and babies. 
And when we fail mothers and babies, we fail everyone who loves mothers and babies: the fathers, the partners, the grandparents, the aunties, the friends and kin that make our human social networks. 
It's time that we abandon simple solutions and simple slogans, and grapple with the nuance. 
I was very fortunate to run smack-dab into that nuance very early, during my first interview with a journalist when she asked me, "How long should a mother breastfeed her baby?" 
And it was that word "should" that brought me up short, because I will never tell a woman what she should do with her body. 
Babies survive and thrive because their mother's milk is food, medicine and signal. 
For young infants, mother's milk is a complete diet that provides all the building blocks for their bodies, that shapes their brain and fuels all of their activity. 
Mother's milk also feeds the microbes that are colonizing the infant's intestinal tract. 
Mothers aren't just eating for two, they're eating for two to the trillions. 
Milk provides immunofactors that help fight pathogens and mother's milk provides hormones that signal to the infant's body. 
But in recent decades, we have come to take milk for granted. 
We stopped seeing something in plain sight. 
We began to think of milk as standardized, homogenized, pasteurized, packaged, powdered, flavored and formulated. 
We abandoned the milk of human kindness and turned our priorities elsewhere. 
At the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC is the National Library of Medicine, which contains 25 million articles -- the brain trust of life science and biomedical research. 
We can use keywords to search that database, and when we do that, we discover nearly a million articles about pregnancy, but far fewer about breast milk and lactation. 
When we zoom in on the number of articles just investigating breast milk, we see that we know much more about coffee, wine and tomatoes. 
(Laughter) We know over twice as much about erectile dysfunction. 
(Laughter) I'm not saying we shouldn't know about those things -- I'm a scientist, I think we should know about everything. 
But that we know so much less -- (Laughter) about breast milk -- the first fluid a young mammal is adapted to consume -- should make us angry. 
Globally, nine out of 10 women will have at least one child in her lifetime. 
That means that nearly 130 million babies are born each year. 
These mothers and babies deserve our best science. 
Recent research has shown that milk doesn't just grow the body, it fuels behavior and shapes neurodevelopment. 
In 2015, researchers discovered that the mixture of breast milk and baby saliva -- specifically, baby saliva -- causes a chemical reaction that produces hydrogen peroxide that can kill staph and salmonella. 
And from humans and other mammal species, we're starting to understand that the biological recipe of milk can be different when produced for sons or daughters. 
When we reach for donor milk in the neonatal intensive care unit, or formula on the store shelf, it's nearly one-size-fits-all. 
We aren't thinking about how sons and daughters may grow at different rates, or different ways, and that milk may be a part of that. 
Mothers have gotten the message and the vast majority of mothers intend to breastfeed, but many do not reach their breastfeeding goals. 
That is not their failure; it's ours. 
Increasingly common medical conditions like obesity, endocrine disorders, C-section and preterm births all can disrupt the underlying biology of lactation. 
And many women do not have knowledgeable clinical support. 
Twenty-five years ago, the World Health Organization and UNICEF established criteria for hospitals to be considered baby friendly -- that provide the optimal level of support for mother-infant bonding and infant feeding. 
Today, only one in five babies in the United States is born in a baby-friendly hospital. 
This is a problem, because mothers can grapple with many problems in the minutes, hours, days and weeks of lactation. 
They can have struggles with establishing latch, with pain, with milk letdown and perceptions of milk supply. 
These mothers deserve knowledgeable clinical staff that understand these processes. 
Mothers will call me as they're grappling with these struggles, crying with wobbly voices. 
"It's not working. 
This is what I'm supposed to naturally be able to do. 
Why is it not working?" 
And just because something is evolutionarily ancient doesn't mean that it's easy or that we're instantly good at it. 
You know what else is evolutionarily ancient? 
(Laughter) Sex. 
And nobody expects us to start out being good at it. 
(Laughter) Clinicians best deliver quality equitable care when they have continuing education about how to best support lactation and breastfeeding. 
And in order to have that continuing education, we need to anchor it to cutting-edge research in both the life sciences and the social sciences, because we need to recognize that too often historical traumas and implicit biases sit in the space between a new mother and her clinician. 
The body is political. 
If our breastfeeding support is not intersectional, it's not good enough. 
And for moms who have to return for work, because countries like the United States do not provide paid parental leave, they can have to go back in as short as just a few days after giving birth. 
How do we optimize mother and infant health just by messaging about breast milk to moms without providing the institutional support that facilitates that mother-infant bonding to support breastfeeding? 
The answer is: we can't. 
I'm talking to you, legislators, and the voters who elect them. 
I'm talking to you, job creators and collective bargaining units, and workers, and shareholders. 
We all have a stake in the public health of our community, and we all have a role to play in achieving it. 
Breast milk is a part of improving human health. 
In the NICU, when infants are born early or sick or injured, milk or bioactive constituents in milk can be critically important. 
Environments or ecologies, or communities where there's high risk of infectious disease, breast milk can be incredibly protective. 
Where there are emergencies like storms and earthquakes, when the electricity goes out, when safe water is not available, breast milk can keep babies fed and hydrated. 
And in the context of humanitarian crises, like Syrian mothers fleeing war zones, the smallest drops can buffer babies from the biggest global challenges. 
But understanding breast milk is not just about messaging to mothers and policy makers. 
It's also about understanding what is important in breast milk so that we can deliver better formulas to moms who cannot or do not breastfeed for whatever reason. 
We can all do a better job of supporting the diversity of moms raising their babies in a diversity of ways. 
As women around the world struggle to achieve political, social and economic equality, we must reimagine motherhood as not the central, core aspect of womanhood, but one of the many potential facets of what makes women awesome. 
It's time. 
(Applause) 

More than six thousand light years from the surface of the earth, a rapidly spinning neutron star called the Black Widow pulsar blasts its companion brown dwarf star with radiation as the two orbit each other every 9 hours. 
Standing on our own planet, you might think you’re just an observer of this violent ballet. 
But in fact, both stars are pulling you towards them. 
And you’re pulling back, connected across trillions of kilometers by gravity. 
Gravity is the attractive force between two objects with mass— any two objects with mass. 
Which means that every object in the universe attracts every other object: every star, black hole, human being, smartphone, and atom are all constantly pulling on each other. 
So why don’t we feel pulled in billions of different directions? 
Two reasons: mass and distance. 
The original equation describing the gravitational force between two objects was written by Isaac Newton in 1687. 
Scientists’ understanding of gravity has evolved since then, but Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is still a good approximation in most situations. 
It goes like this: the gravitational force between two objects is equal to the mass of one times the mass of the other, multiplied by a very small number called the gravitational constant, and divided by the distance between them, squared. 
If you doubled the mass of one of the objects, the force between them would double, too. 
If the distance between them doubled, the force would be one-fourth as strong. 
The gravitational force between you and the Earth pulls you towards its center, a force you experience as your weight. 
Let’s say this force is about 800 Newtons when you’re standing at sea level. 
If you traveled to the Dead Sea, the force would increase by a tiny fraction of a percent. 
And if you climbed to the top of Mount Everest, the force would decrease— but again, by a minuscule amount. 
Traveling higher would make a bigger dent in gravity’s influence, but you won’t escape it. 
Gravity is generated by variations in the curvature of spacetime— the three dimensions of space plus time— which bend around any object that has mass. 
Gravity from Earth reaches the International Space Station, 400 kilometers above the earth, with almost its original intensity. 
If the space station was stationary on top of a giant column, you’d still experience ninety percent of the gravitational force there that you do on the ground. 
Astronauts just experience weightlessness because the space station is constantly falling towards earth. 
Fortunately, it’s orbiting the planet fast enough that it never hits the ground. 
By the time you made it to the surface of the moon, around 400,000 kilometers away, Earth’s gravitational pull would be less than 0.03 percent of what you feel on earth. 
The only gravity you’d be aware of would be the moon’s, which is about one sixth as strong as the earth’s. 
Travel farther still and Earth’s gravitational pull on you will continue to decrease, but never drop to zero. 
Even safely tethered to the Earth, we’re subject to the faint tug of distant celestial bodies and nearby earthly ones. 
The Sun exerts a force of about half a Newton on you. 
If you’re a few meters away from a smartphone, you'll experience a mutual force of a few piconewtons. 
That’s about the same as the gravitational pull between you and the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away but about a trillion times as massive as the sun. 
But when it comes to escaping gravity, there’s a loophole. 
If all the mass around us is pulling on us all the time, how would Earth’s gravity change if you tunneled deep below the surface, assuming you could do so without being cooked or crushed? 
If you hollowed out the center of a perfectly spherical Earth— which it isn’t, but let’s just say it were— you’d experience an identical pull from all sides. 
And you’d be suspended, weightless, only encountering the tiny pulls from other celestial bodies. 
So you could escape the Earth’s gravity in such a thought experiment— but only by heading straight into it. 

No one will ever pay you what you're worth. 
No one will ever pay you what you're worth. 
They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth. 
And you control their thinking, not like this, although that would be cool. 
(Laughter) That would be really cool. 
Instead, like this: clearly defining and communicating your value are essential to being paid well for your excellence. 
Anyone here want to be paid well? 
OK, good, then this talk is for everyone. 
It's got universal applicability. 
It's true if you're a business owner, if you're an employee, if you're a job seeker. 
It's true if you're a man or a woman. 
Now, I approach this today through the lens of the woman business owner, because in my work I've observed that women underprice more so than men. 
The gender wage gap is a well-traveled narrative in this country. 
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a woman employee earns just 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. 
What may surprise you is that this trend continues even into the entrepreneurial sphere. 
A woman business owner earns just 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. 
In my work, I've often heard women express that they're uncomfortable communicating their value, especially early on in business ownership. 
They say things like, "I don't like to toot my own horn." 
"I'd rather let the work speak for itself." 
"I don't like to sing my own praises." 
I hear very different narratives in working with male business owners, and I think this difference is costing women 20 cents on the dollar. 
I'd like to tell you the story of a consulting firm that helps their clients dramatically improve their profitability. 
That company is my company. 
After my first year in business, I saw the profit increases that my clients were realizing in working with me, and I realized that I needed to reevaluate my pricing. 
I was really underpriced relative to the value I was delivering. 
It's hard for me to admit to you, because I'm a pricing consultant. 
(Laughter) It's what I do. 
I help companies price for value. 
But nonetheless, it's what I saw, and so I sat down to evaluate my pricing, evaluate my value, and I did that by asking key value questions. 
What are my clients' needs and how do I meet them? 
What is my unique skill set that makes me better qualified to serve my clients? 
What do I do that no one else does? 
What problems do I solve for clients? 
What value do I add? 
I answered these questions and defined the value that my clients get from working with me, calculated their return on investment, and what I saw was that I needed to double my price, double it. 
Now, I confess to you, this terrified me. 
I'm supposed to be the expert in this, but I'm not cured. 
I knew the value was there. 
I was convinced the value was there, and I was still scared out of my wits. 
What if nobody would pay me that? 
What if clients said, "That's ridiculous. 
You're ridiculous." 
Was I really worth that? 
Not my work, mind you, but me. 
Was I worth that? 
I'm the mother of two beautiful little girls who depend upon me. 
I'm a single mom. 
What if my business fails? 
What if I fail? 
But I know how to take my own medicine, the medicine that I prescribe to my clients. 
I had done the homework. 
I knew the value was there. 
So when prospects came, I prepared the proposals with the new higher pricing and sent them out and communicated the value. 
How's the story end? 
Clients continued to hire me and refer me and recommend me, and I'm still here. 
And I share this story because doubts and fears are natural and normal. 
But they don't define our value, and they shouldn't limit our earning potential. 
I'd like to share another story, about a woman who learned to communicate her value and found her own voice. 
She runs a successful web development company and employs several people. 
When she first started her firm and for several years thereafter, she would say, "I have a little web design company." 
She'd actually use those words with clients. 
"I have a little web design company." 
In this and in many other small ways, she was diminishing her company in the eyes of prospects and clients, and diminishing herself. 
It was really impacting her ability to earn what she was worth. 
I believe her language and her style communicated that she didn't believe she had much value to offer. 
In her own words, she was practically giving her services away. 
And so she began her journey to take responsibility for communicating value to clients and changing her message. 
One thing I shared with her is that it's so important to find your own voice, a voice that's authentic and true to you. 
Don't try to channel your sister-in-law just because she's a great salesperson or your neighbor who tells a great joke if that's not who you are. 
Give up this notion that it's tooting your own horn. 
Make it about the other party. 
Focus on serving and adding value, and it won't feel like bragging. 
What do you love about what you do? 
What excites you about the work that you do? 
If you connect with that, communicating your value will come naturally. 
So she embraced her natural style, found her voice and changed her message. 
For one thing, she stopped calling herself a little web design company. 
She really found a lot of strength and power in communicating her message. 
She's now charging three times as much for web design, and her business is growing. 
She told me about a recent meeting with a gruff and sometimes difficult client who had called a meeting questioning progress on search engine optimization. 
She said in the old days, that would have been a really intimidating meeting for her, but her mindset was different. 
She said, she prepared the information, sat down with the client, said this isn't about me, it's not personal, it's about the client. 
She took them through the data, through the numbers, laid out the trends and the progress in her own voice and in her own way, but very directly said, "Here's what we've done for you." 
The client sat up and took notice, and said, "OK, I got it." 
And she said in describing that meeting, "I didn't feel scared or panicky or small, which is how I used to feel. 
Instead I feel like, 'OK, I got this. 
I know what I'm doing. I'm confident.'" Being properly valued is so important. 
You can hear in this story that the implications range far beyond just finances into the realm of self-respect and self-confidence. 
Today I've told two stories, one about defining our value and the other about communicating our value, and these are the two elements to realizing our full earning potential. 
That's the equation. 
And if you're sitting in the audience today and you're not being paid what you're worth, I'd like to welcome you into this equation. 
Just imagine what life could be like, how much more we could do, how much more we could give back, how much more we could plan for the future, how validated and respected we would feel if we could earn our full potential, realize our full value. 
No one will ever pay you what you're worth. 
They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth, and you control their thinking. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So I've been "futuring," which is a term I made up -- (Laughter) about three seconds ago. 
I've been futuring for about 20 years, and when I first started, I would sit down with people, and say, "Hey, let's talk 10, 20 years out." 
And they'd say, "Great." 
And I've been seeing that time horizon get shorter and shorter and shorter, so much so that I met with a CEO two months ago and I said -- we started our initial conversation. 
He goes, "I love what you do. I want to talk about the next six months." 
(Laughter) We have a lot of problems that we are facing. 
These are civilizational-scale problems. 
The issue though is, we can't solve them using the mental models that we use right now to try and solve these problems. 
Yes, a lot of great technical work is being done, but there is a problem that we need to solve for a priori, before, if we want to really move the needle on those big problems. 
"Short-termism." 
Right? There's no marches. There's no bracelets. 
There's no petitions that you can sign to be against short-termism. 
I tried to put one up, and no one signed. 
It was weird. 
(Laughter) But it prevents us from doing so much. 
Short-termism, for many reasons, has pervaded every nook and cranny of our reality. 
I just want you to take a second and just think about an issue that you're thinking, working on. 
It could be personal, it could be at work or it could be move-the-needle world stuff, and think about how far out you tend to think about the solution set for that. 
Because short-termism prevents the CEO from buying really expensive safety equipment. 
It'll hurt the bottom line. 
So we get the Deepwater Horizon. 
Short-termism prevents teachers from spending quality one-on-one time with their students. 
So right now in America, a high school student drops out every 26 seconds. 
Short-termism prevents Congress -- sorry if there's anyone in here from Congress -- (Laughter) or not really that sorry -- (Laughter) from putting money into a real infrastructure bill. 
So what we get is the I-35W bridge collapse over the Mississippi a few years ago, 13 killed. 
It wasn't always like this. We did the Panama Canal. 
We pretty much have eradicated global polio. 
We did the transcontinental railroad, the Marshall Plan. 
And it's not just big, physical infrastructure problems and issues. 
Women's suffrage, the right to vote. 
But in our short-termist time, where everything seems to happen right now and we can only think out past the next tweet or timeline post, we get hyper-reactionary. 
So what do we do? 
We take people who are fleeing their war-torn country, and we go after them. 
We take low-level drug offenders, and we put them away for life. 
And then we build McMansions without even thinking about how people are going to get between them and their job. 
It's a quick buck. 
Now, the reality is, for a lot of these problems, there are some technical fixes, a lot of them. 
I call these technical fixes sandbag strategies. 
So you know there's a storm coming, the levee is broken, no one's put any money into it, you surround your home with sandbags. 
And guess what? It works. 
Storm goes away, the water level goes down, you get rid of the sandbags, and you do this storm after storm after storm. 
And here's the insidious thing. 
A sandbag strategy can get you reelected. 
A sandbag strategy can help you make your quarterly numbers. 
Now, if we want to move forward into a different future than the one we have right now, because I don't think we've hit -- 2016 is not peak civilization. 
(Laughter) There's some more we can do. 
But my argument is that unless we shift our mental models and our mental maps on how we think about the short, it's not going to happen. 
So what I've developed is something called "longpath," and it's a practice. 
And longpath isn't a kind of one-and-done exercise. 
I'm sure everyone here at some point has done an off-site with a lot of Post-It notes and whiteboards, and you do -- no offense to the consultants in here who do that -- and you do a long-term plan, and then two weeks later, everyone forgets about it. 
Right? Or a week later. If you're lucky, three months. 
It's a practice because it's not necessarily a thing that you do. 
It's a process where you have to revisit different ways of thinking for every major decision that you're working on. 
So I want to go through those three ways of thinking. 
So the first: transgenerational thinking. 
I love the philosophers: Plato, Socrates, Habermas, Heidegger. 
I was raised on them. 
But they all did one thing that didn't actually seem like a big deal until I really started kind of looking into this. 
And they all took, as a unit of measure for their entire reality of what it meant to be virtuous and good, the single lifespan, from birth to death. 
But here's a problem with these issues: they stack up on top of us, because the only way we know how to do something good in the world is if we do it between our birth and our death. 
That's what we're programmed to do. 
If you go to the self-help section in any bookstore, it's all about you. 
Which is great, unless you're dealing with some of these major issues. 
And so with transgenerational thinking, which is really kind of transgenerational ethics, you're able to expand how you think about these problems, what is your role in helping to solve them. 
Now, this isn't something that just has to be done at the Security Council chamber. 
It's something that you can do in a very kind of personal way. 
So every once in a while, if I'm lucky, my wife and I like to go out to dinner, and we have three children under the age of seven. 
So you can imagine it's a very peaceful, quiet meal. 
(Laughter) So we sit down and literally all I want to do is just eat and chill, and my kids have a completely and totally different idea of what we're going to be doing. 
And so my first idea is my sandbag strategy, right? 
It's to go into my pocket and take out the iPhone and give them "Frozen" or some other bestselling game thing. 
And then I stop and I have to kind of put on this transgenerational thinking cap. 
I don't do this in the restaurant, because it would be bizarre, but I have to -- I did it once, and that's how I learned it was bizarre. 
(Laughter) And you have to kind of think, "OK, I can do this." 
But what is this teaching them? 
So what does it mean if I actually bring some paper or engage with them in conversation? 
It's hard. It's not easy, and I'm making this very personal. 
It's actually more traumatic than some of the big issues that I work on in the world -- entertaining my kids at dinner. 
But what it does is it connects them here in the present with me, but it also -- and this is the crux of transgenerational thinking ethics -- it sets them up to how they're going to interact with their kids and their kids and their kids. 
Second, futures thinking. 
When we think about the future, 10, 15 years out, give me a vision of what the future is. 
You don't have to give it to me, but think in your head. 
And what you're probably going to see is the dominant cultural lens that dominates our thinking about the future right now: technology. 
So when we think about the problems, we always put it through a technological lens, a tech-centric, a techno-utopia, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's something that we have to really think deeply about if we're going to move on these major issues, because it wasn't always like this. Right? 
The ancients had their way of thinking about what the future was. 
The Church definitely had their idea of what the future could be, and you could actually pay your way into that future. Right? 
And luckily for humanity, we got the scientific revolution. 
From there, we got the technology, but what has happened -- And by the way, this is not a critique. 
I love technology. 
Everything in my house talks back to me, from my children to my speakers to everything. 
(Laughter) But we've abdicated the future from the high priests in Rome to the high priests of Silicon Valley. 
So when we think, well, how are we going to deal with climate or with poverty or homelessness, our first reaction is to think about it through a technology lens. 
And look, I'm not advocating that we go to this guy. 
I love Joel, don't get me wrong, but I'm not saying we go to Joel. 
What I'm saying is we have to rethink our base assumption about only looking at the future in one way, only looking at it through the dominant lens. 
Because our problems are so big and so vast that we need to open ourselves up. 
So that's why I do everything in my power not to talk about the future. 
I talk about futures. 
It opens the conversation again. 
So when you're sitting and thinking about how do we move forward on this major issue -- it could be at home, it could be at work, it could be again on the global stage -- don't cut yourself off from thinking about something beyond technology as a fix because we're more concerned about technological evolution right now than we are about moral evolution. 
And unless we fix for that, we're not going to be able to get out of short-termism and get to where we want to be. 
The final, telos thinking. This comes from the Greek root. 
Ultimate aim and ultimate purpose. 
And it's really asking one question: to what end? 
When was the last time you asked yourself: To what end? 
And when you asked yourself that, how far out did you go? 
Because long isn't long enough anymore. 
Three, five years doesn't cut it. 
It's 30, 40, 50, 100 years. 
In Homer's epic, "The Odyssey," Odysseus had the answer to his "what end." 
It was Ithaca. 
It was this bold vision of what he wanted -- to return to Penelope. 
And I can tell you, because of the work that I'm doing, but also you know it intuitively -- we have lost our Ithaca. 
We have lost our "to what end," so we stay on this hamster wheel. 
And yes, we're trying to solve these problems, but what comes after we solve the problem? 
And unless you define what comes after, people aren't going to move. 
The businesses -- this isn't just about business -- but the businesses that do consistently, who break out of short-termism not surprisingly are family-run businesses. 
They're transgenerational. They're telos. They think about the futures. 
And this is an ad for Patek Philippe. They're 175 years old, and what's amazing is that they literally embody this kind of longpathian sense in their brand, because, by the way, you never actually own a Patek Philippe, and I definitely won't -- (Laughter) unless somebody wants to just throw 25,000 dollars on the stage. 
You merely look after it for the next generation. 
So it's important that we remember, the future, we treat it like a noun. 
It's not. It's a verb. 
It requires action. 
It requires us to push into it. 
It's not this thing that washes over us. 
It's something that we actually have total control over. 
But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don't. 
We feel like we're trapped. 
We can push through that. 
Now I'm getting more comfortable in the fact that at some point in the inevitable future, I will die. 
But because of these new ways of thinking and doing, both in the outside world and also with my family at home, and what I'm leaving my kids, I get more comfortable in that fact. 
And it's something that a lot of us are really uncomfortable with, but I'm telling you, think it through. 
Apply this type of thinking and you can push yourself past what's inevitably very, very uncomfortable. 
And it all begins really with yourself asking this question: What is your longpath? 
But I ask you, when you ask yourself that now or tonight or behind a steering wheel or in the boardroom or the situation room: push past the longpath, quick, oh, what's my longpath the next three years or five years? 
Try and push past your own life if you can because it makes you do things a little bit bigger than you thought were possible. 
Yes, we have huge, huge problems out there. 
With this process, with this thinking, I think we can make a difference. 
I think you can make a difference, and I believe in you guys. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Last year, I got a chance to watch the new "Star Wars" movie, which was fantastic, but one thing kept bugging me. 
I don't know if you noticed this or not. 
In this entirely technically advanced world, I did not see a single AED anywhere, which was totally shocking -- almost as shocking as not knowing what an AED is, which you guys do know. 
But for those at home, an AED is an automated external defibrillator. 
It's the device you use when your heart goes into cardiac arrest to shock it back into a normal rhythm, or, as one of the guys I was teaching a class to referred to it as: "The shocky-hearty-box thing." 
(Laughter) But I really can't blame the Empire, since health and safety regulations aren't really their first order of business. 
Though, even if we -- I think worse than not having an AED would be if there was one there, but just, no one knew where to find it. 
These devices can drastically increase your chance of survival -- almost like a tauntaun on Hoth. 
(Laughter) But I'm pretty sure that stormtrooper is going to be toast, regardless if we have an AED or not, since what happens is the chest plate is going to be quite hard to get off, and like that tauntaun, the AED has a very short window of time at which it's highly effective. 
In this case -- basically, we've got to use it within the first 10 minutes. 
The Jedi, on the other hand, have no problems with their outfits. 
Those robes open straight up, you can place the pads right onto the chest -- so upper-right-hand side of the chest, lower left, wait for the unit to determine if it's a shockable rhythm and get ready to shock. 
But, the Jedi do have a problem. 
They have a head appendage issue. 
And so I can be totally clear, thinking I'm ready to go, but I'm accidentally touching a tentacle and inadvertently shocking myself. 
(Laughter) So before you hit that button, make sure you are clear and everyone else is clear. 
Going back to that stormtrooper: If I did get that chest plate off in time, what would you do if you suddenly found there was a Wookiee under there, or possibly two Ewoks? 
(Laughter) Well, lucky for us, in the kit there's actually a razor, and we can use that to shave the chest on the upper right-hand side and the lower left. 
Wookiees also have another problem. 
They have an accessory issue. 
What we want to do is remove these -- anything between the two pads we want to remove, since it can cause something called "arcing." 
For those who don't know what arcing is, do you remember the Emperor, when he shoots electricity out the ends of his fingers -- (Laughter) that would be kind of like arcing. 
Another thing that -- Oh! By the way, he creates that by wearing wool socks under his robes. 
(Laughter) We can also get arcing if we have an extremely wet chest. 
The electricity travels across the surface instead of through the heart. 
We can correct this with the immortal words of Douglas Adams: "Don't panic," which most of us have done today -- and also always having a towel. 
So, good words to go by. 
The metal bikini -- unfortunately, this is where panic sets in -- like the modern bra, we have to make sure we remove, because this can cause severe arcing along with burns. 
But unfortunately this opens up an issue that's almost as controversial as talking about the prequels. 
(Laughter) The mere mention of the word "nipples," and people get into a little bit of a tizzy. 
By the way, that is not a nipple, that's a cupcake. 
(Laughter) Chances are, if you do have to use this, this is going to be on someone you know. 
And remember, everyone has nipples, except for Jabba. 
(Laughter) But he does love cupcakes. 
Speaking about Jabba, if we do have to use an AED on him, remember pad placement is the same, even though he doesn't have nipples. 
So it's going to be upper right-hand side, lower left. 
If we were going through, we're shocking, getting ready to go -- after we've done the shock, one of the things we need to do is remember to do compression. 
The preferred method is 30 compressions and two breaths in the center of the chest, between the nipples, pressing down at least two inches, no more than two and a half, at a rate of at least 100 beats a minute, no more than 120. 
Unfortunately, due to the size of Jabba's mouth and also what he puts in said mouth, we may not want to actually do the mouth-to-mouth part. 
So instead, we can do compression-only CPR. 
The way of remembering the compression-only part is we can actually use the Imperial March. 
I would sing it for you -- (Laughter) Unfortunately, that would be more something an interrogation droid would do. 
Yoda. 
Small little guy, like a baby. 
What we do is basically treat him like a baby, in the sense that we're going to place one pad in the center of the chest and one in the back. 
If we place them both in the front, they can be too close and cause severe arcing, so we want to avoid that. 
Hopefully, this helped to clarify and put some light on some of the darker issues of using an AED in the Star Wars universe, or any universe in total. 
I'll leave you with one point. 
Remember, if you do find yourself dealing with a Wookiee, do not shave the entire Wookiee. 
This takes way too much time, and it only pisses them off. 
(Laughter) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

In the next six minutes that you will listen to me, the world will have lost three mothers while delivering their babies: one, because of a severe complication; second, because she will be a teenager and her body will not be prepared for birth; but the third, only because of lack of access to basic clean tools at the time of childbirth. 
She will not be alone. 
Over one million mothers and babies die every single year in the developing world, only because of lack of access to basic cleanliness while giving birth to their babies. 
My journey began on a hot summer afternoon in India in 2008, when after a day of meeting women and listening to their needs, I landed in a thatched hut with a midwife. 
As a mother, I was very curious on how she delivered babies in her house. 
After a deep and engaging conversation with her on how she considered it a profound calling to do what she was doing, I asked her a parting question: Do you have the tools that you need to deliver the babies? 
I got to see her tool. 
"This is what I use to separate the mother and the baby," she said. 
Unsure of how to react, I held this agricultural tool in my hand in shock. 
I took a picture of this, hugged her and walked away. 
My mind was flooded with reflections of my own infection that I had to struggle with for a year past childbirth despite having access to the best medical care, and memories of my conversation with my father, who had lost his mom to childbirth, on how he thought his life would be so different if she would have been just next to him growing up. 
As a product developer, I started my process of research. 
I was very excited to find that there was a product out there called the Clean Birth Kit. 
But I just couldn't buy one for months. 
They were only assembled based on availability of funding. 
Finally, when I got my hands on one, I was in shock again. 
I would never use these tools to deliver my baby, I thought. 
But to confirm my instincts, I went back to the women, some of whom had the experience of using this product. 
Lo and behold, they had the same reaction and more. 
The women said they would rather deliver on a floor than on a plastic sheet that smeared blood all over. 
They were absolutely right -- it would cause more infection. 
The thread provided was a highway to bacterial infection through the baby's umbilical cord, and the blade used was the kind that men used for shaving, and they did not want it anywhere close to them. 
There was no incentive for anybody to redesign this product, because it was based on charity. 
The women were never consulted in this process. 
And to my surprise, the need was not only in homes but also in institutional settings with high-volume births. 
Situations in remote areas were even more daunting. 
This had to change. 
I made this my area of focus. 
I started the design process by collecting feedback, developing prototypes and engaging with various stakeholders researching global protocols. 
With every single prototype, we went back to the women to ensure that we had a product for them. 
What I learned through this process was that these women, despite their extreme poverty, placed great value on their health and well-being. 
They were absolutely not poor in mind. 
As with all of us, they would appreciate a well-designed product developed for their needs. 
After many iterations working with experts, medical health professionals and the women themselves, I should say it was not an easy process at all, but we had a simple and beautiful design. 
For a dollar more than what the existing product was offered for, at three dollars, we were able to deliver "janma," a clean birth kit in a purse. 
Janma, meaning "birth," contained a blood-absorbing sheet for the woman to give birth on, a surgical scalpel, a cord clamp, a bar of soap, a pair of gloves and the first cloth to wipe the baby clean. 
All this came packaged in a beautiful purse that was given to the mother as a gift after all her hard work, that she carried home with pride as a symbol of prosperity. 
One woman reacted to this gift. 
She said, "Is this really mine? Can I keep it?" 
The other one said, "Will you give me a different color when I have my next baby?" 
(Laughter) Better yet, a woman expressed that this was the first purse that she had ever owned in her life. 
The kit, aside from its symbolism and its simplicity, is designed to follow globally recommended medical protocol and serves as a behavior-change tool to follow steps one after the other. 
It can not only be used in homes, but also in institutional settings. 
To date, our kit has impacted over 600,000 mothers and babies around the world. 
It's a humbling experience to watch these numbers grow, and I cannot wait until we reach a hundred million. 
But women's health issues do not end here. 
There are thousands of simple issues that require low-cost interventions. 
We have facts to prove that if we invest in women and girls and provide them with better health and well-being, they will deliver healthier and wealthier and prosperous communities. 
We have to start by bringing simplicity and dignity to women's health issues: from reducing maternal mortality, to breaking taboos, to empowering women to take control of their own lives. 
This is my dream. 
But it is not possible to achieve it without engaging men and women alike from around the world -- yes, all of you. 
I recently heard this lyric by Leonard Cohen: "Ring the bells that still can ring. 
Forget your perfect offering. 
There is a crack in everything. 
That's how the light gets in." 
This is my bit of light. 
But we need more light. 
In fact, we need huge spotlights placed in the world of women's health if we need a better tomorrow. 
We should never forget that women are at the center of a sustainable world, and we do not exist without them. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to tell you a story about a girl. 
But I can't tell you her real name. 
So let's just call her Hadiza. 
Hadiza is 20. 
She's shy, but she has a beautiful smile that lights up her face. 
But she's in constant pain. 
And she will likely be on medication for the rest of her life. 
Do you want to know why? 
Hadiza is a Chibok girl, and on April 14, 2014, she was kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists. 
She managed to escape, though, by jumping off the truck that was carrying the girls. 
But when she landed, she broke both her legs, and she had to crawl on her tummy to hide in the bushes. 
She told me she was terrified that Boko Haram would come back for her. 
She was one of 57 girls who would escape by jumping off trucks that day. 
This story, quite rightly, caused ripples around the world. 
People like Michelle Obama, Malala and others lent their voices in protest, and at about the same time -- I was living in London at the time -- I was sent from London to Abuja to cover the World Economic Forum that Nigeria was hosting for the first time. 
But when we arrived, it was clear that there was only one story in town. 
We put the government under pressure. 
We asked tough questions about what they were doing to bring these girls back. 
Understandably, they weren't too happy with our line of questioning, and let's just say we received our fair share of "alternative facts." 
(Laughter) Influential Nigerians were telling us at the time that we were naïve, we didn't understand the political situation in Nigeria. 
But they also told us that the story of the Chibok girls was a hoax. 
Sadly, this hoax narrative has persisted, and there are still people in Nigeria today who believe that the Chibok girls were never kidnapped. 
Yet I was talking to people like these -- devastated parents, who told us that on the day Boko Haram kidnapped their daughters, they ran into the Sambisa Forest after the trucks carrying their daughters. 
They were armed with machetes, but they were forced to turn back because Boko Haram had guns. 
For two years, inevitably, the news agenda moved on, and for two years, we didn't hear much about the Chibok girls. 
Everyone presumed they were dead. 
But in April last year, I was able to obtain this video. 
This is a still from the video that Boko Haram filmed as a proof of life, and through a source, I obtained this video. 
But before I could publish it, I had to travel to the northeast of Nigeria to talk to the parents, to verify it. 
I didn't have to wait too long for confirmation. 
One of the mothers, when she watched the video, told me that if she could have reached into the laptop and pulled our her child from the laptop, she would have done so. 
For those of you who are parents, like myself, in the audience, you can only imagine the anguish that that mother felt. 
This video would go on to kick-start negotiation talks with Boko Haram. 
And a Nigerian senator told me that because of this video they entered into those talks, because they had long presumed that the Chibok girls were dead. 
Twenty-one girls were freed in October last year. 
Sadly, nearly 200 of them still remain missing. 
I must confess that I have not been a dispassionate observer covering this story. 
I am furious when I think about the wasted opportunities to rescue these girls. 
I am furious when I think about what the parents have told me, that if these were daughters of the rich and the powerful, they would have been found much earlier. 
And I am furious that the hoax narrative, I firmly believe, caused a delay; it was part of the reason for the delay in their return. 
This illustrates to me the deadly danger of fake news. 
So what can we do about it? 
There are some very smart people, smart engineers at Google and Facebook, who are trying to use technology to stop the spread of fake news. 
But beyond that, I think everybody here -- you and I -- we have a role to play in that. 
We are the ones who share the content. 
We are the ones who share the stories online. 
In this day and age, we're all publishers, and we have responsibility. 
In my job as a journalist, I check, I verify. 
I trust my gut, but I ask tough questions. 
Why is this person telling me this story? 
What do they have to gain by sharing this information? 
Do they have a hidden agenda? 
I really believe that we must all start to ask tougher questions of information that we discover online. 
Research shows that some of us don't even read beyond headlines before we share stories. 
Who here has done that? 
I know I have. 
But what if we stopped taking information that we discover at face value? 
What if we stop to think about the consequence of the information that we pass on and its potential to incite violence or hatred? 
What if we stop to think about the real-life consequences of the information that we share? 
Thank you very much for listening. 
(Applause) 

Fresh out of college, I went to work for a consulting firm. 
During orientation, the leaders dished out advice. 
Amongst them was one pithy counsel I will never forget. 
He told us, "Be easy to manage." 
Considering how naïve I really was at the time, I took his advice to heart. 
I told myself, "Yes, I will be the ultimate team player. 
I will do everything I'm told. 
I will be easy to manage." 
It wasn't until I arrived in graduate school and witnessed firsthand the criminal actions of scientists and engineers in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan that I realized how dangerous and yet surprisingly common this line of thinking really is. 
Make no mistake: the Flint water crisis is one of the most egregious environmental injustices of our time. 
For over 18 months, 100,000 residents, including thousands of young children, were exposed to contaminated drinking water with high levels of lead. 
Lead is a potent neurotoxin which causes cognitive and developmental disabilities and is especially harmful to growing fetuses and young children. 
We've known about its dangers since the Roman Empire. 
Amongst a whole host of health issues, 12 people died by contracting Legionnaires' disease. 
Flint's water infrastructure -- the complex network of underground pipes -- has been severely damaged. 
And while the water quality is slowly improving and the pipes are being replaced now, more than two years later, the water is still not safe to drink. 
So, people are still in shock. 
They ask themselves, "How could this have happened?" 
The short answer is: the crisis began when an emergency manager, appointed by Michigan's governor, decided to switch their water source to a local river to save money. 
But it continued for so long because scientists and engineers at government agencies in the state of Michigan and in the federal government did not follow federal regulations for treating the water right. 
What was more, they actively cheated on the law and orchestrated cover-ups. 
They ridiculed residents asking for help, while publicly insisting that the brown, smelly water coming out of the tap was safe to drink. 
The system at the local, state and federal levels completely failed to protect our most vulnerable, and an entire population was left to fend for itself. 
Now, amidst this injustice, Flint residents were rallying together. 
Amongst them were some amazing women of Flint -- mothers concerned about their kids -- who came together forming many grassroots coalitions, and these groups started protesting and demanding change. 
The group also reached out to outside scientists for help, and a few responded. 
Amongst them was a guy named Miguel Del Toral, a water expert at the US EPA -- the Environmental Protection Agency -- who actually wrote this scientific memo and sent it to the state of Michigan and the federal government to bring their attention to this problem. 
He was characterized a "rogue employee," and silenced. 
In collaboration with Flint residents, our research team here at Tech, of students and scientists led by professor Marc Edwards, conducted citywide testing to prove that Flint's water was indeed contaminated, even toxic in some homes. 
We substantiated what Flint had been screaming for months, and put it on the Internet for the world to see. 
Now, when I was getting involved, when I said yes to this, I had no idea what I was getting into. 
But every second of this journey has been totally worth it. 
This was science in service to the public. 
This is what I came to graduate school for, and this is how I would rather spend my life. 
And so this coalition -- this unlikely coalition of citizens, pastors, journalists and scientists -- came together to uncover the truth using science, advocacy and activism. 
A local pediatrician figured out that the instances of childhood lead poisoning had indeed doubled in Flint during the crisis. 
And the state of Michigan was forced to acknowledge the problem and take steps to correct it. 
This group and many others got Flint's kids protected. 
A few months later, President Obama came in and declared a federal emergency, and now Flint is getting more than 600 million dollars in healthcare, nutrition, education and overhauling their water infrastructure. 
However, the arrogance and the callous disregard for public health shown by scientists and engineers at these government agencies is beyond belief. 
These unhealthy cultures that are festering in these groups, where the focus is on meeting regulations and checking boxes as opposed to protecting public health, is just appalling. 
Just consider this email that an EPA employee wrote, where she goes, "I'm not so sure Flint is a community we want to go out on a limb for." 
The dehumanization of an entire population could not be more obvious. 
Now, contrast that to the first canon of engineering, which, in my opinion, should be the first law of humanity: "To hold paramount the health, safety and welfare of the public," above all else. 
This is the Hippocratic Oath we've rarely acknowledged, let alone embraced. 
And so when scientists and engineers, very much like medical doctors, screw up, people can get hurt -- even die. 
If our professionals and even students fail to get that, society pays a huge price. 
Buried deep in history lies a character I deeply admire -- an engineer named Peter Palchinsky. 
He lived in the time of the Soviet Union. 
And Palchinsky repeatedly got in trouble for his radical honesty and willingness to point out major flaws in the Soviets' mindless pursuit of rapid industrialization. 
Everyone was expected to follow orders coming from the top. 
Anyone asking questions or offering feedback was unwelcome. 
The Soviets had created the largest army of engineers the world had ever seen, and yet most of them were mere cogs in a gigantic machine heading for doom. 
Palchinsky, on the other hand, implored engineers to look at the economic, political and social consequences of their actions; in other words, be more public-focused. 
His fearless voice of reason was seen as a threat to the political establishment, and Joseph Stalin had him executed in 1929. 
Palchinsky's view on technocrats is very different from one that is still very popular, still very common -- that of a dispassionate researcher working in his ivory tower lab, or a nerdy engineer working in his cubicle. 
Brilliant, no doubt, yet somehow cut off from the world, shows little emotion -- kind of like Spock from "Star Trek," you know? 
This guy. 
(Laughter) Let's try and do the Spock salute. 
I don't think I'll succeed ... 
See, I can't be Spock. 
Thank goodness I can't be Spock. 
(Laughter) I was reminded of this distinction because a recent article came out in a very reputed scientific journal, which kind of characterized our Flint work as driven by "youthful idealism," and "Hollywood's dramatic sensibilities." 
It asks scientists to protect their research funding and institutions at all costs, no matter how just the cause. 
And if you think you have to get involved in something, even if it's an emergency, try finding an activist group or an NGO, and obtain the full support of the academic community -- whatever that means -- before you get involved. 
Not one mention of our moral and professional obligation of preventing harm to the public, or the fact that we have all this expertise, resources and, for some, even tenure to, you know, accomplish this task. 
I'm not saying every scientist should be an activist. 
There are real and sometimes very painful consequences of speaking up. 
But to denounce this idea, this possibility so completely so that you can protect research funding, simply screams of self-serving cowardice, and these are not the ideals we would want to pass to our students. 
And so you may think, "OK, all this sounds great, but you'll never completely change organizational cultures, or imbibe mindsets in students and professionals to look at their work as a public good -- science in service to the public." 
Maybe so. 
But could a big reason for that be that we are not training our students right? 
Because if you look closely, our education system today is focused more on creating what ex-Yale professor Bill Deresiewicz calls "excellent sheep" -- young people who are smart and ambitious, and yet somehow risk-averse, timid, directionless and, sometimes, full of themselves. 
Now, kids ... you know, we fell in love with science when we were kids, and yet we somehow spend most of our time during high school and college just jumping through hoops and doing things so that we can polish our résumé instead of sitting down and reflecting on what we want to do and who we want to be. 
And so, the markers of empathy in our college graduates have been dropping dramatically in the past two decades, while those of narcissism are on the rise. 
There is also a growing culture of disengagement between engineering students and the public. 
We are trained to build bridges and solve complex problems but not how to think or live or be a citizen of this world. 
My undergraduate years were explicit job preparation, and I cannot tell you how suffocating and painful it was at times. 
And so, some people think the solution to great engineers, to great scientists, is more technical training. 
Maybe so. 
But where are the discussions on ethical decision-making, or building character, or discerning right from wrong? 
Consider this project that I deeply love and admire. 
It's called, "Heroic Imagination Project." 
A brainchild of Dr. Phil Zimbardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, this program seeks to train school-going children around the world to look at themselves as heroes-in-waiting, or heroes-in-training. 
So, these young minds work over time to develop skills and virtues so that when the opportunity comes, no matter what that opportunity be, to stand up and do the right thing. 
In other words, anyone can be a hero. 
Think about that idea for a second. 
Why don't we teach science and engineering like that -- where heroism and public service are seen as key values, because indeed, it's often heroism that is not only the antidote to public indifference, but also to systemic evil like we saw in Flint. 
And so, dream with me what a 21st-century scientist slash engineer could look like: individuals who are driven to master the sciences so that they can serve society, and are also aware of the tremendous power their knowledge and decisions have; folks who are developing their moral courage at all times, and who realize that conflict and controversy are not necessarily bad things if our ultimate loyalty is to the public and the planet. 
These are the people who will stand up like we did in Flint -- not to be saviors or heroes in the media, but altruistic and fundamentally good actors that you and I can trust. 
Imagine fostering such a public-focused mindset in classes, on service trips and during activities during college or even high school, so that these young minds will hold onto those ideals when they actually enter the real world, whether that be consulting, academia, policy making -- or even becoming the president of a country. 
Some of mankind's greatest challenges lie ahead of us; contaminated drinking water is just one example. 
We could definitely use more -- nay, we desperately need more -- compassionate upstanders and public-focused scientists and engineers who will strive to the do right thing, and not be easy to manage. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"Look at me!" 
That phrase turned me into an eye-contact coach. 
I'm the mother of Ivan; he's 15 years old. 
Ivan has autism, he doesn't speak, and he communicates through an iPad, where his whole universe of words exists in images. 
He was diagnosed when he was two and a half. 
I still remember that day painfully. 
My husband and I felt really lost; we didn't know where to begin. 
There was no internet, you couldn't Google information, so we made those first steps out of sheer intuition. 
Ivan would not maintain eye contact, he had lost the words that he did know, and he didn't respond to his name or to anything we asked him, as if words were noise. 
The only way I could know what was going on with him, what he felt, was looking him in the eye. 
But that bridge was broken. 
How could I teach him about life? 
When I did things he liked, he would look at me, and we were connected. 
So I dedicated myself to working with him on those things, so we would have more and more eye-contact moments. 
We would spend hours and hours playing tag with his older sister, Alexia, and when we said: "I caught you!" 
he would look around for us, and at that moment, I could feel he was alive. 
We also hold a record for hours spent in a swimming pool. 
Ivan always had a passion for water. 
I remember when he was two and a half, on a rainy winter day, I was taking him to an indoor pool, because even on rainy days we'd go swimming. 
We were on the highway, and I took the wrong exit. 
He burst into tears and cried inconsolably, nonstop, until I turned back. 
Only then did he calm down. 
How was it possible that a two and a half year old didn't respond to his own name, yet in the middle of the rain and fog, where I couldn't see anything, he knew the exact route? 
That's when I realized that Ivan had an exceptional visual memory, and that that would be my way in. 
So I started taking pictures of everything, and teaching him what life was like, showing it to him, picture by picture. 
Even now, it's the way Ivan communicates what he wants, what he needs and also what he feels. 
But it wasn't just Ivan's eye contact that mattered. 
Everyone else's did, too. 
How could I make people see not only his autism, but see him the person and everything he can give; everything he can do; the things he likes and doesn't like, just like any one of us? 
But for that, I also had to give of myself. 
I had to have the strength to let him go, which was extremely difficult. 
Ivan was 11 years old, and he went for treatment in a neighborhood near our house. 
One afternoon, while I was waiting for him, I went into a greengrocer, a typical neighborhood store with a little bit of everything. 
While doing the shopping, I started talking to Jose, the owner. 
I told him about Ivan, that he had autism, and that I wanted him to learn to walk down the street by himself, without anyone holding his hand. 
So I decided to ask Jose if Thursdays around 2pm, Ivan could come and help him arrange the water bottles on the shelves, because he loved to organize things. 
And as a reward, he could buy some chocolate cookies, which were his favorite. 
He said "yes" right away. 
So that's how it went for a year: Ivan would go to Jose's greengrocer, help him arrange the shelves of water bottles with the labels perfectly lined up on the same side, and he would leave happy with his chocolate cookies. 
Jose is not an expert in autism. 
There is no need to be an expert nor do anything heroic to include someone. 
We just need to be there -- (Applause) (Applause ends) Really, no heroic deed -- we simply need to be close. 
And if we are afraid of something or we don't understand something, we need to ask. 
Let's be curious but never indifferent. 
Let's have the courage to look each other in the eye, because by looking, we can open a whole world to someone else. 
(Applause) (Cheers) 

I was 14 years old inside of a bowling alley, burglarizing an arcade game, and upon exiting the building a security guard grabbed my arm, so I ran. 
I ran down the street, and I jumped on top of a fence. 
And when I got to the top, the weight of 3,000 quarters in my book bag pulled me back down to the ground. 
So when I came to, the security guard was standing on top of me, and he said, "Next time you little punks steal something you can carry." 
(Laughter) I was taken to juvenile hall and when I was released into the custody of my mother, the first words my uncle said was, "How'd you get caught?" 
I said, "Man, the book bag was too heavy." 
He said, "Man, you weren't supposed to take all the quarters." 
I said, "Man, they were small. What am I supposed to do?" 
And 10 minutes later, he took me to burglarize another arcade game. 
We needed gas money to get home. 
That was my life. 
I grew up in Oakland, California, with my mother and members of my immediate family addicted to crack cocaine. 
My environment consisted of living with family, friends, and homeless shelters. 
Oftentimes, dinner was served in breadlines and soup kitchens. 
The big homey told me this: money rules the world and everything in it. 
And in these streets, money is king. 
And if you follow the money, it'll lead you to the bad guy or the good guy. 
Soon after, I committed my first crime, and it was the first time that I was told that I had potential and felt like somebody believed in me. 
Nobody ever told me that I could be a lawyer, doctor or engineer. 
I mean, how was I supposed to do that? I couldn't read, write or spell. 
I was illiterate. 
So I always thought crime was my way to go. 
And then one day I was talking to somebody and he was telling me about this robbery that we could do. 
And we did it. 
The reality was that I was growing up in the strongest financial nation in the world, the United States of America, while I watched my mother stand in line at a blood bank to sell her blood for 40 dollars just to try to feed her kids. 
She still has the needle marks on her arms to day to show for that. 
So I never cared about my community. 
They didn't care about my life. 
Everybody there was doing what they were doing to take what they wanted, the drug dealers, the robbers, the blood bank. 
Everybody was taking blood money. 
So I got mine by any means necessary. 
I got mine. 
Financial literacy really did rule the world, and I was a child slave to it following the bad guy. 
At 17 years old, I was arrested for robbery and murder and I soon learned that finances in prison rule more than they did on the streets, so I wanted in. 
One day, I rushed to grab the sports page of the newspaper so my cellie could read it to me, and I accidentally picked up the business section. 
And this old man said, "Hey youngster, you pick stocks?" 
And I said, "What's that?" 
He said, "That's the place where white folks keep all their money." 
(Laughter) And it was the first time that I saw a glimpse of hope, a future. 
He gave me this brief description of what stocks were, but it was just a glimpse. 
I mean, how was I supposed to do it? 
I couldn't read, write or spell. 
The skills that I had developed to hide my illiteracy no longer worked in this environment. 
I was trapped in a cage, prey among predators, fighting for freedom I never had. 
I was lost, tired, and I was out of options. 
So at 20 years old, I did the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life. 
I picked up a book, and it was the most agonizing time of my life, trying to learn how to read, the ostracizing from my family, the homeys. 
It was rough, man. 
It was a struggle. 
But little did I know I was receiving the greatest gifts I had ever dreamed of: self-worth, knowledge, discipline. 
I was so excited to be reading that I read everything I could get my hands on: candy wrappers, clothing logos, street signs, everything. 
I was just reading stuff! 
(Applause) Just reading stuff. 
I was so excited to know how to read and know how to spell. 
The homey came up, said, "Man, what you eating?" 
I said, "C-A-N-D-Y, candy." 
(Laughter) He said, "Let me get some." I said, "N-O. No." 
(Laughter) It was awesome. 
I mean, I can actually now for the first time in my life read. 
The feeling that I got from it was amazing. 
And then at 22, feeling myself, feeling confident, I remembered what the OG told me. 
So I picked up the business section of the newspaper. 
I wanted to find these rich white folks. 
(Laughter) So I looked for that glimpse. 
As I furthered my career in teaching others how to financially manage money and invest, I soon learned that I had to take responsibility for my own actions. 
True, I grew up in a very complex environment, but I chose to commit crimes, and I had to own up to that. 
I had to take responsibility for that, and I did. 
I was building a curriculum that could teach incarcerated men how to manage money through prison employments. 
Properly managing our lifestyle would provide transferrable tools that we can use to manage money when we reenter society, like the majority of people did who didn't commit crimes. 
Then I discovered that according to MarketWatch, over 60 percent of the American population has under 1,000 dollars in savings. 
Sports Illustrated said that over 60 percent of NBA players and NFL players go broke. 
40 percent of marital problems derive from financial issues. 
What the hell? 
(Laughter) You mean to tell me that people worked their whole lives, buying cars, clothes, homes and material stuff but were living check to check? 
How in the world were members of society going to help incarcerated individuals back into society if they couldn't manage they own stuff? 
We screwed. 
(Laughter) I needed a better plan. 
This is not going to work out too well. 
So ... 
I thought. 
I now had an obligation to meet those on the path and help, and it was crazy because I now cared about my community. 
Wow, imagine that. I cared about my community. 
Financial illiteracy is a disease that has crippled minorities and the lower class in our society for generations and generations, and we should be furious about that. 
Ask yourselves this: How can 50 percent of the American population be financially illiterate in a nation driven by financial prosperity? 
Our access to justice, our social status, living conditions, transportation and food are all dependent on money that most people can't manage. 
It's crazy! 
It's an epidemic and a bigger danger to public safety than any other issue. 
According to the California Department of Corrections, over 70 percent of those incarcerated have committed or have been charged with money-related crimes: robberies, burglaries, fraud, larceny, extortion -- and the list goes on. 
Check this out: a typical incarcerated person would enter the California prison system with no financial education, earn 30 cents an hour, over 800 dollars a year, with no real expenses and save no money. 
Upon his parole, he will be given 200 dollars gate money and told, "Hey, good luck, stay out of trouble. Don't come back to prison." 
With no meaningful preparation or long-term financial plan, what does he do ... ? 
At 60? 
Get a good job, or go back to the very criminal behavior that led him to prison in the first place? 
You taxpayers, you choose. 
Well, his education already chose for him, probably. 
So how do we cure this disease? 
I cofounded a program that we call Financial Empowerment Emotional Literacy. 
We call it FEEL, and it teaches how do you separate your emotional decisions from your financial decisions, and the four timeless rules to personal finance: the proper way to save, control your cost of living, borrow money effectively and diversify your finances by allowing your money to work for you instead of you working for it. 
Incarcerated people need these life skills before we reenter society. 
You can't have full rehabilitation without these life skills. 
This idea that only professionals can invest and manage money is absolutely ridiculous, and whoever told you that is lying. 
(Applause) A professional is a person who knows his craft better than most, and nobody knows how much money you need, have or want better than you, which means you are the professional. 
Financial literacy is not a skill, ladies and gentlemen. 
It's a lifestyle. 
Financial stability is a byproduct of a proper lifestyle. 
A financially sound incarcerated person can become a taxpaying citizen, and a financially sound taxpaying citizen can remain one. 
This allows us to create a bridge between those people who we influence: family, friends and those young people who still believe that crime and money are related. 
So let's lose the fear and anxiety of all the big financial words and all that other nonsense that you've been out there hearing. 
And let's get to the heart of what's been crippling our society from taking care of your responsibility to be better life managers. 
And let's provide a simple and easy to use curriculum that gets to the heart, the heart of what financial empowerment and emotional literacy really is. 
Now, if you're sitting out here in the audience and you said, "Oh yeah, well, that ain't me and I don't buy it," then come take my class -- (Laughter) so I can show you how much money it costs you every time you get emotional. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So there's this thing called the law of unintended consequences. 
I thought it was just like a saying, but it actually exists, I guess. 
There's, like, academic papers about it. 
And I'm a designer. 
I don't like unintended consequences. 
People hire me because they have consequences that they really intend, and what they intend is for me to help them achieve those consequences. 
So I live in fear of unintended consequences. 
And so this is a story about consequences intended and unintended. 
I got called by an organization called Robin Hood to do a favor for them. 
Robin Hood is based in New York, a wonderful philanthropic organization that does what it says in the name. 
They take from rich people, give it to poor people. 
In this case, what they wanted to benefit was the New York City school system, a huge enterprise that educates more than a million students at a time, and in buildings that are like this one, old buildings, big buildings, drafty buildings, sometimes buildings that are in disrepair, certainly buildings that could use a renovation. 
Robin Hood had this ambition to improve these buildings in some way, but what they realized was to fix the buildings would be too expensive and impractical. 
So instead they tried to figure out what one room they could go into in each of these buildings, in as many buildings that they could, and fix that one room so that they could improve the lives of the children inside as they were studying. 
And what they came up with was the school library, and they came up with this idea called the Library Initiative. 
All the students have to pass through the library. 
That's where the books are. 
So let's fix these libraries. 
So they did this wonderful thing where they brought in first 10, then 20, then more architects, each one of whom was assigned a library to rethink what a library was. 
They trained special librarians. 
So they started this mighty enterprise to reform public schools by improving these libraries. 
Then they called me up and they said, "Could you make a little contribution?" 
I said, "Sure, what do you want me to do?" 
And they said, "Well, we want you to be the graphic designer in charge of the whole thing." 
I know how to design that. I design logos. 
That's what people come to me for. 
So OK, let's design a logo for this thing. 
Easy to do, actually, compared with architecture and being a librarian. 
Just do a logo, make a contribution, and then you're out, and you feel really good about yourself. 
So I thought, let's overdeliver. 
So you have three options, pick any of the three. 
They're all great, I said. 
So the basic idea was these would be new school libraries for New York schools, and so the idea is that it's a new thing, a new idea that needs a new name. 
What I wanted to do was dispel the idea that these were musty old libraries, the kind of places that everyone is bored with, you know, not your grandparents' library. 
This is going to this new, exciting thing, not a boring library. 
So option number one: so instead of thinking of it as a library, think of it as a place where it is like: do talk, do make loud noises. 
Right? So no shushing, it's like a shush-free zone. 
We're going to call it the Reading Room. 
That was option number one. OK, option number two. 
Option number two was, wait for it, OWL. 
I'm getting my book from the OWL. Meet you after school down at OWL. 
I like that, right? Now, what does OWL stand for? 
Well, it could be One World Library, or it could be Open. Wonder. Learn. 
Or it could be -- and I figure librarians could figure out other things it could be because they know about words. 
And then look at this. It's like the eye of the owl. 
This is irresistible in my opinion. 
But there's even another idea. 
Option number three was based actually on language. 
It's the idea that "read" is the past tense of "read," and they're both spelled the same way. 
So why don't we call this place The Red Zone? 
I'll meet you at the Red Zone. 
Are you Red? Get Red. 
I'm well Red. 
(Laughter) I really loved this idea, and I somehow was not focused on the idea that librarians as a class are sort of interested in spelling and I don't know. 
(Laughter) But sometimes cleverness is more important than spelling, and I thought this would be one of those instances. 
So usually when I make these presentations I say there's just one question and the question should be, "How can I thank you, Mike?" 
But in this case, the question was more like, "Um, are you kidding?" 
Because, they said, the premise of all this work was that kids were bored with old libraries, musty old libraries. 
They were tired of them. 
The school libraries in these schools are really so dilapidated, if they're there at all, that they haven't bored anyone. 
They haven't even been there to bore anyone at all. 
So the idea was, just forget about giving it a new name. 
Just call it, one last try, a library. 
Right? OK. 
Exclamation point? 
Then -- this is because I'm clever -- move that into the "i," make it red, and there you have it, the Library Initiative. 
So I thought, mission accomplished, there's your logo. 
So what's interesting about this logo, an unintended consequence, was that it turned out that they didn't really even need my design because you could type it any font, you could write it by hand, and when they started sending emails around, they just would use Shift and 1, they'd get their own logo just right out of the thing. 
And I thought, well, that's fine. 
Feel free to use that logo. 
And then I embarked on the real rollout of this thing -- working with every one of the architects to put this logo on the front door of their own library. Right? 
So here's the big rollout. 
First Robin Hood was my client. Now these architects were my client. 
I'd say, "Here's your logo. Put it on the door." 
"Here's your logo. Put it on both doors." 
"Here's your logo. Put it off to the side." 
"Here's your logo repeated all over to the top." 
So everything was going swimmingly. 
I just was saying, "Here's your logo. Here's your logo." 
Then I got a call from one of the architects, a guy named Richard Lewis, and he says, "I've got a problem. 
You're the graphics guy. Can you solve it?" 
And I said, OK, sure." 
And he said, "The problem is that there's a space between the shelf and the ceiling." 
So that sounds like an architectural issue to me, not a graphic design issue, so I'm, "Go on." 
And Richard says, "Well, the top shelf has to be low enough for the kid to reach it, but I'm in a big old building, and the ceilings are really high, so actually I've got all this space up there and I need something like a mural." 
And I'm like, "Whoa, you know, I'm a logo designer. 
I'm not Diego Rivera or something. 
I'm not a muralist." 
And so he said, "But can't you think of anything?" 
So I said, "OK, what if we just took pictures of the kids in the school and just put them around the top of the thing, and maybe that could work." 
And my wife is a photographer, and I said, "Dorothy, there's no budget, can you come to this school in east New York, take these pictures?" 
And she did, and if you go in Richard's library, which is one of the first that opened, it has this glorious frieze of, like, the heroes of the school, oversized, looking down into the little dollhouse of the real library, right? 
And the kids were great, hand-selected by the principals and the librarian. 
It just kind of created this heroic atmosphere in this library, this very dignified setting below and the joy of the children above. 
So naturally all the other librarians in the other schools see this and they said, well, we want murals too. 
And I'm like, OK. 
So then I think, well, it can't be the same mural every time, so Dorothy did another one, and then she did another one, but then we needed more help, so I called an illustrator I knew named Lynn Pauley, and Lynn did these beautiful paintings of the kids. 
Then I called a guy named Charles Wilkin at a place called Automatic Design. 
He did these amazing collages. 
We had Rafael Esquer do these great silhouettes. 
He would work with the kids, asking for words, and then based on those prompts, come up with this little, delirious kind of constellation of silhouettes of things that are in books. 
Peter Arkle interviewed the kids and had them talk about their favorite books and he put their testimony as a frieze up there. 
Stefan Sagmeister worked with Yuko Shimizu and they did this amazing manga-style statement, "Everyone who is honest is interesting," that goes all the way around. 
Christoph Niemann, brilliant illustrator, did a whole series of things where he embedded books into the faces and characters and images and places that you find in the books. 
And then even Maira Kalman did this amazing cryptic installation of objects and words that kind of go all around and will fascinate students for as long as it's up there. 
So this was really satisfying, and basically my role here was reading a series of dimensions to these artists, and I would say, "Three feet by 15 feet, whatever you want. 
Let me know if you have any problem with that." 
And they would go and install these. It just was the greatest thing. 
But the greatest thing, actually, was -- Every once in a while, I'd get, like, an invitation in the mail made of construction paper, and it would say, "You are invited to the opening of our new library." 
So you'd go to the library, say, you'd go to PS10, and you'd go inside. 
There'd be balloons, there'd be a student ambassador, there'd be speeches that were read, poetry that was written specifically for the opening, dignitaries would present people with certificates, and the whole thing was just a delirious, fun party. 
So I loved going to these things. 
I would stand there dressed like this, obviously not belonging, and someone would say, "What are you doing here, mister?" 
And I'd say, "Well, I'm part of the team that designed this place." 
And they'd said, "You do these shelves?" 
And I said, "No." "You took the pictures up above." 
"No." 
"Well, what did you do?" 
"You know when you came in? The sign over the door?" 
"The sign that says library?" 
(Laughter) "Yeah, I did that!" 
And then they'd sort of go, "OK. Nice work if you can get it." 
So it was so satisfying going to these little openings despite the fact that I was kind of largely ignored or humiliated, but it was actually fun going to the openings, so I decided that I wanted to get the people in my office who had worked on these projects, get the illustrators and photographers, and I said, why don't we rent a van and drive around the five boroughs of New York and see how many we could hit at one time. 
And eventually there were going to be 60 of these libraries, so we probably got to see maybe half a dozen in one long day. 
And the best thing of all was meeting these librarians who kind of were running these, took possession of these places like their private stage upon which they were invited to mesmerize their students and bring the books to life, and it was just this really exciting experience for all of us to actually see these things in action. 
So we spent a long day doing this and we were in the very last library. 
It was still winter, because it got dark early, and the librarian says, "I'm about to close down. So really nice having you here. 
Hey, wait a second, do you want to see how I turn off the lights?" 
I'm like, "OK." 
And she said, "I have this special way that I do it." 
And then she showed me. 
What she did was she turned out every light one by one by one by one, and the last light she left on was the light that illuminated the kids' faces, and she said, "That's the last light I turn off every night, because I like to remind myself why I come to work." 
So when I started this whole thing, remember, it was just about designing that logo and being clever, come up with a new name? 
The unintended consequence here, which I would like to take credit for and like to think I can think through the experience to that extent, but I can't. 
I was just focused on a foot ahead of me, as far as I could reach with my own hands. 
Instead, way off in the distance was a librarian who was going to find the chain of consequences that we had set in motion, a source of inspiration so that she in this case could do her work really well. 
40,000 kids a year are affected by these libraries. 
They've been happening for more than 10 years now, so those librarians have kind of turned on a generation of children to books and so it's been a thrill to find out that sometimes unintended consequences are the best consequences. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

[His Holiness Pope Francis Filmed in Vatican City First shown at TED2017] Good evening – or, good morning, I am not sure what time it is there. 
Regardless of the hour, I am thrilled to be participating in your conference. 
I very much like its title – "The Future You" – because, while looking at tomorrow, it invites us to open a dialogue today, to look at the future through a "you." 
"The Future You:" the future is made of yous, it is made of encounters, because life flows through our relations with others. 
Quite a few years of life have strengthened my conviction that each and everyone's existence is deeply tied to that of others: life is not time merely passing by, life is about interactions. 
As I meet, or lend an ear to those who are sick, to the migrants who face terrible hardships in search of a brighter future, to prison inmates who carry a hell of pain inside their hearts, and to those, many of them young, who cannot find a job, I often find myself wondering: "Why them and not me?" 
I, myself, was born in a family of migrants; my father, my grandparents, like many other Italians, left for Argentina and met the fate of those who are left with nothing. 
I could have very well ended up among today's "discarded" people. 
And that's why I always ask myself, deep in my heart: "Why them and not me?" 
First and foremost, I would love it if this meeting could help to remind us that we all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent "I," separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone. 
We don’t think about it often, but everything is connected, and we need to restore our connections to a healthy state. 
Even the harsh judgment I hold in my heart against my brother or my sister, the open wound that was never cured, the offense that was never forgiven, the rancor that is only going to hurt me, are all instances of a fight that I carry within me, a flare deep in my heart that needs to be extinguished before it goes up in flames, leaving only ashes behind. 
Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve. 
While such concerns must be taken very seriously, they are not invincible. 
They can be overcome when we don't lock our door to the outside world. 
Happiness can only be discovered as a gift of harmony between the whole and each single component. 
Even science – and you know it better than I do – points to an understanding of reality as a place where every element connects and interacts with everything else. 
And this brings me to my second message. 
How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. 
How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. 
How wonderful would it be if solidarity, this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word, were not simply reduced to social work, and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples and countries. 
Only by educating people to a true solidarity will we be able to overcome the "culture of waste," which doesn't concern only food and goods but, first and foremost, the people who are cast aside by our techno-economic systems which, without even realizing it, are now putting products at their core, instead of people. 
Solidarity is a term that many wish to erase from the dictionary. 
Solidarity, however, is not an automatic mechanism. 
It cannot be programmed or controlled. 
It is a free response born from the heart of each and everyone. 
Yes, a free response! 
When one realizes that life, even in the middle of so many contradictions, is a gift, that love is the source and the meaning of life, how can they withhold their urge to do good to another fellow being? 
In order to do good, we need memory, we need courage and we need creativity. 
And I know that TED gathers many creative minds. 
Yes, love does require a creative, concrete and ingenious attitude. 
Good intentions and conventional formulas, so often used to appease our conscience, are not enough. 
Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. 
The other has a face. 
The "you" is always a real presence, a person to take care of. 
There is a parable Jesus told to help us understand the difference between those who'd rather not be bothered and those who take care of the other. 
I am sure you have heard it before. It is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. 
When Jesus was asked: "Who is my neighbor?" - namely, "Who should I take care of?" - he told this story, the story of a man who had been assaulted, robbed, beaten and abandoned along a dirt road. 
Upon seeing him, a priest and a Levite, two very influential people of the time, walked past him without stopping to help. 
After a while, a Samaritan, a very much despised ethnicity at the time, walked by. 
Seeing the injured man lying on the ground, he did not ignore him as if he weren't even there. 
Instead, he felt compassion for this man, which compelled him to act in a very concrete manner. 
He poured oil and wine on the wounds of the helpless man, brought him to a hostel and paid out of his pocket for him to be assisted. 
The story of the Good Samaritan is the story of today’s humanity. 
People's paths are riddled with suffering, as everything is centered around money, and things, instead of people. 
And often there is this habit, by people who call themselves "respectable," of not taking care of the others, thus leaving behind thousands of human beings, or entire populations, on the side of the road. 
Fortunately, there are also those who are creating a new world by taking care of the other, even out of their own pockets. 
Mother Teresa actually said: "One cannot love, unless it is at their own expense." 
We have so much to do, and we must do it together. 
But how can we do that with all the evil we breathe every day? 
Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good, to compassion and to our capacity to react against evil, all of which stem from deep within our hearts. 
Now you might tell me, "Sure, these are beautiful words, but I am not the Good Samaritan, nor Mother Teresa of Calcutta." 
On the contrary: we are precious, each and every one of us. 
Each and every one of us is irreplaceable in the eyes of God. 
Through the darkness of today's conflicts, each and every one of us can become a bright candle, a reminder that light will overcome darkness, and never the other way around. 
To Christians, the future does have a name, and its name is Hope. 
Feeling hopeful does not mean to be optimistically naïve and ignore the tragedy humanity is facing. 
Hope is the virtue of a heart that doesn't lock itself into darkness, that doesn't dwell on the past, does not simply get by in the present, but is able to see a tomorrow. 
Hope is the door that opens onto the future. 
Hope is a humble, hidden seed of life that, with time, will develop into a large tree. 
It is like some invisible yeast that allows the whole dough to grow, that brings flavor to all aspects of life. 
And it can do so much, because a tiny flicker of light that feeds on hope is enough to shatter the shield of darkness. 
A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. 
And then there will be another "you," and another "you," and it turns into an "us." 
And so, does hope begin when we have an "us?" 
No. 
Hope began with one "you." 
When there is an "us," there begins a revolution. 
The third message I would like to share today is, indeed, about revolution: the revolution of tenderness. 
And what is tenderness? 
It is the love that comes close and becomes real. 
It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. 
Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. 
To listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of our sick and polluted earth. 
Tenderness means to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need. 
Tenderness is the language of the young children, of those who need the other. 
A child’s love for mom and dad grows through their touch, their gaze, their voice, their tenderness. 
I like when I hear parents talk to their babies, adapting to the little child, sharing the same level of communication. 
This is tenderness: being on the same level as the other. 
God himself descended into Jesus to be on our level. 
This is the same path the Good Samaritan took. 
This is the path that Jesus himself took. 
He lowered himself, he lived his entire human existence practicing the real, concrete language of love. 
Yes, tenderness is the path of choice for the strongest, most courageous men and women. 
Tenderness is not weakness; it is fortitude. 
It is the path of solidarity, the path of humility. 
Please, allow me to say it loud and clear: the more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. 
If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other. 
There is a saying in Argentina: "Power is like drinking gin on an empty stomach." 
You feel dizzy, you get drunk, you lose your balance, and you will end up hurting yourself and those around you, if you don’t connect your power with humility and tenderness. 
Through humility and concrete love, on the other hand, power – the highest, the strongest one – becomes a service, a force for good. 
The future of humankind isn't exclusively in the hands of politicians, of great leaders, of big companies. 
Yes, they do hold an enormous responsibility. 
But the future is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a "you" and themselves as part of an "us." 
We all need each other. 
And so, please, think of me as well with tenderness, so that I can fulfill the task I have been given for the good of the other, of each and every one, of all of you, of all of us. 
Thank you. 

Palms sweaty, heart racing, stomach in knots. 
You can't cry for help. 
Not only is your throat too tight to breathe, but it'd be so embarrassing. 
No, you aren't being stalked by a monster, you're speaking in public, a fate some deem worse than death. 
See, when you're dead, you feel nothing; at a podium, you feel stage fright. 
But at some point we've all had to communicate in front of people, so you have to try and overcome it. 
To start, understand what stage fright is. 
Humans, social animals that we are, are wired to worry about reputation. 
Public speaking can threaten it. 
Before a speech, you fret, "What if people think I'm awful and I'm an idiot?" 
That fear of being seen as an awful idiot is a threat reaction from a primitive part of your brain that's very hard to control. 
It's the fight or flight response, a self-protective process seen in a range of animals, most of which don't give speeches. 
But we have a wise partner in the study of freaking out. 
Charles Darwin tested fight or flight at the London Zoo snake exhibit. 
He wrote in his diary, "My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced." 
He concluded that his response was an ancient reaction unaffected by the nuances of modern civilization. 
So, to your conscious modern mind, it's a speech. 
To the rest of your brain, built up to code with the law of the jungle, when you perceive the possible consequences of blowing a speech, it's time to run for your life or fight to the death. 
Your hypothalamus, common to all vertebrates, triggers your pituitary gland to secrete the hormone ACTH, making your adrenal gland shoot adrenaline into your blood. 
Your neck and back tense up, you slouch. 
Your legs and hand shake as your muscles prepare for attack. 
You sweat. 
Your digestion shuts down to maximize the delivery of nutrients and oxygen to muscles and vital organs, so you get dry mouth, butterflies. 
Your pupils dilate, it's hard to read anything up close, like your notes, but long range is easy. 
That's how stage fright works. 
How do we fight it? 
First, perspective. 
This isn't all in your head. 
It's a natural, hormonal, full body reaction by an autonomic nervous system on autopilot. 
And genetics play a huge role in social anxiety. 
John Lennon played live thousands of times. 
Each time he vomited beforehand. 
Some people are just wired to feel more scared performing in public. 
Since stage fright is natural and inevitable, focus on what you can control. 
Practice a lot, starting long before in an environment similar to the real performance. 
Practicing any task increases your familiarity and reduces anxiety, so when it's time to speak in public, you're confident in yourself and the task at hand. 
Steve Jobs rehearsed his epic speeches for hundreds of hours, starting weeks in advance. 
If you know what you're saying, you'll feed off the crowd's energy instead of letting your hypothalamus convince your body it's about to be lunch for a pack of predators. 
But hey, the vertebrate hypothalamus has had millions of years more practice than you. 
Just before you go on stage, it's time to fight dirty and trick your brain. 
Stretch your arms up and breath deeply. 
This makes your hypothalamus trigger a relaxation response. 
Stage fright usually hits hardest right before a presentation, so take that last minute to stretch and breathe. 
You approach the Mic, voice clear, body relaxed. 
Your well-prepared speech convinces the wild crowd you're a charismatic genius. 
How? 
You didn't overcome stage fright, you adapted to it. 
And to the fact that no matter how civilized you may seem, in part of your brain, you're still a wild animal, a profound, well-spoken wild animal. 

Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? 
On the outside, they may look calm and focused, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required. 
But inside their brains, there's a party going on. 
How do we know this? 
Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time with instruments like fMRI and PET scanners. 
When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks, such as reading or doing math problems, each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. 
But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks. 
Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once, as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into unified musical experience. 
And our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along. 
But when scientists turned from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. 
It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout. 
The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly fast sequences. 
But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? 
The research is still fairly new, but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. 
Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. 
As with any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. 
The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. 
It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision, in which the left hemisphere is more involved, with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. 
For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain's corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. 
This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings. 
Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. 
This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. 
And, indeed, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions, creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. 
Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag, like a good Internet search engine. 
How do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to, say, sports or painting? 
Or could it be that people who go into music were already smarter to begin with? 
Neuroscientists have explored these issues, but so far, they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity studied, including other arts. 
And several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. 
This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain. 

One of the most remarkable aspects of the human brain is its ability to recognize patterns and describe them. 
Among the hardest patterns we've tried to understand is the concept of turbulent flow in fluid dynamics. 
The German physicist Werner Heisenberg said, "When I meet God, I'm going to ask him two questions: why relativity and why turbulence? 
I really believe he will have an answer for the first." 
As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks. 
In June 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted the view just before sunrise from the window of his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he'd admitted himself after mutilating his own ear in a psychotic episode. 
In "The Starry Night," his circular brushstrokes create a night sky filled with swirling clouds and eddies of stars. 
Van Gogh and other Impressionists represented light in a different way than their predecessors, seeming to capture its motion, for instance, across sun-dappled waters, or here in star light that twinkles and melts through milky waves of blue night sky. 
The effect is caused by luminance, the intensity of the light in the colors on the canvas. 
The more primitive part of our visual cortex, which sees light contrast and motion, but not color, will blend two differently colored areas together if they have the same luminance. 
But our brains' primate subdivision will see the contrasting colors without blending. 
With these two interpretations happening at once, the light in many Impressionist works seems to pulse, flicker and radiate oddly. 
That's how this and other Impressionist works use quickly executed prominent brushstrokes to capture something strikingly real about how light moves. 
Sixty years later, Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov furthered our mathematical understanding of turbulence when he proposed that energy in a turbulent fluid at length R varies in proportion to the 5/3rds power of R. 
Experimental measurements show Kolmogorov was remarkably close to the way turbulent flow works, although a complete description of turbulence remains one of the unsolved problems in physics. 
A turbulent flow is self-similar if there is an energy cascade. 
In other words, big eddies transfer their energy to smaller eddies, which do likewise at other scales. 
Examples of this include Jupiter's Great Red Spot, cloud formations and interstellar dust particles. 
In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw the eddies of a distant cloud of dust and gas around a star, and it reminded them of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." 
This motivated scientists from Mexico, Spain and England to study the luminance in Van Gogh's paintings in detail. 
They discovered that there is a distinct pattern of turbulent fluid structures close to Kolmogorov's equation hidden in many of Van Gogh's paintings. 
The researchers digitized the paintings, and measured how brightness varies between any two pixels. 
From the curves measured for pixel separations, they concluded that paintings from Van Gogh's period of psychotic agitation behave remarkably similar to fluid turbulence. 
His self-portrait with a pipe, from a calmer period in Van Gogh's life, showed no sign of this correspondence. 
And neither did other artists' work that seemed equally turbulent at first glance, like Munch's "The Scream." 
While it's too easy to say Van Gogh's turbulent genius enabled him to depict turbulence, it's also far too difficult to accurately express the rousing beauty of the fact that in a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind, and to unite his unique mind's eye with the deepest mysteries of movement, fluid and light. 

As 1905 dawned, the soon-to-be 26-year-old Albert Einstein faced life as a failed academic. 
Most physicists of the time would have scoffed at the idea that this minor civil servant could have much to contribute to science. 
Yet within the following year, Einstein would publish not one, not two, not three, but four extraordinary papers, each on a different topic, that were destined to radically transform our understanding of the universe. 
The myth that Einstein had failed math is just that. 
He had mastered calculus on his own by the age of 15 and done well at both his Munich secondary school and at the Swiss Polytechnic, where he studied for a math and physics teaching diploma. 
But skipping classes to spend more time in the lab and neglecting to show proper deference to his professors had derailed his intended career path. 
Passed over even for a lab assistant position, he had to settle for a job at the Swiss patent office, obtained with the help of a friend's father. 
Working six days a week as a patent clerk, Einstein still managed to make some time for physics, discussing the latest work with a few close friends, and publishing a couple of minor papers. 
It came as a major surprise when in March 1905 he submitted a paper with a shocking hypothesis. 
Despite decades of evidence that light was a wave, Einstein proposed that it could, in fact, be a particle, showing that mysterious phenomena, such as the photoelectric effect, could be explained by his hypothesis. 
The idea was derided for years to come, but Einstein was simply twenty years ahead of his time. 
Wave-particle duality was slated to become a cornerstone of the quantum revolution. 
Two months later in May, Einstein submitted a second paper, this time tackling the centuries old question of whether atoms actually exist. 
Though certain theories were built on the idea of invisible atoms, some prominent scientists still believed them to be a useful fiction, rather than actual physical objects. 
But Einstein used an ingenious argument, showing that the behavior of small particles randomly moving around in a liquid, known as Brownian motion, could be precisely predicted by the collisions of millions of invisible atoms. 
Experiments soon confirmed Einstein's model, and atomic skeptics threw in the towel. 
The third paper came in June. 
For a long time, Einstein had been troubled by an inconsistency between two fundamental principles of physics. 
The well established principle of relativity, going all the way back to Galileo, stated that absolute motion could not be defined. 
Yet electromagnetic theory, also well established, asserted that absolute motion did exist. 
The discrepancy, and his inability to resolve it, left Einstein in what he described as a state of psychic tension. 
But one day in May, after he had mulled over the puzzle with his friend Michele Besso, the clouds parted. 
Einstein realized that the contradiction could be resolved if it was the speed of light that remained constant, regardless of reference frame, while both time and space were relative to the observer. 
It took Einstein only a few weeks to work out the details and formulate what came to be known as special relativity. 
The theory not only shattered our previous understanding of reality but would also pave the way for technologies, ranging from particle accelerators, to the global positioning system. 
One might think that this was enough, but in September, a fourth paper arrived as a "by the way" follow-up to the special relativity paper. 
Einstein had thought a little bit more about his theory, and realized it also implied that mass and energy, one apparently solid and the other supposedly ethereal, were actually equivalent. 
And their relationship could be expressed in what was to become the most famous and consequential equation in history: E=mc^2. 
Einstein would not become a world famous icon for nearly another fifteen years. 
It was only after his later general theory of relativity was confirmed in 1919 by measuring the bending of starlight during a solar eclipse that the press would turn him into a celebrity. 
But even if he had disappeared back into the patent office and accomplished nothing else after 1905, those four papers of his miracle year would have remained the gold standard of startling unexpected genius. 

In 2008, something incredible happened: a man was cured of HIV. 
In over 70 million HIV cases, that was a first and, so far, a last. 
We don't yet understand exactly how he was cured. 
We can cure people of various diseases, such as malaria and hepatitis C, so why can't we cure HIV? 
Well, first let's examine how HIV infects people and progresses into AIDS. 
HIV spreads through exchanges of bodily fluids. 
Unprotected sex and contaminated needles are the leading cause of transmission. 
It, fortunately, cannot spread through air, water, or casual contact. 
Individuals of any age, sexual orientation, gender and race can contract HIV. 
Once inside the body, HIV infects cells that are part of the immune system. 
It particularly targets helper T cells, which help defend the body against bacterial and fungal infections. 
HIV is a retrovirus, which means it can write its genetic code into the genome of infected cells, co-opting them into making more copies of itself. 
During the first stage of HIV infection, the virus replicates within helper T cells, destroying many of them in the process. 
During this stage, patients often experience flu-like symptoms, but are typically not yet in mortal danger. 
However, for a period ranging from a few months to several years, during which time the patient may look and feel completely healthy, the virus continues to replicate and destroy T cells. 
When T cell counts drop too low, patients are in serious danger of contracting deadly infections that healthy immune systems can normally handle. 
This stage of HIV infection is known as AIDS. 
The good news is there are drugs that are highly effective at managing levels of HIV and preventing T cell counts from getting low enough for the disease to progress to AIDS. 
With antiretroviral therapy, most HIV-positive people can expect to live long and healthy lives, and are much less likely to infect others. 
However, there are two major catches. 
One is that HIV-positive patients must keep taking their drugs for the rest of their lives. 
Without them, the virus can make a deadly comeback. 
So, how do these drugs work? 
The most commonly prescribed ones prevent the viral genome from being copied and incorporated into a host cell's DNA. 
Other drugs prevent the virus from maturing or assembling, causing HIV to be unable to infect new cells in the body. 
But HIV hides out somewhere our current drugs cannot reach it: inside the DNA of healthy T cells. 
Most T cells die shortly after being infected with HIV. 
But in a tiny percentage, the instructions for building more HIV viruses lies dormant, sometimes for years. 
So even if we could wipe out every HIV virus from an infected person's body, one of those T cells could activate and start spreading the virus again. 
The other major catch is that not everyone in the world has access to the therapies that could save their lives. 
In Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for over 70% of HIV patients worldwide, antiretrovirals reached only about one in three HIV-positive patients in 2012. 
There is no easy answer to this problem. 
A mix of political, economic and cultural barriers makes effective prevention and treatment difficult. 
And even in the U.S., HIV still claims more than 10,000 lives per year. 
However, there is ample cause for hope. 
Researchers may be closer than ever to developing a true cure. 
One research approach involves using a drug to activate all cells harboring the HIV genetic information. 
This would both destroy those cells and flush the virus out into the open, where our current drugs are effective. 
Another is looking to use genetic tools to cut the HIV DNA out of cells genomes altogether. 
And while one cure out of 70 million cases may seem like terrible odds, one is immeasurably better than zero. 
We now know that a cure is possible, and that may give us what we need to beat HIV for good. 

If you've watched the news or followed politics chances are you've heard the term Orwellian thrown around in one context or another. 
But have you ever stopped to think about what it really means, or why it's used so often? 
The term was named after British author Eric Blair known by his pen name George Orwell. 
Because his most famous work, the novel "1984," depicts an oppressive society under a totalitarian government, "Orwellian" is often used simply to mean authoritarian. 
But using the term in this way not only fails to fully convey Orwell's message, it actually risks doing precisely what he tried to warn against. 
Orwell was indeed opposed to all forms of tyranny, spending much of his life fighting against anti-democratic forces of both the left-wing and the right. 
But he was also deeply concerned with how such ideologies proliferate. 
And one of his most profound insights was the importance that language plays in shaping our thoughts and opinions. 
The government of "1984"'s Oceania controls its people's actions and speech in some ways that are obvious. 
Their every move and word is watched and heard, and the threat of what happens to those who step out of line is always looming overhead. 
Other forms of control are not so obvious. 
The population is inundated with a constant barrage of propaganda made up of historical facts and statistics manufactured in the Ministry of Truth. 
The Ministry of Peace is the military. 
Labor camps are called "Joycamps." 
Political prisoners are detained and tortured in the Ministry of Love. 
This deliberate irony is an example of doublespeak, when words are used not to convey meaning but to undermine it, corrupting the very ideas they refer to. 
The regime's control of language goes even further, eliminating words from the English language to create the official dialect of Newspeak, a crudely limited collection of acronyms and simple concrete nouns lacking any words complex enough to encourage nuanced or critical thought. 
This has an effect on the psyche Orwell calls, "Doublethink," a hypnotic state of cognitive dissonance in which one is compelled to disregard their own perception in place of the officially dictated version of events, leaving the individual completely dependent on the State's definition of reality itself. 
The result is a world in which even the privacy of one's own thought process is violated, where one may be found guilty of thoughtcrime by talking in their sleep, and keeping a diary or having a love affair equals a subversive act of rebellion. 
This might sound like something that can only happen in totalitarian regimes, but Orwell was warning us about the potential for this occurring even in democratic societies. 
And this is why "authoritarian" alone does not "Orwellian" make. 
In his essay, "Politics and the English Language," he described techniques like using pretentious words to project authority, or making atrocities sound acceptable by burying them in euphemisms and convoluted sentence structures. 
But even more mundane abuses of language can affect the way we think about things. 
The words you see and hear in everyday advertising have been crafted to appeal to you and affect your behavior, as have the soundbites and talking points of political campaigns which rarely present the most nuanced perspective on the issues. 
And the way that we use ready-made phrases and responses gleaned from media reports or copied from the Internet makes it easy to get away with not thinking too deeply or questioning your assumptions. 
So the next time you hear someone use the word Orwellian, pay close attention. 
If they're talking about the deceptive and manipulative use of language, they're on the right track. 
If they're talking about mass surveillance and intrusive government, they're describing something authoritarian but not necessarily Orwellian. 
And if they use it as an all-purpose word for any ideas they dislike, it's possible their statements are more Orwellian than whatever it is they're criticizing. 
Words have the power to shape thought. 
Language is the currency of politics, forming the basis of society from the most common, everyday interactions to the highest ideals. 
Orwell urged us to protect our language because ultimately our ability to think and communicate clearly is what stands between us and a world where war is peace and freedom is slavery. 

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

Light, bright, and cheerful. 
It's some of the most familiar of all early 18th century music. 
It's been featured in uncounted films and television commercials, but what is it and why does it sound that way? 
This is the opening of "Spring" from "The Four Seasons," by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. 
"The Four Seasons" are famous in part because they are a delight to the ear. 
However, even more notable is the fact that they have stories to tell. 
At the time of their publication in Amsterdam in 1725, they were accompanied by poems describing exactly what feature of that season Vivaldi intended to capture in musical terms. 
In providing specific plot content for instrumental music, Vivaldi was generations ahead of his time. 
If one were to read the poems simultaneously to hearing the music, one would find the poetic scenes synchronizing nicely with the musical imagery. 
We are told that the birds welcome spring with happy song, and here they are doing exactly that. 
Soon, however, a thunderstorm breaks out. 
Not only is there musical thunder and lightning, there are also more birds, wet, frightened, and unhappy. 
In "Summer," the turtle dove sings her name "tortorella" in Italian, before a hail storm flattens the fields. 
"Autumn" brings eager hunters dashing out in pursuit of their prey. 
The "Winter" concerto begins with teeth chattering in the cold before one takes refuge by a crackling fire. 
Then it's back out into the storm where there'll be slips and falls on the ice. 
In these first weeks of winter, the old year is coming to a close, and so does Vivaldi's musical exploration of the seasons. 
Not until the early 19th century would such expressive instrumental program music, as it was known, become popular. 
By then, larger, more varied ensembles were the rule with woodwinds, brass, and percussion to help tell the tale. 
But Vivaldi pulled it off with just one violin, strings, and a harpsichord. 
Unlike his contemporary Bach, Vivaldi wasn't much interested in complicated fugues. 
He preferred to offer readily accessible entertainment to his listeners with melodies that pop back up later in a piece to remind us of where we've been. 
So the first movement of the "Spring" concerto begins with a theme for spring and ends with it, too, slightly varied from when it was last heard. 
It was an inspired way to attract listeners, and Vivaldi, considered one of the most electrifying violinists of the early 18th century, understood the value of attracting audiences. 
Such concerts might feature himself as the star violinist. 
Others presented the young musicians of the Pietà, a Venetian girls' school where Vivaldi was Director of Music. 
Most of the students were orphans. 
Music training was intended not only as social skills suitable for young ladies but also as potential careers for those who might fail to make good marriages. 
Even in the composer's own time, Vivaldi's music served as diversion for all, not just for the wealthy aristocrats. 
300 years later, it's an approach that still works, and Vivaldi's music still sounds like trotting horses on the move. 

Whether it’s being chained to a burning wheel, turned into a spider, or having an eagle eat one’s liver, Greek mythology is filled with stories of the gods inflicting gruesome horrors on mortals who angered them. 
Yet one of their most famous punishments is not remembered for its outrageous cruelty, but for its disturbing familiarity. 
Sisyphus was the first king of Ephyra, now known as Corinth. 
Although a clever ruler who made his city prosperous, he was also a devious tyrant who seduced his niece and killed visitors to show off his power. 
This violation of the sacred hospitality tradition greatly angered the gods. 
But Sisyphus may still have avoided punishment if it hadn’t been for his reckless confidence. 
The trouble began when Zeus kidnapped the nymph Aegina, carrying her away in the form of a massive eagle. 
Aegina’s father, the river god Asopus, pursued their trail to Ephyra, where he encountered Sisyphus. 
In exchange for the god making a spring inside the city, the king told Asopus which way Zeus had taken the girl. 
When Zeus found out, he was so furious that he ordered Thanatos, or Death, to chain Sisyphus in the underworld so he couldn’t cause any more problems. 
But Sisyphus lived up to his crafty reputation. 
As he was about to be imprisoned, the king asked Thanatos to show him how the chains worked – and quickly bound him instead, before escaping back among the living. 
With Thanatos trapped, no one could die, and the world was thrown into chaos. 
Things only returned to normal when the god of war Ares, upset that battles were no longer fun, freed Thanatos from his chains. 
Sisyphus knew his reckoning was at hand. 
But he had another trick up his sleeve. 
Before dying, he asked his wife Merope to throw his body in the public square, from where it eventually washed up on the shores of the river Styx. 
Now back among the dead, Sisyphus approached Persephone, queen of the Underworld, and complained that his wife had disrespected him by not giving him a proper burial. 
Persephone granted him permission to go back to the land of living and punish Merope, on the condition that he would return when he was done. 
Of course, Sisyphus refused to keep his promise, now having twice escaped death by tricking the gods. 
There wouldn’t be a third time, as the messenger Hermes dragged Sisyphus back to Hades. 
The king had thought he was more clever than the gods, but Zeus would have the last laugh. 
Sisyphus’s punishment was a straightforward task – rolling a massive boulder up a hill. 
But just as he approached the top, the rock would roll all the way back down, forcing him to start over …and over, and over, for all eternity. 
Historians have suggested that the tale of Sisyphus may stem from ancient myths about the rising and setting sun, or other natural cycles. 
But the vivid image of someone condemned to endlessly repeat a futile task has resonated as an allegory about the human condition. 
In his classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus, existentialist philosopher Albert Camus compared the punishment to humanity’s futile search for meaning and truth in a meaningless and indifferent universe. 
Instead of despairing, Camus imagined Sisyphus defiantly meeting his fate as he walks down the hill to begin rolling the rock again. 
And even if the daily struggles of our lives sometimes seem equally repetitive and absurd, we still give them significance and value by embracing them as our own. 

In 1965, 17-year-old high school student, Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours. 
That's 11 days to see how he'd cope without sleep. 
On the second day, his eyes stopped focusing. 
Next, he lost the ability to identify objects by touch. 
By day three, Gardner was moody and uncoordinated. 
At the end of the experiment, he was struggling to concentrate, had trouble with short-term memory, became paranoid, and started hallucinating. 
Although Gardner recovered without long-term psychological or physical damage, for others, losing shuteye can result in hormonal imbalance, illness, and, in extreme cases, death. 
We're only beginning to understand why we sleep to begin with, but we do know it's essential. 
Adults need seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and adolescents need about ten. 
We grow sleepy due to signals from our body telling our brain we are tired, and signals from the environment telling us it's dark outside. 
The rise in sleep-inducing chemicals, like adenosine and melatonin, send us into a light doze that grows deeper, making our breathing and heart rate slow down and our muscles relax. 
This non-REM sleep is when DNA is repaired and our bodies replenish themselves for the day ahead. 
In the United States, it's estimated that 30% of adults and 66% of adolescents are regularly sleep-deprived. 
This isn't just a minor inconvenience. 
Staying awake can cause serious bodily harm. 
When we lose sleep, learning, memory, mood, and reaction time are affected. 
Sleeplessness may also cause inflammation, halluciations, high blood pressure, and it's even been linked to diabetes and obesity. 
In 2014, a devoted soccer fan died after staying awake for 48 hours to watch the World Cup. 
While his untimely death was due to a stroke, studies show that chronically sleeping fewer than six hours a night increases stroke risk by four and half times compared to those getting a consistent seven to eight hours of shuteye. 
For a handful of people on the planet who carry a rare inherited genetic mutation, sleeplessness is a daily reality. 
This condition, known as Fatal Familial Insomnia, places the body in a nightmarish state of wakefulness, forbidding it from entering the sanctuary of sleep. 
Within months or years, this progressively worsening condition leads to dementia and death. 
How can sleep deprivation cause such immense suffering? 
Scientists think the answer lies with the accumulation of waste prducts in the brain. 
During our waking hours, our cells are busy using up our day's energy sources, which get broken down into various byproducts, including adenosine. 
As adenosine builds up, it increases the urge to sleep, also known as sleep pressure. 
In fact, caffeine works by blocking adenosine's receptor pathways. 
Other waste products also build up in the brain, and if they're not cleared away, they collectively overload the brain and are thought to lead to the many negative symptoms of sleep deprivation. 
So, what's happening in our brain when we sleep to prevent this? 
Scientists found something called the glymphatic system, a clean-up mechanism that removes this buildup and is much more active when we're asleep. 
It works by using cerebrospinal fluid to flush away toxic byproducts that accumulate between cells. 
Lymphatic vessels, which serve as pathways for immune cells, have recently been discovered in the brain, and they may also play a role in clearing out the brain's daily waste products. 
While scientists continue exploring the restorative mechanisms behind sleep, we can be sure that slipping into slumber is a necessity if we want to maintain our health and our sanity. 

Gayle King: Have a seat, Serena Williams, or should we say, have a seat, mom. 
(Cheers) So no doubt, you guys are like me. 
You saw the release of Serena in that great yellow bathing suit last week and when I saw it, all I could think of was, "Gosh, why couldn't she have waited til we sat onstage for TED?" 
I was very selfish, I know. 
So I asked you about that picture, and you said nobody was supposed to see that picture. 
What do you mean? 
Serena Williams: Well, actually, it was an accident. 
I was on vacation, just taking some time for myself, and I have this thing where I've been checking my status and taking pictures every week to see how far along I'm going -- GK: And sharing it with friends, maybe? 
SW: No, actually I have just been saving it, and I didn't really tell a lot of people, to be quite honest, and I'd been saving it, and you know how social media is, you press the wrong button and -- (Laughter) GK: And there it was. 
SW: So 30 minutes later -- my phone doesn't ring that much -- and 30 minutes later, I missed like four calls, and I'm like, that's weird, and then I picked it up and I was like, oh no. 
But it was a good moment. 
I was gonna wait literally just five or six more days -- that's OK. 
GK: I know, because it was weird, Serena, because it only said 20 weeks, so it's not like there was a whole lot of information on it. 
SW: Exactly, so that's what I've been doing all this time. 
I've been just tracking it. 
18, 19 -- every week I'd just take a picture and save it, and I've been so good about it, and this was the one time that I slipped. 
GK: There you go. Well, congratulations. 
SW: Yes, thank you. 
GK: It really is OK. When you heard the news, were you excited? Were you afraid? Were you worried? 
That you were pregnant, I mean. 
SW: So I heard it two days before the beginning of the Australian Open, which is one of the biggest grand slams. 
GK: You found out two days before? 
SW: Yeah, so it was two days before, and I knew. 
I was nervous. 
I wasn't quite sure what to think, but I just knew that at that moment it was really important for me to just focus right there at the Australian Open, and I was definitely not sure what to do. 
I was like, can I play? 
I know it's very dangerous, maybe, sometimes in the first 12 weeks or so, so I had a lot of questions. 
GK: But not only did you play, Ms. Williams, you won. 
(Cheers) SW: Yeah. 
May I just say, 23 grand slams to you. 
SW: Thank you. 
(Applause) GK: While pregnant! 
SW: Well, I was looking for another handicap, so ... no. 
GK: Did you play differently that game, knowing you were pregnant? 
SW: I did. It wasn't very easy. 
You hear all these stories about people when they're pregnant, they get sick and they get tired. 
GK: Have you had morning sickness? 
SW: No, I've been so fortunate and so I haven't. 
But they get really tired and they get really stressed out, and I had to really take all that energy, put it in a paper bag, so to say, and throw it away, because I really felt like I didn't have time to deal with any extra emotions, any extra anything, because pregnant or not, no one knew, and I was supposed to win that tournament as I am every tournament that I show up. 
I am expected to win, and if I don't win, it's actually much bigger news. 
GK: Yeah, when you don't win, that's a big story. 
SW: Yes, so for me, I had to really take anything negative and any emotions that I was feeling at that point and kind of just bottle them up and really figure out what the next step for me to do was. 
GK: You have a lot of support. You have a lot of love. 
Even when I was coming here, people stopped me at the airport. 
I was saying to the flight attendant, the pilot, "Guess where I'm going?" 
They said, "Oh my God, we're so glad she's pregnant." 
But then you always have these cranky Yankees. 
On the way over here, somebody was telling me about Ilie Nastase, who said some very unkind, inappropriate, dare I say racial things. 
You have responded to him. 
I'm not even going to dignify what he said, but you responded. Why did you respond? 
SW: Well, I think there are very inappropriate comments, and not only that, I've been really supportive of my peers and the people that I've worked with. 
I've been a pro for almost 20 years, and so for me, it's really important to hold women up, and it's something that these young women, they'll come to the locker room, they'll want to take pictures with me, and for me, it's just like, I want to be able to be a good leader and a good example for them. 
So not only -- (Applause) Not only did he have rude things to say about me and my peers, I felt it was important for us to stand up for each other and to stand up for myself. 
And at that point it was really important for me to say, like, I'm not afraid, I'm not going anywhere, but this is inappropriate, and there's time and there's a place for everything. 
And that really wasn't the time and the place. 
GK: We cut the part where you said you're not going anywhere, because you'll be 36 in September. Baby's coming, 36. 
And your coach said age is always important, but in tennis it's very important, but he has no doubt that you're coming back. 
Have you thought, am I coming back? 
Will I take some time off? 
I know the women on the tour are saying, "How long does it take to have a baby? Two years will she be gone?" 
What are you thinking? 
SW: Well, I'm always trying to defy the odds, you know, so for me everything is really mental. 
I definitely plan on coming back. I'm not done yet. 
I'm really inspired by my sister. 
She's a year older than me, and that's something that -- if she's still playing, I know I can play. 
(Laughter) And there's so many -- Roger Federer, he's a little bit older than me and he's still winning everything, so I'm like, I know I can do that too. 
So that's been so inspiring to me, especially recently, and I know that it's something I want to do. 
And my story is definitely not over yet. 
I was talking to my coach about it, and we were talking about how this is just a new part of my life, and my baby's going to be in the stands and hopefully cheering for me, not crying too much. 
GK: No, you wrote a beautiful letter to your baby yesterday that you said -- from the oldest mommy to the youngest one, to the oldest, to the youngest, I can't wait for you to get here. 
A lot of people feel that. 
I saw you about a year ago, because I think about your life, Serena. 
You've had three life-changing things in a six-month time: pregnant, huge win, fell in love. 
And when I saw you last year, I was saying, "How's your love life? Da da da." 
You said, "I met a guy. He's a nerdy, kinda geeky guy. 
You won't know who he is." 
I said, "What's his name?" 
SW: I remember talking to you about that, yes. 
GK: And you said, "Alexis Ohanian." I said, "I know him!" He's awesome. 
But I would never put you with a nerdy geek, and you said, you neither. 
SW: I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't either, but it's been the best thing for me. 
GK: The best thing why? 
Does that look like a nerdy geek? 
Look at the shirt. 
(Laughter) No, he's a very nice guy. 
SW: You can tell he's into technology. 
GK: He's a very, very nice guy. 
I like him very much. 
So how did he succeed when others have failed? 
How was he the one that you knew, this is the one for me? 
SW: Well, I'm not going to say that, but ... 
(Laughter) GK: Say it, Serena, say it! 
SW: Well ... 
(Laughter) Yes. 
(Applause) GK: But you know what I mean. 
SW: He is very loving and he's very kind, and my mom says he's very considerate, and when she said that to me, I was like, you know, he really is, and it's the little things that really make a huge difference in life. 
GK: Like? 
SW: Something simple. 
My fashion company, we have a show every year, so in our show last year, I was running around like crazy, because I do everything for the show, and everything for it, so I was running around like crazy, and he, it was a simple gesture of this shirt that he had, and he just wanted to make sure that I had the same one, and it was -- it's a weird story. 
It was better in person, I promise. 
GK: Was it a wonderful proposal? 
Or was it a Beyoncé song? 
"If you like it then you ought to put a ring on it"? 
Were you feeling pressure to get married? 
Did you know it was coming? 
SW: Yeah, I actually never felt pressure to get married and I can't say I'm the marrying type of person. 
I really love my life. 
I love my freedom. 
I heard that kind of changes. 
But I love everything that I do, and I love my career, and I always felt like I didn't want anything to interfere with that. 
I've actually been so career-oriented and in fact, when he proposed, I was almost angry. 
Not almost. I was angry, because it was right in the middle of my training season, and I said, "I gotta win the Australian Open. 
I can't fly to Rome." 
Because he wanted to take me to Rome, and I said, "I can't. I gotta win." 
But that's how focused I was. 
GK: This is a girl that says, "No, I can't go to Rome." OK. 
SW: But I was really focused on reaching my goals and I knew at that point there was one player that I wanted to pass. 
I wanted to pass Steffi Graf's record, and that really meant a lot to me, and when I put my mind to something, I really am determined to reach it no matter what. 
GK: You know, you said that for you -- I've heard you say that winning is addictive to you. 
SW: It is. 
GK: What do you mean? 
SW: I feel like winning for me is superaddictive. 
I feel like once you experience it, you always want to get that feeling again, and when I won my first championship, I was only 17 years old, but I never forgot that feeling, and I feel like every time I win one, I want to reach that feeling of your first championship. 
There's really no feeling in the world like that. 
And it's like, all these years of training and being a little kid and playing, and then winning is a wonderful experience. 
So for me I've always felt like I loved that feeling, and obviously I don't like the feeling of losing. I feel like -- GK: No, in fact, people close to you say you're a very bad loser. 
SW: I'm not the best loser. 
GK: That you're very, very, very bad. 
Listen, no athlete, no champion likes to lose. 
I get that. 
But they say when it comes to losing, you are very, very, very bad at it. 
(Laughter) SW: I'm number one at losing too, so you know, that's all I can say. 
(Laughter) (Applause) GK: I'm always curious about the dynamic between you and Venus, because everybody that knows you and has followed the story knows that you two are very close, and you always bring your A game in whatever you do, but I often wonder, when you're playing her, do you bring your A- game because you want to do something for her or do you bring your A++ game because you want to crush her. 
Is it harder for you playing her or easier? 
SW: Well, playing Venus is like playing myself, because we grew up playing each other, we grew up practicing together. 
And it was something that has been difficult, because she's my toughest opponent. 
She's tall, she's fast, she hits hard like me, she serves like me. 
It's really like playing a wall. 
GK: She knows you. 
SW: She knows where I'm hitting the ball before I hit it, so it's something that is not very easy, but it's really about, when I go out there, I really have to shut down my mind and I have to say to myself, "You know what? 
I'm just playing a great player, but today I have to be better. 
I don't care who it is, if it's my sister or it's my friend, today is the day I have to show up and I have to be better and I have to want it more than anyone else at this moment anywhere on this world." 
GK: So never on the court do you fall back for Venus? 
Because, you know, it was always Venus and Serena. 
SW: Yes. 
GK: And now baby sister has surpassed older sister. 
Do you feel guilt about that? 
Do you feel joy in that? 
Is that a difficult position for you? 
SW: I don't feel anything in there. 
In my life, it still and forever is always going to be Venus and Serena. 
She's really love of my life, she's my best friend, she's my soul mate. 
I mean -- There's pictures of her pushing me, really low-quality pictures or else I would have shared them, of her pushing me in a stroller on a tennis court, and she always took care of me. 
I used to spend all of my allowance money on the ice cream truck and stuff, and she would take her money and give it to me at school and make sure I had something to eat and she would go without, and that's the kind of person she actually is since I've always known her. 
So we always have this incredible respect for each other and this incredible love, and I think it's important for people to realize you can be successful but you can still have a wonderful relationship. 
On the court we are mortal enemies, but the second we shake hands, we are best friends again. 
And if I lose, it might be a day later for me, but for Venus -- (Laughter) GK: There's never a time on the court where you hit the ball and say, "That's for seventh grade when you did the blah blah blah"? 
You never have any moment like that? 
SW: I feel like she should have those moments, because she's never done anything bad to me, but I'm the youngest. I'm the younger sister. 
GK: Serena, she's never done anything bad to you? Really? 
I have three sisters. I can think of some stuff I've done bad. 
SW: Unless she brainwashed me to forget them. 
GK: No, but the love you have for her I know is very pure. I know that. 
SW: Yes. GK: I know that. 
SW: We were always brought up to be superclose, and we are incredibly close. 
Not only her. 
I have three other sisters as well, and we were always so close. 
GK: So before a big match, the two of you don't get together and say, look, we're going to go out there and -- there's nothing? 
SW: Well, it's funny. Before the Australian Open, we were in the locker room together, and I always pick on her, so I pulled out my camera while she was changing. 
I started taking pictures of her, which is totally inappropriate, but she was so mad at me. 
She's like, "Serena, stop!" And I was just laughing at her. 
But that's the kind of relationship that we have, and like I said, the second we step on the court, it was like, we were definitely mortal enemies, but the second we stepped off, and moments before, we're just -- It is what it is, because at the end of the day, she'll always be my sister. 
I'm not going to play Australia in -- Well, who knows, I've been playing forever, but I don't think I'll be playing in 50 years, say? 
Let's be safe and say 50 years. 
GK: I don't know, Serena. There's never been anybody like you. 
When you think about it, never been anybody who has intersected gender and race the way you have, the dominance that you have and the scrutiny that you have. 
And when you were growing up, did you say, "I want to be like that"? 
Because now little girls are looking at you saying, "I want to be like that." 
Who was the "I want to be like that" for you? 
SW: Well, it's interesting, and I'm glad you brought that up. 
For me, when I grew up, I always wanted to be the best, and I said, if you want to be the best, you've got to emulate the best. 
So when I started to go on tour when I was really young, I would see Steffi Graf, I would see Monica Seles, and I would even see Pete Sampras, and I would see what they did, and I noticed that Steffi and Monica didn't really talk to a lot of the other players, and they kind of were on their own, and they were just so focused and I would see Pete Sampras, the technique that he did, and I was like, "I want to do that." 
So I did that, and I felt that to be the best, and if you want to be the best, you have to hang around people and you have to look at people that are the best, because you're not going to be the best if you're looking at someone that's not at the top level. 
GK: People say nobody works as hard as you. 
SW: I'm a very hard worker. GK: That's what I heard. 
SW: People say, "Oh, she's talented, she's athletic." 
Actually, I wasn't. I was really small for my age. 
I grew up when I got older, and I had to work really hard, and I think one of the reasons why I fight so hard and I work so hard is because I was really, really, really small. 
GK: Yeah. 
You are no longer small. 
SW: No, I'm fully grown now. 
But I was small when I was really young for whatever reason. 
I think Venus maybe ate all the Wheaties. 
GK: You know, the other thing people talk about is your body. 
Your body brings men and women to their knees. 
And I mean in a good way. 
A lot has been made about your body. 
It's a work of art, it's masculine, it's glorious, there's never been anything like it. 
Did you have body issues when you were growing up? 
Have you always been comfortable with your body? 
SW: It's interesting, because when you're a teenage female growing up in the public eye, it is a lot of scrutiny that you face, and as any female that's a teenager, I definitely was not comfortable in my body. 
I didn't like it. 
I didn't understand why I had muscles. 
And I stopped lifting weights. 
I was like, I'm not going to do this. 
But then after I won the US Open, I realized that my body helped me reach goals that I wanted to reach, and I wanted to be happy with it, and I was so appreciative of it. 
I'm always healthy. 
I'm really fortunate and superblessed, and I felt like not only am I happy with my body, but I want other people and other young girls that have experienced what I've experienced to be happy with themselves. 
So whatever people say -- masculine, whatever, too much, too little -- I'm OK with it as long as I love myself. 
(Applause) GK: I know you learn a lot from winning, but what have you learned from losing? 
SW: I hate to lose, but I think losing has brought me here today. 
The only reason I am who I am is because of my losses, and some of them are extremely painful, but I wouldn't take any of them away, because every time I lose, it takes a really long time for me to lose again because I learn so much from it. 
And I encourage everyone that I talk to -- I'm like, listen, if you lose or if something happens -- not in sports -- in business or in school -- learn from it. 
Don't live in the past, live in the present, and don't make the same mistakes in the future. 
That's something that I always try to live by. 
GK: Now you're planning a wedding and I want to know, is it a destination wedding in the Catskills or Poconos or are you going to do it in Florida? 
What are you thinking? 
Big or small? 
SW: We're thinking medium size. We don't want to do too big, but then we're like, OK, we can't say no to this person, this person. 
So we're thinking medium size and we're just thinking -- My personality is a lot of fun. Hopefully you can see that today. 
I'm not too serious. 
GK: And you like to dance. 
And the next chapter for Serena Williams is what? 
SW: Oh, next for me. 
Obviously I'm going to have a baby and I'm going to stay fit and kind of come back and play tennis and keep working on my fashion line. 
That'll be really fun. 
GK: Do you know if it's a boy or girl? 
SW: I don't. I have a feeling of one or the other. 
It's a 50-50 chance, but I have a feeling. 
GK: Gayle is a unisex name. 
Whatever you and Alexis decide, we are cheering you on! 
SW: Thank you for that. GK: You're welcome. 
We are cheering you on, Serena Williams. SW: Thank you so much. 
Thank you guys. 
(Applause) 

Getting a college education is a 20-year investment. 
When you're growing up poor, you're not accustomed to thinking that far ahead. 
Instead, you're thinking about where you're going to get your next meal and how your family is going to pay rent that month. 
Besides, my parents and my friends' parents seemed to be doing just fine driving taxis and working as janitors. 
It wasn't until I was a teenager when I realized I didn't want to do those things. 
By then, I was two-thirds of the way through my education, and it was almost too late to turn things around. 
When you grow up poor, you want to be rich. 
I was no different. 
I'm the second-oldest of seven, and was raised by a single mother on government aid in Queens, New York. 
By virtue of growing up low-income, my siblings and I went to some of New York City's most struggling public schools. 
I had over 60 absences when I was in seventh grade, because I didn't feel like going to class. 
My high school had a 55 percent graduation rate, and even worse, only 20 percent of the kids graduating were college-ready. 
When I actually did make it to college, I told my friend Brennan how our teachers would always ask us to raise our hands if we were going to college. 
I was taken aback when Brennan said, "Karim, I've never been asked that question before." 
It was always, "What college are you going to?" 
Just the way that question is phrased made it unacceptable for him not to have gone to college. 
Nowadays I get asked a different question. 
"How were you able to make it out?" 
For years I said I was lucky, but it's not just luck. 
When my older brother and I graduated from high school at the very same time and he later dropped out of a two-year college, I wanted to understand why he dropped out and I kept studying. 
It wasn't until I got to Cornell as a Presidential Research Scholar that I started to learn about the very real educational consequences of being raised by a single mother on government aid and attending the schools that I did. 
That's when my older brother's trajectory began to make complete sense to me. 
I also learned that our most admirable education reformers, people like Arne Duncan, the former US Secretary of Education, or Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, had never attended an inner city public school like I had. 
So much of our education reform is driven by a sympathetic approach, where people are saying, "Let's go and help these poor inner city kids, or these poor black and Latino kids," instead of an empathetic approach, where someone like me, who had grown up in this environment, could say, "I know the adversities that you're facing and I want to help you overcome them." 
Today when I get questions about how I made it out, I share that one of the biggest reasons is that I wasn't ashamed to ask for help. 
In a typical middle class or affluent household, if a kid is struggling, there's a good chance that a parent or a teacher will come to their rescue even if they don't ask for help. 
However, if that same kid is growing up poor and doesn't ask for help, there's a good chance that no one will help them. 
There are virtually no social safety nets available. 
So seven years ago, I started to reform our public education system shaped by my firsthand perspective. 
And I started with summer school. 
Research tells us that two-thirds of the achievement gap, which is the disparity in educational attainment between rich kids and poor kids or black kids and white kids, could be directly attributed to the summer learning loss. 
In low-income neighborhoods, kids forget almost three months of what they learned during the school year over the summer. 
They return to school in the fall, and their teachers spend another two months reteaching them old material. 
That's five months. 
The school year in the United States is only 10 months. 
If kids lose five months of learning every single year, that's half of their education. 
Half. 
If kids were in school over the summer, then they couldn't regress, but traditional summer school is poorly designed. 
For kids it feels like punishment, and for teachers it feels like babysitting. 
But how can we expect principals to execute an effective summer program when the school year ends the last week of June and then summer school starts just one week later? 
There just isn't enough time to find the right people, sort out the logistics, and design an engaging curriculum that excites kids and teachers. 
But what if we created a program over the summer that empowered teachers as teaching coaches to develop aspiring educators? 
What if we empowered college-educated role models as teaching fellows to help kids realize their college ambitions? 
What if empowered high-achieving kids as mentors to tutor their younger peers and inspire them to invest in their education? 
What if we empowered all kids as scholars, asked them what colleges they were going to, designed a summer school they want to attend to completely eliminate the summer learning loss and close two-thirds of the achievement gap? 
By this summer, my team will have served over 4,000 low-income children, trained over 300 aspiring teachers and created more than 1,000 seasonal jobs across some of New York City's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. 
(Applause) And our kids are succeeding. 
Two years of independent evaluations tell us that our kids eliminate the summer learning loss and make growth of one month in math and two months in reading. 
So instead of returning to school in the fall three months behind, they now go back four months ahead in math and five months ahead in reading. 
(Applause) Ten years ago, if you would have told me that I'd graduate in the top 10 percent of my class from an Ivy League institution and have an opportunity to make a dent on our public education system just by tackling two months of the calendar year, I would have said, "Nah. No way." 
What's even more exciting is that if we can prevent five months of lost time just by redesigning two months, imagine the possibilities that we can unlock by tackling the rest of the calendar year. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

If you were to take any everyday object, say a coffee cup, and break it in half, then in half again, and keep carrying on, where would you end up? 
Could you keep on going forever? 
Or would you find a set of indivisible building blocks out of which everything is made? 
Physicists have found the latter- that matter is made of fundamental particles, the smallest things in the universe. 
Particles interact with each other according to a theory called the “Standard Model”. 
The Standard Model is a remarkably elegant encapsulation of the strange quantum world of indivisible, infinitely small particles. 
It also covers the forces that govern how particles move, interact, and bind together to give shape to the world around us. 
So how does it work? 
Zooming in on the fragments of the cup, we see molecules, made of atoms bound up together. 
A molecule is the smallest unit of any chemical compound. 
An atom is the smallest unit of any element in the periodic table. 
But the atom is not the smallest unit of matter. 
Experiments found that each atom has a tiny, dense nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of even tinier electrons. 
The electron is, as far as we know, one of the fundamental, indivisible building blocks of the universe. 
It was the first Standard Model particle ever discovered. 
Electrons are bound to an atom’s nucleus by electromagnetism. 
They attract each other by exchanging particles called photons, which are quanta of light that carry the electromagnetic force, one of the fundamental forces of the Standard Model. 
The nucleus has more secrets to reveal, as it contains protons and neutrons. 
Though once thought to be fundamental particles on their own, in 1968 physicists found that protons and neutrons are actually made of quarks, which are indivisible. 
A proton contains two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. 
A neutron contains two down quarks and one up. 
The nucleus is held together by the strong force, another fundamental force of the Standard Model. 
Just as photons carry the electromagnetic force, particles called gluons carry the strong force. 
Electrons, together with up and down quarks, seem to be all we need to build atoms and therefore describe normal matter. 
However, high energy experiments reveal that there are actually six quarks– down & up, strange & charm, and bottom & top - and they come in a wide range of masses. 
The same was found for electrons, which have heavier siblings called the muon and the tau. 
Why are there three (and only three) different versions of each of these particles? 
This remains a mystery. 
These heavy particles are only produced, for very brief moments, in high energy collisions, and are not seen in everyday life. 
This is because they decay very quickly into the lighter particles. 
Such decays involve the exchange of force-carrying particles, called the W and Z, which – unlike the photon – have mass. 
They carry the weak force, the final force of the Standard Model. 
This same force allows protons and neutrons to transform into each other, a vital part of the fusion interactions that drive the Sun. 
To observe the W and Z directly, we needed the high energy collisions provided by particle accelerators. 
There’s another kind of Standard Model particle, called neutrinos. 
These only interact with other particles through the weak force. 
Trillions of neutrinos, many generated by the sun, fly through us every second. 
Measurements of weak interactions found that there are different kinds of neutrinos associated with the electron, muon, and tau. 
All these particles also have antimatter versions, which have the opposite charge but are otherwise identical. 
Matter and antimatter particles are produced in pairs in high-energy collisions, and they annihilate each other when they meet. 
The final particle of the Standard Model is the Higgs boson – a quantum ripple in the background energy field of the universe. 
Interacting with this field is how all the fundamental matter particles acquire mass, according to the Standard Model. 
The ATLAS Experiment on the Large Hadron Collider is studying the Standard Model in-depth. 
By taking precise measurements of the particles and forces that make up the universe, ATLAS physicists can look for answers to mysteries not explained by the Standard Model. 
For example, how does gravity fit in? 
What is the real relationship between force carriers and matter particles? 
How can we describe “Dark Matter”, which makes up most of the mass in the universe but remains unaccounted for? 
While the Standard Model provides a beautiful explanation for the world around us, there is still a universe’s worth of mysteries left to explore. 

It's six o'clock in the morning, pitch black outside. 
My 14-year-old son is fast asleep in his bed, sleeping the reckless, deep sleep of a teenager. 
I flip on the light and physically shake the poor boy awake, because I know that, like ripping off a Band-Aid, it's better to get it over with quickly. 
(Laughter) I have a friend who yells "Fire!" just to rouse her sleeping teen. 
And another who got so fed up that she had to dump cold water on her son's head just to get him out of bed. 
Sound brutal ... 
but perhaps familiar? 
Every morning I ask myself, "How can I -- knowing what I know and doing what I do for a living -- be doing this to my own son?" 
You see, I'm a sleep researcher. 
(Laughter) So I know far too much about sleep and the consequences of sleep loss. 
I know that I'm depriving my son of the sleep he desperately needs as a rapidly growing teenager. 
I also know that by waking him up hours before his natural biological clock tells him he's ready, I'm literally robbing him of his dreams -- the type of sleep most associated with learning, memory consolidation and emotional processing. 
But it's not just my kid that's being deprived of sleep. 
Sleep deprivation among American teenagers is an epidemic. 
Only about one in 10 gets the eight to 10 hours of sleep per night recommended by sleep scientists and pediatricians. 
Now, if you're thinking to yourself, "Phew, we're doing good, my kid's getting eight hours," remember, eight hours is the minimum recommendation. 
You're barely passing. 
Eight hours is kind of like getting a C on your report card. 
There are many factors contributing to this epidemic, but a major factor preventing teens from getting the sleep they need is actually a matter of public policy. 
Not hormones, social lives or Snapchat. 
Across the country, many schools are starting around 7:30am or earlier, despite the fact that major medical organizations recommend that middle and high school start no earlier than 8:30am. 
These early start policies have a direct effect on how much -- or really how little sleep American teenagers are getting. 
They're also pitting teenagers and their parents in a fundamentally unwinnable fight against their own bodies. 
Around the time of puberty, teenagers experience a delay in their biological clock, which determines when we feel most awake and when we feel most sleepy. 
This is driven in part by a shift in the release of the hormone melatonin. 
Teenagers' bodies wait to start releasing melatonin until around 11pm, which is two hours later than what we see in adults or younger children. 
This means that waking a teenager up at 6am is the biological equivalent of waking an adult up at 4am. 
On the unfortunate days when I have to wake up at 4am, I'm a zombie. 
Functionally useless. 
I can't think straight, I'm irritable, and I probably shouldn't be driving a car. 
But this is how many American teenagers feel every single school day. 
In fact, many of the, shall we say, unpleasant characteristics that we chalk up to being a teenager -- moodiness, irritability, laziness, depression -- could be a product of chronic sleep deprivation. 
For many teens battling chronic sleep loss, their go-to strategy to compensate is consuming large quantities of caffeine in the form of venti frappuccinos, or energy drinks and shots. 
So essentially, we've got an entire population of tired but wired youth. 
Advocates of sleep-friendly start times know that adolescence is a period of dramatic brain development, particularly in the parts of the brain that are responsible for those higher order thinking processes, including reasoning, problem-solving and good judgment. 
In other words, the very type of brain activity that's responsible for reining in those impulsive and often risky behaviors that are so characteristic of adolescence and that are so terrifying to us parents of teenagers. 
They know that like the rest of us, when teenagers don't get the sleep they need, their brains, their bodies and behaviors suffer with both immediate and lasting effects. 
They can't concentrate, their attention plummets and many will even show behavioral signs that mimic ADHD. 
But the consequences of teen sleep loss go well beyond the classroom, sadly contributing to many of the mental health problems that skyrocket during adolescence, including substance use, depression and suicide. 
In our work with teens from LA Unified School District, we found that teens with sleep problems were 55 percent more likely to have used alcohol in the past month. 
In another study with over 30,000 high school students, they found that for each hour of lost sleep, there was a 38 percent increase in feeling sad or hopeless, and a 58 percent increase in teen suicide attempts. 
And if that's not enough, teens who skip out on sleep are at increased risk for a host of physical health problems that plague our country, including obesity, heart disease and diabetes. 
Then there's the risk of putting a sleep-deprived teen, with a newly minted driver's license, behind the wheel. 
Studies have shown that getting five hours or less of sleep per night is the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol content above the legal limit. 
Advocates of sleep-friendly start times, and researchers in this area, have produced tremendous science showing the tremendous benefits of later start times. 
The findings are unequivocal, and as a sleep scientist, I rarely get to speak with that kind of certainty. 
Teens from districts with later start times get more sleep. 
To the naysayers who may think that if schools start later, teens will just stay up later, the truth is, their bedtimes stay the same, but their wake-up times get extended, resulting in more sleep. 
They're more likely to show up for school; school absences dropped by 25 percent in one district. 
And they're less likely to drop out. 
Not surprisingly, they do better academically. 
So this has real implications for reducing the achievement gap. 
Standardized test scores in math and reading go up by two to three percentage points. 
That's as powerful as reducing class sizes by one-third fewer students, or replacing a so-so teacher in the classroom with a truly outstanding one. 
Their mental and physical health improves, and even their families are happier. 
I mean, who wouldn't enjoy a little more pleasantness from our teens, and a little less crankiness? 
Even their communities are safer because car crash rates go down -- a 70 percent reduction in one district. 
Given these tremendous benefits, you might think, well, this is a no-brainer, right? 
So why have we as a society failed to heed this call? 
Often the argument against later start times goes something like this: "Why should we delay start times for teenagers? 
We need to toughen them up so they're ready for the real world!" 
But that's like saying to the parent of a two-year-old, "Don't let Johnny nap, or he won't be ready for kindergarten." 
(Laughter) Delaying start times also presents many logistical challenges. 
Not just for students and their families, but for communities as a whole. 
Updating bus routes, increased transportation costs, impact on sports, care before or after school. 
These are the same concerns that come up in district after district, time and again around the country as school start times are debated. 
And they're legitimate concerns, but these are problems we have to work through. 
They are not valid excuses for failing to do the right thing for our children, which is to start middle and high schools no earlier than 8:30am. 
And in districts around the country, big and small, who have made this change, they found that these fears are often unfounded and far outweighed by the tremendous benefits for student health and performance, and our collective public safety. 
So tomorrow morning, when coincidentally we get to set our clocks back by an hour and you get that delicious extra hour of sleep, and the day seems a little longer, and a little more full of hope, think about the tremendous power of sleep. 
And think about what a gift it would be for our children to be able to wake up naturally, in harmony with their own biology. 
Thank you, and pleasant dreams. 

Take a look at this work of art. 
What is it that you see? 
At first glance, it looks to be a grandfather clock with a sheet thrown over it and a rope tied around the center. 
But a first look always warrants a second. 
Look again. 
What do you see now? 
If you look more closely, you'll realize that this entire work of art is made from one piece of sculpture. 
There is no clock, there is no rope, and there is no sheet. 
It is one piece of bleached Honduras mahogany. 
Now let me be clear: this exercise was not about looking at sculpture. 
It's about looking and understanding that looking closely can save a life, change your company and even help you understand why your children behave the way they do. 
It's a skill that I call visual intelligence, and I use works of art to teach everybody, from everyday people to those for whom looking is the job, like Navy SEALs and homicide detectives and trauma nurses. 
The fact is that no matter how skilled you might be at looking, you still have so much to learn about seeing. 
Because we all think we get it in a first glance and a sudden flash, but the real skill is in understanding how to look slowly and how to look more carefully. 
The talent is in remembering -- in the crush of the daily urgencies that demand our attention -- to step back and look through those lenses to help us see what we've been missing all along. 
So how can looking at painting and sculpture help? 
Because art is a powerful tool. 
It's a powerful tool that engages both sight and insight and reframes our understanding of where we are and what we see. 
Here's an example of a work of art that reminded me that visual intelligence -- it's an ongoing learning process and one that really is never mastered. 
I came across this quiet, seemingly abstract painting, and I had to step up to it twice, even three times, to understand why it resonated so deeply. 
Now, I've seen the Washington Monument in person thousands of times, well aware of the change in the color of marble a third of the way up, but I had never really looked at it out of context or truly as a work of art. 
And here, Georgia O'Keeffe's painting of this architectural icon made me realize that if we put our mind to it, it's possible to see everyday things in a wholly new and eye-opening perspective. 
Now, there are some skeptics that believe that art just belongs in an art museum. 
They believe that it has no practical use beyond its aesthetic value. 
I know who they are in every audience I teach. 
Their arms are crossed, their legs are crossed, their body language is saying, "What am I going to learn from this lady who talks fast about painting and sculpture?" 
So how do I make it relevant for them? 
I ask them to look at this work of art, like this portrait by Kumi Yamashita. 
And I ask them to step in close, and even closer still, and while they're looking at the work of art, they need to be asking questions about what they see. 
And if they ask the right questions, like, "What is this work of art? 
Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture? 
What is it made of?" ... 
they will find out that this entire work of art is made of a wooden board, 10,000 nails and one unbroken piece of sewing thread. 
Now that might be interesting to some of you, but what does it have to do with the work that these people do? 
And the answer is everything. 
Because we all interact with people multiple times on a daily basis, and we need to get better at asking questions about what it is that we see. 
Learning to frame the question in such a way as to elicit the information that we need to do our jobs, is a critical life skill. 
Like the radiologist who told me that looking at the negative spaces in a painting helped her discern more discreet abnormalities in an MRI. 
Or the police officer who said that understanding the emotional dynamic between people in a painting helped him to read body language at a domestic violence crime scene, and it enabled him to think twice before drawing and firing his weapon. 
And even parents can look to see absences of color in paintings to understand that what their children say to them is as important as what they don't say. 
So how do I -- how do I train to be more visually intelligent? 
It comes down to four As. 
Every new situation, every new problem -- we practice four As. 
First, we assess our situation. 
We ask, "What do we have in front of us?" 
Then, we analyze it. 
We say, "What's important? 
What do I need? What don't I need?" 
Then, we articulate it in a conversation, in a memo, in a text, in an email. 
And then, we act: we make a decision. 
We all do this multiple times a day, but we don't realize what a role seeing and looking plays in all of those actions, and how visual intelligence can really improve everything. 
So recently, I had a group of counterterrorism officials at a museum in front of this painting. 
El Greco's painting, "The Purification of the Temple," in which Christ, in the center, in a sweeping and violent gesture, is expelling the sinners from the temple of prayer. 
The group of counterterrorism officials had five minutes with that painting, and in that short amount of time, they had to assess the situation, analyze the details, articulate what, if anything, they would do if they were in that painting. 
As you can imagine, observations and insights differed. 
Who would they talk to? 
Who would be the best witness? 
Who was a good potential witness? 
Who was lurking? 
Who had the most information? 
But my favorite comment came from a seasoned cop who looked at the central figure and said, "You see that guy in the pink?" -- referring to Christ -- he said, "I'd collar him, he's causing all the trouble." 
(Laughter) So looking at art gives us a perfect vehicle to rethink how we solve problems without the aid of technology. 
Looking at the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, you see two clocks in perfect synchronicity. 
The hour, minute and second hand perfectly aligned. 
They are installed side by side and they're touching, and they are entitled "'Untitled' (Perfect Lovers)." 
But closer analysis makes you realize that these are two battery-operated clocks, which in turn makes you understand -- "Hey, wait a minute ... 
One of those batteries is going to stop before the other. 
One of those clocks is going to slow down and die before the other and it's going to alter the symmetry of the artwork." 
Just articulating that thought process includes the necessity of a contingency plan. 
You need to have contingencies for the unforeseen, the unexpected and the unknown, whenever and however they may happen. 
Now, using art to increase our visual intelligence involves planning for contingencies, understanding the big picture and the small details and noticing what's not there. 
So in this painting by Magritte, noticing that there are no tracks under the train, there is no fire in the fireplace and there are no candles in the candlesticks actually more accurately describes the painting than if you were to say, "Well, there's a train coming out of a fireplace, and there are candlesticks on the mantle." 
It may sound counterintuitive to say what isn't there, but it's really a very valuable tool. 
When a detective who had learned about visual intelligence in North Carolina was called to the crime scene, it was a boating fatality, and the eyewitness told this detective that the boat had flipped over and the occupant had drowned underneath. 
Now, instinctively, crime scene investigators look for what is apparent, but this detective did something different. 
He looked for what wasn't there, which is harder to do. 
And he raised the question: if the boat had really tipped flipped over -- as the eyewitness said that it did -- how come the papers that were kept at one end of the boat were completely dry? 
Based on that one small but critical observation, the investigation shifted from accidental death to homicide. 
Now, equally important to saying what isn't there is the ability to find visual connections where they may not be apparent. 
Like Marie Watt's totem pole of blankets. 
It illustrates that finding hidden connections in everyday objects can resonate so deeply. 
The artist collected blankets from all different people in her community, and she had the owners of the blankets write, on a tag, the significance of the blanket to the family. 
Some of the blankets had been used for baby blankets, some of them had been used as picnic blankets, some of them had been used for the dog. 
We all have blankets in our homes and understand the significance that they play. 
But similarly, I instruct new doctors: when they walk into a patient's room, before they pick up that medical chart, just look around the room. 
Are there balloons or cards, or that special blanket on the bed? 
That tells the doctor there's a connection to the outside world. 
If that patient has someone in the outside world to assist them and help them, the doctor can implement the best care with that connection in mind. 
In medicine, people are connected as humans before they're identified as doctor and patient. 
But this method of enhancing perception -- it need not be disruptive, and it doesn't necessitate an overhaul in looking. 
Like Jorge Méndez Blake's sculpture of building a brick wall above Kafka's book "El Castillo" shows that more astute observation can be subtle and yet invaluable. 
You can discern the book, and you can see how it disrupted the symmetry of the bricks directly above it, but by the time you get to the end of the sculpture, you can no longer see the book. 
But looking at the work of art in its entirety, you see that the impact of the work's disruption on the bricks is nuanced and unmistakable. 
One thought, one idea, one innovation can alter an approach, change a process and even save lives. 
I've been teaching visual intelligence for over 15 years, and to my great amazement and astonishment -- to my never-ending astonishment and amazement, I have seen that looking at art with a critical eye can help to anchor us in our world of uncharted waters, whether you are a paramilitary trooper, a caregiver, a doctor or a mother. 
Because let's face it, things go wrong. 
(Laughter) Things go wrong. 
And don't misunderstand me, I'd eat that doughnut in a minute. 
(Laughter) But we need to understand the consequences of what it is that we observe, and we need to convert observable details into actionable knowledge. 
Like Jennifer Odem's sculpture of tables standing sentinel on the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, guarding against the threat of post-Katrina floodwaters and rising up against adversity, we too have the ability to act affirmatively and affect positive change. 
I have been mining the world of art to help people across the professional spectrum to see the extraordinary in the everyday, to articulate what is absent and to be able to inspire creativity and innovation, no matter how small. 
And most importantly, to forge human connections where they may not be apparent, empowering us all to see our work and the world writ large with a new set of eyes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have a confession. 
I have been in an affair since I was 17 years old. 
I wish I could talk about butterflies in my stomach or maps I drew on the ground when I think about this affair, but I cannot. 
I wish I could talk about sweet words spoken or gifts that I received from this affair, but I cannot. 
All I can tell you about is the aftermath, about days I spent constantly asking: Why, why, why me? 
I remember how it all began. 
I was in my final year of high school, and my class had just won in sports, so we were singing and dancing and hugging each other. 
I went and took a shower. 
Then I went for dinner. 
And when I sat down to eat, my teeth started chattering, and so I couldn't put the spoon in my mouth. 
I rushed to the nurse's office, and because I couldn't talk, I just pointed at my mouth. 
She didn't know what was happening, so she told me to lie down, and it worked -- after a few minutes, the chattering stopped. 
I was about to dash out, and she told me -- no, she insisted -- that I go up to the dormitories to sleep. 
Here I was in my final year of high school, just a few months from doing my end of high school exams and a few days from doing a set of exams we call here in Kenya "mocks," which are somehow meant to gauge how prepared one is for the final exams. 
There is no way I was going to sleep and let a set of exams mock me. 
I went to class, sat down, took my Kenyan history notes, and there I was, down Kenyan coastal town, with the great Mekatilili wa Menza, the Giriama woman who led her people against British colonial rule. 
Then, without any notice, my left hand started jerking, and it was as if I was marking imaginary papers. 
In and out it went, and with every stroke, one by one, my classmates stopped concentrating on their reading and started looking at me. 
And I tried really hard to stop it, but I couldn't, because it had a life of its own. 
And then, when it was sure everybody was looking at us, in its final show and official introduction, I had my first full-blown seizure, which was the beginning of what has been a 15-year-long affair. 
Seizures are the trademark characteristic for most types of epilepsy, and every first-ever seizure needs to be assessed by a doctor to determine if one has epilepsy or if it's a symptom of something else. 
In my case, it was confirmed that I had epilepsy. 
I spent a large chunk of my time in hospital and at home, and only went back to do my final exams. 
I had seizures in between papers, but managed to get good enough grades to be admitted for an actuarial science degree at the University of Nairobi. 
(Applause) Unfortunately, I had to drop out in my second year. 
I didn't have good enough coping skills and a support community around me. 
I was lucky enough to get a job, but I was fired from that job when I had a seizure in the workplace. 
So I found myself in a space where I was constantly asking myself why this had to happen to me. 
I lived in denial for a long time, and the denial was maybe because of the things that had happened, dropping out of school and being fired from my job. 
Or maybe it was because of the things I had heard about epilepsy and about people living with epilepsy: that they would never live on their own; that they would never travel on their own or even get work; that they were outcasts, with a spirit in them that they needed to be delivered from. 
And so the more I thought about these things, the more my seizures became, and I spent days with my legs locked, my speech became blurred and on days on end, this is how I'd be. 
Two or three days after a seizure, my head and my hand would still be twitching. 
I felt lost, like I'd lost everything, and sometimes, even the will to live. 
(Sigh) I had so much frustration in me. 
And so I started writing, because the people around me didn't have answers to the questions that I had. 
And so I wrote my fears and my doubts. 
I wrote about my good days and my bad days and my really ugly days, and I shared them on a blog. 
And before long, I began to be seen and heard by people who had epilepsy and their families, and even those who did not have the diagnosis. 
And I moved from that girl who constantly asked why me to one who not only self-advocates, but does it for those who are yet to find their voices. 
(Applause) My seizures are greatly reduced, from two to three times a day, to sometimes two to three times in one year. 
I went on -- (Applause) I went on to employ five people, when I began what was Kenya's first free mental health and epilepsy support line. 
And I travel -- (Applause) And I travel to speak about my affair, all these things that I had been told people like me living with epilepsy could never be able to do. 
Every year, a population as big as 80 percent of Nairobi gets diagnosed with epilepsy across the globe. 
And they, like me, go through the emotions of stigma and exclusion. 
And so I have made it my life journey to keep these conversations going, and I keep confessing about my affair so that those people who do not have the diagnosis might know and might have a constant reminder that it is alright to engage with people like us, that as long as they pull down the walls of stigma and exclusion, that we, just like them, can be able to take anything life throws at us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This story begins in 1985, when at age 22, I became the World Chess Champion after beating Anatoly Karpov. 
Earlier that year, I played what is called simultaneous exhibition against 32 of the world's best chess-playing machines in Hamburg, Germany. 
I won all the games, and then it was not considered much of a surprise that I could beat 32 computers at the same time. 
To me, that was the golden age. 
(Laughter) Machines were weak, and my hair was strong. 
(Laughter) Just 12 years later, I was fighting for my life against just one computer in a match called by the cover of "Newsweek" "The Brain's Last Stand." 
No pressure. 
(Laughter) From mythology to science fiction, human versus machine has been often portrayed as a matter of life and death. 
John Henry, called the steel-driving man in the 19th century African American folk legend, was pitted in a race against a steam-powered hammer bashing a tunnel through mountain rock. 
John Henry's legend is a part of a long historical narrative pitting humanity versus technology. 
And this competitive rhetoric is standard now. 
We are in a race against the machines, in a fight or even in a war. 
Jobs are being killed off. 
People are being replaced as if they had vanished from the Earth. 
It's enough to think that the movies like "The Terminator" or "The Matrix" are nonfiction. 
There are very few instances of an arena where the human body and mind can compete on equal terms with a computer or a robot. 
Actually, I wish there were a few more. 
Instead, it was my blessing and my curse to literally become the proverbial man in the man versus machine competition that everybody is still talking about. 
In the most famous human-machine competition since John Henry, I played two matches against the IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue. 
Nobody remembers that I won the first match -- (Laughter) (Applause) In Philadelphia, before losing the rematch the following year in New York. 
But I guess that's fair. 
There is no day in history, special calendar entry for all the people who failed to climb Mt. Everest before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it to the top. 
And in 1997, I was still the world champion when chess computers finally came of age. 
I was Mt. Everest, and Deep Blue reached the summit. 
I should say of course, not that Deep Blue did it, but its human creators -- Anantharaman, Campbell, Hoane, Hsu. 
Hats off to them. 
As always, machine's triumph was a human triumph, something we tend to forget when humans are surpassed by our own creations. 
Deep Blue was victorious, but was it intelligent? 
No, no it wasn't, at least not in the way Alan Turing and other founders of computer science had hoped. 
It turned out that chess could be crunched by brute force, once hardware got fast enough and algorithms got smart enough. 
Although by the definition of the output, grandmaster-level chess, Deep Blue was intelligent. 
But even at the incredible speed, 200 million positions per second, Deep Blue's method provided little of the dreamed-of insight into the mysteries of human intelligence. 
Soon, machines will be taxi drivers and doctors and professors, but will they be "intelligent?" 
I would rather leave these definitions to the philosophers and to the dictionary. 
What really matters is how we humans feel about living and working with these machines. 
When I first met Deep Blue in 1996 in February, I had been the world champion for more than 10 years, and I had played 182 world championship games and hundreds of games against other top players in other competitions. 
I knew what to expect from my opponents and what to expect from myself. 
I was used to measure their moves and to gauge their emotional state by watching their body language and looking into their eyes. 
And then I sat across the chessboard from Deep Blue. 
I immediately sensed something new, something unsettling. 
You might experience a similar feeling the first time you ride in a driverless car or the first time your new computer manager issues an order at work. 
But when I sat at that first game, I couldn't be sure what is this thing capable of. 
Technology can advance in leaps, and IBM had invested heavily. 
I lost that game. 
And I couldn't help wondering, might it be invincible? 
Was my beloved game of chess over? 
These were human doubts, human fears, and the only thing I knew for sure was that my opponent Deep Blue had no such worries at all. 
(Laughter) I fought back after this devastating blow to win the first match, but the writing was on the wall. 
I eventually lost to the machine but I didn't suffer the fate of John Henry who won but died with his hammer in his hand. 
[John Henry Died with a Hammer in His Hand Palmer C. Hayden] [The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles] It turned out that the world of chess still wanted to have a human chess champion. 
And even today, when a free chess app on the latest mobile phone is stronger than Deep Blue, people are still playing chess, even more than ever before. 
Doomsayers predicted that nobody would touch the game that could be conquered by the machine, and they were wrong, proven wrong, but doomsaying has always been a popular pastime when it comes to technology. 
What I learned from my own experience is that we must face our fears if we want to get the most out of our technology, and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of our humanity. 
While licking my wounds, I got a lot of inspiration from my battles against Deep Blue. 
As the old Russian saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them. 
Then I thought, what if I could play with a computer -- together with a computer at my side, combining our strengths, human intuition plus machine's calculation, human strategy, machine tactics, human experience, machine's memory. 
Could it be the perfect game ever played? 
My idea came to life in 1998 under the name of Advanced Chess when I played this human-plus-machine competition against another elite player. 
But in this first experiment, we both failed to combine human and machine skills effectively. 
Advanced Chess found its home on the internet, and in 2005, a so-called freestyle chess tournament produced a revelation. 
A team of grandmasters and top machines participated, but the winners were not grandmasters, not a supercomputer. 
The winners were a pair of amateur American chess players operating three ordinary PCs at the same time. 
Their skill of coaching their machines effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of their grandmaster opponents and much greater computational power of others. 
And I reached this formulation. 
A weak human player plus a machine plus a better process is superior to a very powerful machine alone, but more remarkably, is superior to a strong human player plus machine and an inferior process. 
This convinced me that we would need better interfaces to help us coach our machines towards more useful intelligence. 
Human plus machine isn't the future, it's the present. 
Everybody that's used online translation to get the gist of a news article from a foreign newspaper, knowing its far from perfect. 
Then we use our human experience to make sense out of that, and then the machine learns from our corrections. 
This model is spreading and investing in medical diagnosis, security analysis. 
The machine crunches data, calculates probabilities, gets 80 percent of the way, 90 percent, making it easier for analysis and decision-making of the human party. 
But you are not going to send your kids to school in a self-driving car with 90 percent accuracy, even with 99 percent. 
So we need a leap forward to add a few more crucial decimal places. 
Twenty years after my match with Deep Blue, second match, this sensational "The Brain's Last Stand" headline has become commonplace as intelligent machines move in every sector, seemingly every day. 
But unlike in the past, when machines replaced farm animals, manual labor, now they are coming after people with college degrees and political influence. 
And as someone who fought machines and lost, I am here to tell you this is excellent, excellent news. 
Eventually, every profession will have to feel these pressures or else it will mean humanity has ceased to make progress. 
We don't get to choose when and where technological progress stops. 
We cannot slow down. 
In fact, we have to speed up. 
Our technology excels at removing difficulties and uncertainties from our lives, and so we must seek out ever more difficult, ever more uncertain challenges. 
Machines have calculations. 
We have understanding. 
Machines have instructions. 
We have purpose. 
Machines have objectivity. 
We have passion. 
We should not worry about what our machines can do today. 
Instead, we should worry about what they still cannot do today, because we will need the help of the new, intelligent machines to turn our grandest dreams into reality. 
And if we fail, if we fail, it's not because our machines are too intelligent, or not intelligent enough. 
If we fail, it's because we grew complacent and limited our ambitions. 
Our humanity is not defined by any skill, like swinging a hammer or even playing chess. 
There's one thing only a human can do. 
That's dream. 
So let us dream big. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) Sophie Hawley-Weld: OK, you don't have to stand up, but ... 
we can see you really clearly -- (Laughter) So you have to dance with us. 
And we have this, like, choreographed dance thing that we're about to do -- Betta Lemme: Really easy. 
SHW: And we're going to flick our wrists like this, and you're going to do it with us. 
And you can also stand up. 
(Music) (Sings) I know I did not raise a wrist (Both sing) I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit Awoo! 
I know I did not raise a wrist I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit Awoo! 
BL: (Speaks) There you go! 
(Music) SHW: We have another one coming up. 
It's a little finger-pointing dance. 
(Music) The people sitting down, I want to see your fingers pointing. 
Yeah! 
(Sings) I know I did not raise a wrist (Both sing) I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit Aaaa ... 
(Applause) Awoo! 
(Music) (Clapping to the beat) (Music) Aaaa ... 
SHW: (Speaks) Alright, hand flick. 
(Both sing) I know I did not raise a wrist I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit I know I did not raise a wrist I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it went It conquered quick I was there and then I quit (Music) Tucker Halpern: You guys are way more fun than I thought you'd be. 
(Laughter) (Music) Awoo! 
(Applause) SHW: Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

(Sings) Water Boy (Guitar strum) where are you hidin'? 
(Guitar strum) If you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. 
(Guitar strum) There ain't no hammer -- (Guitar strum) that's on this mountain (Guitar strum) That ring like mine, boy -- (Guitar strum) that ring like mine. 
(Guitar strum) I'm gonna bust this rock, boy -- (Guitar strum) from here to Macon. 
(Guitar strum) All the way to the jail, boy -- (Guitar strum) all the way to the jail. 
(Guitar strum) You jack of diamonds -- (Music) you jack of diamonds I know you of old boy, I know you of old. 
You done robbed my pocket, you done robbed my pocket of silver and gold, boy, of silver and gold. 
Water Boy, where are you hidin'? 
If you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. 
There ain't no hammer that's on this mountain that ring like mine, boy, that ring like mine. 
I'm gonna bust this rock, boy, from here to Macon. 
All the way to the jail, boy, all the way to the jail. 
Water Boy (Guitar strum) where are you hidin'? 
(Guitar strum) If you don't come right here, if you don't come right here, if you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. 
(Guitar strum) (Applause) Thank you. 
That was a song based on numerous work songs, and it was arranged by Odetta, a hero of mine. 
And this next song, well, I do a lot of historical music, starting with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and continuing on in my solo endeavors. 
And I believe that knowing your history as a musician is super important -- it's important as a person, it's important as a country, it's important as a people. 
So I read a lot about where the music comes from and where this country comes from. 
I've been reading a lot about the Civil War and about slavery. 
And it's really tough. 
You know? 
It's really tough reading. 
And so as an artist, what I do with all that emotion, reading these people's stories, not just, "Oh, slavery was terrible." 
Yes, it was. 
But it's reading individual narratives of how it was for these people. 
You know? 
Then it's like, "Yeah, that could've been me." 
And it is people now. You know? 
So what you do with all that emotion is you've got to do something with it. 
As an artist, I write. 
So I wrote a song based on some of those narratives that I read, and it's called, "Come Love Come." 
We're going to do it for you now. 
(Claps) (Sings) Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
(Music) (Sings) When I was four, my loving mam was cornered by the boss's man. 
She turned her head and got struck down, they buried her in the cold, cold ground. 
Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
(Music) When I was 12, my father dear was strong of arm and free of fear until the day he raised his hand, then he was sold to Alabama. 
Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
(Music) When I was 16, found my bloom and found my man, we jumped the broom. 
We pledged each other the rest of our lives and on Saturday nights we were man and wife. 
Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
(Music) When I was 18, bugles called and boys in blue came o'er the wall. 
I took my chance and followed free, they led the way to Tennessee. 
Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
(Music) Now here I sit in a tiny shack with 13 others at my back. 
I've sent you word, so all I can do is wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait for you. 
Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. 
Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee. 
Oh, oh, oh. 
Whoa ... oh I'll wait for you. 
I'll wait for you. 
I'll wait for you I'll wait for you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, with the dark you have to have the light. 
And in the African-American community, it's been the work of many hundreds of years to find a way to lift ourselves up. 
So I'm going to end with a couple of tunes from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, one of the more influential American music figures that most of you probably never heard of. 
If you have, I'm so happy. 
She's one of the innovators of rock 'n' roll guitar, and one of the first crossover artists from gospel to secular. 
She's an incredibly important figure, and I'm going to talk about her whenever I can. 
So these are a couple of her tunes. 
And don't worry -- you're going to get your chance to sing. 
(Music) (Sings) Look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on. 
Look up, look up and greet your maker, for Gabriel blows his horn. 
Weary totin' such a load, goin' down that lonesome road. 
Look down that lonesome road, before you travel on. 
Look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on. 
Look up, look up and greet your maker, for Gabriel blows his horn. 
Weary totin' such a load, goin' down that lonesome road. 
Look down, look down, look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air music in the air. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air I hear music in the air. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air music in the air and I really do believe I really do believe there's a Heaven somewhere. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air singin' in the air. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air I hear singin' in the air. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air singin' in the air and I really do believe I really do believe there's a Heaven somewhere. 
(Speaks) All right now, guitar man! 
(Guitar music) That's Hubby Jenkins, y'all. 
(Sings) Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air shoutin' in the air. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air I hear shoutin' in the air. 
Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air, that's right, and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. 
(Speaks) All right now, give me some of that bass. 
(Bass solo) Yeah! 
Woo! 
Jason Sypher on the bass. 
Jamie Dick on those drums. 
All right now, I'm running out of time. 
So it's time for y'all to sing. 
This is the call-and-response. 
I call, you respond. 
There are so many songs like this, y'all know how it goes, don't you? 
You're going to sing along? 
I said, are you going to sing along? 
Audience members: Yes! 
Rhiannon Giddens: Here we go! 
(Sings) Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: music in the air AM: music in the air. 
RG: up above my head AM: up above my head RG: music in the air AM: music in the air RG: up above my head AM: up above my head RG: music in the air AM: music in the air RG: and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. 
One more time! 
Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: I hear music in the air AM: music in the air. 
RG: Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: I hear music in the air AM: music in the air. 
RG: Up above my head AM: up above my head RG: I hear music in the air AM: music in the air RG: and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. 
I said I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. 
Heaven somewhere. 
(Holds note) (Applause and cheers) (Music ends) (Applause) 

Paying close attention to something: Not that easy, is it? 
It's because our attention is pulled in so many different directions at a time, and it's in fact pretty impressive if you can stay focused. 
Many people think that attention is all about what we are focusing on, but it's also about what information our brain is trying to filter out. 
There are two ways you direct your attention. 
First, there's overt attention. 
In overt attention, you move your eyes towards something in order to pay attention to it. 
Then there's covert attention. 
In covert attention, you pay attention to something, but without moving your eyes. 
Think of driving for a second. 
Your overt attention, your direction of the eyes, are in front, but that's your covert attention which is constantly scanning the surrounding area, where you don't actually look at them. 
I'm a computational neuroscientist, and I work on cognitive brain-machine interfaces, or bringing together the brain and the computer. 
I love brain patterns. 
Brain patterns are important for us because based on them we can build models for the computers, and based on these models computers can recognize how well our brain functions. 
And if it doesn't function well, then these computers themselves can be used as assistive devices for therapies. 
But that also means something, because choosing the wrong patterns will give us the wrong models and therefore the wrong therapies. 
Right? 
In case of attention, the fact that we can shift our attention not only by our eyes but also by thinking -- that makes covert attention an interesting model for computers. 
So I wanted to know what are the brainwave patterns when you look overtly or when you look covertly. 
I set up an experiment for that. 
In this experiment there are two flickering squares, one of them flickering at a slower rate than the other one. 
Depending on which of these flickers you are paying attention to, certain parts of your brain will start resonating in the same rate as that flickering rate. 
So by analyzing your brain signals, we can track where exactly you are watching or you are paying attention to. 
So to see what happens in your brain when you pay overt attention, I asked people to look directly in one of the squares and pay attention to it. 
In this case, not surprisingly, we saw that these flickering squares appeared in their brain signals which was coming from the back of their head, which is responsible for the processing of your visual information. 
But I was really interested to see what happens in your brain when you pay covert attention. 
So this time I asked people to look in the middle of the screen and without moving their eyes, to pay attention to either of these squares. 
When we did that, we saw that both of these flickering rates appeared in their brain signals, but interestingly, only one of them, which was paid attention to, had stronger signals, so there was something in the brain which was handling this information so that thing in the brain was basically the activation of the frontal area. 
The front part of your brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions as a human. 
The frontal part, it seems that it works as a filter trying to let information come in only from the right flicker that you are paying attention to and trying to inhibit the information coming from the ignored one. 
The filtering ability of the brain is indeed a key for attention, which is missing in some people, for example in people with ADHD. 
So a person with ADHD cannot inhibit these distractors, and that's why they can't focus for a long time on a single task. 
But what if this person could play a specific computer game with his brain connected to the computer, and then train his own brain to inhibit these distractors? 
Well, ADHD is just one example. 
We can use these cognitive brain-machine interfaces for many other cognitive fields. 
It was just a few years ago that my grandfather had a stroke, and he lost complete ability to speak. 
He could understand everybody, but there was no way to respond, even not writing because he was illiterate. 
So he passed away in silence. 
I remember thinking at that time: What if we could have a computer which could speak for him? 
Now, after years that I am in this field, I can see that this might be possible. 
Imagine if we can find brainwave patterns when people think about images or even letters, like the letter A generates a different brainwave pattern than the letter B, and so on. 
Could a computer one day communicate for people who can't speak? 
What if a computer can help us understand the thoughts of a person in a coma? 
We are not there yet, but pay close attention. 
We will be there soon. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, this happy pic of me was taken in 1999. 
I was a senior in college, and it was right after a dance practice. 
I was really, really happy. 
And I remember exactly where I was about a week and a half later. 
I was sitting in the back of my used minivan in a campus parking lot, when I decided I was going to commit suicide. 
I went from deciding to full-blown planning very quickly. 
And I came this close to the edge of the precipice. 
It's the closest I've ever come. 
And the only reason I took my finger off the trigger was thanks to a few lucky coincidences. 
And after the fact, that's what scared me the most: the element of chance. 
So I became very methodical about testing different ways that I could manage my ups and downs, which has proven to be a good investment. (Laughs) Many normal people might have, say, six to 10 major depressive episodes in their lives. 
I've had 50-plus at this point, and I've learned a lot. 
I've had a lot of at-bats, many rounds in the ring with darkness, taking good notes. 
So I thought rather than get up and give any type of recipe for success or highlight reel, I would share my recipe for avoiding self-destruction, and certainly self-paralysis. 
And the tool I've found which has proven to be the most reliable safety net for emotional free fall is actually the same tool that has helped me to make my best business decisions. 
But that is secondary. 
And it is ... stoicism. 
That sounds boring. 
(Laughter) You might think of Spock, or it might conjure and image like this -- (Laughter) a cow standing in the rain. 
It's not sad. It's not particularly happy. 
It's just an impassive creature taking whatever life sends its way. 
You might not think of the ultimate competitor, say, Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, who has the all-time NFL record for Super Bowl titles. 
And stoicism has spread like wildfire in the top of the NFL ranks as a means of mental toughness training in the last few years. 
You might not think of the Founding Fathers -- Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington to name but three students of stoicism. 
George Washington actually had a play about a Stoic -- this was "Cato, a Tragedy" -- performed for his troops at Valley Forge to keep them motivated. 
So why would people of action focus so much on an ancient philosophy? 
This seems very academic. 
I would encourage you to think about stoicism a little bit differently, as an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments, for making better decisions. 
And it all started here, kind of, on a porch. 
So around 300 BC in Athens, someone named Zeno of Citium taught many lectures walking around a painted porch, a "stoa." 
That later became "stoicism." 
And in the Greco-Roman world, people used stoicism as a comprehensive system for doing many, many things. 
But for our purposes, chief among them was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former. 
This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower. 
You miss a pass. You get furious with yourself. 
That could cost you a game. 
If you're a CEO, and you fly off the handle at a very valued employee because of a minor infraction, that could cost you the employee. 
If you're a college student who, say, is in a downward spiral, and you feel helpless and hopeless, unabated, that could cost you your life. 
So the stakes are very, very high. 
And there are many tools in the toolkit to get you there. 
I'm going to focus on one that completely changed my life in 2004. 
It found me then because of two things: a very close friend, young guy, my age, died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly, and then my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to marry, walked out. 
She'd had enough, and she didn't give me a Dear John letter, but she did give me this, a Dear John plaque. 
(Laughter) I'm not making this up. I've kept it. 
"Business hours are over at five o'clock." 
She gave this to me to put on my desk for personal health, because at the time, I was working on my first real business. 
I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 14-plus hour days, seven days a week. 
I was using stimulants to get going. 
I was using depressants to wind down and go to sleep. 
It was a disaster. 
I felt completely trapped. 
I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers. 
And I did find a quote that made a big difference in my life, which was, "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality," by Seneca the Younger, who was a famous Stoic writer. 
That took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise, "premeditatio malorum," which means the pre-meditation of evils. 
In simple terms, this is visualizing the worst-case scenarios, in detail, that you fear, preventing you from taking action, so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis. 
My problem was monkey mind -- super loud, very incessant. 
Just thinking my way through problems doesn't work. 
I needed to capture my thoughts on paper. 
So I created a written exercise that I called "fear-setting," like goal-setting, for myself. 
It consists of three pages. 
Super simple. 
The first page is right here. 
"What if I ...?" 
This is whatever you fear, whatever is causing you anxiety, whatever you're putting off. 
It could be asking someone out, ending a relationship, asking for a promotion, quitting a job, starting a company. 
It could be anything. 
For me, it was taking my first vacation in four years and stepping away from my business for a month to go to London, where I could stay in a friend's room for free, to either remove myself as a bottleneck in the business or shut it down. 
In the first column, "Define," you're writing down all of the worst things you can imagine happening if you take that step. 
You want 10 to 20. 
I won't go through all of them, but I'll give you two examples. 
One was, I'll go to London, it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed, the whole thing will be a huge waste of time. 
Number two, I'll miss a letter from the IRS, and I'll get audited or raided or shut down or some such. 
And then you go to the "Prevent" column. 
In that column, you write down the answer to: What could I do to prevent each of these bullets from happening, or, at the very least, decrease the likelihood even a little bit? 
So for getting depressed in London, I could take a portable blue light with me and use it for 15 minutes in the morning. 
I knew that helped stave off depressive episodes. 
For the IRS bit, I could change the mailing address on file with the IRS so the paperwork would go to my accountant instead of to my UPS address. 
Easy-peasy. 
Then we go to "Repair." 
So if the worst-case scenarios happen, what could you do to repair the damage even a little bit, or who could you ask for help? 
So in the first case, London, well, I could fork over some money, fly to Spain, get some sun -- undo the damage, if I got into a funk. 
In the case of missing a letter from the IRS, I could call a friend who is a lawyer or ask, say, a professor of law what they would recommend, who I should talk to, how had people handled this in the past. 
So one question to keep in mind as you're doing this first page is: Has anyone else in the history of time less intelligent or less driven figured this out? 
Chances are, the answer is "Yes." 
(Laughter) The second page is simple: What might be the benefits of an attempt or a partial success? 
You can see we're playing up the fears and really taking a conservative look at the upside. 
So if you attempted whatever you're considering, might you build confidence, develop skills, emotionally, financially, otherwise? 
What might be the benefits of, say, a base hit? 
Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this. 
Page three. 
This might be the most important, so don't skip it: "The Cost of Inaction." 
Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if we try something new, say, ask for a raise. 
What we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo -- not changing anything. 
So you should ask yourself, if I avoid this action or decision and actions and decisions like it, what might my life look like in, say, six months, 12 months, three years? 
Any further out, it starts to seem intangible. 
And really get detailed -- again, emotionally, financially, physically, whatever. 
And when I did this, it painted a terrifying picture. 
I was self-medicating, my business was going to implode at any moment at all times, if I didn't step away. 
My relationships were fraying or failing. 
And I realized that inaction was no longer an option for me. 
Those are the three pages. That's it. That's fear-setting. 
And after this, I realized that on a scale of one to 10, one being minimal impact, 10 being maximal impact, if I took the trip, I was risking a one to three of temporary and reversible pain for an eight to 10 of positive, life-changing impact that could be a semi-permanent. 
So I took the trip. 
None of the disasters came to pass. 
There were some hiccups, sure. 
I was able to extricate myself from the business. 
I ended up extending that trip for a year and a half around the world, and that became the basis for my first book, that leads me here today. 
And I can trace all of my biggest wins and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear-setting at least once a quarter. 
It's not a panacea. 
You'll find that some of your fears are very well-founded. 
(Laughter) But you shouldn't conclude that without first putting them under a microscope. 
And it doesn't make all the hard times, the hard choices, easy, but it can make a lot of them easier. 
I'd like to close with a profile of one of my favorite modern-day Stoics. 
This is Jerzy Gregorek. 
He is a four-time world champion in Olympic weightlifting, political refugee, published poet, 62 years old. 
He can still kick my ass and probably most asses in this room. 
He's an impressive guy. 
I spent a lot of time on his stoa, his porch, asking life and training advice. 
He was part of the Solidarity in Poland, which was a nonviolent movement for social change that was violently suppressed by the government. 
He lost his career as a firefighter. 
Then his mentor, a priest, was kidnapped, tortured, killed and thrown into a river. 
He was then threatened. 
He and his wife had to flee Poland, bounce from country to country until they landed in the US with next to nothing, sleeping on floors. 
He now lives in Woodside, California, in a very nice place, and of the 10,000-plus people I've met in my life, I would put him in the top 10, in terms of success and happiness. 
And there's a punchline coming, so pay attention. 
I sent him a text a few weeks ago, asking him: Had he ever read any Stoic philosophy? 
And he replied with two pages of text. 
This is very unlike him. He is a terse dude. 
(Laughter) And not only was he familiar with stoicism, but he pointed out, for all of his most important decisions, his inflection points, when he stood up for his principles and ethics, how he had used stoicism and something akin to fear-setting, which blew my mind. 
And he closed with two things. 
Number one: he couldn't imagine any life more beautiful than that of a Stoic. 
And the last was his mantra, which he applies to everything, and you can apply to everything: "Easy choices, hard life. 
Hard choices, easy life." 
The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- these are very often exactly what we most need to do. 
And the biggest challenges and problems we face will never be solved with comfortable conversations, whether it's in your own head or with other people. 
So I encourage you to ask yourselves: Where in your lives right now might defining your fears be more important than defining your goals? 
Keeping in mind all the while, the words of Seneca: "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever." 
And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?" 
I think this pretty much says it for me and most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. 
So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday, and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure. 
There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things. 
For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being. 
My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him. 
(Laughter) Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954. 
My inside self is outside of time and space. 
It doesn't have an age. 
I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the '60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield. 
(Laughter) It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing I know. 
People feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what's true. 
So I hope that my list of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered. 
Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. 
Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. 
It's been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. 
It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. 
It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. 
I don't think it's an ideal system. 
(Laughter) Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes -- (Laughter) (Applause) including you. 
Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you're waiting for an organ. 
You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. 
This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. 
But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. 
They have to find their own ways, their own answers. 
You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey. 
You have to release them. 
It's disrespectful not to. 
And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer, anyway. 
(Laughter) Our help is usually not very helpful. 
Our help is often toxic. 
And help is the sunny side of control. 
Stop helping so much. 
Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody. 
(Laughter) (Applause) This brings us to number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. 
They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides. 
It will only make you worse than you already are. 
(Laughter) Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober. 
What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. 
So I asked some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power. 
One acronym for God is the "gift of desperation," G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards. 
(Laughter) So God might mean, in this case, "me running out of any more good ideas." 
While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. 
It's a huge gift to the world. 
When people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. 
Being full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. 
It's where world peace begins. 
Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food. 
(Laughter) Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. 
It was never meant to be considered an edible. 
Number six -- (Laughter) writing. 
Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. 
That's the secret of life. 
That's probably the main difference between you and them. 
They just do it. 
They do it by prearrangement with themselves. 
They do it as a debt of honor. 
They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little. 
When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started. 
So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads -- for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads -- and he said to my brother, "Just take it bird by bird, buddy. 
Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. 
And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. 
And then geese." 
So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts. 
If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. 
If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should've behaved better. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs -- your truth, your version of things -- in your own voice. 
That's really all you have to offer us, and that's also why you were born. 
Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. 
They kill as many people as not. 
They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. 
The most degraded and evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge best sellers. 
And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is paradox, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard. 
Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. 
It can't. 
It won't. 
But writing can. 
So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. 
So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will. 
Number eight: families. 
Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. 
Again, see number one. 
(Laughter) At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal -- (Laughter) remember that in all cases, it's a miracle that any of us, specifically, were conceived and born. 
Earth is forgiveness school. 
It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table. 
That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants. 
(Laughter) When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. 
But I promise you are up to it. 
You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it, and you will be amazed. 
Nine: food. 
Try to do a little better. 
I think you know what I mean. 
(Laughter) Number 10 -- (Laughter) grace. 
Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings. 
The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. 
Go figure. 
(Laughter) The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. 
To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up. 
Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you. 
And grace won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. 
But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you'll get your sense of humor about yourself back. 
Laughter really is carbonated holiness. 
It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. 
And remember -- grace always bats last. 
Eleven: God just means goodness. 
It's really not all that scary. 
It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin." 
A good name for God is: "Not me." 
Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. 
So go outside a lot and look up. 
My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don't look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. 
Go outside. Look up. 
Secret of life. 
And finally: death. 
Number 12. 
Wow and yikes. 
It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. 
You'll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to. 
We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don't seal it off. 
Like Leonard Cohen said, "There are cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in." 
And that's how we feel our people again fully alive. 
Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that's the great good news. 
But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. 
Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. 
Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you walk. 
Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? 
He says, "Take off your shoes." 
Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the contrary. 
It's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know. 
When you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth. 
And don't worry -- get on with your life. 
Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need. 
You won't be alone. 
They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. 
As Ram Dass said, "When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home." 
I think that's it, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) I was very surprised to be asked to come, because it is not my realm, technology or design or entertainment. 
I mean, my realm is sort of faith and writing and kind of lurching along together. 
And I was surprised, but they said I could give a talk, and I said I'd love to. 
(Video) If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it. 
Anne Lamott: People are very frightened and feel really doomed in America these days, and I just wanted to help people get their sense of humor about it and to realize how much isn't a problem. 
If you take an action, take a really healthy or loving or friendly action, you'll have loving and friendly feelings. 

Michael Browning: engineer, innovator -- inventor, really -- and inspiring father. 
He had a passion for flight, as you can kind of sense from that rather dubious 1970s office-leaving present. 
And some 40 years after that was created, a small group of us got together to have a go, a run at the whole challenge of flight that inspired people for years, and do it in a very different kind of way. 
And that's the journey I'd like to share with you now. 
The starting hypothesis was one of the human mind and body, which, as you've seen for the last few days here, is an amazing construct. 
What if you augmented that wonderful machine with just the right technology? 
If you approach flight in that kind of real way, where could you get to? 
So my training partner here back in London, Denton, is doing a much better job of that kind of stuff than me. 
Guess what? It's London. 
The idea was that you augment that. 
And so, how do you augment that? 
Well, we bought one of these. 
This is a micro gas turbine. 
This was ground zero, so that little piece of kit proved really quite impressive, so we got two in a field. 
The real hero here, by the way, is, right in the background, there's a lady tending some vegetables, who does a brilliant job of trying to ignore us for a while -- (Laughter) I think the only thing less happy is the grass, that we did probably damage quite badly. 
You get an idea of the thrust here, when I try to hold them horizontally and somewhat fail. 
That's around 50 kilos of thrust there. 
We were quite impressed with that. 
We thought we were getting somewhere. 
So there's only one sensible way to go from there: you get four. 
(Laughter) I have to say, I still like watching these back. 
So then we thought well, let's try and spread the load a bit. 
The legs are designed to take the load, so why don't we spread it out a bit? 
That bit was good. 
The harness -- a nice idea but it didn't really work, as you'll see now. 
This whole journey was very much about trying things -- (Laughter) Yeah, it really didn't work, did it? 
Trying things and learning by failing at them most of the time. 
And that included failing by falling over. 
If you notice, we've got five engines here -- not to be put off by the fact one was in maintenance, still had a go. 
(Laughter) And then I pinched a fuel line. 
So again, good learning. We learned not to do that again. 
This was a blind alley. 
(Laughter) This was three on each arm -- that was ridiculous. 
That was 70 kilos on each arm. 
Again, struck that one off. 
(Laughter) But we were starting to make some really quite convincing progress, just enough to make you believe that maybe -- maybe we could get there. 
You can see, look -- tantalizing. 
The model of one on each leg and two on each arm, on paper, that was enough thrust. 
And then we did what I'm about to show you now, and I still love watching this one. 
This was our first six-second, reasonably coherent flight. 
(Applause) That was the point where this endeavor went from: "I'm really not sure this is going to work," to: "Oh my god, it does work!" 
From there on we then refined it, but we carried on falling over a lot. 
Falling over, like I say, is definitely the best way to learn. 
After a while, we starting really refining the layout of all of this. 
And you'll see, that's stability and control -- there's no wires there or anything -- that's a combination of us refining the technology, including with a Tupperware box on the back for the electronics and actually learning the balance and control. 
I'm now going to save your ears for the next short piece and talk over it. 
After a while, the jet engine noise is a bit annoying. 
This is only a few weeks ago. 
You can see the stability and control is really quite nice, and I'd like to think this somewhat validates that starting hypothesis, that the human mind and body, if properly augmented in that way, can achieve some pretty cool stuff. 
I mean, like I said: I'm not thinking about where I'm moving my arms at that stage. 
I'm looking at the objective of where I want to get to, and a bit like riding a bike, my arms are just doing their thing. 
It's a very strange experience. 
So where is all this headed? 
I'll talk over this landing -- I think I land in this one. 
Well, I don't think anybody's going to go down to Walmart or take the kids to school in any of this stuff for a while, but the team at Gravity are building some awesome technology that's going to make this look like child's play. 
We're working on some things that will seek to bring this unusual experience of flight to a wider audience, beyond the events and displays we're doing. 
We're even starting to look for pilots two and three, if there's any volunteers. 
I've got this vision. 
It sounds audacious, but let's just stick it out there, that one day maybe we can rise up above a beach, fly up and down the coastline of it, rise up a bit higher, with some of the safety kit we're working on to make this achievable. 
Then over the horizon comes a Hercules with the ramp down. 
As it comes past, you start picking up speed and see if we can intercept -- from the rear, not the front, that would be a mistake -- and then try and land in the back. 
And as I say, that's a little way off at the moment. 
But this is also, if I take a big step back from this, this is also a very personal journey for me. 
Back to that lovely photo, or photo in a picture. 
Sadly, my father took his own life when I was 15, and left an awful lot of unfulfilled ambition. 
He was a wonderful inventor, a maverick creator. 
And I'd just like to think, if it was possible, if he was looking down, he would be -- he'd certainly be smiling at some of the things we've done here, I think. 
So, it's a tribute to him. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) (Voice-over) Richard Browning: I'm probably more nervous about doing the demo after this. 
I've got a lot of things to get done today. 
Worst-case scenario, we don't get a clean start. 
Or we get an unplanned failure while I'm actually flying around. 
This is why we keep it very low, so the worst is I just look like an idiot and fall on my rear, as I said. 
So you can all enjoy that if that happens. 
(Music) (Jet engine accelerates) (Cheers) 

I want to give you a new perspective. 
That sounds grandiose, and it is. 
I left Ireland yesterday morning. 
I traveled from Dublin to New York independently. 
But the design of an airport, plane and terminal offers little independence when you're 105 and a half centimeters tall. 
For Americans, that's 3' 5". 
I was whisked through the airport by airline assistants in a wheelchair. 
Now, I don't need to use a wheelchair, but the design of an airport and its lack of accessibility means that it's my only way to get through. 
With my carry-on bag between my feet, I was wheeled through security, preclearance and I arrived at my boarding gate. 
I use the accessibility services in the airport because most of the terminal is just not designed with me in mind. 
Take security, for example. 
I'm not strong enough to lift my carry-on bag from the ground to the carousel. 
I stand at eye level with it. 
And those who work in that space for safety purposes cannot help me and cannot do it for me. 
Design inhibits my autonomy and my independence. 
But traveling at this size, it isn't all bad. 
The leg room in economy is like business class. 
(Laughter) I often forget that I'm a little person. 
It's the physical environment and society that remind me. 
Using a public bathroom is an excruciating experience. 
I walk into the cubicle but I can't reach the lock on the door. 
I'm creative and resilient. 
I look around and see if there's a bin that I can turn upside down. 
Is it safe? 
Not really. 
Is it hygienic and sanitary? 
Definitely not. 
But the alternative is much worse. 
If that doesn't work, I use my phone. 
It gives me an additional four- to six-inch reach, and I try to jam the lock closed with my iPhone. 
Now, I imagine that's not what Jony Ive had in mind when he designed the iPhone, but it works. 
The alternative is that I approach a stranger. 
I apologize profusely and I ask them to stand guard outside my cubicle door. 
They do and I emerge grateful but absolutely mortified, and hope that they didn't notice that I left the bathroom without washing my hands. 
I carry hand sanitizer with me every single day because the sink, soap dispenser, hand dryer and mirror are all out of my reach. 
Now, the accessible bathroom is somewhat of an option. 
In this space, I can reach the lock on the door, the sink, the soap dispenser, the hand dryer and the mirror. 
Yet, I cannot use the toilet. 
It is deliberately designed higher so that wheelchair users can transfer across with ease. 
This is a wonderful and necessary innovation, but in the design world, when we describe a new project or idea as accessible, what does that mean? 
Who is it accessible to? 
And whose needs are not being accommodated for? 
Now, the bathroom is an example of where design impinges upon my dignity, but the physical environment impacts upon me in much more casual ways too, something as simple as ordering a cup of coffee. 
Now, I'll admit it. 
I drink far too much coffee. 
My order is a skinny vanilla latte, but I'm trying to wean myself off the syrup. 
But the coffee shop, it's not designed well, at least not for me. 
Queuing, I'm standing beside the pastry cabinet and the barista calls for the next order. 
"Next, please!" they shout. 
They can't see me. 
The person next to me in the queue points to my existence and everyone is embarrassed. 
I order as quick as I can and I move along to collect my coffee. 
Now, think just for a second. 
Where do they put it? 
Up high and without a lid. 
Reaching up to collect a coffee that I have paid for is an incredibly dangerous experience. 
But design also impinges on the clothes that I want to wear. 
I want garments that reflect my personality. 
It's difficult to find in the childrenswear department. 
And often womenswear requires far too many alterations. 
I want shoes that affect my maturity, professionalism and sophistication. 
Instead, I'm offered sneakers with Velcro straps and light-up shoes. 
Now, I'm not totally opposed to light-up shoes. 
(Laughter) But design also impacts on such simple things, like sitting on a chair. 
I cannot go from a standing to a seating position with grace. 
Due to the standards of design heights of chairs, I have to crawl on my hands and knees just to get on top of it, whilst also being conscious that it might tip over at any stage. 
But whilst design impacts on me whether it's a chair, a bathroom, a coffee shop, or clothes, I rely on and benefit from the kindness of strangers. 
But not everybody is so nice. 
I'm reminded that I'm a little person when a stranger points, stares, laughs, calls me a name, or takes a photograph of me. 
This happens almost every day. 
With the rise of social media, it has given me an opportunity and a platform to have a voice as a blogger and as an activist, but it has also made me nervous that I might become a meme or a viral sensation, all without my consent. 
So let's take a moment right now to make something very clear. 
The word "midget" is a slur. 
It evolved from PT Barnum's era of circuses and freak shows. 
Society has evolved. 
So should our vocabulary. 
Language is a powerful tool. 
It does not just name our society. 
It shapes it. 
I am incredibly proud to be a little person, to have inherited the condition of achondroplasia. 
But I am most proud to be Sinead. 
Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism. 
Achondroplasia translates as "without cartilage formation." 
I have short limbs and achondroplastic facial features, my forehead and my nose. 
My arms do not straighten fully, but I can lick my elbow. 
I'm not showing you that one. 
Achondroplasia occurs in approximately one in every 20,000 births. 
80 percent of little people are born to two average-height parents. 
That means that anybody in this room could have a child with achondroplasia. 
Yet, I inherited my condition from my dad. 
I'd like to show you a photo of my family. 
My mother is average height, my father is a little person and I am the eldest of five children. 
I have three sisters and one brother. 
They are all average height. 
I am incredibly fortunate to have been born into a family that cultivated my curiosity and my tenacity, that protected me from the unkindness and ignorance of strangers and that armed me with the resilience, creativity and confidence that I needed to survive and manipulate the physical environment and society. 
If I was to pinpoint any reason why I am successful, it is because I was and I am a loved child, now, a loved child with a lot of sass and sarcasm, but a loved child nonetheless. 
In giving you an insight into who I am today I wanted to offer you a new perspective. 
I wanted to challenge the idea that design is but a tool to create function and beauty. 
Design greatly impacts upon people's lives, all lives. 
Design is a way in which we can feel included in the world, but it is also a way in which we can uphold a person's dignity and their human rights. 
Design can also inflict vulnerability on a group whose needs aren't considered. 
So today, I want your perceptions challenged. 
Who are we not designing for? 
How can we amplify their voices and their experiences? 
What is the next step? 
Design is an enormous privilege, but it is a bigger responsibility. 
I want you to open your eyes. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

So, I love making tools and sharing them with people. 
I remember as a child, my first tool I built was actually a microscope that I built by stealing lenses from my brother's eyeglasses. 
He wasn't that thrilled. 
But, you know, maybe because of that moment, 30 years later, I'm still making microscopes. 
And the reason I built these tools is for moments like this. 
(Video) Girl: I have black things in my hair -- Manu Prakash: This is a school in the Bay Area. 
(Video) MP: The living world far supersedes our imagination of how things actually work. 
(Video) Boy: Oh my God! 
MP: Right -- oh my God! 
I hadn't realized this would be such a universal phrase. 
Over the last two years, in my lab, we built 50,000 Foldscopes and shipped them to 130 countries in the world, at no cost to the kids we sent them to. 
This year alone, with the support of our community, we are planning to ship a million microscopes to kids around the world. 
What does that do? 
It creates an inspiring community of people around the world, learning and teaching each other, from Kenya to Kampala to Kathmandu to Kansas. 
And one of the phenomenal things that I love about this is the sense of community. 
There's a kid in Nicaragua teaching others how to identify mosquito species that carry dengue by looking at the larva under a microscope. 
There's a pharmacologist who came up with a new way to detect fake drugs anywhere. 
There is a girl who wondered: "How does glitter actually work?" 
and discovered the physics of crystalline formation in glitter. 
There is an Argentinian doctor who's trying to do field cervical cancer screening with this tool. 
And yours very truly found a species of flea that was dug inside my heel in my foot one centimeter deep. 
Now, you might think of these as anomalies. 
But there is a method to this madness. 
I call this "frugal science" -- the idea of sharing the experience of science, and not just the information. 
To remind you: there are a billion people on this planet who live with absolutely no infrastructure: no roads, no electricity and thus, no health care. 
Also, there a billion kids on this planet that live in poverty. 
How are we supposed to inspire them for the next generation of solution makers? 
There are health care workers that we put on the line to fight infectious diseases, to protect us with absolutely bare-minimum tools and resources. 
So as a lab at Stanford, I think of this from a context of frugal science and building solutions for these communities. 
Often we think about being able to do diagnosis under a tree, off-grid. 
I'll tell you two examples today of new tools. 
One of them starts in Uganda. 
In 2013, on a field trip to detect schistosomiasis with Foldscopes, I made a minor observation. 
In a clinic, in a far, remote area, I saw a centrifuge being used as a doorstop. 
I mean -- quite literally, the doorstop. 
And I asked them and they said, "Oh, we don't actually have electricity, so this piece of junk is good as a doorstop." 
Centrifuges, for some of you who don't know, are the pinnacle tool to be able to do sample processing. 
You separate components of blood or body fluids to be able to detect and identify pathogens. 
But centrifuges are bulky, expensive -- cost around 1,000 dollars -- and really hard to carry out in the field. 
And of course, they don't work without power. 
Sound familiar? 
So we started thinking about solving this problem, and I came back -- kept thinking about toys. 
Now ... 
I have a few with me here. 
I first started with yo-yos ... 
and I'm a terrible yo-yo thrower. 
Because these objects spin, we wondered, could we actually use the physics of these objects to be able to build centrifuges? 
This was possibly the worst throw I could make. 
But you might start realizing, if you start exploring the space of toys -- we tried these spinning tops, and then in the lab, we stumbled upon this wonder. 
It's the whirligig, or a buzzer, or a rundle. 
A couple of strings and a little disk, and if I push, it spins. 
How many of you have played with this as a kid? 
This is called a button-on-a-string. 
OK, maybe 50 percent of you. 
What you didn't realize -- that this little object is the oldest toy in the history of mankind ... 
5,000 years ago. 
We have found relics of this object hidden around on our planet. 
Now the irony is, we actually don't understand how this little thing works. 
That's when I get excited. 
So we got back to work, wrote down a couple of equations. 
If you take the input torque that you put in, you take the drag on this disc, and the twist drag on these strings, you should be able to mathematically solve this. 
This is not the only equation in my talk. 
Ten pages of math later, we could actually write down the complete analytical solution for this dynamic system. 
And out comes what we call "Paperfuge." 
That's my postdoc Saad Bhamla, who's the co-inventor of Paperfuge. 
And to the left, you see all the centrifuges that we're trying to replace. 
This little object that you see right here is a disc, a couple of strings and a handle. 
And when I spin and I push, it starts to spin. 
Now, when you realize, when you do the math, when we calculate the rpm for this object, mathematically, we should be able to go all the way to a million rpm. 
Now, there is a little twist in human anatomy, because the resonant frequency of this object is about 10 hertz, and if you've ever played the piano, you can't go higher than two or three hertz. 
The maximum speed we've been able to achieve with this object is not 10,000 rpm, not 50,000 rpm -- 120,000 rpm. 
That's equal to 30,000 g-forces. 
If I was to stick you right here and have it spin, you would think about the types of forces you would experience. 
One of the factors of a tool like this is to be able to do diagnosis with this. 
So, I'm going to do a quick demo here, where -- this is a moment where I'm going to make a little finger prick, and a tiny drop of blood is going to come out. 
If you don't like blood, you don't have to look at it. 
Here is a little lancet. 
These lancets are available everywhere, completely passive. 
And if I've had breakfast today ... 
That didn't hurt at all. 
OK, I take a little capillary with a drop of blood -- now this drop of blood has answers, that's why I'm interested in it. 
It might actually tell me whether I have malaria right now or not. 
I take a little capillary, and you see it starts wicking in. 
I'm going to draw a little more blood. 
And that's good enough for right now. 
Now, I just seal this capillary by putting it in clay. 
And now that's sealed the sample. 
We're going to take the sample, mount it on Paperfuge. 
A little piece of tape to make a sealed cavity. 
So now the sample is completely enclosed. 
And we are ready for a spin. 
I'm pushing and pulling with this object. 
I'm going to load this up ... 
And you see the object starts spinning. 
Unlike a regular centrifuge, this is a counter-rotating centrifuge. 
It goes back and forth, back and forth ... 
And now I'm charging it up, and you see it builds momentum. 
And now -- I don't know if you can hear this -- 30 seconds of this, and I should be able to separate all the blood cells with the plasma. 
And the ratio of those blood cells to plasma -- (Applause) Already, if you see right here, if you focus on this, you should be able to see a separated volume of blood and plasma. 
And the ratio of that actually tells me whether I might be anemic. 
One of the aspects of this is, we build many types of Paperfuges. 
This one allows us to identify malaria parasites by running them for a little longer, and we can identify malaria parasites that are in the blood that we can separate out and detect with something like a centrifuge. 
Another version of this allows me to separate nucleic acids to be able to do nucleic acid tests out in the field itself. 
Here is another version that allows me to separate bulk samples, and then, finally, something new that we've been working on to be able to implement the entire multiplex test on an object like this. 
So where you do the sample preparation and the chemistry in the same object. 
Now ... 
this is all good, but when you start thinking about this, you have to share these tools with people. 
And one of the things we did is -- we just got back from Madagascar; this is what clinical trials for malaria look like -- (Laughter) You can do this while having coffee. 
But most importantly, this is a village six hours from any road. 
We are in a room with one of the senior members of the community and a health care worker. 
It really is this portion of the work that excites me the most -- that smile, to be able to share simple but powerful tools with people around the world. 
Now, I forgot to tell you this, that all of that cost me 20 cents to make. 
OK, in the negative time I have left, I'll tell you about the most recent -- (Laughter) invention from our lab. 
It's called Abuzz -- the idea that all of you could help us fight mosquitoes; you could all help us track our enemies. 
These are enemies because they cause malaria, Zika, chikungunya, dengue. 
But the challenge is that we actually don't know where our enemies are. 
The world map for where mosquitoes are is missing. 
So we started thinking about this. 
There are 3,500 species of mosquitoes, and they're all very similar. 
Some of them are so identical that even an entomologist cannot identify them under a microscope. 
But they have an Achilles' heel. 
This is what mosquitoes flirting with each other looks like. 
That's a male chasing a female. 
They're actually talking to each other with their wingbeat frequencies. 
(Buzzing sound) And thus, they have a signature. 
We realized that using a regular phone, a $5-10 flip phone -- how many remember what this object is? 
(Laughter) We can record these acoustic signatures from mosquitoes. 
I'll tell you exactly how to do this. 
I caught some mosquitoes outside. 
Unlike Bill [Gates], I'm not going to release them. 
(Laughter) But I will tell you how to record from this. 
All you do is tap them and they fly. 
You can first test -- I can actually hear that. 
And you bring your phone, which has microphones -- it turns out the mics are so damn good already, even on regular phones, that you can pick up this near-field signature. 
And since I'm out of time, let me just play the recording that I made a day ago. 
(Mosquitoes buzz) This is all the charming sound that you heard before that you all love. 
One of the contexts of this is that being able to do this with a regular cell phone allows us to map mosquito species. 
Using a flip phone, we mapped one of the largest acoustic databases with 25 to 20 species of mosquitoes that carry human pathogens. 
And from this and machine learning, anybody who uploads this data, we can identify and tell the probability of what species of mosquitoes you're actually working with. 
We call this Abuzz, and if any of you want to sign up, just go to the website. 
Let me close with something that's very important and dear to my heart. 
One of the challenges of today is we have terrible problems. 
We have a billion people with absolutely no health care, climate change, biodiversity loss, on and on and on. 
And we hope that science is going to provide the answer. 
But before you leave this theatre today, I want you to promise one thing. 
We're going to make science accessible -- not just to the people who can afford it, but a billion others who can't. 
Let's make science and scientific literacy a human right. 
The moment that you pass the tingling feeling of making a discovery to another child, you're enabling them to be the next group of people who will actually solve these problems. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. 
Apparently, the head of a large pet food company would go into the annual shareholder's meeting with can of dog food. 
And he would eat the can of dog food. 
And this was his way of convincing them that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for their pets. 
This strategy is now known as "dogfooding," and it's a common strategy in the business world. 
It doesn't mean everyone goes in and eats dog food, but businesspeople will use their own products to demonstrate that they feel -- that they're confident in them. 
Now, this is a widespread practice, but I think what's really interesting is when you find exceptions to this rule, when you find cases of businesses or people in businesses who don't use their own products. 
Turns out there's one industry where this happens in a common way, in a pretty regular way, and that is the screen-based tech industry. 
So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described the iPad as a device that was "extraordinary." 
"The best browsing experience you've ever had; way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone. 
It's an incredible experience." 
A couple of months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New York Times, and they had a long phone call. 
At the end of the call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of softball. 
He said to him, "Your kids must love the iPad." 
There's an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said really staggered the journalist. 
He was very surprised, because he said, "They haven't used it. 
We limit how much technology our kids use at home." 
This is a very common thing in the tech world. 
In fact, there's a school quite near Silicon Valley called the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, and they don't introduce screens until the eighth grade. 
What's really interesting about the school is that 75 percent of the kids who go there have parents who are high-level Silicon Valley tech execs. 
So when I heard about this, I thought it was interesting and surprising, and it pushed me to consider what screens were doing to me and to my family and the people I loved, and to people at large. 
So for the last five years, as a professor of business and psychology, I've been studying the effect of screens on our lives. 
And I want to start by just focusing on how much time they take from us, and then we can talk about what that time looks like. 
What I'm showing you here is the average 24-hour workday at three different points in history: 2007 -- 10 years ago -- 2015 and then data that I collected, actually, only last week. 
And a lot of things haven't changed all that much. 
We sleep roughly seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day; some people say that's declined slightly, but it hasn't changed much. 
We work eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. 
We engage in survival activities -- these are things like eating and bathing and looking after kids -- about three hours a day. 
That leaves this white space. 
That's our personal time. 
That space is incredibly important to us. 
That's the space where we do things that make us individuals. 
That's where hobbies happen, where we have close relationships, where we really think about our lives, where we get creative, where we zoom back and try to work out whether our lives have been meaningful. 
We get some of that from work as well, but when people look back on their lives and wonder what their lives have been like at the end of their lives, you look at the last things they say -- they are talking about those moments that happen in that white personal space. 
So it's sacred; it's important to us. 
Now, what I'm going to do is show you how much of that space is taken up by screens across time. 
In 2007, this much. 
That was the year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. 
Eight years later, this much. 
Now, this much. 
That's how much time we spend of that free time in front of our screens. 
This yellow area, this thin sliver, is where the magic happens. 
That's where your humanity lives. 
And right now, it's in a very small box. 
So what do we do about this? 
Well, the first question is: What does that red space look like? 
Now, of course, screens are miraculous in a lot of ways. 
I live in New York, a lot of my family lives in Australia, and I have a one-year-old son. 
The way I've been able to introduce them to him is with screens. 
I couldn't have done that 15 or 20 years ago in quite the same way. 
So there's a lot of good that comes from them. 
One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that time? 
How enriching are the apps that we're using? 
And some are enriching. 
If you stop people while they're using them and say, "Tell us how you feel right now," they say they feel pretty good about these apps -- those that focus on relaxation, exercise, weather, reading, education and health. 
They spend an average of nine minutes a day on each of these. 
These apps make them much less happy. 
About half the people, when you interrupt them and say, "How do you feel?" 
say they don't feel good about using them. 
What's interesting about these -- dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing -- people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. 
We're spending three times longer on the apps that don't make us happy. 
That doesn't seem very wise. 
One of the reasons we spend so much time on these apps that make us unhappy is they rob us of stopping cues. 
Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. 
They were baked into everything we did. 
A stopping cue is basically a signal that it's time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. 
And -- think about newspapers; eventually you get to the end, you fold the newspaper away, you put it aside. 
The same with magazines, books -- you get to the end of a chapter, prompts you to consider whether you want to continue. 
You watched a show on TV, eventually the show would end, and then you'd have a week until the next one came. 
There were stopping cues everywhere. 
But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. 
The news feed just rolls on, and everything's bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging, the news. 
And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on. 
So, we can get a cue about what to do from Western Europe, where they seem to have a number of pretty good ideas in the workplace. 
Here's one example. This is a Dutch design firm. 
And what they've done is rigged the desks to the ceiling. 
And at 6pm every day, it doesn't matter who you're emailing or what you're doing, the desks rise to the ceiling. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Four days a week, the space turns into a yoga studio, one day a week, into a dance club. 
It's really up to you which ones you stick around for. 
But this is a great stopping rule, because it means at the end of the day, everything stops, there's no way to work. 
At Daimler, the German car company, they've got another great strategy. 
When you go on vacation, instead of saying, "This person's on vacation, they'll get back to you eventually," they say, "This person's on vacation, so we've deleted your email. 
This person will never see the email you just sent." 
(Laughter) "You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else." 
(Laughter) And so -- (Applause) You can imagine what that's like. 
You go on vacation, and you're actually on vacation. 
The people who work at this company feel that they actually get a break from work. 
But of course, that doesn't tell us much about what we should do at home in our own lives, so I want to make some suggestions. 
It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I'm going to not use my phone. 
The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on different days. 
I think a far better strategy is to say, I do certain things every day, there are certain occasions that happen every day, like eating dinner. 
Sometimes I'll be alone, sometimes with other people, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes at home, but the rule that I've adopted is: I will never use my phone at the table. 
It's far away, as far away as possible. 
Because we're really bad at resisting temptation. 
But when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together. 
At first, it hurts. 
I had massive FOMO. 
(Laughter) I struggled. 
But what happens is, you get used to it. 
You overcome the withdrawal the same way you would from a drug, and what happens is, life becomes more colorful, richer, more interesting -- you have better conversations. 
You really connect with the people who are there with you. 
I think it's a fantastic strategy, and we know it works, because when people do this -- and I've tracked a lot of people who have tried this -- it expands. 
They feel so good about it, they start doing it for the first hour of the day in the morning. 
They start putting their phones on airplane mode on the weekend. 
That way, your phone remains a camera, but it's no longer a phone. 
It's a really powerful idea, and we know people feel much better about their lives when they do this. 
So what's the take home here? 
Screens are miraculous; I've already said that, and I feel that it's true. 
But the way we use them is a lot like driving down a really fast, long road, and you're in a car where the accelerator is mashed to the floor, it's kind of hard to reach the brake pedal. 
You've got a choice. 
You can either glide by, past, say, the beautiful ocean scenes and take snaps out the window -- that's the easy thing to do -- or you can go out of your way to move the car to the side of the road, to push that brake pedal, to get out, take off your shoes and socks, take a couple of steps onto the sand, feel what the sand feels like under your feet, walk to the ocean, and let the ocean lap at your ankles. 
Your life will be richer and more meaningful because you breathe in that experience, and because you've left your phone in the car. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

About once every century, a massive star somewhere in our galaxy runs out of fuel. 
This happens after millions of years of heat and pressure have fused the star’s hydrogen into heavier elements like helium, carbon, and nitrogen— all the way to iron. 
No longer able to produce sufficient energy to maintain its structure, it collapses under its own gravitational pressure and explodes in a supernova. 
The star shoots most of its innards into space, seeding the galaxy with heavy elements. 
But what this cataclysmic eruption leaves behind might be even more remarkable: a ball of matter so dense that atomic electrons collapse from their quantum orbits into the depths of atomic nuclei. 
The death of that star is the birth of a neutron star: one of the densest known objects in the universe, and a laboratory for the strange physics of supercondensed matter. 
But what is a neutron star? 
Think of a compact ball inside of which protons and electrons fuse into neutrons and form a frictionless liquid called a superfluid— surrounded by a crust. 
This material is incredibly dense – the equivalent of the mass of a fully-loaded container ship squeezed into a human hair, or the mass of Mount Everest in a space of a sugar cube. 
Deeper in the crust, the neutron superfluid forms different phases that physicists call “nuclear pasta,” as it’s squeezed from lasagna to spaghetti-like shapes. 
The massive precursors to neutron stars often spin. 
When they collapse, stars that are typically millions of kilometers wide compress down to neutron stars that are only about 25 kilometers across. 
But the original star’s angular momentum is preserved. 
So for the same reason that a figure skater’s spin accelerates when they bring in their arms, the neutron star spins much more rapidly than its parent. 
The fastest neutron star on record rotates over 700 times every second, which means that a point on its surface whirls through space at more than a fifth of the speed of light. 
Neutron stars also have the strongest magnetic field of any known object. 
This magnetic concentration forms vortexes that radiate beams from the magnetic poles. 
Since the poles aren’t always aligned with the rotational axis of the star, the beams spin like lighthouse beacons, which appear to blink when viewed from Earth. 
We call those pulsars. 
The detection of one of these tantalizing flashing signals by astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell in 1967 was in fact the way we indirectly discovered neutron stars in the first place. 
An aging neutron star’s furious rotation slows over a period of billions of years as it radiates away its energy in the form of electromagnetic and gravity waves. 
But not all neutron stars disappear so quietly. 
For example, we’ve observed binary systems where a neutron star co-orbits another star. 
A neutron star can feed on a lighter companion, gorging on its more loosely bound atmosphere before eventually collapsing cataclysmically into a black hole. 
While many stars exist as binary systems, only a small percentage of those end up as neutron-star binaries, where two neutron stars circle each other in a waltz doomed to end as a merger. 
When they finally collide, they send gravity waves through space-time like ripples from a stone thrown into a calm lake. 
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicted this phenomenon over 100 years ago, but it wasn't directly verified until 2017, when gravitational-wave observatories LIGO and VIRGO observed a neutron star collision. 
Other telescopes picked up a burst of gamma rays and a flash of light, and, later, x-rays and radio signals, all from the same impact. 
That became the most studied event in the history of astronomy. 
It yielded a treasure trove of data that’s helped pin down the speed of gravity, bolster important theories in astrophysics, and provide evidence for the origin of heavy elements like gold and platinum. 
Neutron stars haven’t given up all their secrets yet. 
LIGO and VIRGO are being upgraded to detect more collisions. 
That’ll help us learn what else the spectacular demise of these dense, pulsating, spinning magnets can tell us about the universe. 

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

I'd like to introduce you to my mom. 
(Laughter) I'm guessing that's not what you expected, and it's not what I expected either, and thank goodness I realized that an Asian man was not my mom before I hugged him, because that would have been so awkward. 
Recognizing people isn't one of my strengths due to a genetic visual impairment that has no correction or cure. 
As a result, I am legally blind, though I prefer "partially sighted" because it's more optimistic. 
(Laughter) And I'm entitled to the label "disabled." 
I hate the word disabled when it's used to describe people. 
It detonates a mindset of less than that utterly disregards capacity, ability, potential, instead prioritizing brokenness and lack. 
The perspective can be overt. 
What can't he do for himself that I'm going to have to do for him? 
She'll probably need some accommodation that no other employee at this business needs. 
Sometimes, the hidden bias is so sweetly conveyed. 
"Wow, Susan, look at everything you've done in your career and your life. 
How did you do all of that and be visually impaired?" 
(Laughter) I fail at being disabled. 
(Laughter) So in the spirit of incentivizing the rampant failure of people all over the world and enticing the so-called normal to just give it a rest already, here are five tips to fail at being disabled. 
Tip one: know your superpowers. 
The best team I ever led in my career was based on superpowers, and we even gave ourselves fancy-pantsy titles like "the Pillar of Masterly Acumen." 
"The Biscuit Butterer." 
(Laughter) "The Voice of Reason." 
Because we relied on our strengths, our best strengths, we achieved tremendous outcomes. 
The trait that prevents me from recognizing my mom allows me to smoothly adapt, to quickly absorb and accurately process an exhausting volume of cues, tease out what's important, determine multiple processes or potentials for any situation that I'm in, and then select the one that makes the most sense, all in a matter of seconds. 
I see what other people do not. 
Some people think that's a superpower, but my real superpowers are ricocheting off of glass walls -- (Laughter) and letting my friends walk around with kale in their teeth. 
(Laughter) It's true. Don't have lunch with me, or dinner. 
Tip two: be supremely skilled, supremely skilled at getting it wrong. 
It is important to be as equally confident in your superpowers as you are in you FUBARs. 
That's "effed up beyond all recognition" for you millennials. 
(Laughter) Here's a good example. 
It is not a great idea to say, "Don't worry, everything in here is too small for me to see" when you accidentally walk into the men's room -- (Laughter) at one of the world's largest sporting arenas -- (Laughter) or anywhere. 
I really wish that one wasn't true. 
I'm serious. It is better to just walk out and let them think you're drunk. 
(Laughter) Tip three: know that everyone is disabled in some way, like when you have a cold and you can't smell and you realize that the milk that you splashed in your coffee was sour only after you've tasted it. 
Very recently, a woman walked up to me frantic. 
She could not find the bakery she was looking for. 
As I motioned in the direction I thought she should go, saying, "There are no stores on this side of the street so your best bet is to cross --" "Oh my goodness," she interrupted. 
"There it is. 
All I needed was another set of eyes." 
(Laughter) I just let her have it. 
I would have said that, you know, being logical and paying attention and staying calm would have done the trick, but who am I? 
Tip four: point out the disability in others. 
This one is best reserved -- very important note -- this one is best reserved for people you know well, because random strangers typically don't appreciate teachable moments. 
A few years ago, my parents and I went to see the Rockettes, Radio City's high-kicking dancers. 
I leaned over to my dad. 
"The two Rockettes on the left aren't kicking in a straight line." 
"Yes, they are." 
"No, they're not." 
"Yes, they are, and how do you know? 
You can't see." 
But I know what a straight line looks like. 
I had snapped a picture during our back and forth and presented him the evidence that proved I was right. 
He looked at the picture. 
I leaned in further. 
"Who's disabled now?" 
Tip five: pursue audacious goals. 
Flip expectation upside down and shove limitation off a cliff to meet its demise. 
There is a college football linebacker who blitzes, tackles, recovers fumbles while having one hand. 
There is a teacher who successfully transfers knowledge and inspires countless students while living with Down syndrome. 
And for me, on my long list, to cycle from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Darjeeling, India on the backseat of a bicycle built for two. 
It will be an exciting 620-mile adventure, and I'm sure I will have the blurry photos to show for it. 
(Laughter) Oh, before we go on, I forgot to introduce you to my mom. 
I need to do that. 
And here she is, as she would appear to me if I were looking through a crowd of people looking for her. 
Or is that an Asian man? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Here's a question for you: how many different scents do you think you can smell, and maybe even identify with accuracy? 
100? 
300? 
1,000? 
One study estimates that humans can detect up to one trillion different odors. 
A trillion. 
It's hard to imagine, but your nose has the molecular machinery to make it happen. 
Olfactory receptors -- tiny scent detectors -- are packed into your nose, each one patiently waiting to be activated by the odor, or ligand, that it's been assigned to detect. 
It turns out we humans, like all vertebrates, have lots of olfactory receptors. 
In fact, more of our DNA is devoted to genes for different olfactory receptors than for any other type of protein. 
Why is that? 
Could olfactory receptors be doing something else in addition to allowing us to smell? 
In 1991, Linda Buck and Richard Axel uncovered the molecular identity of olfactory receptors -- work which ultimately led to a Nobel Prize. 
At the time, we all assumed that these receptors were only found in the nose. 
However, about a year or so later, a report emerged of an olfactory receptor expressed in a tissue other than the nose. 
And then another such report emerged, and another. 
We now know that these receptors are found all over the body, including in some pretty unexpected places -- in muscle, in kidneys, lungs and blood vessels. 
But what are they doing there? 
Well, we know that olfactory receptors act as sensitive chemical sensors in the nose -- that's how they mediate our sense of smell. 
It turns out they also act as sensitive chemical sensors in many other parts of the body. 
Now, I'm not saying that your liver can detect the aroma of your morning coffee as you walk into the kitchen. 
Rather, after you drink your morning coffee, your liver might use an olfactory receptor to chemically detect the change in concentration of a chemical floating through your bloodstream. 
Many cell types and tissues in the body use chemical sensors, or chemosensors, to keep track of the concentration of hormones, metabolites and other molecules, and some of these chemosensors are olfactory receptors. 
If you are a pancreas or a kidney and you need a specialized chemical sensor that will allow you to keep track of a specific molecule, why reinvent the wheel? 
One of the first examples of an olfactory receptor found outside the nose showed that human sperm express an olfactory receptor, and that sperm with this receptor will seek out the chemical that the receptor responds to -- the receptor's ligand. 
That is, the sperm will swim toward the ligand. 
This has intriguing implications. 
Are sperm aided in finding the egg by sniffing out the area with the highest ligand concentration? 
I like this example because it clearly demonstrates that an olfactory receptor's primary job is to be a chemical sensor, but depending on the context, it can influence how you perceive a smell, or in which direction sperm will swim, and as it turns out, a huge variety of other processes. 
Olfactory receptors have been implicated in muscle cell migration, in helping the lung to sense and respond to inhaled chemicals, and in wound healing. 
Similarly, taste receptors once thought to be found only in the tongue, are now known to be expressed in cells and tissues throughout the body. 
Even more surprisingly, a recent study found that the light receptors in our eyes also play a role in our blood vessels. 
In my lab, we work on trying to understand the roles of olfactory receptors and taste receptors in the context of the kidney. 
The kidney is a central control center for homeostasis. 
And to us, it makes sense that a homeostatic control center would be a logical place to employ chemical sensors. 
We've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney, one of which, olfactory receptor 78, is known to be expressed in cells and tissues that are important in the regulation of blood pressure. 
When this receptor is deleted in mice, their blood pressure is low. 
Surprisingly, this receptor was found to respond to chemicals called short-chain fatty acids that are produced by the bacteria that reside in your gut -- your gut microbiota. 
After being produced by your gut microbiota, these chemicals are absorbed into your bloodstream where they can then interact with receptors like olfactory receptor 78, meaning that the changes in metabolism of your gut microbiota may influence your blood pressure. 
Although we've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney, we've only just begun to tease out their different functions and to figure out which chemicals each of them responds to. 
Similar investigations lie ahead for many other organs and tissues -- only a small minority of receptors has been studied to date. 
This is exciting stuff. 
It's revolutionizing our understanding of the scope of influence for one of the five senses. 
And it has the potential to change our understanding of some aspects of human physiology. 
It's still early, but I think we've picked up on the scent of something we're following. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The first time I cried underwater was in 2008, the island of Curaçao, way down in the southern Caribbean. 
It's beautiful there. 
I was studying these corals for my PhD, and after days and days of diving on the same reef, I had gotten to know them as individuals. 
I had made friends with coral colonies -- totally a normal thing to do. 
Then, Hurricane Omar smashed them apart and ripped off their skin, leaving little bits of wounded tissue that would have a hard time healing, and big patches of dead skeleton that would get overgrown by algae. 
When I saw this damage for the first time, stretching all the way down the reef, I sunk onto the sand in my scuba gear and I cried. 
If a coral could die that fast, how could a reef ever survive? 
And why was I making it my job to try to fight for them? 
I never heard another scientist tell that kind of story until last year. 
A scientist in Guam wrote, "I cried right into my mask," seeing the damage on the reefs. 
Then a scientist in Australia wrote, "I showed my students the results of our coral surveys, and we wept." 
Crying about corals is having a moment, guys. 
(Laughter) And that's because reefs in the Pacific are losing corals faster than we've ever seen before. 
Because of climate change, the water is so hot for so long in the summers, that these animals can't function normally. 
They're spitting out the colored algae that lives in their skin, and the clear bleached tissue that's left usually starves to death and then rots away. 
Then the skeletons are overgrown by algae. 
This is happening over an unbelievable scale. 
The Northern Great Barrier Reef lost two-thirds of its corals last year over a distance of hundreds of miles, then bleached again this year, and the bleaching stretched further south. 
Reefs in the Pacific are in a nosedive right now, and no one knows how bad it's going to get, except ... 
over in the Caribbean where I work, we've already been through the nosedive. 
Reefs there have suffered through centuries of intense human abuse. 
We kind of already know how the story goes. 
And we might be able to help predict what happens next. 
Let's consult a graph. 
Since the invention of scuba, scientists have measured the amount of coral on the seafloor, and how it's changed through time. 
And after centuries of ratcheting human pressure, Caribbean reefs met one of three fates. 
Some reefs lost their corals very quickly. 
Some reefs lost their corals more slowly, but kind of ended up in the same place. 
OK, so far this is not going very well. 
But some reefs in the Caribbean -- the ones best protected and the ones a little further from humans -- they managed to hold onto their corals. 
Give us a challenge. 
And, we almost never saw a reef hit zero. 
The second time I cried underwater was on the north shore of Curaçao, 2011. 
It was the calmest day of the year, but it's always pretty sketchy diving there. 
My boyfriend and I swam against the waves. 
I watched my compass so we could find our way back out, and he watched for sharks, and after 20 minutes of swimming that felt like an hour, we finally dropped down to the reef, and I was so shocked, and I was so happy that my eyes filled with tears. 
There were corals 1,000 years old lined up one after another. 
They had survived the entire history of European colonialism in the Caribbean, and for centuries before that. 
I never knew what a coral could do when it was given a chance to thrive. 
The truth is that even as we lose so many corals, even as we go through this massive coral die-off, some reefs will survive. 
Some will be ragged on the edge, some will be beautiful. 
And by protecting shorelines and giving us food to eat and supporting tourism, they will still be worth billions and billions of dollars a year. 
The best time to protect a reef was 50 years ago, but the second-best time is right now. 
Even as we go through bleaching events, more frequent and in more places, some corals will be able to recover. 
We had a bleaching event in 2010 in the Caribbean that took off big patches of skin on boulder corals like these. 
This coral lost half of its skin. 
But if you look at the side of this coral a few years later, this coral is actually healthy again. 
It's doing what a healthy coral does. 
It's making copies of its polyps, it's fighting back the algae and it's reclaiming its territory. 
If a few polyps survive, a coral can regrow; it just needs time and protection and a reasonable temperature. 
Some corals can regrow in 10 years -- others take a lot longer. 
But the more stresses we take off them locally -- things like overfishing, sewage pollution, fertilizer pollution, dredging, coastal construction -- the better they can hang on as we stabilize the climate, and the faster they can regrow. 
And as we go through the long, tough and necessary process of stabilizing the climate of planet Earth, some new corals will still be born. 
This is what I study in my research. 
We try to understand how corals make babies, and how those babies find their way to the reef, and we invent new methods to help them survive those early, fragile life stages. 
One of my favorite coral babies of all time showed up right after Hurricane Omar. 
It's the same species I was studying before the storm, but you almost never see babies of this species -- it's really rare. 
This is actually an endangered species. 
In this photo, this little baby coral, this little circle of polyps, is a few years old. 
Like its cousins that bleach, it's fighting back the algae. 
And like its cousins on the north shore, it's aiming to live for 1,000 years. 
What's happening in the world and in the ocean has changed our time horizon. 
We can be incredibly pessimistic on the short term, and mourn what we lost and what we really took for granted. 
But we can still be optimistic on the long term, and we can still be ambitious about what we fight for and what we expect from our governments, from our planet. 
Corals have been living on planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. 
They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. 
They're badasses. 
(Laughter) An individual coral can go through tremendous trauma and fully recover if it's given a chance and it's given protection. 
Corals have always been playing the long game, and now so are we. 
Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

I want you to touch your face. 
Go on. 
What do you feel? 
Soft? Squishy? 
It's you, right? You're feeling you? 
Well, it's not quite true. 
You're actually feeling thousands of microscopic creatures that live on our face and fingers. 
You're feeling some of the fungi that drifted down from the air ducts today. 
They set off our allergies and smell of mildew. 
You're feeling some of the 100 billion bacterial cells that live on our skin. 
They've been munching away at your skin oils and replicating, producing the smells of body odor. 
You're likely even touching the fecal bacteria that sprayed onto you the last time you flushed a toilet, or those bacteria that live in our water pipes and sprayed onto you with your last shower. 
Sorry. 
(Laughter) You're probably even giving a microscopic high five to the two species of mites that live on our faces, on all of our faces. 
They've spent the night squirming across your face and having sex on the bridge of your nose. 
(Laughter) Many of them are now leaking their gut contents onto your pores. 
(Laughter) Now look at your finger. 
How's it feel? Gross? 
In desperate need of soap or bleach? 
That's how you feel now, but it's not going to be how you feel in the future. 
For the last 100 years, we've had an adversarial relationship with the microscopic life nearest us. 
If I told you there was a bug in your house or bacteria in your sink, there was a human-devised solution for that, a product to eradicate, exterminate, disinfect. 
We strive to remove most of the microscopic life in our world now. 
But in doing so, we're ignoring the best source of new technology on this planet. 
The last 100 years have featured human solutions to microbial problems, but the next 100 years will feature microbial solutions to human problems. 
I'm a scientist, and I work with researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado to uncover the microscopic life that is nearest us, and that's often in our most intimate and boring environments, be it under our couches, in our backyards, or in our belly buttons. 
I do this work because it turns out that we know very little about the microscopic life that's nearest us. 
As of a few years ago, no scientist could tell you what bugs or microorganisms live in your home -- your home, the place you know better than anywhere else. 
And so I and teams of others are armed with Q-tips and tweezers and advanced DNA techniques to uncover the microscopic life nearest us. 
In doing so, we found over 600 species of bugs that live in USA homes, everything from spiders and cockroaches to tiny mites that cling to feathers. 
And we found over 100,000 species of bacteria and fungi that live in our dust bunnies, thousands more that live on our clothes or in our showers. 
We've gone further still, and we looked at the microorganisms that live inside the bodies of each of those bugs in our home. 
In each bug, for example, a wasp, we see a microscopic jungle unfold in a petri plate, a world of hundreds of vibrant species. 
Behold the biological cosmos! 
So many of the species you're looking at right now don't yet have names. 
Most of the life around us remains unknown. 
I remember the first time I discovered and got to name a new species. 
It was a fungus that lives in the nest of a paper wasp. 
It's white and fluffy, and I named it "mucor nidicola," meaning in Latin that it lives in the nest of another. 
This is a picture of it growing on a dinosaur, because everyone thinks dinosaurs are cool. 
At the time, I was in graduate school, and I was so excited that I had found this new life form. 
I called up my dad, and I go, "Dad! I just discovered a new microorganism species." 
And he laughed and he goes, "That's great. I hope you also discovered a cure for it." 
(Laughter) "Cure it." 
Now, my dad is my biggest fan, so in that crushing moment where he wanted to kill my new little life form, I realized that actually I had failed him, both as a daughter and a scientist. 
In my years toiling away in labs and in people's backyards, investigating and cataloging the microscopic life around us, I'd never made clear my true mission to him. 
My goal is not to find technology to kill the new microscopic life around us. 
My goal is to find new technology from this life, that will help save us. 
The diversity of life in our homes is more than a list of 100,000 new species. 
It is 100,000 new sources of solutions to human problems. 
I know it's hard to believe that anything that's so small or only has one cell can do anything powerful, but they can. 
These creatures are microscopic alchemists, with the ability to transform their environment with an arsenal of chemical tools. 
This means that they can live anywhere on this planet, and they can eat whatever food is around them. 
This means they can eat everything from toxic waste to plastic, and they can produce waste products like oil and battery power and even tiny nuggets of real gold. 
They can transform the inedible into nutritive. 
They can make sugar into alcohol. 
They give chocolate its flavor, and soil the power to grow. 
I'm here to tell you that the next 100 years will feature these microscopic creatures solving more of our problems. 
And we have a lot of problems to choose from. 
We've got the mundane: bad-smelling clothes or bland food. 
And we've got the monumental: disease, pollution, war. 
And so this is my mission: to not just catalog the microscopic life around us, but to find out what it's uniquely well-suited to help us with. 
Here's an example. 
We started with a pest, a wasp that lives on many of our homes. 
Inside that wasp, we plucked out a little-known microorganism species with a unique ability: it could make beer. 
This is a trait that only a few species on this planet have. 
In fact, all commercially produced beer you've ever had likely came from one of only three microorganism species. 
Yet our species, it could make a beer that tasted like honey, and it could also make a delightfully tart beer. 
In fact, this microorganism species that lives in the belly of a wasp, it could make a valuable sour beer better than any other species on this planet. 
There are now four species that produce commercial beer. 
Where you used to see a pest, now think of tasting your future favorite beer. 
As a second example, I worked with researchers to dig in the dirt in people's backyards. 
There, we uncovered a microorganism that could make novel antibiotics, antibiotics that can kill the world's worst superbugs. 
This was an awesome thing to find, but here's the secret: for the last 60 years, most of the antibiotics on the market have come from similar soil bacteria. 
Every day, you and I and everyone in this room and on this planet, are saved by similar soil bacteria that produce most of our antibiotics. 
Where you used to see dirt, now think of medication. 
Perhaps my favorite example comes from colleagues who are studying a pond scum microorganism, which is tragically named after the cow dung it was first found in. 
It's pretty unremarkable and would be unworthy of discussion, except that the researchers found that if you feed it to mice, it vaccinates against PTSD. 
It vaccinates against fear. 
Where you used to see pond scum, now think of hope. 
There are so many more microbial examples that I don't have time to talk about today. 
I gave you examples of solutions that came from just three species, but imagine what those other 100,000 species in your dust bunnies might be able to do. 
In the future, they might be able to make you sexier or smarter or perhaps live longer. 
So I want you to look at your finger again. 
Think about all those microscopic creatures that are unknown. 
Think about in the future what they might be able to do or make or whose life they might be able to save. 
How does your finger feel right now? 
A little bit powerful? 
That's because you're feeling the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, I'm afraid. 
Right now, on this stage, I feel fear. 
In my life, I ain't met many people that will readily admit when they are afraid. 
And I think that's because deep down, they know how easy it spreads. 
See, fear is like a disease. 
When it moves, it moves like wildfire. 
But what happens when, even in the face of that fear, you do what you've got to do? 
That's called courage. 
And just like fear, courage is contagious. 
See, I'm from East St. Louis, Illinois. 
That's a small city across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. 
I have lived in and around St. Louis my entire life. 
When Michael Brown, Jr., an ordinary teenager, was gunned down by police in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri -- another suburb, but north of St. Louis -- I remember thinking, he ain't the first, and he won't be the last young kid to lose his life to law enforcement. 
But see, his death was different. 
When Mike was killed, I remember the powers that be trying to use fear as a weapon. 
The police response to a community in mourning was to use force to impose fear: fear of militarized police, imprisonment, fines. 
The media even tried to make us afraid of each other by the way they spun the story. 
And all of these things have worked in the past. 
But like I said, this time it was different. 
Michael Brown's death and the subsequent treatment of the community led to a string of protests in and around Ferguson and St. Louis. 
When I got out to those protests about the fourth or fifth day, it was not out of courage; it was out of guilt. 
See, I'm black. 
I don't know if y'all noticed that. 
(Laughter) But I couldn't sit in St. Louis, minutes away from Ferguson, and not go see. 
So I got off my ass to go check it out. 
When I got out there, I found something surprising. 
I found anger; there was a lot of that. 
But what I found more of was love. 
People with love for themselves. 
Love for their community. 
And it was beautiful -- until the police showed up. 
Then a new emotion was interjected into the conversation: fear. 
Now, I'm not going to lie; when I saw those armored vehicles, and all that gear and all those guns and all those police I was terrified -- personally. 
And when I looked around that crowd, I saw a lot of people that had the same thing going on. 
But I also saw people with something else inside of them. 
That was courage. 
See, those people yelled, and they screamed, and they were not about to back down from the police. 
They were past that point. 
And then I could feel something in me changing, so I yelled and I screamed, and I noticed that everybody around me was doing the same thing. 
And there was nothing like that feeling. 
So I decided I wanted to do something more. 
I went home, I thought: I'm an artist. I make shit. 
So I started making things specific to the protest, things that would be weapons in a spiritual war, things that would give people voice and things that would fortify them for the road ahead. 
I did a project where I took pictures of the hands of protesters and put them up and down the boarded-up buildings and community shops. 
My goal was to raise awareness and to raise the morale. 
And I think, for a minute at least, it did just that. 
Then I thought, I want to uplift the stories of these people I was watching being courageous in the moment. 
And myself and my friend, and filmmaker and partner Sabaah Folayan did just that with our documentary, "Whose Streets?" 
I kind of became a conduit for all of this courage that was given to me. 
And I think that's part of our job as artists. 
I think we should be conveyors of courage in the work that we do. 
And I think that we are the wall between the normal folks and the people that use their power to spread fear and hate, especially in times like these. 
So I'm going to ask you. 
Y'all the movers and the shakers, you know, the thought leaders: What are you gonna do with the gifts that you've been given to break us from the fear the binds us every day? 
Because, see, I'm afraid every day. 
I can't remember a time when I wasn't. 
But once I figured out that fear was not put in me to cripple me, it was there to protect me, and once I figured out how to use that fear, I found my power. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Imagine you and a friend are strolling through an art exhibit and a striking painting catches your eye. 
The vibrant red appears to you as a symbol of love, but your friend is convinced it's a symbol of war. 
And where you see stars in a romantic sky, your friend interprets global warming-inducing pollutants. 
To settle the debate, you turn to the internet, where you read that the painting is a replica of the artist's first-grade art project: Red was her favorite color and the silver dots are fairies. 
You now know the exact intentions that led to the creation of this work. 
Are you wrong to have enjoyed it as something the artist didn’t intend? 
Do you enjoy it less now that you know the truth? 
Just how much should the artist's intention affect your interpretation of the painting? 
It's a question that's been tossed around by philosophers and art critics for decades, with no consensus in sight. 
In the mid-20th century, literary critic W.K. Wimsatt and philosopher Monroe Beardsley argued that artistic intention was irrelevant. 
They called this the Intentional Fallacy: the belief that valuing an artist's intentions was misguided. 
Their argument was twofold: First, the artists we study are no longer living, never recorded their intentions, or are simply unavailable to answer questions about their work. 
Second, even if there were a bounty of relevant information, Wimsatt and Beardsley believed it would distract us from the qualities of the work itself. 
They compared art to a dessert: When you taste a pudding, the chef's intentions don't affect whether you enjoy its flavor or texture. 
All that matters, they said, is that the pudding "works." 
Of course, what "works" for one person might not "work" for another. 
And since different interpretations appeal to different people, the silver dots in our painting could be reasonably interpreted as fairies, stars, or pollutants. 
By Wimsatt and Beardsley's logic, the artist's interpretation of her own work would just be one among many equally acceptable possibilities. 
If you find this problematic, you might be more in line with Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, two literary theorists who rejected the Intentional Fallacy. 
They argued that an artist's intended meaning was not just one possible interpretation, but the only possible interpretation. 
For example, suppose you're walking along a beach and come across a series of marks in the sand that spell out a verse of poetry. 
Knapp and Michaels believed the poem would lose all meaning if you discovered these marks were not the work of a human being, but an odd coincidence produced by the waves. 
They believed an intentional creator is what makes the poem subject to understanding at all. 
Other thinkers advocate for a middle ground, suggesting that intention is just one piece in a larger puzzle. 
Contemporary philosopher Noel Carroll took this stance, arguing that an artist's intentions are relevant to their audience the same way a speaker's intentions are relevant to the person they’re engaging in conversation. 
To understand how intentions function in conversation, Carroll said to imagine someone holding a cigarette and asking for a match. 
You respond by handing them a lighter, gathering that their motivation is to light their cigarette. 
The words they used to ask the question are important, but the intentions behind the question dictate your understanding and ultimately, your response. 
So which end of this spectrum do you lean towards? 
Do you, like Wimsatt and Beardsley, believe that when it comes to art, the proof should be in the pudding? 
Or do you think that an artist's plans and motivations for their work affect its meaning? 
Artistic interpretation is a complex web that will probably never offer a definitive answer. 

What's one thing that every person in this room is going to become? 
Older. 
And most of us are scared stiff at the prospect. 
How does that word make you feel? 
I used to feel the same way. 
What was I most worried about? 
Ending up drooling in some grim institutional hallway. 
And then I learned that only four percent of older Americans are living in nursing homes, and the percentage is dropping. 
What else was I worried about? 
Dementia. 
Turns out that most of us can think just fine to the end. 
Dementia rates are dropping, too. 
The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss. 
(Laughter) I also figured that old people were depressed because they were old and they were going to die soon. 
(Laughter) It turns out that the longer people live, the less they fear dying, and that people are happiest at the beginnings and the end of their lives. 
It's called the U-curve of happiness, and it's been borne out by dozens of studies around the world. 
You don't have to be a Buddhist or a billionaire. 
The curve is a function of the way aging itself affects the brain. 
So I started feeling a lot better about getting older, and I started obsessing about why so few people know these things. 
The reason is ageism: discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of age. 
We experience it anytime someone assumes we're too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we're capable of, or too young. 
Ageism cuts both ways. 
All -isms are socially constructed ideas -- racism, sexism, homophobia -- and that means we make them up, and they can change over time. 
All these prejudices pit us against each other to maintain the status quo, like auto workers in the US competing against auto workers in Mexico instead of organizing for better wages. 
(Applause) We know it's not OK to allocate resources by race or by sex. 
Why should it be OK to weigh the needs of the young against the old? 
All prejudice relies on "othering" -- seeing a group of people as other than ourselves: other race, other religion, other nationality. 
The strange thing about ageism: that other is us. 
Ageism feeds on denial -- our reluctance to acknowledge that we are going to become that older person. 
It's denial when we try to pass for younger or when we believe in anti-aging products, or when we feel like our bodies are betraying us, simply because they are changing. 
Why on earth do we stop celebrating the ability to adapt and grow as we move through life? 
Why should aging well mean struggling to look and move like younger versions of ourselves? 
It's embarrassing to be called out as older until we quit being embarrassed about it, and it's not healthy to go through life dreading our futures. 
The sooner we get off this hamster wheel of age denial, the better off we are. 
Stereotypes are always a mistake, of course, but especially when it comes to age, because the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. 
Right? Think about it. 
And yet, we tend to think of everyone in a retirement home as the same age: old -- (Laughter) when they can span four decades. 
Can you imagine thinking that way about a group of people between the ages of 20 and 60? 
When you get to a party, do you head for people your own age? 
Have you ever grumbled about entitled millennials? 
Have you ever rejected a haircut or a relationship or an outing because it's not age-appropriate? 
For adults, there's no such thing. 
All these behaviors are ageist. 
We all do them, and we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it. 
Nobody's born ageist, but it starts at early childhood, around the same time attitudes towards race and gender start to form, because negative messages about late life bombard us from the media and popular culture at every turn. 
Right? Wrinkles are ugly. 
Old people are pathetic. 
It's sad to be old. 
Look at Hollywood. 
A survey of recent Best Picture nominations found that only 12 percent of speaking or named characters were age 60 and up, and many of them were portrayed as impaired. 
Older people can be the most ageist of all, because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages and we've never thought to challenge them. 
I had to acknowledge it and stop colluding. 
"Senior moment" quips, for example: I stopped making them when it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn't call it a "junior moment." 
(Laughter) I stopped blaming my sore knee on being 64. 
My other knee doesn't hurt, and it's just as old. 
(Laughter) (Applause) We are all worried about some aspect of getting older, whether running out of money, getting sick, ending up alone, and those fears are legitimate and real. 
But what never dawns on most of us is that the experience of reaching old age can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. 
It is not having a vagina that makes life harder for women. 
It's sexism. 
(Applause) It's not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys. 
It's homophobia. 
And it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be. 
It is ageism. 
When labels are hard to read or there's no handrail or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves, our failure to age successfully, instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable. 
You can't make money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets, and capitalism always needs new markets. 
Who says wrinkles are ugly? 
The multi-billion-dollar skin care industry. 
Who says perimenopause and low T and mild cognitive impairment are medical conditions? 
The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. 
(Cheers) The more clearly we see these forces at work, the easier it is to come up with alternative, more positive and more accurate narratives. 
Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured. 
It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all. 
Changing the culture is a tall order, I know that, but culture is fluid. 
Look at how much the position of women has changed in my lifetime or the incredible strides that the gay rights movement has made in just a few decades, right? 
(Applause) Look at gender. 
We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it's a spectrum. 
It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too. 
There is no line in the sand between old and young, after which it's all downhill. 
And the longer we wait to challenge that idea, the more damage it does to ourselves and our place in the world, like in the workforce, where age discrimination is rampant. 
In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botoxed and hair-plugged before key interviews -- and these are skilled white men in their 30s, so imagine the effects further down the food chain. 
(Laughter) The personal and economic consequences are devastating. 
Not one stereotype about older workers holds up under scrutiny. 
Companies aren't adaptable and creative because their employees are young; they're adaptable and creative despite it. 
Companies -- (Laughter) (Applause) We know that diverse companies aren't just better places to work; they work better. 
And just like race and sex, age is a criterion for diversity. 
A growing body of fascinating research shows that attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. 
When we talk to older people like this (Speaks more loudly) or call them "sweetie" or "young lady" -- it's called elderspeak -- they appear to instantly age, walking and talking less competently. 
People with more positive feelings towards aging walk faster, they do better on memory tests, they heal quicker, and they live longer. 
Even with brains full of plaques and tangles, some people stayed sharp to the end. 
What did they have in common? 
A sense of purpose. 
And what's the biggest obstacle to having a sense of purpose in late life? 
A culture that tells us that getting older means shuffling offstage. 
That's why the World Health Organization is developing a global anti-ageism initiative to extend not just life span but health span. 
Women experience the double whammy of ageism and sexism, so we experience aging differently. 
There's a double standard at work here -- shocker -- (Laughter) the notion that aging enhances men and devalues women. 
Women reinforce this double standard when we compete to stay young, another punishing and losing proposition. 
Does any woman in this room really believe that she is a lesser version -- less interesting, less fun in bed, less valuable -- than the woman she once was? 
This discrimination affects our health, our well-being and our income, and the effects add up over time. 
They are further compounded by race and by class, which is why, everywhere in the world, the poorest of the poor are old women of color. 
What's the takeaway from that map? 
By 2050, one out of five of us, almost two billion people, will be age 60 and up. 
Longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress. 
All these older people represent a vast unprecedented and untapped market. 
And yet, capitalism and urbanization have propelled age bias into every corner of the globe, from Switzerland, where elders fare the best, to Afghanistan, which sits at the bottom of the Global AgeWatch Index. 
Half of the world's countries aren't mentioned on that list because we don't bother to collect data on millions of people because they're no longer young. 
Almost two-thirds of people over 60 around the world say they have trouble accessing healthcare. 
Almost three-quarters say their income doesn't cover basic services like food, water, electricity, and decent housing. 
Is this the world we want our children, who may well live to be a hundred, to inherit? 
Everyone -- all ages, all genders, all nationalities -- is old or future-old, and unless we put an end to it, ageism will oppress us all. 
And that makes it a perfect target for collective advocacy. 
Why add another -ism to the list when so many, racism in particular, call out for action? 
Here's the thing: we don't have to choose. 
When we make the world a better place to grow old in, we make it a better place in which to be from somewhere else, to have a disability, to be queer, to be non-rich, to be non-white. 
And when we show up at all ages for whatever cause matters most to us -- save the whales, save the democracy -- we not only make that effort more effective, we dismantle ageism in the process. 
Longevity is here to stay. 
A movement to end ageism is underway. 
I'm in it, and I hope you will join me. 
(Applause and cheers) Thank you. Let's do it! Let's do it! 
(Applause) 

The philosopher Plato once said, "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." 
Music has always been a big part of my life. 
To create and to perform music connects you to people countries and lifetimes away. 
It connects you to the people you're playing with, to your audience and to yourself. 
When I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm bored, when I'm stressed, I listen to and I create music. 
When I was younger, I played piano; later, I took up guitar. 
And as I started high school, music became a part of my identity. 
I was in every band, I was involved with every musical fine arts event. 
Music surrounded me. 
It made me who I was, and it gave me a place to belong. 
Now, I've always had this thing with rhythms. 
I remember being young, I would walk down the hallways of my school and I would tap rhythms to myself on my leg with my hands, or tapping my teeth. 
It was a nervous habit, and I was always nervous. 
I think I liked the repetition of the rhythm -- it was calming. 
Then in high school, I started music theory, and it was the best class I've ever taken. 
We were learning about music -- things I didn't know, like theory and history. 
It was a class where we basically just listened to a song, talked about what it meant to us and analyzed it, and figured out what made it tick. 
Every Wednesday, we did something called "rhythmic dictation," and I was pretty good at it. 
Our teacher would give us an amount of measures and a time signature, and then he would speak a rhythm to us and we would have to write it down with the proper rests and notes. 
Like this: ta ta tuck-a tuck-a ta, ta tuck-a-tuck-a-tuck-a, tuck-a. 
And I loved it. 
The simplicity of the rhythm -- a basic two- to four- measure line -- and yet each of them almost told a story, like they had so much potential, and all you had to do was add a melody. 
(Guitar) Rhythms set a foundation for melodies and harmonies to play on top of. 
It gives structure and stability. 
Now, music has these parts -- rhythm, melody and harmony -- just like our lives. 
Where music has rhythm, we have routines and habits -- things that help us to remember what to do and to stay on track, and to just keep going. 
And you may not notice it, but it's always there. 
(Guitar) And it may seem simple, it may seem dull by itself, but it gives tempo and heartbeat. 
And then things in your life add on to it, giving texture -- that's your friends and your family, and anything that creates a harmonic structure in your life and in your song, like harmonies, cadences and anything that makes it polyphonic. 
And they create beautiful chords and patterns. 
(Guitar) And then there's you. 
You play on top of everything else, on top of the rhythms and the beat because you're the melody. 
And things may change and develop, but no matter what we do, we're still the same people. 
Throughout a song melodies develop, but it's still the same song. 
No matter what you do, the rhythms are still there: the tempo and the heartbeat ... 
until I left, and I went to college and everything disappeared. 
When I first arrived at university, I felt lost. 
And don't get me wrong -- sometimes I loved it and it was great, but other times, I felt like I had been left alone to fend for myself. 
It's like I had been taken out of my natural environment, and put somewhere new, where the rhythms and the harmonies and the form had gone away, and it was just me -- (Guitar) silence and my melody. 
And even that began to waver, because I didn't know what I was doing. 
I didn't have any chords to structure myself, or a rhythm or a beat to know the tempo. 
(Guitar) And then I began to hear all these other sounds. 
(Guitar) And they were off-time and off-key. 
And the more I was around them, the more my melody started to sound like theirs. 
And slowly I began to lose myself, like I was being washed away. 
But then the next moment -- (Guitar) I could hear it. 
And I could feel it. 
And it was me. 
And I was here. 
And it was different, but not worse off. 
Just changed a little. 
Music is my way of coping with the changes in my life. 
There's a beautiful connection between music and life. 
It can bind us to reality at the same time it allows us to escape it. 
Music is something that lives inside of you. 
You create it and you're created by it. 
Our lives are not only conducted by music, they're also composed of it. 
So this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but hear me out: music is a fundamental part of what we are and of everything around us. 
Now, music is my passion, but physics also used to be an interest of mine. 
And the more I learned, the more I saw connections between the two -- especially regarding string theory. 
I know this is only one of many theories, but it spoke to me. 
So, one aspect of string theory, at its simplest form, is this: matter is made up of atoms, which are made up of protons and neutrons and electrons, which are made up of quark. 
And here's where the string part comes in. 
This quark is supposedly made up of little coiled strings, and it's the vibrations of these strings that make everything what it is. 
Michio Kaku once explained this in a lecture called, "The Universe in a Nutshell," where he says, "String theory is the simple idea that the four forces of the universe -- gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the two strong forces -- can be viewed as music. 
The music of tiny little rubber bands." 
In this lecture, he goes on to explain physics as the laws of harmony between these strings; chemistry, as the melodies you can play on these strings; and he states that the universe is a "symphony of strings." 
These strings dictate the universe; they make up everything we see and everything we know. 
They're musical notes, but they make us what we are and they hold us together. 
So you see, everything is music. 
(Guitar) When I look at the world, I see music all around us. 
When I look at myself, I see music. 
And my life has been defined by music. 
I found myself through music. 
Music is everywhere, and it is in everything. 
And it changes and it builds and it diminishes. 
But it's always there, supporting us, connecting us to each other and showing us the beauty of the universe. 
So if you ever feel lost, stop and listen for your song. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Mother Earth: Our end was imminent yet finality relented. 
Wind, water and fire gently revived; you and I reconciled, rhythms realigned, the blues gone green. 
Your care in conserving in exchange for my fruit and replenishing this picturous restoring of painted skies, mountains rolling, forest covering -- no more warming. 
The purity and simplicity of how we used to be. 
You remember me? 
All I give to humanity? 
Housing, land, seas, birds, beast and all of mankind, exclusively the interface where you and the elements meet and vibrate harmoniously. 
(Piano plays) (Violin plays) (Music) (Music tempo quickens) (Violin plays) (Music) (Violin plays) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) My beauty altered, muddied waters, fields stripped bare, interior scarred beyond repair, our memories eroding. 
You once obsessed over my frame and how I came to be; my nature, its polarity -- how my sweet winds whisper softly, yet assault seas. 
You remember me? 
All I give to humanity? 
Housing, land, seas, birds, beast and all of mankind -- exclusively the interface where you and the elements meet and vibrate harmoniously. 
The unseen traveler forever passing, carrying life, moving, awning of earth felt and heard, strong and stirring, blowing. 
Breathe you in, cleansing wind, gentle and still, quieter. 
The source eternally here, ascent and descending: air. 
Rhythmic flow, fluid and graceful, waves of serenity, smooth strings of purity, rains replenishing rapidly, rivers of dreams, raging springs covering earth in abundance, universal solvent dissolving, drink, liquid, life and power: water. 
Born when the universe was formed, warmed mankind, gave him light, colored rays illuminate ember flickers incandescent, powerful and brilliant. 
Sacred son of air, father of fury, heat dancing vigorously between perfection and beauty. 
Unconfined agility, fast and fancy, sparks of ingenuity rise: fire. 
(Canku One Star dances) (Choir chants) (Drums) (Drumming and chanting) (Drumming and chanting) (Drumming and chanting) (Music ends) (Applause) (Violin plays) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) 

Why do people deliberately destroy cultural heritage? 
By doing so, do they believe they're erasing our history? 
Our cultural memory? 
It's true that we are losing cultural heritage to erosion and natural disasters, but this is something that is simply difficult to avoid. 
I'm here to show you today how we can use pictures -- your pictures -- to reclaim the history that is being lost using innovative technology and the effort of volunteers. 
In the early 20th century, archaeologists discovered hundreds of statues and artifacts at the ancient city of Hatra, in northern Iraq. 
Statues like this one were found in fragments, some of them missing their heads or arms, yet the clothing that they are wearing and their pose can still tell us their story. 
For example, we believe that by wearing a knee-length tunic and open bare feet, this was representative of a priest. 
However, with a closer look at this particular piece, we can see that this tunic being worn was elaborately decorated, which has led many researchers to believe this was actually a statue of a king performing his religious functions. 
When the Mosul Cultural Museum opened in 1952 in northern Iraq, this statue, as well as others, were placed there to preserve them for future generations. 
Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a few statues and artifacts were relocated to Baghdad, but this statue remained. 
Then in February of last year, a video was released, and it instantly went viral. 
Maybe some of you remember seeing it. 
Here's a short clip. 
(Video) (Singing in Arabic) (Singing ends) Not a very pleasant sight, right? 
Did you notice anything familiar in the video? 
There it is. 
There is that very statue, as it was toppled over, breaking into pieces. 
When Matthew Vincent and I saw this video, we were shocked. 
Since we are archaeologists using innovative technology for digital preservation, an idea sprung to mind. 
Maybe we can crowdsource the images that were taken of these artifacts before they were destroyed, to create digital reconstructions. 
If we can do that, maybe we can put them into a virtual museum to tell that story. 
And so two weeks after we saw this video, we started the project called Project Mosul. 
Remember the pictures of the statue I showed you before? 
This is actually the crowdsourced reconstruction of it before it was destroyed. 
Now, many of you may be wondering, how exactly does this work? 
Well, the key to this technology is called photogrammetry, and it was invented here, in Germany. 
It is the technology that allows us to use two-dimensional images taken of the same object from different angles to create a 3D model. 
I know you may be thinking this sounds like magic -- but it's not. 
Let me show you how it works. 
Here are two crowdsourced images of the same statue. 
What the computer can do is it can detect similar features between the photographs -- similar features of the object. 
Then, by using multiple photos, in this case, it can begin to reconstruct the object in 3D. 
In this case, you have the position of the cameras when each image was taken, shown in blue. 
Now, this is a partial reconstruction, I admit, but why would I say partial? 
Well, simply because the statue was positioned against a wall. 
We don't have photographs taken of it from the back. 
If I wanted to complete a full digital reconstruction of this statue, I would need a proper camera, tripods, proper lighting, but we simply can't do that with crowdsourced images. 
Think about it: How many of you, when you visit a museum, take photographs of all parts of the statue, even the back side of it? 
Well, maybe if some of you find Michelangelo's David interesting, I guess -- (Laughter) But the thing is, if we can find more images of this object, we can improve the 3D model. 
When we started the project, we started it with the Mosul Museum in mind. 
We figured we may get a few images, some people interested, make one or two virtual reconstructions, but we had no idea that we had sparked something that would grow so quickly. 
Before we knew it, we realized it was obvious: we could apply this same idea to lost heritage anywhere. 
And so, we decided to change the name of the project to Rekrei. 
Then, in the summer of last year, "The Economist" magazine's media lab reached out to us. 
They asked us, "Hey, would you like us to build a virtual museum to put the reconstructions back inside, to tell the story?" 
Can you imagine us saying no? 
Of course not. 
We said yes! 
We were so excited. 
This was exactly the initial dream of that project. 
And so now, any of you can experience RecoVR Mosul on your phone, using Google Cardboard or a tablet or even YouTube 360. 
Here is a screenshot from the virtual museum. 
And there it is ... 
the partial reconstruction of the statue, as well as the Lion of Mosul, the first reconstruction completed by our project. 
Although the video doesn't explicitly show the Lion of Mosul being destroyed, we have many other examples of large artifacts being destroyed that were simply too large to have been stolen. 
For example, the Gate of Nimrud in northern Iraq. 
This is a digital reconstruction from before, and this is actually during the destruction. 
Or the Lion of Al-Lāt, in Palmyra, Syria: before ... 
and after. 
Although virtual reconstructions are primarily the main focus of our project, some people have been asking the question: Can we print them in 3D? 
We believe 3D printing doesn't offer a straightforward solution to lost heritage. 
Once an object is destroyed, it's gone. 
But 3D printing does offer an addition to tell that story. 
For example, I can show you here ... 
There is the statue from Hatra and the Lion of Mosul. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Now, if you look closely, you'll notice that there are some parts that have been printed in color, and some parts that are in white or gray. 
This part was added simply to hold the statues up. 
This works the same way if you visit a museum, and a statue is found in fragments; it's put together for the people to see it. 
This makes sense, right? 
However, we're much more interested in what virtual reality has to offer for lost heritage. 
Here is an example of one of the tower tombs that was destroyed in Palmyra. 
Using Sketchfab's online viewer, we can show that we have reconstructed three parts of the exterior of the tomb, but we also have photos of the inside, so we're beginning to create a reconstruction of the wall and the ceiling. 
Archaeologists worked there for many, many years, so we also have architectural drawing plans of this lost heritage. 
Unfortunately, we are not only losing cultural heritage to areas of conflict and at war -- we're also losing it to natural disasters. 
This is a 3D model of Durbar Square in Kathmandu, before the earthquake that occurred last April ... 
and this is after. 
You may be thinking, you didn't create these 3D models with only tourist photographs, and that's true. 
But what this represents is the ability for large, public organizations and private industry to come together for initiatives like ours. 
And so one of the major challenges of our project, really, is to find photographs that were taken before something happens, right? 
Well, the internet is basically a database with millions of images, right? 
Exactly. 
So we have begun to develop a tool that allows us to extract images from websites like Flickr, based on their geotags, to complete reconstructions. 
Because we're not only losing cultural heritage to natural disasters and in war, but we're also losing it to something else. 
Any idea, just looking at these two pictures? 
Maybe it's a little difficult to remember, but only a few weeks ago, this was the example of human destruction by human stupidity. 
Because a tourist in Lisbon wanted to climb onto this statue and take a selfie with it -- (Laughter) and pulled it down with him. 
So we're already finding photographs to complete a digital reconstruction of this. 
We need to remember that the destruction of cultural heritage isn't a recent phenomenon. 
In the 16th century, European priests and explorers burned thousands of Maya books in the Americas, of which we only have a handful left. 
Fast-forward to 2001, when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. 
You see, cultural heritage is about our shared global history. 
It helps us connect with our ancestors and their stories, but we're losing pieces of it every day to natural disasters and in areas of conflict. 
Of course, the loss of human life is the most heartbreaking loss ... 
but cultural heritage offers us a way to preserve the memory of the people for future generations. 
We need your help to reclaim the history that is being lost. 
Will you join us? 
(Applause) 

Your internship in Professor Ramsey’s physics lab has been amazing. 
Until, that is, the professor accidentally stepped through a time portal. 
You’ve got just a minute to jump through the portal to save him before it closes and leaves him stranded in history. 
Once you’re through it, the portal will close, and your only way back will be to create a new one using the chrono-nodules from your lab. 
Activated nodules connect to each other via red or blue tachyon entanglement. 
Activate more nodules and they’ll connect to all other nodules in the area. 
As soon as a red or blue triangle is created with a nodule at each point, it opens a doorway through time that will take you back to the present. 
But the color of each individual connection manifests at random, and there’s no way to choose or change its color. 
And there’s one more problem: each individual nodule creates a temporal instability that raises the chances the portal might collapse as you go through it. 
So the fewer you bring, the better. 
The portal’s about to close. 
What’s the minimum number of nodules you need to bring to be certain you’ll create a red or blue triangle and get back to the present? 
Pause here if you want to figure it out for yourself! 
Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 This question is so rich that an entire branch of mathematics known as Ramsey Theory developed from it. 
Ramsey Theory is home to some famously difficult problems. 
This one isn’t easy, but it can be handled if you approach it systematically. 
Imagine you brought just three nodules. 
Would that be enough? No - for example, you might have two blue and one red connection, and be stuck in the past forever. 
Would four nodules be enough? No - there are many arrangements here that don’t give a blue or red triangle. 
What about five? 
It turns out there is an arrangement of connections that avoids creating a blue or red triangle. 
These smaller triangles don’t count because they don’t have a nodule at each corner. 
However, six nodules will always create a blue triangle or a red triangle. 
Here’s how we can prove that without sorting through every possible case. 
Imagine activating the sixth nodule, and consider how it might connect to the other five. 
It could do so in one of six ways: with five red connections, five blue connections, or some mix of red and blue. 
Notice that every possibility has at least three connections of the same color coming from this nodule. 
Let’s look at just the nodules on the other end of those same three color connections. 
If the connections were blue, then any additional blue connection between those three would give us a blue triangle. 
So the only way we could get in trouble is if all the connections between them were red. 
But those three red connections would give us a red triangle. 
No matter what happens, we’ll get a red or a blue triangle, and open our doorway. 
On the other hand, if the original three connections were all red instead of blue, the same argument still works, with all the colors flipped. 
In other words, no matter how the connections are colored, six nodules will always create a red or blue triangle and a doorway leading home. 
So you grab six nodules and jump through the portal. 
You were hoping your internship would give you valuable life experience. 
Turns out, that didn’t take much time. 

By the light of the moon, a group of youths sneak into the woods, where they take mind-altering substances, switch it up romantically, and brush up against creatures from another dimension. 
"A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream" sees Shakespeare get psychedelic – and the result is a treat in the theatre and on the page. 
First performed in the 1590's, this play is one of Shakespeare’s friskiest works, filled with trickery, madness and magic. 
Set over the course of one night, Midsummer progresses at a rollicking pace. 
The plot is structured around patterns of collision and dissolution, where characters from different worlds are thrown together and torn apart. 
Shakespeare uses these patterns to mock the characters’ self-obsession and question authority with a comic twist. 
The action is set in Ancient Greece, but like many of Shakespeare’s plays it reflects his contemporary concerns. 
The magical setting of the woods at night disrupts the boundaries between separate groups, with bizarre results. 
Here, the bard plays with the rigid class system of his own time, taking three distinct groups and turning their society upside-down in a world where no mortal is in control. 
The play opens with young Hermia raging at her father Egeus and Theseus, the King of Athens, who have forbidden her to marry her lover Lysander. 
Hermia has no interest in her father's choice for her of Demetrius – but her best friend Helena definitely does. 
Furious at their elders, Hermia and Lysander elope under cover of darkness, with Demetrius in hot pursuit. 
This is further complicated by Helena’s decision to follow them all into the woods, in the hope of winning Demetrius’ heart. 
At this point, the woods are getting crowded, as the lovers are sharing the space with a group of “rude mechanicals”— a troupe of workers drunkenly rehearsing a play, led by the jovial Nick Bottom. 
Unbeknownst to them, the humans have entered into the world of the fairies. 
Despite their magical splendor, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, have their own romantic problems. 
Furious at his inability to control Titania, the jealous Oberon commands the trickster Puck to squeeze the juice of a magical flower over her eyes. 
When she wakes up, she’ll fall in love with the first thing she sees. 
On his mission, Puck gleefully sprinkles the juice over the eyes of the napping Demetrius and Lysander, and transforms Bottom’s head into that of a donkey for good measure. 
As eyes flicker open, a night of chaos commences that includes broken hearts, mistaken identity, and transformations. 
Out of all the characters, Bottom probably fares the best – when the bewitched Titania lays eyes on him, she calls on her fairies to lavish him with wine and treasures and sweeps the transfigured donkeyman off his feet: “pluck the wings from painted butterflies/ To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. 
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.” While magic is the catalyst to the action, the play reflects the real drama of the things we do for love – and the nonsensical behavior of the people under its spell. 
The moon overlooks the action “like a silver bow,” signifying erratic behavior, the dark side of love, and the bewitching allure of a world where the usual rules don’t apply. 
Although the characters eventually come to their senses, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" raises the question of how much agency we have over our own daily lives. 
But it’s not the more realistically rendered lovers, rulers or workers who have the last word, but the impish Puck who queries whether we can ever truly trust what we see: If we shadows have offended, Think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear. 
And in so doing, he evokes the effect of entering into the magical world of great theatre that plays with the boundary between illusion and reality – and dramatizes the possibility that life is but a dream. 

So, my mother's a pediatrician, and when I was young, she'd tell the craziest stories that combined science with her overactive imagination. 
One of the stories she told was that if you eat a lot of salt, all of the blood rushes up your legs, through your body, and shoots out the top of your head, killing you instantly. 
(Laughter) She called it "high blood pressure." 
(Laughter) This was my first experience with science fiction, and I loved it. 
So when I started to write my own science fiction and fantasy, I was surprised that it was considered un-African. 
So naturally, I asked, what is African? 
And this is what I know so far: Africa is important. 
Africa is the future. 
It is, though. 
And Africa is a serious place where only serious things happen. 
So when I present my work somewhere, someone will always ask, "What's so important about it? 
How does it deal with real African issues like war, poverty, devastation or AIDS?" 
And it doesn't. 
My work is about Nairobi pop bands that want to go to space or about seven-foot-tall robots that fall in love. 
It's nothing incredibly important. 
It's just fun, fierce and frivolous, as frivolous as bubble gum -- "AfroBubbleGum." 
So I'm not saying that agenda art isn't important; I'm the chairperson of a charity that deals with films and theaters that write about HIV and radicalization and female genital mutilation. 
It's vital and important art, but it cannot be the only art that comes out of the continent. 
We have to tell more stories that are vibrant. 
The danger of the single story is still being realized. 
And maybe it's because of the funding. 
A lot of art is still dependent on developmental aid. 
So art becomes a tool for agenda. 
Or maybe it's because we've only seen one image of ourselves for so long that that's all we know how to create. 
Whatever the reason, we need a new way, and AfroBubbleGum is one approach. 
It's the advocacy of art for art's sake. 
It's the advocacy of art that is not policy-driven or agenda-driven or based on education, just for the sake of imagination: AfroBubbleGum art. 
And we can't all be AfroBubbleGumists. 
We have to judge our work for its potential poverty porn pitfalls. 
We have to have tests that are similar to the Bechdel test, and ask questions like: Are two or more Africans in this piece of fiction healthy? 
Are those same Africans financially stable and not in need of saving? 
Are they having fun and enjoying life? 
And if we can answer yes to two or more of these questions, then surely we're AfroBubbleGumists. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And fun is political, because imagine if we have images of Africans who were vibrant and loving and thriving and living a beautiful, vibrant life. 
What would we think of ourselves then? 
Would we think that maybe we're worthy of more happiness? 
Would we think of our shared humanity through our shared joy? 
I think of these things when I create. 
I think of the people and the places that give me immeasurable joy, and I work to represent them. 
And that's why I write stories about futuristic girls that risk everything to save plants or to race camels or even just to dance, to honor fun, because my world is mostly happy. 
And I know happiness is a privilege in this current splintered world where remaining hopeful requires diligence. 
But maybe, if you join me in creating, curating and commissioning more AfroBubbleGum art, there might be hope for a different view of the world, a happy Africa view where children are strangely traumatized by their mother's dark sense of humor, (Laughter) but also they're claiming fun, fierce and frivolous art in the name of all things unseriously African. 
Because we're AfroBubbleGumists and there's so many more of us than you can imagine. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. 
They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. 
And one of them wrote, "Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes." 
And the other one wrote, "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." 
(Laughter) Now, there's a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. 
And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet. 
And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. 
Actually, it's not really an experiment, because I know the outcome. 
(Laughter) But it's like an experiment. 
Now, before we start -- (Laughter) Before we start, I need to do two things. 
One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano. 
Maybe you have this child at home. 
He sounds something like this. 
(Music) (Music ends) I see some of you recognize this child. 
Now, if he practices for a year and takes lessons, he's now eight and he sounds like this. 
(Music) (Music ends) He practices for another year and takes lessons -- he's nine. 
(Music) (Music ends) Then he practices for another year and takes lessons -- now he's 10. 
(Music) (Music ends) At that point, they usually give up. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this. 
(Music) (Music ends) Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. 
What actually happened was the impulses were reduced. 
You see, the first time, he was playing with an impulse on every note. 
(Music) And the second, with an impulse every other note. 
(Music) You can see it by looking at my head. 
(Laughter) The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes. 
(Music) The 10-year-old, on every eight notes. 
(Music) And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase. 
(Music) I don't know how we got into this position. 
(Laughter) I didn't say, "I'm going to move my shoulder over, move my body." 
No, the music pushed me over, which is why I call it one-buttock playing. 
(Music) It can be the other buttock. 
(Music) You know, a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing, when I was working with a young pianist. 
He was the president of a corporation in Ohio. 
I was working with this young pianist, and said, "The trouble with you is you're a two-buttock player. 
You should be a one-buttock player." 
I moved his body while he was playing. 
And suddenly, the music took off. It took flight. 
The audience gasped when they heard the difference. 
Then I got a letter from this gentleman. 
He said, "I was so moved. 
I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company." 
(Laughter) Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. 
There are 1,600 people, I believe. 
My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. 
You adore classical music. Your FM is always on that classical dial. 
You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. 
You can't imagine your life without classical music. 
That's the first group, quite small. 
Then there's another bigger group. 
The people who don't mind classical music. 
(Laughter) You know, you've come home from a long day, and you take a glass of wine, and you put your feet up. 
A little Vivaldi in the background doesn't do any harm. 
That's the second group. 
Now comes the third group: people who never listen to classical music. 
It's just simply not part of your life. 
You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport ... 
(Laughter) -- and maybe a little bit of a march from "Aida" when you come into the hall. 
But otherwise, you never hear it. 
That's probably the largest group. 
And then there's a very small group. 
These are the people who think they're tone-deaf. 
Amazing number of people think they're tone-deaf. 
Actually, I hear a lot, "My husband is tone-deaf." 
(Laughter) Actually, you cannot be tone-deaf. 
Nobody is tone-deaf. 
If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your car, in a stick shift car. 
You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome. 
And the telephone. The telephone. 
If your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, "Hello," you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. 
You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. 
So nobody is tone-deaf. 
But I tell you what. 
It doesn't work for me to go on with this thing, with such a wide gulf between those who understand, love and are passionate about classical music, and those who have no relationship to it at all. 
The tone-deaf people, they're no longer here. 
But even between those three categories, it's too wide a gulf. 
So I'm not going to go on until every single person in this room, downstairs and in Aspen, and everybody else looking, will come to love and understand classical music. 
So that's what we're going to do. 
Now, you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work, if you look at my face, right? 
It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. 
Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, "I have a dream. 
Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it." 
(Laughter) All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. 
This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin. 
Some of you will know it. 
(Music) Do you know what I think probably happened here? 
When I started, you thought, "How beautiful that sounds." 
(Music) "I don't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year." 
(Laughter) It's funny, isn't it? 
It's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head. 
And of course -- (Applause) Of course, if the piece is long and you've had a long day, you might actually drift off. 
Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say, "Wake up! It's culture!" And then you feel even worse. 
(Laughter) But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you, but because of us? 
Did anybody think while I was playing, "Why is he using so many impulses?" 
If I'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it. 
(Music) (Music ends) And for the rest of your life, every time you hear classical music, you'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses. 
So let's see what's really going on here. 
We have a B. This is a B. 
The next note is a C. 
And the job of the C is to make the B sad. 
And it does, doesn't it? 
(Laughter) Composers know that. 
If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. 
(Music) But basically, it's just a B, with four sads. 
(Laughter) Now, it goes down to A. 
Now to G. 
And then to F. 
So we have B, A, G, F. 
And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next? 
(Music) That might have been a fluke. 
Let's try it again. 
(Music) Oh, the TED choir. 
(Laughter) And you notice nobody is tone-deaf, right? 
Nobody is. 
You know, every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China -- everybody knows: da, da, da, da -- da. 
Everybody knows, who's expecting that E. 
Chopin didn't want to reach the E there, because what will have happened? 
It will be over, like Hamlet. Do you remember? 
Act One, scene three, he finds out his uncle killed his father. 
He keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him. 
And then he backs away, he goes up to him again, almost kills him. 
The critics sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion, so they say, "Hamlet is a procrastinator." 
Or they say, "Hamlet has an Oedipus complex." 
No, otherwise the play would be over, stupid. 
(Laughter) That's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet -- Ophelia going mad, the play within the play, and Yorick's skull, and the gravediggers. 
That's in order to delay -- until Act Five, he can kill him. 
It's the same with the Chopin. 
He's just about to reach the E, and he says, "Oops, better go back up and do it again." 
So he does it again. 
Now, he gets excited. 
(Music) That's excitement, don't worry about it. 
Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord -- because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does ... 
Now, we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us. 
I tell my students, "If you have a deceptive cadence, raise your eyebrows, and everybody will know." 
(Laughter) (Applause) Right. 
He gets to E, but it's the wrong chord. 
Now, he tries E again. 
That chord doesn't work. 
Now, he tries the E again. That chord doesn't work. 
Now, he tries E again, and that doesn't work. 
And then finally ... 
There was a gentleman in the front row who went, "Mmm." 
(Laughter) It's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says, "Aah, I'm home." 
Because we all know where home is. 
So this is a piece which goes from away to home. 
I'm going to play it all the way through and you're going to follow. 
B, C, B, C, B, C, B -- down to A, down to G, down to F. 
Almost goes to E, but otherwise the play would be over. 
He goes back up to B, he gets very excited. 
Goes to F-sharp. Goes to E. 
It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. 
And finally goes to E, and it's home. 
And what you're going to see is one-buttock playing. 
(Laughter) Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E. 
You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. 
What was he thinking about? Lunch? 
No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. 
This is about vision. This is about the long line. 
Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath, all right? 
So now, you're going to follow the line all the way from B to E. 
And I've one last request before I play this piece all the way through. 
Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? 
A beloved grandmother, a lover -- somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. 
Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say. 
(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now, you may be wondering -- (Applause) (Applause ends) You may be wondering why I'm clapping. 
Well, I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders, 12-year-olds. 
I did exactly what I did with you, and I explained the whole thing. 
At the end, they went crazy, clapping. 
I was clapping. They were clapping. 
Finally, I said, "Why am I clapping?" 
(Laughter) Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. 
Now, that is something. 
Am I sure that every single person followed that, understood it, was moved by it? 
Of course, I can't be sure. 
But I'll tell you what happened to me in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. 
And I did this with them -- a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. 
And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, "You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that shopping piece ..." 
(Laughter) He said, "My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. 
But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. 
And I felt the tears streaming down my face. 
And it felt really good to cry for my brother." 
So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody. 
Everybody. 
Now, how would you walk -- my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. 
They say three percent of the population likes classical music. 
If only we could move it to four percent, our problems would be over. 
(Laughter) How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? 
If you thought, "Three percent of the population likes classical music, if only we could move it to four percent." 
How would you walk or talk? How would you be? 
If you thought, "Everybody loves classical music -- they just haven't found out about it yet." 
See, these are totally different worlds. 
Now, I had an amazing experience. 
I was 45 years old, I'd been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. 
The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. 
My picture appears on the front of the CD -- (Laughter) But the conductor doesn't make a sound. 
He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. 
And that changed everything for me. 
It was totally life-changing. 
People in my orchestra said, "Ben, what happened?" That's what happened. 
I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. 
And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. 
How do you find out? 
You look at their eyes. 
If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. 
You could light up a village with this guy's eyes. 
(Laughter) Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. 
If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. 
And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? 
We can do that with our children, too. 
Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? 
That's a totally different world. 
Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week, we're going back into the world. 
And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question, who are we being as we go back out into the world? 
And you know, I have a definition of success. 
For me, it's very simple. 
It's about how many shining eyes I have around me. 
So now, I have one last thought, which is that it really makes a difference what we say -- the words that come out of our mouth. 
I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. 
She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old. 
And ... 
And her brother was eight, and the parents were lost. 
And she told me this, she said, "We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. 
I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?'" The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. 
Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him, because she never saw him again. 
He did not survive. 
And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. 
She told me this. 
She said, "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. 
And the vow was, "I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." 
Now, can we do that? No. 
And we'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong. 
But it is a possibility to live into. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Shining eyes. 
(Applause) Shining eyes. 
(Applause) Thank you, thank you. 

I used to think the whole purpose of life was pursuing happiness. 
Everyone said the path to happiness was success, so I searched for that ideal job, that perfect boyfriend, that beautiful apartment. 
But instead of ever feeling fulfilled, I felt anxious and adrift. 
And I wasn't alone; my friends -- they struggled with this, too. 
Eventually, I decided to go to graduate school for positive psychology to learn what truly makes people happy. 
But what I discovered there changed my life. 
The data showed that chasing happiness can make people unhappy. 
And what really struck me was this: the suicide rate has been rising around the world, and it recently reached a 30-year high in America. 
Even though life is getting objectively better by nearly every conceivable standard, more people feel hopeless, depressed and alone. 
There's an emptiness gnawing away at people, and you don't have to be clinically depressed to feel it. 
Sooner or later, I think we all wonder: Is this all there is? 
And according to the research, what predicts this despair is not a lack of happiness. 
It's a lack of something else, a lack of having meaning in life. 
But that raised some questions for me. 
Is there more to life than being happy? 
And what's the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? 
Many psychologists define happiness as a state of comfort and ease, feeling good in the moment. 
Meaning, though, is deeper. 
The renowned psychologist Martin Seligman says meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and from developing the best within you. 
Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path. 
And the studies show that people who have meaning in life, they're more resilient, they do better in school and at work, and they even live longer. 
So this all made me wonder: How can we each live more meaningfully? 
To find out, I spent five years interviewing hundreds of people and reading through thousands of pages of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. 
Bringing it all together, I found that there are what I call four pillars of a meaningful life. 
And we can each create lives of meaning by building some or all of these pillars in our lives. 
The first pillar is belonging. 
Belonging comes from being in relationships where you're valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value others as well. 
But some groups and relationships deliver a cheap form of belonging; you're valued for what you believe, for who you hate, not for who you are. 
True belonging springs from love. 
It lives in moments among individuals, and it's a choice -- you can choose to cultivate belonging with others. 
Here's an example. 
Each morning, my friend Jonathan buys a newspaper from the same street vendor in New York. 
They don't just conduct a transaction, though. 
They take a moment to slow down, talk, and treat each other like humans. 
But one time, Jonathan didn't have the right change, and the vendor said, "Don't worry about it." 
But Jonathan insisted on paying, so he went to the store and bought something he didn't need to make change. 
But when he gave the money to the vendor, the vendor drew back. 
He was hurt. 
He was trying to do something kind, but Jonathan had rejected him. 
I think we all reject people in small ways like this without realizing it. 
I do. 
I'll walk by someone I know and barely acknowledge them. 
I'll check my phone when someone's talking to me. 
These acts devalue others. 
They make them feel invisible and unworthy. 
But when you lead with love, you create a bond that lifts each of you up. 
For many people, belonging is the most essential source of meaning, those bonds to family and friends. 
For others, the key to meaning is the second pillar: purpose. 
Now, finding your purpose is not the same thing as finding that job that makes you happy. 
Purpose is less about what you want than about what you give. 
A hospital custodian told me her purpose is healing sick people. 
Many parents tell me, "My purpose is raising my children." 
The key to purpose is using your strengths to serve others. 
Of course, for many of us, that happens through work. 
That's how we contribute and feel needed. 
But that also means that issues like disengagement at work, unemployment, low labor force participation -- these aren't just economic problems, they're existential ones, too. 
Without something worthwhile to do, people flounder. 
Of course, you don't have to find purpose at work, but purpose gives you something to live for, some "why" that drives you forward. 
The third pillar of meaning is also about stepping beyond yourself, but in a completely different way: transcendence. 
Transcendent states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality. 
For one person I talked to, transcendence came from seeing art. 
For another person, it was at church. 
For me, I'm a writer, and it happens through writing. 
Sometimes I get so in the zone that I lose all sense of time and place. 
These transcendent experiences can change you. 
One study had students look up at 200-feet-tall eucalyptus trees for one minute. 
But afterwards they felt less self-centered, and they even behaved more generously when given the chance to help someone. 
Belonging, purpose, transcendence. 
Now, the fourth pillar of meaning, I've found, tends to surprise people. 
The fourth pillar is storytelling, the story you tell yourself about yourself. 
Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. 
It helps you understand how you became you. 
But we don't always realize that we're the authors of our stories and can change the way we're telling them. 
Your life isn't just a list of events. 
You can edit, interpret and retell your story, even as you're constrained by the facts. 
I met a young man named Emeka, who'd been paralyzed playing football. 
After his injury, Emeka told himself, "My life was great playing football, but now look at me." 
People who tell stories like this -- "My life was good. Now it's bad." -- tend to be more anxious and depressed. 
And that was Emeka for a while. 
But with time, he started to weave a different story. 
His new story was, "Before my injury, my life was purposeless. 
I partied a lot and was a pretty selfish guy. 
But my injury made me realize I could be a better man." 
That edit to his story changed Emeka's life. 
After telling the new story to himself, Emeka started mentoring kids, and he discovered what his purpose was: serving others. 
The psychologist Dan McAdams calls this a "redemptive story," where the bad is redeemed by the good. 
People leading meaningful lives, he's found, tend to tell stories about their lives defined by redemption, growth and love. 
But what makes people change their stories? 
Some people get help from a therapist, but you can do it on your own, too, just by reflecting on your life thoughtfully, how your defining experiences shaped you, what you lost, what you gained. 
That's what Emeka did. 
You won't change your story overnight; it could take years and be painful. 
After all, we've all suffered, and we all struggle. 
But embracing those painful memories can lead to new insights and wisdom, to finding that good that sustains you. 
Belonging, purpose, transcendence, storytelling: those are the four pillars of meaning. 
When I was younger, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by all of the pillars. 
My parents ran a Sufi meetinghouse from our home in Montreal. 
Sufism is a spiritual practice associated with the whirling dervishes and the poet Rumi. 
Twice a week, Sufis would come to our home to meditate, drink Persian tea, and share stories. 
Their practice also involved serving all of creation through small acts of love, which meant being kind even when people wronged you. 
But it gave them a purpose: to rein in the ego. 
Eventually, I left home for college and without the daily grounding of Sufism in my life, I felt unmoored. 
And I started searching for those things that make life worth living. 
That's what set me on this journey. 
Looking back, I now realize that the Sufi house had a real culture of meaning. 
The pillars were part of the architecture, and the presence of the pillars helped us all live more deeply. 
Of course, the same principle applies in other strong communities as well -- good ones and bad ones. 
Gangs, cults: these are cultures of meaning that use the pillars and give people something to live and die for. 
But that's exactly why we as a society must offer better alternatives. 
We need to build these pillars within our families and our institutions to help people become their best selves. 
But living a meaningful life takes work. 
It's an ongoing process. 
As each day goes by, we're constantly creating our lives, adding to our story. 
And sometimes we can get off track. 
Whenever that happens to me, I remember a powerful experience I had with my father. 
Several months after I graduated from college, my dad had a massive heart attack that should have killed him. 
He survived, and when I asked him what was going through his mind as he faced death, he said all he could think about was needing to live so he could be there for my brother and me, and this gave him the will to fight for life. 
When he went under anesthesia for emergency surgery, instead of counting backwards from 10, he repeated our names like a mantra. 
He wanted our names to be the last words he spoke on earth if he died. 
My dad is a carpenter and a Sufi. 
It's a humble life, but a good life. 
Lying there facing death, he had a reason to live: love. 
His sense of belonging within his family, his purpose as a dad, his transcendent meditation, repeating our names -- these, he says, are the reasons why he survived. 
That's the story he tells himself. 
That's the power of meaning. 
Happiness comes and goes. 
But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is a picture of a sunset on Mars taken by NASA's Curiosity rover in 2013. 
Mars is a very cold planet, flooded with high levels of UV radiation and extremely dry. 
In fact, Mars is considered to be too dry for life as we know it. 
I'm an astrobiologist. 
I try to understand the origin of life on Earth and the possibilities of finding life elsewhere in the universe. 
People sometimes ask me, how can you be an astrobiologist if you don't have your own spaceship? 
Well, what I do is that I study life in those environments on Earth that most closely resemble other interesting places in the universe. 
All life on Earth requires water, so in my case I focus on the intimate relationship between water and life in order to understand if we could find life in a planet as dry as Mars. 
But since I do not have the 2.5 billion dollars to send my own robot to Mars, I study the most Martian place on Earth, the Atacama Desert. 
Located in northern Chile, it is the oldest and driest desert on Earth. 
To give you an idea of how dry it is, consider here in Vancouver it rains over 1,000 millimeters of rain every year. 
In the Atacama, there are places with no reported rains in the last 400 years. 
How do I know this? 
Well, because I was born and raised in the Atacama -- (Laughter) So I had a unique advantage when I started studying this desert. 
So let me tell you guys a few fantastic examples he has found on how life has adapted to live with almost no water at all. 
One of my first findings was in the entrance of a cave facing the Pacific Ocean. 
In this place, we reported a new type of microalgae that grew only on top of the spiderwebs that covered the cave entrance. 
Have you ever seen a spiderweb early in the morning? 
It's covered with dew, so this microalgae learned that in order to carry photosynthesis in the coast of the driest desert on Earth, they could use the spiderwebs. 
So here they may access the water from the fogs that regularly cover these areas in the morning. 
In another cave, we found a different type of microalgae. 
This one is able to use ocean mist as a source of water, and strikingly lives in the very bottom of a cave, so it has adapted to live with less than 0.1 percent of the amount of light that regular plants need. 
These type of findings suggest to me that on Mars, we may find even photosynthetic life inside caves. 
And by the way, that's me. 
(Laughter) Now, for almost 15 years this region of Yungay, discovered by NASA, was thought to be the driest place of this desert, but I knew that it was not. 
How? You already know the answer. 
Because I was born and raised in this desert. 
So I remembered that I usually see fogs in Yungay, so after setting sensors in a number of places, where I remember never seeing fogs or clouds, I reported four other sites much drier than Yungay, with this one, María Elena South, being the truly driest place on Earth, as dry as Mars, and amazingly, just a 15-minute ride from the small mining town where I was born. 
Now, in this search, we were trying to actually find the dry limit for life on Earth, a place so dry that nothing was able to survive in it. 
But even here, well hidden underground, we found a number of different microorganisms, which suggested to me that similarly dry places, like Mars, may be inhabited. 
We even have some preliminary evidences that these microorganisms may still be active in the desiccated state, like walking mummies all around us, and that they may be using UV radiation as a source of energy. 
If confirmed, this would have a huge impact on our definition of life, on how we look for life elsewhere in the universe. 
Due to its clear skies, by 2020, 60 percent of the biggest telescopes on Earth will be located in the Atacama, and while everyone else will be looking among the stars to answer the question, "Are we alone?" 
I will be looking down to the ground searching for this same answer in my own backyard. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Back home, my friends call me nicknames, such as "The Giant Clam Girl," "Clam Queen," or, "The Mother of Clams." 
(Laughter) This is because every time I see them, I talk nonstop about giant clams all day, every day. 
Giant clams are these massive and colorful shelled marine animals, the largest of its kind. 
Just look at this shell. 
The biggest recorded individual was four-and-a-half-feet long and weighed about 550 pounds. 
That is almost as heavy as three baby elephants. 
South Pacific legends once described giant clams as man-eaters that would lie in wait on the seabed to trap unsuspecting divers. 
A story goes that a diver had lost his legs while trying to retrieve a pearl from a giant clam. 
I thought, "Really?" 
So out of curiosity, I did an experiment using myself as bait. 
(Laughter) I carefully placed my hand into the clam's mouth and waited. 
Hmm ... 
I still have my hand. 
It seems that these gentle giants would rather retreat and protect their fleshy bodies than feed on me. 
So much for those killer clam myths! 
Unfortunately, the reality is, we are the giant clams' biggest threat. 
Considered a delicacy throughout the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans, giant clams have been traditionally fished as seafood. 
Fishermen are particularly interested in their adductor muscles, which are organs that hold the two shells together like a hinge. 
Just for their muscles, giant clams were almost hunted to extinction between the 1960s and 1980s. 
Clamshells are also popular in the ornamental trade as jewelry and for display. 
In the South China Sea, fishermen went out of their way to collect fossilized clamshells by digging through large areas of coral reefs. 
These were later carved and sold as so-called "ivory handicrafts" in China. 
Giant clams, dead or alive, are not safe from us. 
It's a "clamity!" 
(Laughter) (Applause) With the spotlight on more charismatic marine animals such as the whales and coral reefs, it is easy to forget that other marine life needs our help, too. 
My fascination with giant clams got me started on conservation research to fill in the knowledge gaps on their ecology and behavior. 
One of the discoveries that we made was that giant clams could walk across the seafloor. 
Yes, you heard me right: they can walk. 
To find out, we placed numerous baby clams on a grid. 
Now watch what happens over 24 hours. 
We think that walking is important for getting away from predators and finding mates for breeding. 
While it can hard to imagine any movement in these enormous animals, giant clams up to 400 pounds can still walk, they just move slower. 
During my PhD, I discovered more secrets about the giant clams. 
But there was something missing in my work. 
I found myself asking, "Why should people care about conserving giant clams?" -- other than myself, of course. 
(Laughter) It turns out that giant clams have a giant impact on coral reefs. 
These multitasking clams are reef builders, food factories, shelters for shrimps and crabs and water filters, all rolled into one. 
In a nutshell, giant clams play a major contributing role as residents of their own reef home, and just having them around keeps the reef healthy. 
And because they can live up to 100 years old, giant clams make vital indicators of coral reef health. 
So when giant clams start to disappear from coral reefs, their absence can serve as an alarm bell for scientists to start paying attention, similar to the canary in a coal mine. 
But giant clams are endangered. 
The largest clam in the world is facing the threat of extinction, with more than 50 percent of the wild population severely depleted. 
And the ecological benefits of having giant clams on coral reefs are likely to continue only if populations are healthy, making their conservation paramount. 
So I stand here today to give a voice to the giant clams, because I care a whole lot for these amazing animals, and they deserve to be cared for. 
It is time for the giant clams to step out of their shells, and show the world that they, too, can be the heroes of the oceans. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So, I teach college students about inequality and race in education, and I like to leave my office open to any of my students who might just want to see me to chat. 
And a few semesters ago, one of my more cheerful students, Mahari, actually came to see me and mentioned that he was feeling a bit like an outcast because he's black. 
He had just transferred to NYU from a community college on a merit scholarship, and turns out, only about five percent of students at NYU are black. 
And so I started to remember that I know that feeling of being an outsider in your own community. 
It's partially what drew me to my work. 
At my university, I'm one of the few faculty members of color, and growing up, I experienced my family's social mobility, moving out of apartments into a nice house, but in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood. 
I was 12, and kids would say that were surprised that I didn't smell like curry. 
(Laughter) That's because school is in the morning, and I had Eggo waffles for breakfast. 
(Laughter) Curry is for dinner. 
(Laughter) So when Mahari was leaving, I asked him how he was coping with feeling isolated. 
And he said that despite feeling lonely, he just threw himself at his work, that he built strategies around his grit and his desire to be successful. 
A mentor of mine is actually Dr. Angela Duckworth, the psychologist at UPenn who has defined this stick-to-itiveness of grit as being "the perseverance and passion for long-term goals." 
Angela's book has become a bestseller, and schools across the country, particularly charter schools, have become interested in citing "grit" as a core value. 
But sometimes grit isn't enough, especially in education. 
So when Mahari was leaving my office, I worried that he might need something more specific to combat the challenges that he mentioned to me. 
As a sociologist, I also study achievement, but from a slightly different perspective. 
I research students who have overcome immense obstacles related to their background. 
Students from low-income, often single-parent households, students who have been homeless, incarcerated or perhaps undocumented, or some who have struggled with substance abuse or lived through violent or sexual trauma. 
So let me tell you about two of the grittiest people I've met. 
Tyrique was raised by a single mother, and then after high school, he fell in with the wrong crowd. 
He got arrested for armed robbery. 
But in prison, he started to work hard. 
He took college credit courses, so when he got out, he was able to get a master's, and today he's a manager at a nonprofit. 
Vanessa had to move around a lot as a kid, from the Lower East Side to Staten Island to the Bronx. 
She was raised primarily by her extended family, because her own mother had a heroin addiction. 
Yet at 15, Vanessa had to drop out of school, and she had a son of her own. 
But eventually, she was able to go to community college, get her associate's, then go to an elite college to finish her bachelor's. 
So some people might hear these stories and say, "Yes, those two definitely have grit. 
They basically pulled themselves up by the bootstraps." 
But that's an incomplete picture, because what's more important is that they had factors in their lives that helped to influence their agency, or their specific capacity to actually overcome the obstacles that they were facing and navigate the system given their circumstances. 
So, allow me to elaborate. 
In prison, Tyrique was actually aimless at first, as a 22-year-old on Rikers Island. 
This is until an older detainee took him aside and asked him to help with the youth program. 
And in mentoring youth, he started to see his own mistakes and possibilities in the teens. 
This is what got him interested in taking college-credit courses. 
And when he got out, he got a job with Fortune Society, where many executives are people who have been formerly incarcerated. 
So then he was able to get a master's in social work, and today, he even lectures at Columbia about prison reform. 
And Vanessa ... 
well, after the birth of her son, she happened to find a program called Vocational Foundation that gave her 20 dollars biweekly, a MetroCard and her first experiences with a computer. 
These simple resources are what helped her get her GED, but then she suffered from a very serious kidney failure, which was particularly problematic because she was only born with one kidney. 
She spent 10 years on dialysis waiting for a successful transplant. 
After that, her mentors at community college had kept in touch with her, and so she was able to go, and they put her in an honors program. 
And that's the pathway that allowed her to become accepted to one of the most elite colleges for women in the country, and she received her bachelor's at 36, setting an incredible example for her young son. 
What these stories primarily indicate is that teaching is social and benefits from social scaffolding. 
There were factors pushing these two in one direction, but through tailored mentorship and opportunities, they were able to reflect on their circumstances and resist negative influences. 
They also learned simple skills like developing a network, or asking for help -- things many of us in this room can forget that we have needed from time to time, or can take for granted. 
And when we think of people like this, we should only think of them as exceptional, but not as exceptions. 
Thinking of them as exceptions absolves us of the collective responsibility to help students in similar situations. 
When Presidents Bush, Obama and now even Trump, have called education "the civil rights issue of our time," perhaps we should treat it that way. 
If schools were able to think about the agency that their students have and bring to the table when they push them, what students learn can become more relevant to their lives, and then they can tap into those internal reservoirs of grit and character. 
So this here -- My student Mahari got accepted to law school with scholarships, and not to brag, but I did write one of his letters of recommendation. 
(Laughter) And even though I know hard work is what got him this achievement, I've seen him find his voice along the way, which as someone who's grown up a little bit shy and awkward, I know it takes time and support. 
So even though he will rely a lot on his grit to get him through that first-year law school grind, I'll be there as a mentor for him, check in with him from time to time, maybe take him out to get some curry ... 
(Laughter) so that he can keep growing his agency to succeed even more. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, Ma was trying to explain something to me about Grandma and when they grew up, but I couldn't pay attention to her because I was five years old, and I was petrified. 
I had just seen The Green Lady. 
Now, about a week earlier, I'd watched that movie "Godzilla," the one about that huge lizard-like beast storming a major city, and the thought of a green monster coming for me was stuck in my mind. 
And yet there I was, at the tip of Lower Manhattan with my mom, just staring at her: her horns, her muscles -- all of it just frightened me. 
And I didn't know whether she was a monster or a hero. 
So I decided to consult the Google of the day -- "Ma! Ma!" 
(Laughter) My mother explained that The Green Lady is actually the Statue of Liberty and that she was waving immigrants in. 
Now, the part of her explanation that really messed with my young head was the fact that, according to Ma, long before us, The Green Lady was actually brown, brown like me, and that she changed colors over the years, much like America. 
Now, the part that really is intriguing about this is that when she changed colors, she made me think about myself. 
It all made sense to me, because as a first-generation American, I was surrounded by immigrants. 
In fact, within my immediate social circle of the people who support me, who enrich my life, at least two are foreign-born. 
My life as a US citizen is in many ways shaped by newcomers, and chances are, so is yours. 
There are more than 40 million immigrants in the USA. 
According to census data, a quarter of the nation's children have at least one foreign-born parent. 
I know all these statistics because I study global migration patterns. 
I'm a journalist, and for the last few years, I've been documenting the lives of US citizens who've lost people to deportation. 
And the numbers are enormous. 
From 2008 to 2016, more than three million people were "ordered removed" -- that's the technical term for being deported. 
There is an economic, a political, a psychological and an emotional cost to those deportations -- the moments when these circles are broken. 
I once asked a US soldier, "Why did you volunteer to fight this war?" 
And she told me, "Because I'm proud to defend my country." 
But I pressed to know -- "Really, when you're on base, and you hear bombs exploding in the distance, and you see soldiers coming back who are gravely injured, in that moment, when you know you could be next, what does 'my country' mean?" 
She looked at me. 
"My country is my wife, my family, my friends, my soldiers." 
What she was telling me is that "my country" is a collection of these strong relationships; these social circles. 
When the social circles are weakened, a country itself is weaker. 
We're missing a crucial aspect in the debate about immigration policy. 
Rather than focusing on individuals, we should focus on the circles around them, because these are the people who are left behind: the voters, the taxpayers, the ones who are suffering that loss. 
And it's not just the children of the deported who are impacted. 
You have brothers and sisters who are separated by borders. 
You have classmates, teachers, law enforcement officers, technologists, scientists, doctors, who are all scrambling to make sense of new realities when their social circles are broken. 
These are the real lives behind all these statistics that dominate discussions about immigration policy. 
But we don't often think about them. 
And I'm trying to change that. 
Here's just one of the real-life stories that I've collected. 
And it still haunts me. 
I met Ramon and his son in 2016, the same year both of them were being ordered out of the country. 
Ramon was being deported to Latin America, while his son, who was a sergeant in the US military, was being deployed. 
Deported ... 
deployed. 
If you just look at Ramon's case, it wouldn't be clear how deeply connected to the country he is. 
But consider his son: a US citizen defending a country that's banished his father. 
The social circle is what's key here. 
Here's another example that illustrates those critical bonds. 
A group of citizens in Philadelphia were concerned about their jobs, because the legal owner of the restaurant where they worked was an undocumented immigrant, and immigration officials had picked him up. 
They rallied behind him. 
An immigration lawyer argued he was too important to the local community to be deported. 
At the hearing, they even submitted restaurant reviews -- restaurant reviews! 
In the end, a judge exercised what's called "judicial discretion" and allowed him to stay in the country, but only because they considered the social circle. 
There are 23 million noncitizens in the USA, according to verifiable federal data. 
And that doesn't include the undocumented, because numbers for that population are at best complex estimates. 
Let's just work with what we have. 
That's 23 million social circles -- about 100 million individuals whose lives could be impacted by deportation. 
And the stress of it all is trickling down through the population. 
A 2017 poll by UCLA of LA County residents found that 30 percent of citizens in LA County are stressed about deportation, not because they themselves could be removed, but rather, because members of their social circle were at risk. 
I am not suggesting that no one should ever be deported; don't confuse me with that. 
But what I am saying is that we need to look at the bigger picture. 
If you are within the sound of my voice, I want you to close your eyes for a moment and examine your own social circle. 
Who are your foreign-born? 
What would it feel like if the circle were broken? 
Share your story. 
I'm building a global archive of first-person accounts and linking them with mapping technology, so that we can see exactly where these circles break, because this is not just an American issue. 
There are a quarter-billion migrants around the world; people living, loving and learning in countries where they were not born. 
And in my career, in my life, I've been one of them: in China, in Africa, in Europe. 
And each time I become one of these foreigners -- one of these strange-looking guys in a new land -- I can't help but think back to that day when I was in Lower Manhattan with my mom all those decades ago, when I was scared, and I had just spotted that green lady. 
And I guess the question that I keep on thinking about when I see her and all the younger replicas of her that are so obviously brown, and even the paintings that showcase her in the beginning as not quite green -- when I look at all of that, the question that my research seeks to answer becomes, to me, the same one that confounded me all those years ago: Is she a monster or a hero? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, I had been a photographer for 18 years before I began the Microsculpture Project. 
And in that time, I had shot global ad campaigns, I had the opportunity to photograph some of my generation's icons, and I was traveling the world. 
I got to a point in my career that I dreamed of getting to, and yet, for some reason, I still felt a little bit unfulfilled. 
Despite the extraordinary things I was shooting and experiencing, they'd started to feel a little bit ordinary to me. 
I was also getting concerned about how disposable photography had started to feel in the digital world, and I really wanted to produce images that had a sense of worth again. 
And I needed a subject that felt extraordinary. 
Sometimes I wish I had the eyes of a child. 
And by that I mean, I wish I could look at the world in the same as I did when I was a small boy. 
I think there is a danger, as we get older, that our curiosity becomes slightly muted or dulled by familiarity. 
And as a visual creator, one of the challenges for me is to present the familiar in a new and engaging way. 
Fortunately for me, though, I've got two great kids who are still curious about the world. 
Sebastian -- he's still curious about the world, and in 2014, in spring, he brought in a ground beetle from the garden. 
There was nothing particularly special about this insect -- you know, it was a common species. 
But he was still curious, and he brought it up to my office, and we decided to look at it under his microscope. 
He had a little science kit for Christmas. 
And this is what we saw. 
Now, when I first saw this, it blew me away. 
Up here -- this is the back of the ground beetle. 
When I first saw it, it reminded me of a galaxy. 
And all the time, this had just been outside our window. 
You know, I was looking for this extraordinary subject, and it took Seb's eyes and curiosity to bring it in to me. 
So I decided to photograph it for him, and this is what I produced. 
I basically asked myself two simple questions. 
The first one: Could I take all my knowledge and skill of photographic lighting and take that onto a subject that's five millimeters long? 
But also: Could I keep creative control over that lighting on a subject that size? 
So I practiced on some other found specimens, and I approached the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to see if I could have access to their collection, to progress the project. 
And I went up there for a meeting, and I showed them some of the images that I'd been shooting, and they could see the kind of detail I was able to get. 
I don't think they'd ever really seen anything quite like it before, and from that point forward, they gave me open access to their entire collection and the assistance of Dr. James Hogan, their entomologist. 
Now, over the next two-and-a-half years, I shot 37 insects from their collection. 
And the way I work is that I essentially split the insect up into multiple sections, and I treat each one of those sections like a small still life. 
So for example, if I was photographing the eye of the insect, which is normally quite smooth and dome-shaped, then I'd use a light source that is large and soft and diffuse, so I don't get any harsh hot spots on that surface. 
But once my attention turns over to a hairy leg, that lighting setup will change completely. 
And so I make that one tiny section look as beautiful as I possibly can, and I work my way across the insect until I have about 20 or 25 different sections. 
The issue with photography at high magnification is that there is inherently a very shallow depth of field. 
So to get around that, what I do is, I put my camera on a rail that I can automate to move 10 microns in between each shot. 
That's about one-seventh the width of a human hair. 
And then that provides me with a deep stack of images. 
Each has a tiny sliver of focus all the way through. 
And I can squash that down to produce one image that is fully focused from front to back. 
So essentially, that gives me 25 sections that are fully focused and beautifully lit. 
Now, each one of my images is made up of anywhere between 8- and 10,000 separate shots. 
They take about three-and-a-half weeks to create, and the file sizes on average are about four gigabytes. 
So I've got plenty of information to play with when I'm printing. 
And the prints at the exhibition are around the three-meter mark. 
In fact, I had a show in Milan two weeks ago, and we had some prints there that were nine meters long. 
But, you know, I realize that these images still have to work in the digital world. 
There's no point in me putting all my blood, sweat and tears into these pictures if they're only going to be showing 500 pixels on a screen. 
So with the help of Rob Chandler and Will Cookson, we developed a website that enables the viewer to immerse themselves into the full four-gigabyte files, and they can explore all that microscopic detail. 
So if you have the time, and I encourage you, please visit microsculpture.net and go and have a play. 
It's good fun. 
I first showed the work at Oxford, and since then, it's moved on to the Middle East. 
It's now back in Europe and goes to Copenhagen this month. 
And the feedback has been great. 
You know, I get emails, actually, from all over the world -- from teachers, at the moment, who are using the website in school. 
The kids are using them on the tablet. 
They're zooming into the pictures and using it for art class, biology class. 
And that's not something I planned. 
That's just a beautiful offshoot of the project. 
In fact, one of the things I like to do at the exhibitions is actually look at the kiddies' reactions. 
And, you know, standing in front of a three-meter insect, they could have been horrified. 
But they're not. They look in wonder. 
This little chap here, he stood there for five minutes, motionless. 
(Laughter) And at the end of the day, actually, at the end of the day at the exhibitions, we have to wipe down the lower third of the big prints -- (Laughter) just to remove all those sticky handprints, because all they want to do is touch those big bugs. 
I do want to leave you with one final image, if that's OK. 
This has to do with Charles Darwin. 
One of the recent images that I photographed was this one here. 
I'm talking about the creature in the box, not my cat. 
And this is a shield bug that Charles Darwin brought back from Australia on the HMS Beagle in 1836. 
And when I got it home, I stood in my kitchen and stared at it for about 20 minutes. 
I couldn't believe I was in possession of this beautiful creature. 
And at that moment, I kind of realized that this validated the project for me. 
The fact that the museum was willing to risk me playing with this kind of showed me that my images had worth -- you know, they weren't disposable. 
That's the image that I produced. 
I often wonder, still, when I look at this: What would Charles Darwin make of these images? 
Do you think he'd like his picture of his shield bug? I hope so. 
So -- (Applause) You know, I think it's strange in a way. 
I'm a visual person, I'm a creative person, but I still needed the eyes of a child to find my extraordinary subject. 
That's the way it was. 
So all I can say is, thank you very much, Sebastian; I am very, very grateful. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Billy Pilgrim can’t sleep because he knows aliens will arrive to abduct him in one hour. 
He knows the aliens are coming because he has become “unstuck” in time, causing him to experience events out of chronological order. 
Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, he hops back and forth between a childhood trip to the Grand Canyon, his life as a middle-aged optometrist, his captivity in an intergalactic zoo, the humiliations he endured as a war prisoner, and more. 
The title of Slaughterhouse-five and much of its source material came from Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II. 
As a prisoner of war, he lived in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden, where he took refuge in an underground meat locker while Allied forces bombed the city. 
When he and the other prisoners finally emerged, they found Dresden utterly demolished. 
After the war, Vonnegut tried to make sense of human behavior by studying an unusual aspect of anthropology: the shapes of stories, which he insisted were just as interesting as the shapes of pots or spearheads. 
To find the shape, he graphed the main character’s fortune from the beginning to the end of a story. 
The zany curves he generated revealed common types of fairy tales and myths that echo through many cultures. 
But this shape can be the most interesting of all. 
In a story like this, it’s impossible to distinguish the character’s good fortune from the bad. 
Vonnegut thought this kind of story was the truest to real life, in which we are all the victims of a series of accidents, unable to predict how events will impact us long term. 
He found the tidy, satisfying arcs of many stories at odds with this reality, and he set out to explore the ambiguity between good and bad fortune in his own work. 
When Vonnegut ditched clear-cut fortunes, he also abandoned straightforward chronology. 
Instead of proceeding tidily from beginning to end, in his stories “All moments, past, present and future always have existed, always will exist.” Tralfamadorians, the aliens who crop up in many of his books, see all moments at once. 
They “can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.” But although they can see all of time, they don’t try to change the course of events. 
While the Trafalmadorians may be at peace with their lack of agency, Vonnegut’s human characters are still getting used to it. 
In The Sirens of Titan, when they seek the meaning of life in the vastness of the universe, they find nothing but “empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.” Then, from their vantage point within a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum,” a man and his dog see devastating futures for their earthly counterparts, but can’t change the course of events. 
Though there aren’t easy answers available, they eventually conclude that the purpose of life is “to love whoever is around to be loved.” In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s characters turn to a different source of meaning: Bokonism, a religion based on harmless lies that all its adherents recognize as lies. 
Though they’re aware of Bokonism’s lies, they live their lives by these tenets anyway, and in so doing develop some genuine hope. 
They join together in groups called Karasses, which consist of people we “find by accident but […] stick with by choice”— cosmically linked around a shared purpose. 
These are not to be confused with Granfalloons, groups of people who appoint significance to actually meaningless associations, like where you grew up, political parties, and even entire nations. 
Though he held a bleak view of the human condition, Vonnegut believed strongly that “we are all here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." 
We might get pooped and demoralized, but Vonnegut interspersed his grim assessments with more than a few morsels of hope. 
His fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout, supplied this parable: two yeast sat “discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. 
Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.” In spite of his insistence that we’re all here to fart around, in spite of his deep concerns about the course of human existence, Vonnegut also advanced the possibility, however slim, that we might end up making something good. 
And if that isn’t nice, what is? 

What are you doing on this stage in front of all these people? 
(Laughter) Run! 
(Laughter) Run now. 
That's the voice of my anxiety talking. 
Even when there's absolutely nothing wrong, I sometimes get this overwhelming sense of doom, like danger is lurking just around the corner. 
You see, a few years ago, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and depression -- two conditions that often go hand in hand. 
Now, there was a time I wouldn't have told anybody, especially not in front of a big audience. 
As a black woman, I've had to develop extraordinary resilience to succeed. 
And like most people in my community, I had the misconception that depression was a sign of weakness, a character flaw. 
But I wasn't weak; I was a high achiever. 
I'd earned a Master's degree in Media Studies and had a string of high-profile jobs in the film and television industries. 
I'd even won two Emmy Awards for my hard work. 
Sure, I was totally spent, I lacked interest in things I used to enjoy, barely ate, struggled with insomnia and felt isolated and depleted. 
But depressed? 
No, not me. 
It took weeks before I could admit it, but the doctor was right: I was depressed. 
Still, I didn't tell anybody about my diagnosis. 
I was too ashamed. 
I didn't think I had the right to be depressed. 
I had a privileged life with a loving family and a successful career. 
And when I thought about the unspeakable horrors that my ancestors had been through in this country so that I could have it better, my shame grew even deeper. 
I was standing on their shoulders. 
How could I let them down? 
I would hold my head up, put a smile on my face and never tell a soul. 
On July 4, 2013, my world came crashing in on me. 
That was the day I got a phone call from my mom telling me that my 22-year-old nephew, Paul, had ended his life, after years of battling depression and anxiety. 
There are no words that can describe the devastation I felt. 
Paul and I were very close, but I had no idea he was in so much pain. 
Neither one of us had ever talked to the other about our struggles. 
The shame and stigma kept us both silent. 
Now, my way of dealing with adversity is to face it head on, so I spent the next two years researching depression and anxiety, and what I found was mind-blowing. 
The World Health Organization reports that depression is the leading cause of sickness and disability in the world. 
While the exact cause of depression isn't clear, research suggests that most mental disorders develop, at least in part, because of a chemical imbalance in the brain, and/or an underlying genetic predisposition. 
So you can't just shake it off. 
For black Americans, stressors like racism and socioeconomic disparities put them at a 20 percent greater risk of developing a mental disorder, yet they seek mental health services at about half the rate of white Americans. 
One reason is the stigma, with 63 percent of black Americans mistaking depression for a weakness. 
Sadly, the suicide rate among black children has doubled in the past 20 years. 
Now, here's the good news: seventy percent of people struggling with depression will improve with therapy, treatment and medication. 
Armed with this information, I made a decision: I wasn't going to be silent anymore. 
With my family's blessing, I would share our story in hopes of sparking a national conversation. 
A friend, Kelly Pierre-Louis, said, "Being strong is killing us." 
She's right. 
We have got to retire those tired, old narratives of the strong black woman and the super-masculine black man, who, no matter how many times they get knocked down, just shake it off and soldier on. 
Having feelings isn't a sign of weakness. 
Feelings mean we're human. 
And when we deny our humanity, it leaves us feeling empty inside, searching for ways to self-medicate in order to fill the void. 
My drug was high achievement. 
These days, I share my story openly, and I ask others to share theirs, too. 
I believe that's what it takes to help people who may be suffering in silence to know that they are not alone and to know that with help, they can heal. 
Now, I still have my struggles, particularly with the anxiety, but I'm able to manage it through daily mediation, yoga and a relatively healthy diet. 
(Laughter) If I feel like things are starting to spiral, I make an appointment to see my therapist, a dynamic black woman named Dawn Armstrong, who has a great sense of humor and a familiarity that I find comforting. 
I will always regret that I couldn't be there for my nephew. 
But my sincerest hope is that I can inspire others with the lesson that I've learned. 
Life is beautiful. 
Sometimes it's messy, and it's always unpredictable. 
But it will all be OK when you have your support system to help you through it. 
I hope that if your burden gets too heavy, you'll ask for a hand, too. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"Robam kbach boran," or the art of Khmer classical dance, is more than 1,000 years old. 
It was developed as a prayer in movement for rain and fertility, and a prosperity that this meant for an agricultural society. 
Dancers who were both men and women were offered to temples where they served as living bridges between heaven and earth. 
Their dancing bodies carried the prayers of the people up to the gods, and the will of the deities was delivered back through them to the people and the land. 
There are a lot of curves in Khmer dance. 
Our backs are arched, our knees are bent, our toes are curled, our elbows are hyperflexed and our fingers are curved backwards. 
All of these curves create a serpentine impression, and this is important because before the introduction of major religions, Khmers, and people all over the world practiced animism. 
Serpents were especially important in this belief system because in their fluid, curvilinear movement, they mimicked the flow of water. 
So to invoke the serpent in your dancing body then was to conjure the image of rivers cutting across the earth: inspire the flow of life-giving waters. 
As you can see then, Khmer classical dance is a transformation of nature, of both the physical world around us and of our own internal universe. 
We have four primary hand gestures that we use. 
Can we do them together? 
Yeah? OK. 
This is a tree. 
That tree will grow, and then it will have leaves. 
After it has leaves, it'll have flowers, and after it has flowers, it'll have fruit. 
That fruit will drop and a new tree will grow. 
And in those four gestures is the cycle of life. 
These four gestures are then used to create a whole entire language with which dancers express themselves. 
So for example, I can say, "I." 
"I." 
In dance that would be ... 
"I." 
Or I can say ... 
"Hey you, come here, come here." 
In dance ... 
"Come here," or, "Go, go." 
(Laughter) "Go." 
And everything from ... 
love ... 
to sadness, to -- (Stomping) anger can be expressed through the dance as well. 
There's a certain magic in the way that things are filtered, transformed and put together to create limitless possibilities in art. 
The Khmer word for art, silapak, in fact, at its root, means "magic." 
The artist -- the silapakar, or the silapakarani, then, is nothing short of a magician. 
I am very proud to say that I belong to a long line of magicians, from my teacher, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, to her teachers who were stars in the royal palace, to the ancient dancers of Angkor and to the primal villagers from which the art form originally took life. 
That said, our cherished heritage was once almost completely destroyed. 
If you are wearing glasses, please stand up. 
If you speak more than one language, please stand up. 
If you have light skin, please stand up. 
Your glasses meant that you could afford health care. 
That second or third language you spoke indicated your elite education. 
Your light skin meant you didn't have to work beneath the sun. 
Under the Khmer Rouge, who took over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, we would all be dead now, targeted because of our assumed privilege. 
You see, the Khmer Rouge looked to Cambodia, and they saw centuries of rigid inequality. 
The king and the few elites around him had all the pleasures and comforts of the world while the mass majority suffered from backbreaking labor and harsh poverty. 
You don't need a history book to see that this is true. 
The Khmer word for "I," for "me," is khnhom. 
This very same word can also mean "slave" and dancers were in fact known as knhom preah robam, or "slaves of the sacred dance." 
The Khmer Rouge sought to end slavery in Cambodia, yet somehow they turned everyone into slaves to do it. 
They became the oppression that they sought to end. 
They evacuated the capital and forced people into labor camps. 
They tore families apart and brainwashed children against their own parents. 
Everywhere, people were dying and being killed, losing their lives from disease, overwork, execution and starvation. 
The result of this is that an entire third of Cambodia's population was lost in less than four years, and in that number were 90 percent of Khmer dance artists. 
In other words, nine out of 10 visions for the tradition and future were lost. 
Thankfully, however, it was my teacher's teachers, Chea Samy, Soth Sam On and Chheng Phon, who would lead the revival of the art form from the ashes of war and genocide: one student, one gesture, one dance at a time. 
They wrote the love, magic, beauty, history and philosophy of our lineage into the bodies of the next generation. 
Nearly 40 years later, Khmer classical dance has been revived to new heights. 
Yet somehow it still exists in a vulnerable environment. 
The disastrous effects of war still haunt Khmer people today. 
It is written in our bodies, manifested in a genetic passage of PTSD and in families facing cyclical poverty and immense cultural rifts and language barriers. 
Yet beauty is a most resilient thing. 
Beauty has this ability to grow anywhere and everywhere at any time. 
Beauty is what connects people through time and place. 
Beauty is a liberation from suffering. 
As Khmer artists work to revive our culture and country, we find that there are many paths in which to move forward into the future. 
And in a tradition where we often don't know the dancer's names, who they were, what their lives were like, what they felt, let me propose that we move forward honestly and openly from "khnhom." 
Khnhom not as in slave, but as in conscious service. 
Khnhom: "I," "me," "flowering." 
My name is Prumsodun Ok. 
I am Khmer, and I am American. 
I am the child of refugees, a creator, a healer, and a builder of bridges. 
I am my teacher's first male student in a tradition understood by many as female, and I founded Cambodia's first gay dance company. 
I am the incarnation of the beauty, dreams and power of those who came before me. 
The convergence of past, present and future, and of individual and collective. 
Let me then play that ancient and ageless role of the artist as messenger, by sharing the words of Chheng Phon "A garden with only one type of flower, or flowers of only one color, is no good." 
This is a reminder that our strength, growth, survival and very existence, lies in diversity. 
It is, however, a message of courage as well. 
For a flower does not ask for anyone's permission to bloom. 
It was born to offer itself to the world. 
Fearless love is its nature. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So there's a lot of valid concern these days that our technology is getting so smart that we've put ourselves on the path to a jobless future. 
And I think the example of a self-driving car is actually the easiest one to see. 
So these are going to be fantastic for all kinds of different reasons. 
But did you know that "driver" is actually the most common job in 29 of the 50 US states? 
What's going to happen to these jobs when we're no longer driving our cars or cooking our food or even diagnosing our own diseases? 
Well, a recent study from Forrester Research goes so far to predict that 25 million jobs might disappear over the next 10 years. 
To put that in perspective, that's three times as many jobs lost in the aftermath of the financial crisis. 
And it's not just blue-collar jobs that are at risk. 
On Wall Street and across Silicon Valley, we are seeing tremendous gains in the quality of analysis and decision-making because of machine learning. 
So even the smartest, highest-paid people will be affected by this change. 
What's clear is that no matter what your job is, at least some, if not all of your work, is going to be done by a robot or software in the next few years. 
And that's exactly why people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are talking about the need for government-funded minimum income levels. 
But if our politicians can't agree on things like health care or even school lunches, I just don't see a path where they'll find consensus on something as big and as expensive as universal basic life income. 
Instead, I think the response needs to be led by us in industry. 
We have to recognize the change that's ahead of us and start to design the new kinds of jobs that will still be relevant in the age of robotics. 
The good news is that we have faced down and recovered two mass extinctions of jobs before. 
From 1870 to 1970, the percent of American workers based on farms fell by 90 percent, and then again from 1950 to 2010, the percent of Americans working in factories fell by 75 percent. 
The challenge we face this time, however, is one of time. 
We had a hundred years to move from farms to factories, and then 60 years to fully build out a service economy. 
The rate of change today suggests that we may only have 10 or 15 years to adjust, and if we don't react fast enough, that means by the time today's elementary-school students are college-aged, we could be living in a world that's robotic, largely unemployed and stuck in kind of un-great depression. 
But I don't think it has to be this way. 
You see, I work in innovation, and part of my job is to shape how large companies apply new technologies. 
Certainly some of these technologies are even specifically designed to replace human workers. 
But I believe that if we start taking steps right now to change the nature of work, we can not only create environments where people love coming to work but also generate the innovation that we need to replace the millions of jobs that will be lost to technology. 
I believe that the key to preventing our jobless future is to rediscover what makes us human, and to create a new generation of human-centered jobs that allow us to unlock the hidden talents and passions that we carry with us every day. 
But first, I think it's important to recognize that we brought this problem on ourselves. 
And it's not just because, you know, we are the one building the robots. 
But even though most jobs left the factory decades ago, we still hold on to this factory mindset of standardization and de-skilling. 
We still define jobs around procedural tasks and then pay people for the number of hours that they perform these tasks. 
We've created narrow job definitions like cashier, loan processor or taxi driver and then asked people to form entire careers around these singular tasks. 
These choices have left us with actually two dangerous side effects. 
The first is that these narrowly defined jobs will be the first to be displaced by robots, because single-task robots are just the easiest kinds to build. 
But second, we have accidentally made it so that millions of workers around the world have unbelievably boring working lives. 
(Laughter) Let's take the example of a call center agent. 
Over the last few decades, we brag about lower operating costs because we've taken most of the need for brainpower out of the person and put it into the system. 
For most of their day, they click on screens, they read scripts. 
They act more like machines than humans. 
And unfortunately, over the next few years, as our technology gets more advanced, they, along with people like clerks and bookkeepers, will see the vast majority of their work disappear. 
To counteract this, we have to start creating new jobs that are less centered on the tasks that a person does and more focused on the skills that a person brings to work. 
For example, robots are great at repetitive and constrained work, but human beings have an amazing ability to bring together capability with creativity when faced with problems that we've never seen before. 
It's when every day brings a little bit of a surprise that we have designed work for humans and not for robots. 
Our entrepreneurs and engineers already live in this world, but so do our nurses and our plumbers and our therapists. 
You know, it's the nature of too many companies and organizations to just ask people to come to work and do your job. 
But if you work is better done by a robot, or your decisions better made by an AI, what are you supposed to be doing? 
Well, I think for the manager, we need to realistically think about the tasks that will be disappearing over the next few years and start planning for more meaningful, more valuable work that should replace it. 
We need to create environments where both human beings and robots thrive. 
I say, let's give more work to the robots, and let's start with the work that we absolutely hate doing. 
Here, robot, process this painfully idiotic report. 
(Laughter) And move this box. Thank you. 
(Laughter) And for the human beings, we should follow the advice from Harry Davis at the University of Chicago. 
He says we have to make it so that people don't leave too much of themselves in the trunk of their car. 
I mean, human beings are amazing on weekends. 
Think about the people that you know and what they do on Saturdays. 
They're artists, carpenters, chefs and athletes. 
But on Monday, they're back to being Junior HR Specialist and Systems Analyst 3. 
(Laughter) You know, these narrow job titles not only sound boring, but they're actually a subtle encouragement for people to make narrow and boring job contributions. 
But I've seen firsthand that when you invite people to be more, they can amaze us with how much more they can be. 
A few years ago, I was working at a large bank that was trying to bring more innovation into its company culture. 
So my team and I designed a prototyping contest that invited anyone to build anything that they wanted. 
We were actually trying to figure out whether or not the primary limiter to innovation was a lack of ideas or a lack of talent, and it turns out it was neither one. 
It was an empowerment problem. 
And the results of the program were amazing. 
We started by inviting people to reenvision what it is they could bring to a team. 
This contest was not only a chance to build anything that you wanted but also be anything that you wanted. 
And when people were no longer limited by their day-to-day job titles, they felt free to bring all kinds of different skills and talents to the problems that they were trying to solve. 
We saw technology people being designers, marketing people being architects, and even finance people showing off their ability to write jokes. 
(Laughter) We ran this program twice, and each time more than 400 people brought their unexpected talents to work and solved problems that they had been wanting to solve for years. 
Collectively, they created millions of dollars of value, building things like a better touch-tone system for call centers, easier desktop tools for branches and even a thank you card system that has become a cornerstone of the employee working experience. 
Over the course of the eight weeks, people flexed muscles that they never dreamed of using at work. 
People learned new skills, they met new people, and at the end, somebody pulled me aside and said, "I have to tell you, the last few weeks has been one of the most intense, hardest working experiences of my entire life, but not one second of it felt like work." 
And that's the key. 
For those few weeks, people got to be creators and innovators. 
They had been dreaming of solutions to problems that had been bugging them for years, and this was a chance to turn those dreams into a reality. 
And that dreaming is an important part of what separates us from machines. 
For now, our machines do not get frustrated, they do not get annoyed, and they certainly don't imagine. 
But we, as human beings -- we feel pain, we get frustrated. 
And it's when we're most annoyed and most curious that we're motivated to dig into a problem and create change. 
Our imaginations are the birthplace of new products, new services, and even new industries. 
I believe that the jobs of the future will come from the minds of people who today we call analysts and specialists, but only if we give them the freedom and protection that they need to grow into becoming explorers and inventors. 
If we really want to robot-proof our jobs, we, as leaders, need to get out of the mindset of telling people what to do and instead start asking them what problems they're inspired to solve and what talents they want to bring to work. 
Because when you can bring your Saturday self to work on Wednesdays, you'll look forward to Mondays more, and those feelings that we have about Mondays are part of what makes us human. 
And as we redesign work for an era of intelligent machines, I invite you all to work alongside me to bring more humanity to our working lives. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A long time ago, I was a professional animator. 
(Music) [Eric Dyer] [Animator] [Compositor] And at night, I would make my own experimental films. 
(Music) And I was spending a lot of time, way too much time, in front of a screen for work that would be presented on a screen, and I had this great need to get my hands back on the work again. 
Now, before "The Simpsons," before "Gumby," before "Betty Boop," before there was such a thing as cinema and television, animation was hugely popular in this form. 
This is a zoetrope. 
And you spin this drum, and you look through the slits into the inside of the drum, and you see the animation pop to life. 
This is animation in physical form, and it's animation I could get my hands on again. 
I took these ideas to Denmark. 
I went there with my family on a Fulbright Fellowship. 
That's my daughter, Mia. 
I rode around the city on my bicycle and shot all the interesting moving elements of Copenhagen: the boaters in the canals, the colors that explode in spring, the free-use city bikes, love, textures, the healthy cuisine -- (Laughter) And I brought all that video back into the physical world by printing it out on these long strips of ink-jet paper and cutting out the forms. 
Now, I invented my own form of the zoetrope, which removes the drum and replaces the slits with a video camera. 
And this was very exciting for me, because it meant that I could make these physical objects, and I could make films from those objects. 
That's me riding on my bicycle. 
(Laughter) I made about 25 paper sculptures, each the size of a bicycle wheel. 
I brought them into the studio, spun them and shot them to make the film "Copenhagen Cycles." 
(Music) This project not only allowed me to get my hands back on the work again but it helped me get my life back. 
Instead of spending 12, 15 hours a day with my face plastered to a screen, I was having these little adventures with our new family and shooting video along the way, and it was kind of a symbiosis of art and life. 
And I think that it's no mistake that zoetrope translates into "wheel of life." 
(Music) But film and video does flatten sculpture, so I tried to imagine a way that animated sculpture could be experienced as such, and also a completely immersive kind of animated sculpture. 
And that's where I came up with the idea for the zoetrope tunnel. 
You walk through with a handheld strobe, and wherever you point the flashlight, the animation pops to life. 
I plan to finish this project in the next 30 to 40 years. 
(Laughter) But I did build a half-scale prototype. 
It's covered in Velcro, and I could lay inside on this bridge and stick animated sequences to the walls and test stuff out. 
People would comment that it reminded them of an MRI. 
And that medical connection spoke to me, because at the age of 14, I was diagnosed with a degenerative retinal condition that's slowly taking my vision away, and I'd never responded to that in my work. 
So I responded to it in this piece called, "Implant." 
It is an imaginary, super-magnified medical device that fits around the optic nerve. 
And the public is, in a sense, miniaturized to experience it. 
With a handheld strobe, they can explore the sculpture, and discover thousands of cell-sized robots hard at work, leaping in and out of the optic nerve, being deployed to the retina to repair it. 
It's my science fiction fantasy cure of my own incurable disorder. 
(Machine buzzes) Now, in the real-world gene therapy and gene therapy research, healthy genes are being administered to unhealthy cells using viruses. 
There's a lot of colorful, fluffy hope in this, and there's also some creepy, threatening idea of viruses maybe becoming an invasive species in your body. 
Vision loss has helped to take me away from the things that disconnect me from the world. 
Instead of being sealed off in an automobile, I ride my bike, take buses and trains and walk a lot. 
And instead of a visually intensive process in the studio, primarily, I'm also getting outdoors a lot more and using more of my senses. 
This landscape is a couple hours east of San Diego, California. 
My brother lives out that way. 
He and I went camping there for four days. 
And I grabbed my camera, and I walked through the canyons. 
And I tried to imagine and figure out what kind of motion would be present in this place that was so still and so devoid of motion. 
I think it's the stillest place I've ever been. 
And I realized that it was the movement of my own body through the landscape that was creating the animation. 
It was the motion of changing perspective. 
So I created this piece called "Mud Caves" from those photographs. 
It's a multilayered print piece, and you can think of it as a zoetrope laid flat. 
It's kind of my western landscape panorama. 
And next to the print piece there's a video monitor that shows the animation hidden within the artwork. 
I think one of the best parts about this project for me was that I got to hang out with my brother a lot, who lives 2,500 miles away from me. 
And we would just sit in this seemingly eternal landscape sculpted by water over millions of years and talk. 
We'd talk about our kids growing up and the slowing pace of our parents, and our dad who's suffering from leukemia, memory loss and infection. 
And it struck me that, as individuals, we're finite, but as a family, we are an ongoing cycle -- a kind of wheel of life. 
Now, I want to leave you with a tribute to one of my mentors. 
She reminds me that physical presence is important and that play is not a luxury, but a necessity. 
She's Pixie, and she's our family dog. 
And she loves to jump. 
(Dog barking) (Dog barking and spring boinging) And this is a new kind of zoetrope that I developed at the Imaging Research Center at UMBC in Baltimore. 
And I call it a "real-time zoetrope." 
(Dog barking) (Dog barking and spring boinging) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Workplace romance can be a tricky topic. 
(Music) [The Way We Work] How do we manage the boundaries between our personal and professional lives? 
How do we deal with gender imbalances and power dynamics in the workplace? 
There's a lot of gray area in workplace romance. 
I'd like to take a few minutes and answer some of your frequently asked questions. 
So, question one: Should I date my coworker? 
Uh ... it depends. 
Do you want to date your coworker for a bit of fun? 
Do you want to date your coworker to hook up? 
Because then you're really better off on Tinder. 
If you want to date your coworker because you really, sincerely think you're falling in love with them or there's a real potential for a long-term, committed relationship, maybe you should date your coworker. 
Studies show that your coworkers are generally positive about it if they perceive that you're falling in love and genuinely care about each other. 
It's when your coworkers sense that something else is in play -- that can be disruptive. 
Question two: Should I date my boss? 
In almost all cases, no, you should not date your boss, because now, you've got a power dynamic. 
When there's a relationship between a boss and a subordinate, it generates a lot of negative feelings, and the negative feelings tend to fall on the person who's lower on the totem pole. 
People usually assume some kind of favoritism, some kind of inside knowledge, and there can be resentment stirred up by that. 
There was a study published last year that suggested dating a superior can even have a negative impact on your career. 
The researchers asked third-party evaluators online to imagine that they worked at a law firm. 
They asked them to make recommendations on which employee should get picked for a special training program and which should get promoted to partner. 
They looked at credentials for imaginary employees, and when it was stated that an employee had been dating or was in a relationship with a superior, the evaluators were less likely to pick that person for the training program or the promotion, even if they had the exact same credentials as someone who wasn't dating their boss. 
The evaluators were also quick to dismiss their accomplishments. 
Question three: Can I date someone who reports to me? 
Still a big no. 
You may not feel like you're really the boss, right? 
But you are, and there's a power dynamic there that's simply not there for other couples. 
If you really believe there is a sincere, honestly felt, personal connection that would be lasting and meaningful, one of you may need to move, and it shouldn't always be the person who's lower in the company pecking order. 
Question four: I've just started seeing a coworker. 
How do we handle things? 
I get this question a lot. 
"Are they dating? Are they not dating?" 
Don't keep it a secret. 
You don't have to make a big deal of it, but secrecy tends to be corrosive. 
People tend to see workplace couples as a coalition or a unit, so try to make it clear to your coworkers that you're not the same person; you love each other, but you are going to disagree. 
Question five: Why are coworkers often attracted to each other? 
Well, the obvious answer is people tend to be attracted to each other the more time they spend together. 
But there's another ingredient that has to be added: attraction tends to happen when there's work that demands close collaboration. 
So imagine you have a big group project with a tight deadline and you're working late nights and brainstorming ideas. 
You look up, and across the table, one of your colleagues throws out a really great idea. 
You may feel something, and that's natural. 
We call this task interdependence. 
It's a ripe ground for attraction. 
The second reason why people at work are attracted to each other is they may often be similar to each other. 
There's two old adages: "Birds of a feather flock together." And "Opposites attract." 
Well, the psychological research suggests ... 
birds of a feather flock together, and we like people who are like us. 
Question six: My coworkers are flirting. 
I'm annoyed. What do I do? 
Some researchers argue that for people flirting at work, flirting is good and it boosts creativity. 
But my own research suggests things are different for people who are watching or who are subjected to the flirting. 
It can be awkward, right? 
Witnessing flirtation in the workplace creates a sense of not knowing the rules, not knowing what's going on, or maybe seeing something that you shouldn't be seeing. 
People who frequently witness flirting at work -- they actually report feeling less satisfied in their jobs, and they feel less valued by their company. 
They're more likely to give a negative appraisal of the work environment, and they may even consider leaving. 
For women, this association can be even stronger. 
This appears to be the case even when people report not being bothered by the flirting. 
It's true even when they say they enjoy it. 
So, a flirtatious environment really could be toxic. 
Question seven: Do I need a policy on workplace relationships? 
You certainly need a policy on a sexual harassment, and I think most HR departments recognize that. 
But for the kind of consensual behavior we've been talking about, it's a little different. 
As much as people in HR would love to wave a magic wand and say, "Thou shall not fall in love at work," it's just not realistic. 
Emotional connection and sexuality is who we are. 
I kind of want you to flip the script a little bit. 
I encourage HR to really think more broadly about their role in not necessarily stamping out office romance, because I don't think that's realistic, but how do I help create a workplace climate and culture where people feel respected for their individual contributions, not for their appearance or their gender, or their personal relationships? 
So the larger question is, how do you make sure people are valued and respected? 

When I was in high school at the age of 17 -- I graduated from high school in Decatur, Georgia, as valedictorian of my high school -- I was very proud of myself. 
I was from a low-income community, I had grown up in Mississippi, we'd moved from Mississippi to Georgia so my parents could pursue their degrees as United Methodist ministers. 
We were poor, but they didn't think we were poor enough, so they were going for permanent poverty. 
(Laughter) And so, while they studied at Emory, I studied at Avondale, and I became valedictorian. 
Well, one of the joys of being valedictorian in the state of Georgia is that you get invited to meet the governor of Georgia. 
I was mildly interested in meeting him. 
It was kind of cool. 
I was more intrigued by the fact that he lived in a mansion, because I watched a lot of "General Hospital" and "Dynasty" as a child. 
(Laughter) And so I got up that morning, ready to go to visit the governor. 
My mom and my dad, who were also invited, got up, and we went outside. 
But we didn't get in our car. 
And in the south, a car is a necessary thing. 
We don't have a lot of public transit, there aren't a lot of options. 
But if you're lucky enough to live in a community where you don't have a car, the only option is public transit. 
And that's what we had to take. 
And so we got on the bus. 
And we took the bus from Decatur all the way to Buckhead, where the Governor's Mansion sat on this really beautiful acreage of land, with these long black gates that ran the length of the property. 
We get to the Governor's Mansion, we pull the little lever that lets them know this is our stop, we get off the bus, my mom, my dad and I, we walk across the street. 
We walk up the driveway, because there are cars coming up, cars bringing in students from all across the state of Georgia. 
So we're walking along the side. 
And as we walk single file along the side, my mom and dad sandwiching me to make sure I don't get hit by one of the cars bringing in the other valedictorians, we approach the guard gate. 
When we get to the guard gate, the guard comes out. 
He looks at me, and he looks at my parents, and he says, "You don't belong here, this is a private event." 
My dad says, "No, this is my daughter, Stacey. She's one of the valedictorians." 
But the guard doesn't look at the checklist that's in his hands. 
He doesn't ask my mom for the invitation that's at the bottom of her very voluminous purse. 
Instead, he looks over our shoulder at the bus, because in his mind, the bus is telling him a story about who should be there. 
And the fact that we were too poor to have our own car -- that was a story he told himself. 
And he may have seen something in my skin color, he may have seen something in my attire; I don't know what went through his mind. 
But his conclusion was to look at me again, and with a look of disdain, say, "I told you, this is a private event. You don't belong here." 
Now, my parents were studying to become United Methodist ministers, but they were not pastors yet. 
(Laughter) And so they proceeded to engage this gentleman in a very robust discussion of his decision-making skills. 
(Laughter) My father may have mentioned that he was going to spend eternity in a very fiery place if he didn't find my name on that checklist. 
And indeed, the man checks the checklist eventually, and he found my name, and he let us inside. 
But I don't remember meeting the governor of Georgia. 
I don't recall meeting my fellow valedictorians from 180 school districts. 
The only clear memory I have of that day was a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me and telling me I don't belong. 
And so I decided, 20-some-odd years later, to be the person who got to open the gates. 
(Cheers) (Applause) Unfortunately, you may have read the rest of the story. 
It didn't quite work out that way. 
And now I'm tasked with figuring out: How do I move forward? 
Because, you see, I didn't just want to open the gates for young black women who had been underestimated and told they don't belong. 
I wanted to open those gates for Latinas and for Asian Americans. 
I wanted to open those gates for the undocumented and the documented. 
I wanted to open those gates as an ally of the LGBTQ community. 
I wanted to open those gates for the families that have to call themselves the victims of gun violence. 
I wanted to open those gates wide for everyone in Georgia, because that is our state, and this is our nation, and we all belong here. 
(Cheers) (Applause) But what I recognized is that the first try wasn't enough. 
And my question became: How do I move forward? 
How do I get beyond the bitterness and the sadness and the lethargy and watching an inordinate amount of television as I eat ice cream? 
(Laughter) What do I do next? 
And I'm going to do what I've always done. 
I'm going to move forward, because going backwards isn't an option and standing still is not enough. 
(Applause) You see, I began my race for governor by analyzing who I was and what I wanted to be. 
And there are three questions I ask myself about everything I do, whether it's running for office or starting a business; when I decided to start the New Georgia Project to register people to vote; or when I started the latest action, Fair Fight Georgia. 
No matter what I do, I ask myself three questions: What do I want? 
Why do I want it? 
And how do I get it? 
And in this case, I know what I want. 
I want change. 
That is what I want. 
But the question is: What change do I want to see? 
And I know that the questions I have to ask myself are: One, am I honest about the scope of my ambition? 
Because it's easy to figure out that once you didn't get what you wanted, then maybe you should have set your sights a little lower, but I'm here to tell you to be aggressive about your ambition. 
Do not allow setbacks to set you back. 
(Applause) Number two, let yourself understand your mistakes. 
But also understand their mistakes, because, as women in particular, we're taught that if something doesn't work out, it's probably our fault. 
And usually, there is something we could do better, but we've been told not to investigate too much what the other side could have done. 
And this isn't partisan -- it's people. 
We're too often told that our mistakes are ours alone, but victory is a shared benefit. 
And so what I tell you to do is understand your mistakes, but understand the mistakes of others. 
And be clearheaded about it. 
And be honest with yourself and honest with those who support you. 
But once you know what you want, understand why you want it. 
And even though it feels good, revenge is not a good reason. 
(Laughter) Instead, make sure you want it because there's something not that you should do, but something you must do. 
It has to be something that doesn't allow you to sleep at night unless you're dreaming about it; something that wakes you up in the morning and gets you excited about it; or something that makes you so angry, you know you have to do something about it. 
But know why you're doing it. 
And know why it must be done. 
You've listened to women from across this world talk about why things have to happen. 
But figure out what the "why" is for you, because jumping from the "what" to the "do" is meaningless if you don't know why. 
Because when it gets hard, when it gets tough, when your friends walk away from you, when your supporters forget you, when you don't win your first race -- if you don't know why, you can't try again. 
So, first know what you want. 
Second, know why you want it, but third, know how you're going to get it done. 
I faced a few obstacles in this race. 
(Laughter) Just a few. 
But in the pursuit, I became the first black woman to ever become the nominee for governor in the history of the United States of America for a major party. 
(Cheers) (Applause) But more importantly, in this process, we turned out 1.2 million African American voters in Georgia. 
That is more voters than voted on the Democratic side of the ticket in 2014. 
(Applause) Our campaign tripled the number of Latinos who believed their voices mattered in the state of Georgia. 
We tripled the number of Asian Americans who stood up and said, "This is our state, too." 
Those are successes that tell me how I can get it done. 
But they also let me understand the obstacles aren't insurmountable. 
They're just a little high. 
But I also understand that there are three things that always hold us hostage. 
The first is finances. 
Now, you may have heard, I'm in a little bit of debt. 
If you didn't hear about it, you did not go outside. 
(Laughter) And finances are something that holds us back so often, our dreams are bounded by how much we have in resources. 
But we hear again and again the stories of those who overcome those resource challenges. 
But you can't overcome something you don't talk about. 
And that's why I didn't allow them to debt-shame me in my campaign. 
I didn't allow anyone to tell me that my lack of opportunity was a reason to disqualify me from running. 
And believe me, people tried to tell me I shouldn't run. 
Friends told me not to run. 
Allies told me not to run. 
"USA Today" mentioned maybe I shouldn't run. 
(Laughter) But no matter who it was, I understood that finances are often a reason we don't let ourselves dream. 
I can't say that you will always overcome those obstacles, but I will tell you, you will be damned if you do not try. 
(Applause) The second is fear. 
And fear is real. 
It is paralyzing. 
It is terrifying. 
But it can also be energizing, because once you know what you're afraid of, you can figure out how to get around it. 
And the third is fatigue. 
Sometimes you just get tired of trying. 
You get tired of reading about processes and politics and the things that stop you from getting where you want to be. 
Sometimes, fatigue means that we accept position instead of power. 
We let someone give us a title as a consolation prize, rather than realizing we know what we want and we're going to get it, even if we're tired. 
That's why God created naps. 
(Laughter) But we also learn in those moments that fatigue is an opportunity to evaluate how much we want it. 
Because if you are beaten down, if you have worked as hard as you can, if you have done everything you said you should, and it still doesn't work out, fatigue can sap you of your energy. 
But that's why you go back to the "why" of it. 
Because I know we have to have women who speak for the voiceless. 
I know we have to have people of good conscience who stand up against oppression. 
I know we have to have people who understand that social justice belongs to us all. 
And that wakes me up every morning, and that makes me fight even harder. 
Because I am moving forward, knowing what is in my past. 
I know the obstacles they have for me. 
I know what they're going to do, and I'm fairly certain they're energizing and creating new obstacles now. 
But they've got four years to figure it out. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Maybe two. 
(Cheers) (Applause) But here's my point: I know what I want, and that is justice. 
I know why I want it, because poverty is immoral, and it is a stain on our nation. 
And I know how I'm going to get it: by moving forward every single day. 
Thank you so much. 
(Cheers) (Applause) 

I love learning foreign languages. 
In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years, currently working on my eighth one. 
When people find that out about me, they always ask me, "How do you do that? What's your secret?" 
And to be honest, for many years, my answer would be, "I don't know. I simply love learning languages." 
But people were never happy with that answer. 
They wanted to know why they are spending years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency, and here I come, learning one language after another. 
They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages. 
And that made me wonder, too, how do actually other polyglots do it? 
What do we have in common? 
And what is it that enables us to learn languages so much faster than other people? 
I decided to meet other people like me and find that out. 
The best place to meet a lot of polyglots is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place to practice their languages. 
There are several such polyglot events organized all around the world, and so I decided to go there and ask polyglots about the methods that they use. 
And so I met Benny from Ireland, who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one. 
He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them right away. 
He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day, because that's how he learns, based on the feedback. 
And the best thing is, he doesn't even need to travel a lot today, because you can easily have conversations with native speakers from the comfort of your living room, using websites. 
I also met Lucas from Brazil who had a really interesting method to learn Russian. 
He simply added a hundred random Russian speakers on Skype as friends, and then he opened a chat window with one of them and wrote "Hi" in Russian. 
And the person replied, "Hi, how are you?" 
Lucas copied this and put it into a text window with another person, and the person replied, "I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?" 
Lucas copied this back to the first person, and in this way, he had two strangers have a conversation with each other without knowing about it. 
(Laughter) And soon he would start typing himself, because he had so many of these conversations that he figured out how the Russian conversation usually starts. 
What an ingenious method, right? 
And then I met polyglots who always start by imitating sounds of the language, and others who always learn the 500 most frequent words of the language, and yet others who always start by reading about the grammar. 
If I asked a hundred different polyglots, I heard a hundred different approaches to learning languages. 
Everybody seems to have a unique way they learn a language, and yet we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently. 
And as I was listening to these polyglots telling me about their methods, it suddenly dawned on me: the one thing we all have in common is that we simply found ways to enjoy the language-learning process. 
All of these polyglots were talking about language learning as if it was great fun. 
You should have seen their faces when they were showing me their colorful grammar charts and their carefully handmade flash cards, and their statistics about learning vocabulary using apps, or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language. 
All of them use different methods, but they always make sure it's something that they personally enjoy. 
I realized that this is actually how I learn languages myself. 
When I was learning Spanish, I was bored with the text in the textbook. 
I mean, who wants to read about Jose asking about the directions to the train station. Right? 
I wanted to read "Harry Potter" instead, because that was my favorite book as a child, and I have read it many times. 
So I got the Spanish translation of "Harry Potter" and started reading, and sure enough, I didn't understand almost anything at the beginning, but I kept on reading because I loved the book, and by the end of the book, I was able to follow it almost without any problems. 
And the same thing happened when I was learning German. 
I decided to watch "Friends," my favorite sitcom, in German, and again, at the beginning it was all just gibberish. 
I didn't know where one word finished and another one started, but I kept on watching every day because it's "Friends." 
I can watch it in any language. I love it so much. 
And after the second or third season, seriously, the dialogue started to make sense. 
I only realized this after meeting other polyglots. 
We are no geniuses and we have no shortcut to learning languages. 
We simply found ways how to enjoy the process, how to turn language learning from a boring school subject into a pleasant activity which you don't mind doing every day. 
If you don't like writing words down on paper, you can always type them in an app. 
If you don't like listening to boring textbook material, find interesting content on YouTube or in podcasts for any language. 
If you're a more introverted person and you can't imagine speaking to native speakers right away, you can apply the method of self-talk. 
You can talk to yourself in the comfort of your room, describing your plans for the weekend, how your day has been, or even take a random picture from your phone and describe the picture to your imaginary friend. 
This is how polyglots learn languages, and the best news is, it's available to anyone who is willing to take the learning into their own hands. 
So meeting other polyglots helped me realize that it is really crucial to find enjoyment in the process of learning languages, but also that joy in itself is not enough. 
If you want to achieve fluency in a foreign language, you'll also need to apply three more principles. 
First of all, you'll need effective methods. 
If you try to memorize a list of words for a test tomorrow, the words will be stored in your short-term memory and you'll forget them after a few days. 
If you, however, want to keep words long term, you need to revise them in the course of a few days repeatedly using the so-called space repetition. 
You can use apps which are based on this system such as Anki or Memrise, or you can write lists of word in a notebook using the Goldlist method, which is also very popular with many polyglots. 
If you're not sure which methods are effective and what is available out there, just check out polyglots' YouTube channels and websites and get inspiration from them. 
If it works for them, it will most probably work for you too. 
The third principle to follow is to create a system in your learning. 
We're all very busy and no one really has time to learn a language today. 
But we can create that time if we just plan a bit ahead. 
Can you wake up 15 minutes earlier than you normally do? 
That would be the perfect time to revise some vocabulary. 
Can you listen to a podcast on your way to work while driving? 
Well, that would be great to get some listening experience. 
There are so many things we can do without even planning that extra time, such as listening to podcasts on our way to work or doing our household chores. 
The important thing is to create a plan in the learning. 
"I will practice speaking every Tuesday and Thursday with a friend for 20 minutes. 
I will listen to a YouTube video while having breakfast." 
If you create a system in your learning, you don't need to find that extra time, because it will become a part of your everyday life. 
And finally, if you want to learn a language fluently, you need also a bit of patience. 
It's not possible to learn a language within two months, but it's definitely possible to make a visible improvement in two months, if you learn in small chunks every day in a way that you enjoy. 
And there is nothing that motivates us more than our own success. 
I vividly remember the moment when I understood the first joke in German when watching "Friends." 
I was so happy and motivated that I just kept on watching that day two more episodes, and as I kept watching, I had more and more of those moments of understanding, these little victories, and step by step, I got to a level where I could use the language freely and fluently to express anything. 
This is a wonderful feeling. 
I can't get enough of that feeling, and that's why I learn a language every two years. 
So this is the whole polyglot secret. 
Find effective methods which you can use systematically over the period of some time in a way which you enjoy, and this is how polyglots learn languages within months, not years. 
Now, some of you may be thinking, "That's all very nice to enjoy language learning, but isn't the real secret that you polyglots are just super talented and most of us aren't?" 
Well, there's one thing I haven't told you about Benny and Lucas. 
Benny had 11 years of Irish Gaelic and five years of German at school. 
He couldn't speak them at all when graduating. 
Up to the age of 21, he thought he didn't have the language gene and he could not speak another language. 
Then he started to look for his way of learning languages, which was speaking to native speakers and getting feedback from them, and today Benny can easily have a conversation in 10 languages. 
Lucas tried to learn English at school for 10 years. 
He was one of the worst students in class. 
His friends even made fun of him and gave him a Russian textbook as a joke because they thought he would never learn that language, or any language. 
And then Lucas started to experiment with methods, looking for his own way to learn, for example, by having Skype chat conversations with strangers. 
And after just 10 years, Lucas is able to speak 11 languages fluently. 
Does that sound like a miracle? 
Well, I see such miracles every single day. 
As a language mentor, I help people learn languages by themselves, and I see this every day. 
People struggle with language learning for five, 10, even 20 years, and then they suddenly take their learning into their own hands, start using materials which they enjoy, more effective methods, or they start tracking their learning so that they can appreciate their own progress, and that's when suddenly they magically find the language talent that they were missing all their lives. 
So if you've also tried to learn a language and you gave up, thinking it's too difficult or you don't have the language talent, give it another try. 
Maybe you're also just one enjoyable method away from learning that language fluently. 
Maybe you're just one method away from becoming a polyglot. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Every year, more than four to five million people die due to exposure to outdoor air pollution around the world. 
This petri dish that you are looking at contains approximately 20 minutes' worth of pollution captured off a pyrolysis plant. 
This is PM 2.5. 
These particles -- you can see it right now, but when they're out there in the air, you won't see them. 
These are so tiny that our lungs -- our bodies cannot filter them, and they end up in our bodies -- give us asthma and lung cancer if not treated in the right time. 
On a trip back to India, when I was a student in 2012, I took this picture. 
This picture stuck in my head. 
On one side, you see this exhaust of a diesel generator, the same generator which is a sign of human progress, which is a sign of rapid industrialization and what we have become as a society in the last 100 years, generating energy. 
But on the other side, you see this very interesting triangular, black-colored swatch, that is produced by the same residual particulate waste created by the emissions of the generator. 
Now, this picture gave me an idea and got me thinking about rethinking both pollution and inks, because it was making that black-colored mark. 
Now, the reality is that most of the black ink that we use conventionally is traditionally produced by conventionally burning fossil fuels in factories. 
There are factories around the world that are burning fossil fuels to produce carbon black, to make black inks that we use on an everyday basis. 
But given that millions of liters of fossil fuels are already being burned out there by our cars, our engines and our exhaust out there, what if you could capture that pollution and use it to recycle and make those inks? 
I decided to give this experiment a shot. 
I went back to my lab back in Boston and conducted a small experiment. 
In Boston, I couldn't find much pollution to play with, so I resorted to using a candle. 
This was an experiment. 
I burnt a candle, built this contraption that would suck in that candle soot, mixed it with some vegetable oil and vodka, because to a DIY hacker, these were really easily available. 
(Laughter) And after mixing them, you could churn out a very rudimentary form of ink that would go into a cartridge, and now you could print with it. 
This was my "Hello, World!" of experimenting with printing with pollution. 
This is the same pollution that I showed you in the petri dish, which is the result of any fossil fuel that is being burned out there. 
In 2015, I decided to take this experimentation forward and set up a lab in India to work on the capture and recycling of air pollution. 
In the good times, the lab used to look something like this. 
But experimentations were not always controlled, and disasters happened. 
And while experimentation would happen, the lab would end up looking something like this. 
Well, we knew where we wanted to go, but we were not sure how exactly to reach there. 
The passersby who used to go by that lab through that building used to, at times, think, "These guys are making bombs in there," because there was too much fire, wires and smoke in the same vicinity. 
(Laughter) We decided, let's move to a garage and take experiments forward. 
We took a garage, and during the early stages, we were driving around Bangalore with contraptions like these. 
This is an early-stage prototype. 
Imagine the looks people gave us, "What are these cars driving around doing?" 
This is an early-stage prototype of our system that would capture pollution that is being released from a conventional diesel-based car. 
This is an early stage of the technology. 
We advanced the technology and created this into this version that would capture pollution from static sources of pollution, like a diesel generator. 
If you see, all the fumes disappear as soon as you turn this machine on. 
Without affecting the performance of the engine, we are able to capture 95 percent worth of pollution released from the diesel generator. 
This is the particulate matter that we are talking about that we capture, in this case, within three to four hours of operation of a generator. 
And while our experiments and our research was advancing, a very big company, a very big brand, approached us and said, "We want to take this idea further with you guys, and take this further in a very big celebrated form." 
They said, "Let's do a global art campaign with the inks that you are making off this pollution." 
I'll show you what the ink looks like. 
So, this pen is made by recycling 40 to 50 minutes of that car pollution that we are talking about, the same pollution that is in the petri dish. 
And it's a very sharp black that you can write with. 
So I'm going to write ... 
PM 2.5, that's incorrect. 
So this is a very sharp black that is generated by the same pollution. 
After much work on the lab-level research, we got an offer from a big corporation to do a very big trial of this idea. 
And it happened to be a brand, and we didn't think twice. 
We said, "Let's go ahead." 
Inventing in the lab is one thing and taking ideas and deploying them in the real world is completely another. 
During early stages, we had to resort to using our own houses and own kitchens as our ink-making factories, and our own bedrooms and living rooms as the first assembly line for making these inks. 
This is my cofounder Nikhil's own bedroom, that is being used to supply inks to artists all around the world, who would paint with AIR-INK. 
And that's him, delivering AIR-INKs to the ports so that the artists around the world can use it. 
Soon, we started seeing that thousands of artists around the world started using AIR-INK, and artworks started emerging like this. 
Soon, thousands of black-and-white, pollution-made artworks started emerging on a global scale. 
And believe me, for a group of scientists and engineers and inventors, there was nothing more satisfying than that the product of their work is now being used by some of the finest artists around the world. 
This is the cover of "Contagious" magazine last year, that was done by using the same ink that we made back in our labs. 
This is a famous painting by the British artist, Christian Furr, who painted it for the song "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones. 
Now, there's more to this pen and this ink than just the popular and pop-culture artworks. 
And now our goal is to create a company that can actually make some black money -- I mean, just money -- (Laughter) and high-quality printing processes and inks that can replace the conventional black inks that have been produced for the last thousands of years around the world. 
Soon after our growing popularity and artworks around the world, we started facing a very different kind of a problem. 
We started getting spammed by polluters, who would send us bags full of pollution to our office address, asking us, "What can we do with this pollution?" 
Our lab back in Bombay right now has pollution samples that have come from London, from India, from China, you name it. 
And this is just the beginning. 
This polluter sent us this specific image, asking us that these are all bags filled with PM 2.5, and can we recycle it for him if we paid him some money. 
Well, what would he have done if we did not take that pollution? 
He would probably find a nearby river or a landfill and dump it over there. 
But now, because we had the economics of AIR-INK figured out on the other side, we could incentivize him to give us this pollution and make inks from it, and turn it into even more valuable products. 
Now, pollution, as we all know, is a global killer. 
We can't claim that our ink will solve the world's pollution problem. 
But it does show what can be done if you look at this problem slightly differently. 
Look at this T-shirt I'm holding right now. 
This is made from the same AIR-INK I'm talking about. 
It's made from the same pollution that is inside this petri dish. 
And the same pollution we are all breathing in when we are walking outdoors. 
And we are on our way to do better than this. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Some years ago, I was visiting Paris and walking along the Seine River during a beautiful summer afternoon. 
I saw giant bubbles floating on the riverbank, like this one. 
The next moment, it popped and was gone. 
Making them were two street performers surrounded by a crowd. 
They visibly make a living by asking for donations and by selling pairs of sticks tied with two strings. 
When I was there, a man bought a pair of sticks for 10 euros, which surprised me. 
I am a scientist who is passionate about bubbles. 
I know the right trick to make the giant bubbles is the right soapy water mixture itself -- not the sticks, which may be needed, but you can easily make them at home. 
Focusing on the sticks makes us not see that the real tool is the bubble itself. 
Bubbles might seem like something just children make while playing, but sometimes it can be really stunning. 
However, there are more fascinating science to bubbles, such as problem-solving tools. 
So I would like to share with you a few stories about the science of creating bubbles and the science of eliminating the microscopic ones. 
Since it's up on the screen, let's start with the soap bubble. 
It is made from very common substances: air, water, soap, in the right mixture. 
You can see soap bubbles constantly changing their colors. 
This is due to the interaction with light at various directions and the changes of their thickness. 
One of the common substances, water molecules, are formed by two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen -- H2O. 
On most surfaces, water droplets tend to curve inwards, forming a semihemisphere shape. 
This is because the water droplet's surface is like an elastic sheet. 
The water molecule on the surface is constantly being pulled inwards by the molecule at the center. 
And the quality of the elasticity is what we call "surface tension." 
Now by adding soap, what happens is the soap molecule reduces the surface tension of water, making it more elastic and easier to form bubbles. 
You can think of a bubble as a mathematical problem-solver. 
You see it relentlessly trying to achieve geometry perfection. 
For instance, a sphere is the shape with the least surface area for a given volume. 
That's why a single bubble is always in the shape of a sphere. 
Let me show you. Check it out. 
This is a single bubble. 
When two bubbles touch each other, they can save materials by sharing a common wall. 
When more and more bubbles are added together, their geometry changes. 
These four bubbles are added together. 
They meet at one point at the center. 
When six bubbles are added together, a magical cube appears at the center. 
(Applause) That is surface tension at work, trying to find the most effective geometry arrangement. 
Now, let me give you another example. 
This is a very simple prop. 
This is made from two layers of plastic with four pins connected to each other. 
Imagine these four pins represent four cities that are equally apart, and we would like to make roads to connect these four cities. 
My question is: What is the shortest length to connect these four cities? 
Let's find out the answer by dipping it into the soapy water. 
Remember, the soap bubble forms will always try to minimize their surface area with a perfect geometry arrangement. 
So the solution might not be something you expected. 
The shortest length to connect these four cities is 2.73 times the distance between these two cities. 
(Applause) Now you've got the idea. 
The soap bubble forms will always try to minimize their surface area with a perfect geometry arrangement. 
Now, let us look at bubbles in another perspective. 
My daughter, Zoe, loves visiting zoos. 
Her favorite spot is Penguin Cove at Marwell Zoo in Southern England, where she could see penguins swim at speed under the water. 
One day, she noticed that the body of penguins leaves a trail of bubbles when they swim and asked why. 
Animals and birds like penguins that spend a lot of their time under the water have evolved an ingenious way of utilizing the capability of bubbles to reduce the density of water. 
Emperor penguins are thought to be able to dive a few hundred meters below the sea surface. 
They are thought to store the air under their feathers before they dive and then progressively release it as a cloud of bubbles. 
This reduces the density of water surrounding them, making it easier to swim through and speed up their swimming speed at least 40 percent. 
This feature has been noticed by the ship manufacturers. 
I am talking about the big ships here, the ones that are used to transport thousands of containers across the ocean. 
Recently, they developed a system called "air lubricating system," inspired by the penguins. 
In this system, they produce a lot of air bubbles and redistribute them across the whole of the ship, like an air carpet that reduces the water resistance when a ship is moving. 
This feature cuts off the energy consumption for the ship up to 15 percent. 
Bubbles can also be used for medicines. 
It can also play a role in medicines, for instance, as a method for noninvasive delivery systems for drugs and genes to a specific part of the body. 
Imagine a microbubble filled with a mixture of drugs and magnetic agents being injected into our bloodstream. 
The bubbles will move to the target areas. 
But how do they know where to go? 
Because we placed a magnet there. 
For instance, this part of my hand. 
When the microbubbles move to this part of my hand, we can pop it via ultrasound and release the drug exactly where it's needed. 
Now, I mentioned about the science of creating bubbles. 
But sometimes we also need to remove them. 
That's actually part of my job. 
My exact job title is "ink formulation scientist." 
But I don't work on the ink that you use for your writing pens. 
I'm working on some cool applications such as organic photovoltaics, OPVs, and organic light-emitting diodes, OLEDs. 
Part of my job is to figure out how and why we want to remove the bubbles from the ink that my company produces. 
During the formulation-mixing process, or preparation process, we mix active ingredients, solvents and additives in order to achieve the formulations with the properties we want when the ink is being used. 
But just like you would make drinks or bake cakes, it is unavoidable that some air bubbles will be trapped inside that ink. 
Here, we are talking about a different space from the bubbles I'd seen in Paris. 
The bubbles that are trapped inside those inks vary between a few millimeters, a few microns or even a few nanometers in size. 
And what we are concerned about is the oxygen and the moisture that is trapped inside. 
At this size scale, removing them is not easy. 
But it matters, for instance, for organic light-emitting diodes inks that we can use to produce display for your smartphone, for example. 
It's supposed to last for many years, but if the ink that we use has been absorbed with oxygen and moisture [which] are not being removed, then we can quickly see dark spots appear in the pixels. 
Now, one challenge we face in removing the microbubbles is that they are not very cooperative. 
They like to sit there, bathing in the ink without moving much. 
But how do we kick them out? 
One technology we use is to force the ink going through a thin, long and tiny tube with a porous wall, and we place the tubes inside the vacuum chamber, so that the bubbles can be squeezed out from the ink and be removed. 
Once we manage to remove the bubbles from the ink that we produce, it is time for celebration. 
Let's open a bubbling champagne. 
Ooh, this is going to be fun! 
(Laughter) Woooo! 
(Applause) You could see a lot of bubbles rushing out from the champagne bottle. 
These are the bubbles filled with carbon dioxide, a gas that's been produced during the fermentation process of the wine. 
Let me pour some out. 
I can't miss the chance. 
I guess it's enough. 
(Laughter) Here, I can see a lot of microbubbles moving from the bottom of the glass to the top of the champagne. 
Before it pops, it will jet tiny droplets of aroma molecules and intensify the flavor of champagne, making us enjoy much more the flavor of champagne. 
As a scientist who is passionate about bubbles, I love to see them, I love to play with them, and I love to study them. 
And also, I love to drink them. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm a neuroscientist, and I'm the co-founder of Backyard Brains, and our mission is to train the next generation of neuroscientists by taking graduate-level neuroscience research equipment and making it available for kids in middle schools and high schools. 
And so when we go into the classroom, one way to get them thinking about the brain, which is very complex, is to ask them a very simple question about neuroscience, and that is, "What has a brain?" 
When we ask that, students will instantly tell you that their cat or dog has a brain, and most will say that a mouse or even a small insect has a brain, but almost nobody says that a plant or a tree or a shrub has a brain. 
And so when you push -- because this could actually help describe a little bit how the brain actually functions -- so you push and say, "Well, what is it that makes living things have brains versus not?" 
And often they'll come back with the classification that things that move tend to have brains. 
And that's absolutely correct. 
Our nervous system evolved because it is electrical. 
It's fast, so we can quickly respond to stimuli in the world and move if we need to. 
But you can go back and push back on a student, and say, "Well, you know, you say that plants don't have brains, but plants do move." 
Anyone who has grown a plant has noticed that the plant will move and face the sun. 
But they'll say, "But that's a slow movement. 
You know, that doesn't count. That could be a chemical process." 
But what about fast-moving plants? 
Now, in 1760, Arthur Dobbs, the Royal Governor of North Carolina, made a pretty fascinating discovery. 
In the swamps behind his house, he found a plant that would spring shut every time a bug would fall in between it. 
He called this plant the flytrap, and within a decade, it made its way over to Europe, where eventually the great Charles Darwin got to study this plant, and this plant absolutely blew him away. 
He called it the most wonderful plant in the world. 
This is a plant that was an evolutionary wonder. 
This is a plant that moves quickly, which is rare, and it's carnivorous, which is also rare. 
And this is in the same plant. 
But I'm here today to tell you that's not even the coolest thing about this plant. 
The coolest thing is that the plant can count. 
So in order to show that, we have to get some vocabulary out of the way. 
So I'm going to do what we do in the classroom with students. 
We're going to do an experiment on electrophysiology, which is the recording of the body's electrical signal, either coming from neurons or from muscles. 
And I'm putting some electrodes here on my wrists. 
As I hook them up, we're going to be able to see a signal on the screen here. 
And this signal may be familiar to you. 
It's called the EKG, or the electrocardiogram. 
And this is coming from neurons in my heart that are firing what's called action potentials, potential meaning voltage and action meaning it moves quickly up and down, which causes my heart to fire, which then causes the signal that you see here. 
And so I want you to remember the shape of what we'll be looking at right here, because this is going to be important. 
This is a way that the brain encodes information in the form of an action potential. 
So now let's turn to some plants. 
So I'm going to first introduce you to the mimosa, not the drink, but the Mimosa pudica, and this is a plant that's found in Central America and South America, and it has behaviors. 
And the first behavior I'm going to show you is if I touch the leaves here, you get to see that the leaves tend to curl up. 
And then the second behavior is, if I tap the leaf, the entire branch seems to fall down. 
So why does it do that? 
It's not really known to science. 
One of the reasons why could be that it scares away insects or it looks less appealing to herbivores. 
But how does it do that? Now, that's interesting. 
We can do an experiment to find out. 
So what we're going to do now, just like I recorded the electrical potential from my body, we're going to record the electrical potential from this plant, this mimosa. 
And so what we're going to do is I've got a wire wrapped around the stem, and I've got the ground electrode where? 
In the ground. It's an electrical engineering joke. Alright. 
(Laughter) Alright. So I'm going to go ahead and tap the leaf here, and I want you to look at the electrical recording that we're going to see inside the plant. 
Whoa. It is so big, I've got to scale it down. 
Alright. So what is that? 
That is an action potential that is happening inside the plant. 
Why was it happening? 
Because it wanted to move. Right? 
And so when I hit the touch receptors, it sent a voltage all the way down to the end of the stem, which caused it to move. 
And now, in our arms, we would move our muscles, but the plant doesn't have muscles. 
What it has is water inside the cells and when the voltage hits it, it opens up, releases the water, changes the shape of the cells, and the leaf falls. 
OK. So here we see an action potential encoding information to move. Alright? 
But can it do more? 
So let's go to find out. 
We're going to go to our good friend, the Venus flytrap here, and we're going to take a look at what happens inside the leaf when a fly lands on here. 
So I'm going to pretend to be a fly right now. 
And now here's my Venus flytrap, and inside the leaf, you're going to notice that there are three little hairs here, and those are trigger hairs. 
And so when a fly lands -- I'm going to touch one of the hairs right now. 
Ready? One, two, three. 
What do we get? We get a beautiful action potential. 
However, the flytrap doesn't close. 
And to understand why that is, we need to know a little bit more about the behavior of the flytrap. 
Number one is that it takes a long time to open the traps back up -- you know, about 24 to 48 hours if there's no fly inside of it. 
And so it takes a lot of energy. 
And two, it doesn't need to eat that many flies throughout the year. 
Only a handful. It gets most of its energy from the sun. 
It's just trying to replace some nutrients in the ground with flies. 
And the third thing is, it only opens then closes the traps a handful of times until that trap dies. 
So therefore, it wants to make really darn sure that there's a meal inside of it before the flytrap snaps shut. 
So how does it do that? 
It counts the number of seconds between successive touching of those hairs. 
And so the idea is that there's a high probability, if there's a fly inside of there, they're going to be quick together, and so when it gets the first action potential, it starts counting, one, two, and if it gets to 20 and it doesn't fire again, then it's not going to close, but if it does it within there, then the flytrap will close. 
So we're going to go back now. 
I'm going to touch the Venus flytrap again. 
I've been talking for more than 20 seconds. 
So we can see what happens when I touch the hair a second time. 
So what do we get? We get a second action potential, but again, the leaf doesn't close. 
So now if I go back in there and if I'm a fly moving around, I'm going to be touching the leaf a few times. 
I'm going to go and brush it a few times. 
And immediately, the flytrap closes. 
So here we are seeing the flytrap actually doing a computation. 
It's determining if there's a fly inside the trap, and then it closes. 
So let's go back to our original question. 
Do plants have brains? 
Well, the answer is no. 
There's no brains in here. 
There's no axons, no neurons. 
It doesn't get depressed. 
It doesn't want to know what the Tigers' score is. 
It doesn't have self-actualization problems. 
But what it does have is something that's very similar to us, which is the ability to communicate using electricity. 
It just uses slightly different ions than we do, but it's actually doing the same thing. 
So just to show you the ubiquitous nature of these action potentials, we saw it in the Venus flytrap, we've seen an action potential in the mimosa. 
We've even seen an action potential in a human. 
Now, this is the euro of the brain. 
It's the way that all information is passed. 
And so what we can do is we can use those action potentials to pass information between species of plants. 
And so this is our interspecies plant-to-plant communicator, and what we've done is we've created a brand new experiment where we're going to record the action potential from a Venus flytrap, and we're going to send it into the sensitive mimosa. 
So I want you to recall what happens when we touch the leaves of the mimosa. 
It has touch receptors that are sending that information back down in the form of an action potential. 
And so what would happen if we took the action potential from the Venus flytrap and sent it into all the stems of the mimosa? 
We should be able to create the behavior of the mimosas without actually touching it ourselves. 
And so if you'll allow me, I'm going to go ahead and trigger this mimosa right now by touching on the hairs of the Venus flytrap. 
So we're going to send information about touch from one plant to another. 
So there you see it. 
So -- (Applause) So I hope you learned a little bit, something about plants today, and not only that. 
You learned that plants could be used to help teach neuroscience and bring along the neurorevolution. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Look all around you. 
Whether you're in a subway, a park, an airport, a restaurant, even at this conference, all of you have a phone in your hands or maybe in your pockets. 
How many of you have a book? 
Very few, right? 
This is the sight that used to greet me every time I walked out of my office block. 
I was surrounded by a sea of 20-something professionals glued to their phones. 
And not a single one had a book in their hands. 
And this used to make me very, very frustrated. 
I was a bookworm all my life. 
Books formed the milestones of my life. 
The first man I fell in love with was Mr. Darcy. 
I first read "Harry Potter" when I was 21, on a summer break from college. 
And I remember the first night I spent in a little flat I bought in my mid-20s, very proudly, and I spent the whole night reading "The Da Vinci Code." 
And then I'm going to make a terrible confession: even today, when I'm low, I get into bed with "War and Peace." 
Don't laugh. 
(Laughter) But I was also like all those people I saw around me: I, too, lived on my phone. 
I ordered my groceries online, and soon my app knew that I needed a monthly dose of diapers. 
I booked my cinemas on my phone. 
I booked planes on my phone. 
And when I did the long commute back home like most urban Indians, and was stuck in traffic, I passed the time on WhatsApp, video-chatting my twin. 
I was part of an extraordinary revolution that was happening in India. 
Indians are the second-largest users of smartphones in the world. 
And data prices have been slashed so radically that half of urban India and even a part of rural India now have a smartphone with a data connection in their hands. 
And if you know anything about India, you'll know that "half" means, like, all of America or something. 
You know, it's large numbers. 
(Laughter) And these numbers are just growing and growing and growing. 
They're exploding. 
And what they're doing is empowering Indians in all kinds of extraordinary ways. 
And yet, none of these changes that I was seeing around me were reflected in my world, my world of books. 
I live in a country the size of Europe, and it only has 50 decent bookshops. 
And Indians just didn't seem to want to read for fun. 
So if you look at all the best-seller lists in India, what you'll always find in the best-seller list is exam and professional guides. 
Imagine if you found the SAT guides as the "New York Times" number one seller, month after month. 
And yet, the smartphone revolution was creating readers and writers of a different kind. 
Whether it was on Facebook or WhatsApp, Indians were writing and sharing and reading all kinds of things: terrible jokes, spurious pop history, long, emotional confessions, diatribes against the government. 
And as I read and shared these things, I wondered to myself, "Could I get these writers and these readers, could I turn them into my readers?" 
And so I left my plush corner office and my job as the publisher of India's top publishing company, and I set up on my own. 
I moved into a single large room in a cheap bohemian district of Delhi, with a small team. 
And there, I set up a new kind of publishing house. 
A new kind of publishing house needs a new kind of reader and a new kind of book. 
And so I asked myself, "What would this new reader want? 
Would they prize urgency, relevance, timeliness, directness -- the very qualities they seem to want from their online services, indeed, the qualities they seem to want from life today?" 
I knew that my readers were always on the go. 
I'd have to fit into their lifestyle and schedules. 
Would they actually want to read a 200-page book? 
Or would they want something a little bit more digestible? 
Indians are incredibly value-conscious, especially when it comes to their online reading. 
I knew I had to give them books under a dollar. 
And so my company was formed, and it was born. 
It was a platform where we created a list of stories designed for the smartphone, but it also allowed amateur writers to upload their own stories, so they could be showcased along with the very writers they read and admired. 
And we could also enter into other people's digital platforms. 
So, imagine this: imagine you're a receptionist, you've had a long day at work, you book your cab in your ride-hailing app, it shows up, and you get into your car, and you lie back on your seat, and you put on your app. 
And you find a set of stories waiting for you, timed to your journey. 
Imagine you're a gay young woman, in a relatively conservative city like Lucknow, which lies near Delhi. 
There's no way your parents know about your sexuality. 
They'd completely freak out. 
Would you like lesbian love stories written in Hindi, priced under a dollar, to be read in the privacy of your phone? 
And could I match readers to the events that were taking place around them in real time? 
So we published biographies of very famous politicians after they won big elections. 
When the supreme court decriminalized homosexuality, an LGBTQ collection was waiting on our home page. 
And when India's Toni Morrison, the great writer Mahasweta Devi died, our readers found a short story by her as soon as news hit. 
The idea was to be relevant to every moment of a reader's life. 
Who are our readers? 
They're mostly young men under the age of 30. 
There's someone like Salil, who lives in a city where there isn't a modern bookshop. 
And he comes to our app almost every day. 
There's someone like Manoj, who mostly reads us during the long commute back home. 
And there's someone like Ahmed, who loves our nonfiction that he can read in a single sitting, and that's priced very low. 
Imagine if you're like a young, techie boy in India's Silicon Valley city of Bangalore. 
And one day, you get an in-app notification and it says that your favorite actress has written a sexy short story and it's waiting for you. 
That's how we launched Juggernaut. 
We got a very famous ex-adult star, called Sunny Leone. 
She's India's most Googled person, as it happens. 
And we got her to write us a collection of sexy short stories that we published every night for a week. 
And it was a sensation. 
I mean, no one could believe that we'd asked Sunny Leone to write. 
But she did, and she proved everyone wrong, and she found this immense readership. 
And just as we've redefined what a book is and how a reader behaves, we're rethinking who an author is. 
In our amateur writing platform, we have writers that range from teenagers to housewives. 
And they're writing all kinds of things. 
It starts as small as a poem, an essay, a single short story ... 
Fifty percent of them are returning to the app to write again. 
Take someone like Neeraj. 
He's a middle-aged executive, wife, two kids, a good job. 
And Neeraj loves to read. 
But every time Neeraj read a book that he loved, he was also filled with regret. 
He wondered to himself if he could write, too. 
He was convinced he had stories in his mind. 
But time and real life had happened, and he couldn't really manage it. 
And then he heard about the Juggernaut writer's platform. 
And what he loved about it was that he felt this was a place where he could stand head and shoulders, equally, with the very writers that he most admired. 
And so he began to write. 
And he snatched a minute here, an hour there, in between flights in airports, late at night, when he had a little bit of time on his hands. 
And he wrote this extraordinary story for us. 
He wrote a story about a family of assassins who lived in the winding lanes of Old Delhi. 
We loved it, it was so fresh and original. 
And before Neeraj knew it, he'd not only scored a film deal but also a second contract to write another story. 
Neeraj's story is one of the most read stories on our app. 
My journey is very, very young. 
We're a two-year-old company, and we have a long way to go. 
But we already, and we will by the end of this year, have about half a million stories, many priced at under a dollar. 
Most of our readers love reading and trying out authors they've never, ever heard of before. 
Thirty percent of our home page reads comes out of the writing that comes from our writer's platform. 
By being everywhere, by being accessible and relevant, I hope to make reading a daily habit, as easy and effortless as checking your email, as booking a ticket online or ordering your groceries. 
And as for me, I've discovered that as I entered the six-inch world of the smartphone, my own world just got very, very big. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Let's play a game. 
Imagine that you are in Las Vegas, in a casino, and you decide to play a game on one of the casino's computers, just like you might play solitaire or chess. 
The computer can make moves in the game, just like a human player. 
This is a coin game. 
It starts with a coin showing heads, and the computer will play first. 
It can choose to flip the coin or not, but you don't get to see the outcome. 
Next, it's your turn. 
You can also choose to flip the coin or not, and your move will not be revealed to your opponent, the computer. 
Finally, the computer plays again, and can flip the coin or not, and after these three rounds, the coin is revealed, and if it is heads, the computer wins, if it's tails, you win. 
So it's a pretty simple game, and if everybody plays honestly, and the coin is fair, then you have a 50 percent chance of winning this game. 
And to confirm that, I asked my students to play this game on our computers, and after many, many tries, their winning rate ended up being 50 percent, or close to 50 percent, as expected. 
Sounds like a boring game, right? 
But what if you could play this game on a quantum computer? 
Now, Las Vegas casinos do not have quantum computers, as far as I know, but IBM has built a working quantum computer. 
Here it is. 
But what is a quantum computer? 
Well, quantum physics describes the behavior of atoms and fundamental particles, like electrons and photons. 
So a quantum computer operates by controlling the behavior of these particles, but in a way that is completely different from our regular computers. 
So a quantum computer is not just a more powerful version of our current computers, just like a light bulb is not a more powerful candle. 
You cannot build a light bulb by building better and better candles. 
A light bulb is a different technology, based on deeper scientific understanding. 
Similarly, a quantum computer is a new kind of device, based on the science of quantum physics, and just like a light bulb transformed society, quantum computers have the potential to impact so many aspects of our lives, including our security needs, our health care and even the internet. 
So companies all around the world are working to build these devices, and to see what the excitement is all about, let's play our game on a quantum computer. 
So I can log into IBM's quantum computer from right here, which means I can play the game remotely, and so can you. 
To make this happen, you may remember getting an email ahead of time, from TED, asking you whether you would choose to flip the coin or not, if you played the game. 
Well, actually, we asked you to choose between a circle or a square. 
You didn't know it, but your choice of circle meant "flip the coin," and your choice of square was "don't flip." 
We received 372 responses. 
Thank you. 
That means we can play 372 games against the quantum computer using your choices. 
And it's a pretty fast game to play, so I can show you the results right here. 
Unfortunately, you didn't do very well. 
(Laughter) The quantum computer won almost every game. 
It lost a few only because of operational errors in the computer. 
(Laughter) So how did it achieve this amazing winning streak? 
It seems like magic or cheating, but actually, it's just quantum physics in action. 
Here's how it works. 
A regular computer simulates heads or tails of a coin as a bit, a zero or a one, or a current flipping on and off inside your computer chip. 
A quantum computer is completely different. 
A quantum bit has a more fluid, nonbinary identity. 
It can exist in a superposition, or a combination of zero and one, with some probability of being zero and some probability of being one. 
In other words, its identity is on a spectrum. 
For example, it could have a 70 percent chance of being zero and a 30 percent chance of being one or 80-20 or 60-40. 
The possibilities are endless. 
The key idea here is that we have to give up on precise values of zero and one and allow for some uncertainty. 
So during the game, the quantum computer creates this fluid combination of heads and tails, zero and one, so that no matter what the player does, flip or no flip, the superposition remains intact. 
It's kind of like stirring a mixture of two fluids. 
Whether or not you stir, the fluids remain in a mixture, but in its final move, the quantum computer can unmix the zero and one, perfectly recovering heads so that you lose every time. 
(Laughter) If you think this is all a bit weird, you are absolutely right. 
Regular coins do not exist in combinations of heads and tails. 
We do not experience this fluid quantum reality in our everyday lives. 
So if you are confused by quantum, don't worry, you're getting it. 
(Laughter) But even though we don't experience quantum strangeness, we can see its very real effects in action. 
You've seen the data for yourself. 
The quantum computer won because it harnessed superposition and uncertainty, and these quantum properties are powerful, not just to win coin games, but also to build future quantum technologies. 
So let me give you three examples of potential applications that could change our lives. 
First of all, quantum uncertainty could be used to create private keys for encrypting messages sent from one location to another so that hackers could not secretly copy the key perfectly, because of quantum uncertainty. 
They would have to break the laws of quantum physics to hack the key. 
So this kind of unbreakable encryption is already being tested by banks and other institutions worldwide. 
Today, we use more than 17 billion connected devices globally. 
Just imagine the impact quantum encryption could have in the future. 
Secondly, quantum technologies could also transform health care and medicine. 
For example, the design and analysis of molecules for drug development is a challenging problem today, and that's because exactly describing and calculating all of the quantum properties of all the atoms in the molecule is a computationally difficult task, even for our supercomputers. 
But a quantum computer could do better, because it operates using the same quantum properties as the molecule it's trying to simulate. 
So future large-scale quantum simulations for drug development could perhaps lead to treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's, which affects thousands of lives. 
And thirdly, my favorite quantum application is teleportation of information from one location to another without physically transmitting the information. 
Sounds like sci-fi, but it is possible, because these fluid identities of the quantum particles can get entangled across space and time in such a way that when you change something about one particle, it can impact the other, and that creates a channel for teleportation. 
It's already been demonstrated in research labs and could be part of a future quantum internet. 
We don't have such a network as yet, but my team is working on these possibilities, by simulating a quantum network on a quantum computer. 
So we have designed and implemented some interesting new protocols such as teleportation among different users in the network and efficient data transmission and even secure voting. 
So it's a lot of fun for me, being a quantum physicist. 
I highly recommend it. 
(Laughter) We get to be explorers in a quantum wonderland. 
Who knows what applications we will discover next. 
We must tread carefully and responsibly as we build our quantum future. 
And for me, personally, I don't see quantum physics as a tool just to build quantum computers. 
I see quantum computers as a way for us to probe the mysteries of nature and reveal more about this hidden world outside of our experiences. 
How amazing that we humans, with our relatively limited access to the universe, can still see far beyond our horizons just using our imagination and our ingenuity. 
And the universe rewards us by showing us how incredibly interesting and surprising it is. 
The future is fundamentally uncertain, and to me, that is certainly exciting. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On May 27th, 1941, the German battleship Bismarck sank in a fierce firefight, leaving only 118 of her 2,200 crew members alive. 
But when a British destroyer came to collect the prisoners, they found an unexpected survivor - a black and white cat clinging to a floating plank. 
For the next several months this cat hunted rats and raised British morale - until a sudden torpedo strike shattered the hull and sank the ship. 
But, miraculously, not the cat. 
Nicknamed Unsinkable Sam, he rode to Gibraltar with the rescued crew and served as a ship cat on three more vessels – one of which also sank - before retiring to the Belfast Home for Sailors. 
Many may not think of cats as serviceable sailors, or cooperative companions of any kind. 
But cats have been working alongside humans for thousands of years - helping us just as often as we help them. 
So how did these solitary creatures go from wild predator to naval officer to sofa sidekick? 
The domestication of the modern house cat can be traced back to more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, at the start of the Neolithic era. 
People were learning to bend nature to their will, producing much more food than farmers could eat at one time. 
These Neolithic farmers stored their excess grain in large pits and short, clay silos. 
But these stores of food attracted hordes of rodents, as well as their predator, Felis silvestris lybica - the wildcat found across North Africa and Southwest Asia. 
These wildcats were fast, fierce, carnivorous hunters. 
And they were remarkably similar in size and appearance to today’s domestic cats. 
The main differences being that ancient wildcats were more muscular, had striped coats, and were less social towards other cats and humans. 
The abundance of prey in rodent-infested granaries drew in these typically solitary animals. 
And as the wildcats learned to tolerate the presence of humans and other cats during mealtime, we think that farmers likewise tolerated the cats in exchange for free pest control. 
The relationship was so beneficial that the cats migrated with Neolithic farmers from Anatolia into Europe and the Mediterranean. 
Vermin were a major scourge of the seven seas. 
They ate provisions and gnawed at lines of rope, so cats had long since become essential sailing companions. 
Around the same time these Anatolian globe trotting cats set sail, the Egyptians domesticated their own local cats. 
Revered for their ability to dispatch venomous snakes, catch birds, and kill rats, domestic cats became important to Egyptian religious culture. 
They gained immortality in frescos, hieroglyphs, statues, and even tombs, mummified alongside their owners. 
Egyptian ship cats cruised the Nile, holding poisonous river snakes at bay. 
And after graduating to larger vessels, they too began to migrate from port to port. 
During the time of the Roman Empire, ships traveling between India and Egypt carried the lineage of the central Asian wildcat F. s. ornata. 
Centuries later, in the Middle Ages, Egyptian cats voyaged up to the Baltic Sea on the ships of Viking seafarers. 
And both the Near Eastern and North African wildcats – probably tamed at this point -- continued to travel across Europe, eventually setting sail for Australia and the Americas. 
Today, most house cats have descended from either the Near Eastern or the Egyptian lineage of F.s.lybica. 
But close analysis of the genomes and coat patterns of modern cats tells us that unlike dogs, which have undergone centuries of selective breeding, modern cats are genetically very similar to ancient cats. 
And apart from making them more social and docile, we’ve done little to alter their natural behaviors. 
In other words, cats today are more or less as they’ve always been: Wild animals. 
Fierce hunters. Creatures that don’t see us as their keepers. 
And given our long history together, they might not be wrong. 

As dawn breaks over a moveable city of ten thousand yurts, Queen Boraqchin is in for a rude awakening. 
A rogue sheep has slipped past her servants and guards and bolted into her yurt, where he springs into bed and bleats in her ear. 
Although she’s the formidable khatun of the Golden Horde, a huge kingdom in the Mongolian Empire, Boraqchin has a hands-on approach to ruling. 
She’s been married to Batu Khan, the fearsome grandson of Genghis Khan himself, since she was fifteen – and while her husband is out on his raids, she juggles the duties of flocks, family and empire at home. 
This makes her the manager – and the mover – of a city of thousands. 
Twice a year, Boraqchin moves the city between two seasonal camping grounds. 
This ensures constant water and lush grass in summer, and protection from harsh winds in winter. 
The whole operation requires weeks of strict planning, liaising with the other camps in her domain, strategic delegation – and the patience to move at the speed of dawdling animals. 
Today is moving day, and she’ll have to direct throngs of her ladies, commanders, slaves and animals up the river Volga for the summer. 
As Boraqchin steps outside, she’s greeted by a commotion – her unwanted visitor is now running circles around her stewards. 
They’re attempting to stow her possessions securely into wagons. 
Boraqchin orders them to get it under control – but she’s the only one quick enough to catch the stray. 
She next supervises her ladies who are unpinning her yurt and lifting it onto its custom wagon. 
It requires a team of twenty oxen to pull, and Boraqchin wouldn’t trust anyone to steer it but herself. 
Next, Boraqchin and her woolly companion meet with the guards. 
She orders them to keep close watch on her husband's special reception yurt and port-able throne during the journey. 
They’ll also act as outriders, and she tells them how to secure the route, surround her for safety – and keep the animals in check. 
But when the sheep finally breaks free and makes for the fields, the guards can barely keep up as it scampers through crowds packing up their yurts. 
Exasperated, Boraqchin rides down to the pastures herself. 
When she gets there, she catches sight of the troublesome sheep wriggling into the middle of a flock. 
When she follows him in, he’s nestled next to a ewe, his mother. 
She’s pregnant, and seems to be in pain. 
With a start, Boraqchin realizes that this ewe’s impending delivery has been forgotten in the flurry of moving day. 
There’s no time to find a shepherd – instead, Boraqchin rolls up her sleeves, greases her arm and helps the ewe give birth to two new additions to the empire. 
Leaving the lambs and their mother, Boraqchin dashes back to the camp. 
Here the final touches have been put to packing, and vehicles are starting to line up. 
This vast procession starts with the queen and two hundred wagons filled with her treasures. 
Next up are the junior wives and crew, then the concubines – and this is only Boraqchin's camp. 
After this comes the second imperial camp led by another senior wife, then two more camps, also led by wives. 
Boraqchin has been checking in with them for weeks to ensure a smooth departure and orderly queue. 
But they only make up the royal portion of the line – behind them winds the entire civilian city, which includes holy men with portable chapels and mosques, families, tradesmen, and shepherds. 
Finally, Boraqchin settles into her wagon. 
It’ll take weeks to reach their destination – but over the course of the journey, she’ll keep everyone expertly in check – from her proud children and attentive subjects, to the most meandering sheep at the back of line. 

Curiosity: a blessing, or a curse? 
The paradoxical nature of this trait was personified for the ancient Greeks in the mythical figure of Pandora. 
According to legend, she was the first mortal woman, whose blazing curiosity set a chain of earth-shattering events in motion. 
Pandora was breathed into being by Hephaestus, God of fire, who enlisted the help of his divine companions to make her extraordinary. 
From Aphrodite she received the capacity for deep emotion; from Hermes she gained mastery over language. 
Athena gave the gift of fine craftsmanship and attention to detail, and Hermes gave her her name. 
Finally, Zeus bestowed two gifts on Pandora. 
The first was the trait of curiosity, which settled in her spirit and sent her eagerly out into the world. 
The second was a heavy box, ornately curved, heavy to hold – and screwed tightly shut. 
But the contents, Zeus told her, were not for mortal eyes. 
She was not to open the box under any circumstance. 
On earth, Pandora met and fell in love with Epimetheus, a talented titan who had been given the task of designing the natural world by Zeus. 
He had worked alongside his brother Prometheus, who created the first humans but was eternally punished for giving them fire. 
Epimetheus missed his brother desperately, but in Pandora he found another fiery-hearted soul for companionship. 
Pandora brimmed with excitement at life on earth. 
She was also easily distracted and could be impatient, given her thirst for knowledge and desire to question her surroundings. 
Often, her mind wandered to the contents of the sealed box. 
What treasure was so great it could never be seen by human eyes, and why was it in her care? 
Her fingers itched to pry it open. 
Sometimes she was convinced she heard voices whispering and the contents rattling around inside, as if straining to be free. 
Its enigma became maddening. 
Over time, Pandora became more and more obsessed with the box. 
It seemed there was a force beyond her control that drew her to the contents, which echoed her name louder and louder. 
One day she could bear it no longer. 
Stealing away from Epimetheus, she stared at the mystifying box. 
She’d take one glance inside, then be able to rid her mind of it forever... 
But at the first crack of the lid, the box burst open. 
Monstrous creatures and horrendous sounds rushed out in a cloud of smoke and swirled around her, screeching and cackling. 
Filled with terror, Pandora clawed desperately at the air to direct them back into their prison. 
But the creatures surged out in a gruesome cloud. 
She felt a wave of foreboding as they billowed away. 
Zeus had used the box as a vessel for all the forces of evil and suffering he’d created – and once released, they were uncontainable. 
As she wept, Pandora became aware of a sound echoing from within the box. 
This was not the eerie whispering of demons, but a light tinkling that seemed to ease her anguish. 
When she once again lifted the lid and peered in, a warm beam of light rose out and fluttered away. 
As she watched it flickering in the wake of the evil she’d unleashed, Pandora’s pain was eased. 
She knew that opening the box was irreversible – but alongside the strife, she’d set hope forth to temper its effects. 
Today, Pandora’s Box suggests the extreme consequences of tampering with the unknown – but Pandora’s burning curiosity also suggests the duality that lies at the heart of human inquiry. 
Are we bound to investigate everything we don’t know, to mine the earth for more – or are there some mysteries that are better left unsolved? 

We all know that saving is important and is something that we should be doing. 
And yet, overall, we're doing less and less of it. 
[The Way We Work] We know what we need to do. 
The question is: How do we do it? 
And that's what I'm here to teach you. 
Your savings behavior isn't a question of how smart you are or how much willpower you have. 
The amount we save depends on the environmental cues around us. 
Let me give you an example. 
We ran a study in which, in one group, we showed people their income on a monthly basis. 
In another group, we showed people their income on a weekly basis. 
And what we found was that people who saw their income on a weekly basis were able to budget better throughout the month. 
Now, it's important to know that we didn't change how much money people were receiving, we just changed the environment in which they understood their income. 
And environmental cues like this have an impact. 
So I'm not going to share tricks with you that you already know. 
I'm not going to tell you how to open up a savings account or how to start saving for your retirement. 
What I am going to share with you is how to bridge this gap from your intentions to save and your actions. 
Are you ready? 
Here's number one: harness the power of pre-commitment. 
Fundamentally, we think about ourselves in two different ways: our present self and our future self. 
In the future, we're perfect. 
In the future, we're going to save for retirement, we're going to lose weight, we're going to call our parents more. 
But we oftentimes forget that our future self is exactly the same person as our present self. 
We know that one of the best times to save is when you get your tax return. 
So we tried an A/B test. 
In the first group, we texted people in early February, hopefully before they even filed for their taxes. 
And we asked them, "If you get a tax refund, what percentage would you like to save?" 
Now this is a really hard question. 
They didn't know if they would receive a tax refund or how much. 
But we asked the question anyway. 
In the second group, we asked people right after they received their refund, "What percentage would you like to save?" 
Now, here's what happened. 
In that second condition, when people just received their tax refund, they wanted to save about 17 percent of their tax refund. 
But in the condition when we asked people before they even filed their taxes, savings rates increased from 17 percent to 27 percent when we asked in February. 
Why? 
Because you're committing for your future self, and of course your future self can save 27 percent. 
These large changes in savings behavior came from the fact that we changed the decision-making environment. 
We want you to be able to harness that same power. 
So take a moment and think about the ways in which you can sign up your future self for something that you know today will be a little bit hard. 
Sign up for an app that lets you make savings decisions in advance. 
The trick is, you have to have that binding contract. 
Number two: use transition moments to your advantage. 
We did an experiment with a website that helps older adults share their housing. 
We ran two ads on social media, targeted to the same population of 64-year-olds. 
In one group, we said, "Hey, you're getting older. 
Are you ready for retirement? 
House sharing can help." 
In the second group, we got a little bit more specific and said, "You're 64 turning 65. 
Are you ready for retirement? 
House sharing can help." 
What we're doing in that second group is highlighting that a transition is happening. 
All of a sudden, we saw click-through rates, and ultimately sign-up rates, increase when we highlight that. 
In psychology, we call this the "fresh start effect." 
Whether it's the start of a new year or even a new season, your motivation to act increases. 
So right now, put a meeting request on your calendar for the day before your next birthday. 
Identify the one financial thing you most want to do. 
And commit yourself to it. 
The third and final trick: get a handle on small, frequent purchases. 
We've run a few different studies and found that the number one purchase people say they regret, after bank fees, is eating out. 
It's a frequent purchase we make almost every day, and it's death by a thousand cuts. 
A coffee here, a burrito there ... 
It adds up and decreases our ability to save. 
Back when I lived in New York City, I looked at my expenses and saw that I spent over 2,000 dollars on ride-sharing apps. 
It was more than my New York City rent. 
I vowed to make a change. 
And the next month, I spent 2,000 dollars again -- no change, because the information alone didn't change my behavior. 
I didn't change my environment. 
So now that I was 4,000 dollars in the hole, I did two things. 
The first is that I unlinked my credit card from my car-sharing apps. 
Instead, I linked a debit card that only had 300 dollars a month. 
If I needed more, I had to go through the whole process of adding a new card, and we know that every click, every barrier, changes our behavior. 
We aren't machines. 
We don't carry around an abacus every day, adding up what we're spending, in comparison to what we wanted. 
But what our brains are very good at is counting up the number of times we've done something. 
So I gave myself a limit. 
I can only use ride-sharing apps three times a week. 
It forced me to ration my travels. 
I got a handle on my car-sharing expenses to the benefit of my husband, because of the environmental changes that I did. 
So get a handle on whatever that purchase is for you, and change your environment to make it harder to do so. 
Those are my tips for you. 
But I want you to remember one thing. 
As human beings, we can be irrational when it comes to saving and spending and budgeting. 
But luckily, we know this about ourselves, and we can predict how we'll act under certain environments. 
Let's do that with saving. 
Let's change our environment to help our future selves. 

“It was a pleasure to burn. 
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.” Fahrenheit 451 opens in a blissful blaze - and before long, we learn what’s going up in flames. 
Ray Bradbury’s novel imagines a world where books are banned from all areas of life - and possessing, let alone reading them, is forbidden. 
The protagonist, Montag, is a fireman responsible for destroying what remains. 
But as his pleasure gives way to doubt, the story raises critical questions of how to preserve one’s mind in a society where free will, self-expression, and curiosity are under fire. 
In Montag’s world, mass media has a monopoly on information, erasing almost all ability for independent thought. 
On the subway, ads blast out of the walls. 
At home, Montag’s wife Mildred listens to the radio around the clock, and three of their parlor walls are plastered with screens. 
At work, the smell of kerosene hangs over Montag’s colleagues, who smoke and set their mechanical hound after rats to pass the time. 
When the alarm sounds they surge out in salamander-shaped vehicles, sometimes to burn whole libraries to the ground. 
But as he sets tomes ablaze day after day like “black butterflies,” Montag’s mind occasionally wanders to the contraband that lies hidden in his home. 
Gradually, he begins to question the basis of his work. 
Montag realizes he’s always felt uneasy - but has lacked the descriptive words to express his feelings in a society where even uttering the phrase “once upon a time” can be fatal. 
Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world governed by surveillance, robotics, and virtual reality- a vision that proved remarkably prescient, but also spoke to the concerns of the time. 
The novel was published in 1953, at the height of the Cold War. 
This era kindled widespread paranoia and fear throughout Bradbury’s home country of the United States, amplified by the suppression of information and brutal government investigations. 
In particular, this witch hunt mentality targeted artists and writers who were suspected of Communist sympathies. 
Bradbury was alarmed at this cultural crackdown. 
He believed it set a dangerous precedent for further censorship, and was reminded of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the book-burning of Fascist regimes. 
He explored these chilling connections in Fahrenheit 451, titled after the temperature at which paper burns. 
The accuracy of that temperature has been called into question, but that doesn’t diminish the novel’s standing as a masterpiece of dystopian fiction. 
Dystopian fiction as a genre amplifies troubling features of the world around us and imagines the consequences of taking them to an extreme. 
In many dystopian stories, the government imposes constrictions onto unwilling subjects. 
But in Fahrenheit 451, Montag learns that it was the apathy of the masses that gave rise to the current regime. 
The government merely capitalized on short attention spans and the appetite for mindless entertainment, reducing the circulation of ideas to ash. 
As culture disappears, imagination and self-expression follow. 
Even the way people talk is short-circuited - such as when Montag’s boss Captain Beatty describes the acceleration of mass culture: "Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! 
Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. 
Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes!" 
In this barren world, Montag learns how difficult it is to resist when there's nothing left to hold on to. 
Altogether, Fahrenheit 451 is a portrait of independent thought on the brink of extinction - and a parable about a society which is complicit in its own combustion. 

I'd like to take you back about seven years in my life. 
Friday afternoon, a few days before Christmas 2009, I was the director of operations at a consumer products company in San Francisco, and I was called into a meeting that was already in progress. 
That meeting turned out to be my exit interview. 
I was fired, along with several others. 
I was 64 years old at the time. 
It wasn't completely unexpected. 
I signed a stack of papers, gathered my personal effects, and left to join my wife who was waiting for me at a nearby restaurant, completely unaware. 
Fast-forward several hours, we both got really silly drunk. 
(Laughter) So, 40 plus years of continuous employment for a variety of companies, large and small, was over. 
I had a good a network, a good reputation -- I thought I'd be just fine. 
I was an engineer in manufacturing and packaging, I had a good background. 
Retirement was, like for so many people, simply not an option for me, so I turned to consulting for the next couple of years without any passion whatsoever. 
And then an idea began to take root, born from my concern for our environment. 
I wanted to build my own business, designing and manufacturing biodegradable packaging from waste -- paper, agricultural, even textile waste -- replacing the toxic, disposable plastic packaging to which we've all become addicted. 
This is called clean technology, and it felt really meaningful to me. 
A venture that could help to reduce the billions of pounds of single-use plastic packaging dumped each year, and polluting our land, our rivers and our oceans, and left for future generations to resolve -- our grandchildren, my grandchildren. 
And so now at the age of 66, with 40 years of experience, I became an entrepreneur for the very first time. 
(Cheers) (Applause) Thank you. 
But there's more. 
(Laughter) Lots of issues to deal with: manufacturing, outsourcing, job creation, patents, partnerships, funding -- these are all typical issues for a start-up, but hardly typical for me. 
And a word about funding. 
I live and work in San Francisco, and if you're looking for funding, you are typically going to compete with some very young people from the high-tech industry, and it can be very discouraging and intimidating. 
I have shoes older than most of these people. 
(Laughter) I do. 
(Laughter) But five years later, I'm thrilled and proud to share with you that our revenues have doubled every year, we have no debt, we have several marquee clients, our patent was issued, I have a wonderful partner who's been with me right from the beginning, and we've won more than 20 awards for the work that we've done. 
But best of all, we've made a small dent -- a very small dent -- in the worldwide plastic pollution crisis. 
(Applause) And I am doing the most rewarding and meaningful work of my life right now. 
I can tell you there's lots of resources available to entrepreneurs of all ages, but what I really yearned for five years ago was to find other first-time entrepreneurs who were my age. 
I had no role models, absolutely none. 
That 20-something app developer from Silicon Valley was not my role model. 
(Laughter) I'm sure he was very clever -- (Laughter) I want to do something about that, and I want all of us to do something about that. 
I want us to start talking more about people who don't become entrepreneurs until they are seniors. 
Talking about these bold men and women who are checking in when their peers, in essence, are checking out. 
And then connecting all these people across industries, across regions, across countries -- building a community. 
You know, the Small Business Administration tells us that 64 percent of new jobs created in the private sector in the USA are thanks to small businesses like mine. 
And who's to say that we'll stay forever small? 
We have an interesting culture that really expects when you reach a certain age, you're going to be golfing, or playing checkers, or babysitting the grandkids all of the time. 
And I adore my grandchildren -- (Laughter) and I'm also passionate about doing something meaningful in the global marketplace. 
And I'm going to have lots of company. 
The Census Bureau says that by 2050, there will be 84 million seniors in this country. 
That's an amazing number. 
That's almost twice as many as we have today. 
Can you imagine how many first-time entrepreneurs there will be among 84 million people? 
And they'll all have four decades of experience. 
(Laughter) So when I say, "Let's start talking more about these wonderful entrepreneurs," I mean, let's talk about their ventures, just as we do the ventures of their much younger counterparts. 
The older entrepreneurs in this country have a 70 percent success rate starting new ventures. 
We're like the Golden State Warriors of entrepreneurs -- (Laughter) (Applause) And that number plummets to 28 percent for younger entrepreneurs. 
This is according to a UK-based group called CMI. 
Aren't the accomplishments of a 70-year-old entrepreneur every bit as meaningful, every bit as newsworthy, as the accomplishments of a 30-year-old entrepreneur? 
Of course they are. 
That's why I'd like to make the phrase "70 over 70" just as -- (Laughter) just as commonplace as the phrase "30 under 30." 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Cheers) (Applause) 

The decorative use of wire in southern Africa dates back hundreds of years. 
But modernization actually brought communication and a whole new material, in the form of telephone wire. 
Rural to urban migration meant that newfound industrial materials started to replace hard-to-come-by natural grasses. 
So, here you can see the change from use -- starting to use contemporary materials. 
These pieces date back from the '40s to the late '50s. 
In the '90s, my interest and passion for transitional art forms led me to a new form, which came from a squatter camp outside Durban. 
And I got the opportunity to start working with this community at that point, and started developing, really, and mentoring them in terms of scale, in terms of the design. 
And the project soon grew from five to 50 weavers in about a year. 
Soon we had outgrown the scrap yards, what they could provide, so we coerced a wire manufacturer to help us, and not only to supply the materials on bobbins, but to produce to our color specifications. 
At the same time, I was thinking, well, there's lots of possibility here to produce contemporary products, away from the ethnic, a little bit more contemporary. 
So I developed a whole range around -- mass-produced range -- that obviously fitted into a much higher-end decor market that could be exported and also service our local market. 
We started experimenting, as you can see, in terms of shapes, forms. The scale became very important, and it's become our pet project. It's successful, it's been running for 12 years. And we supply the Conran shops, and Donna Karan, and so it's kind of great. 
This is our group, our main group of weavers. 
They come on a weekly basis to Durban. 
They all have bank accounts. 
They've all moved back to the rural area where they came from. 
It's a weekly turnaround of production. 
This is the community that I originally showed you the slide of. 
And that's also modernized today, and it's supporting work for 300 weavers. 
And the rest says it all. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Almost 50 years ago, psychiatrists Richard Rahe and Thomas Holmes developed an inventory of the most distressing human experiences that we could have. 
Number one on the list? Death of a spouse. 
Number two, divorce. Three, marital separation. 
Now, generally, but not always, for those three to occur, we need what comes in number seven on the list, which is marriage. 
(Laughter) Fourth on the list is imprisonment in an institution. 
Now, some say number seven has been counted twice. 
(Laughter) I don't believe that. 
When the life stress inventory was built, back then, a long-term relationship pretty much equated to a marriage. 
Not so now. 
So for the purposes of this talk, I'm going to be including de facto relationships, common-law marriages and same-sex marriages, or same-sex relationships soon hopefully to become marriages. 
And I can say from my work with same-sex couples, the principles I'm about to talk about are no different. 
They're the same across all relationships. 
So in a modern society, we know that prevention is better than cure. 
We vaccinate against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles. 
We have awareness campaigns for melanoma, stroke, diabetes -- all important campaigns. 
But none of those conditions come close to affecting 45 percent of us. 
Forty-five percent: that's our current divorce rate. 
Why no prevention campaign for divorce? 
Well, I think it's because our policymakers don't believe that things like attraction and the way relationships are built is changeable or educable. 
Why? 
Well, our policymakers currently are Generation X. 
They're in their 30s to 50s. 
And when I'm talking to these guys about these issues, I see their eyes glaze over, and I can see them thinking, "Doesn't this crazy psychiatrist get it? 
You can't control the way in which people attract other people and build relationships." 
Not so, our dear millennials. 
This is the most information-connected, analytical and skeptical generation, making the most informed decisions of any generation before them. 
And when I talk to millennials, I get a very different reaction. 
They actually want to hear about this. 
They want to know about how do we have relationships that last? 
So for those of you who want to embrace the post- "romantic destiny" era with me, let me talk about my three life hacks for preventing divorce. 
Now, we can intervene to prevent divorce at two points: later, once the cracks begin to appear in an established relationship; or earlier, before we commit, before we have children. 
And that's where I'm going to take us now. 
So my first life hack: millennials spend seven-plus hours on their devices a day. 
That's American data. 
And some say, probably not unreasonably, this has probably affected their face-to-face relationships. 
Indeed, and add to that the hookup culture, ergo apps like Tinder, and it's no great surprise that the 20-somethings that I work with will often talk to me about how it is often easier for them to have sex with somebody that they've met than have a meaningful conversation. 
Now, some say this is a bad thing. 
I say this is a really good thing. 
It's a particularly good thing to be having sex outside of the institution of marriage. 
Now, before you go out and get all moral on me, remember that Generation X, in the American Public Report, they found that 91 percent of women had had premarital sex by the age of 30. 
Ninety-one percent. 
It's a particularly good thing that these relationships are happening later. 
See, boomers in the '60s -- they were getting married at an average age for women of 20 and 23 for men. 
2015 in Australia? 
That is now 30 for women and 32 for men. 
That's a good thing, because the older you are when you get married, the lower your divorce rate. 
Why? 
Why is it helpful to get married later? 
Three reasons. 
Firstly, getting married later allows the other two preventers of divorce to come into play. 
They are tertiary education and a higher income, which tends to go with tertiary education. 
So these three factors all kind of get mixed up together. 
Number two, neuroplasticity research tell us that the human brain is still growing until at least the age of 25. 
So that means how you're thinking and what you're thinking is still changing up until 25. 
And thirdly, and most importantly to my mind, is personality. 
Your personality at the age of 20 does not correlate with your personality at the age of 50. 
But your personality at the age of 30 does correlate with your personality at the age of 50. 
So when I ask somebody who got married young why they broke up, and they say, "We grew apart," they're being surprisingly accurate, because the 20s is a decade of rapid change and maturation. 
So the first thing you want to get before you get married is older. 
(Laughter) Number two, John Gottman, psychologist and relationship researcher, can tell us many factors that correlate with a happy, successful marriage. 
But the one that I want to talk about is a big one: 81 percent of marriages implode, self-destruct, if this problem is present. 
And the second reason why I want to talk about it here is because it's something you can evaluate while you're dating. 
Gottman found that the relationships that were the most stable and happy over the longer term were relationships in which the couple shared power. 
They were influenceable: big decisions, like buying a house, overseas trips, buying a car, having children. 
But when Gottman drilled down on this data, what he found was that women were generally pretty influenceable. 
Guess where the problem lay? 
(Laughter) Yeah, there's only two options here, isn't there? 
Yeah, we men were to blame. 
The other thing that Gottman found is that men who are influenceable also tended to be "outstanding fathers." 
So women: How influenceable is your man? 
Men: you're with her because you respect her. 
Make sure that respect plays out in the decision-making process. 
Number three. 
I'm often intrigued by why couples come in to see me after they've been married for 30 or 40 years. 
This is a time when they're approaching the infirmities and illness of old age. 
It's a time when they're particularly focused on caring for each other. 
They'll forgive things that have bugged them for years. 
They'll forgive all betrayals, even infidelities, because they're focused on caring for each other. 
So what pulls them apart? 
The best word I have for this is reliability, or the lack thereof. 
Does your partner have your back? 
It takes two forms. 
Firstly, can you rely on your partner to do what they say they're going to do? 
Do they follow through? 
Secondly, if, for example, you're out and you're being verbally attacked by somebody, or you're suffering from a really disabling illness, does your partner step up and do what needs to be done to leave you feeling cared for and protected? 
And here's the rub: if you're facing old age, and your partner isn't doing that for you -- in fact, you're having to do that for them -- then in an already-fragile relationship, it can look a bit like you might be better off out of it rather than in it. 
So is your partner there for you when it really matters? 
Not all the time, 80 percent of the time, but particularly if it's important to you. 
On your side, think carefully before you commit to do something for your partner. 
It is much better to commit to as much as you can follow through than to commit to more sound-good-in-the-moment and then let them down. 
And if it's really important to your partner, and you commit to it, make sure you move hell and high water to follow through. 
Now, these are things that I'm saying you can look for. 
Don't worry, these are also things that can be built in existing relationships. 
I believe that the most important decision that you can make is who you choose as a life partner, who you choose as the other parent of your children. 
And of course, romance has to be there. 
Romance is a grand and beautiful and quirky thing. 
But we need to add to a romantic, loving heart an informed, thoughtful mind, as we make the most important decision of our life. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When my 91-year-old mother, Elia, moved in with me, I thought I was doing her a service. 
In fact, it was the other way around. 
You see, Mom was having issues with memory loss and accepting her age. 
She looked defeated. 
I tried to make her as comfortable as possible, but when I was at my easel, painting, I would peek over and see her just ... there. 
She'd be staring at nothing in particular. 
I'd watch her slowly climb the stairs, and she wasn't the mom I grew up with. 
I saw, instead, a frail, tiny, old woman. 
A few weeks went by, and I needed a break from my painting. 
I wanted to play with the new camera I had just bought. 
I was excited -- it had all sorts of dials, buttons and settings I wanted to learn, so I set up my tripod facing this large mirror, blocking the doorway to the only bathroom in the house. 
(Laughter) After a while, I hear, (Imitating Italian accent) "I need to use the washroom." 
(Laughter) "Five minutes, Mom. I need to do this." 
15 minutes later, and I hear, again, "I need to use the washroom." 
"Five more minutes." 
Then this happened. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And this. 
(Laughter) And then, this. 
(Laughter) I had my "aha!" moment. 
We connected. 
We had something tangible we could do together. 
My mom was born in a small mountain village in central Italy, where her parents had land and sheep. 
At a young age, her father died of pneumonia, leaving his wife and two daughters alone with all the heavy chores. 
They found that they couldn't cope. 
So a very hard decision was made. 
Mom, the oldest, at 13, was married off to a complete stranger twice her age. 
She went from being just a kid and was pushed into adulthood. 
Mom had her first child when she was only 16. 
Years later, and now living in Toronto, Mom got work in a clothing factory and soon became manager of a very large sewing department. 
And because it was full of immigrant workers, Mom taught herself words from translation books. 
She then practiced them in French, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, all around the house. 
I was in awe of her focus and determination to succeed at whatever she loved to do. 
After that bathroom "aha!" moment, I practiced my newfound camera skills with Mom as portrait model. 
Through all of this, she talked, and I listened. 
She'd tell me about her early childhood and how she was feeling now. 
We had each other's attention. 
Mom was losing her short-term memory, but was better recalling her younger years. 
I'd ask, and she would tell me stories. 
I listened, and I was her audience. 
I got ideas. 
I wrote them down, and I sketched them out. 
I showed her what to do by acting out the scenarios myself. 
We would then stage them. 
So she posed, and I learned more about photography. 
Mom loved the process, the acting. 
She felt worthy again, she felt wanted and needed. 
And she certainly wasn't camera-shy. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Mom laughed hysterically at this one. 
(Laughter) The idea for this image came from an old German film I'd seen, about a submarine, called "Das Boot." 
As you can see, what I got instead looked more like "E.T." 
(Laughter) So I put this image aside, thinking it was a total failure, because it didn't reach my particular vision. 
But Mom laughed so hard, I eventually, for fun, decided to post it online anyway. 
It got an incredible amount of attention. 
Now, with any Alzheimer's, dementia, there's a certain amount of frustration and sadness for everyone involved. 
This is Mom's silent scream. 
Her words to me one day were, "Why is my head so full of things to say, but before they reach my mouth, I forget what they are?" 
"Why is my head so full of things to say, but before they reach my mouth, I forget what they are?" 
(Applause) Now, as full-time care partner and full-time painter, I had my frustrations too. 
(Laughter) But to balance off all the difficulties, we played. 
That was Mom's happy place. 
And I needed her to be there, too. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) Now, Mom was also preoccupied with aging. 
She would say, "How did I get so old, so fast?" 
(Audience sighs) "So old." 
"So fast." 
I also got Mom to model for my oil paintings. 
This painting is called "The Dressmaker." 
I remember, as a kid, Mom sewing clothes for the whole family on this massive, heavy sewing machine that was bolted to the floor in the basement. 
Many nights, I would go downstairs and bring my schoolwork with me. 
I would sit behind her in this overstuffed chair. 
The low hum of the huge motor and the repetitive stitching sounds were comforting to me. 
When Mom moved into my house, I saved this machine and stored it in my studio for safekeeping. 
This painting brought me back to my childhood. 
The interesting part was that it was now Mom, sitting behind me, watching me paint her working on that very same machine she sewed at when I sat behind her, watching her sew, 50 years earlier. 
I also gave Mom a project to do, to keep her busy and thinking. 
I provided her with a small camera and asked her to take at least 10 pictures a day of anything she wanted. 
These are Mom's photographs. 
She's never held a camera in her life before this. 
She was 93. 
We would sit down together and talk about our work. 
I would try to explain (Laughter) how and why I did them, the meaning, the feeling, why they were relevant. 
Mom, on the other hand, would just bluntly say, "sì," "no," "bella" or "bruta." 
(Laughter) I watched her facial expressions. 
She always had the last say, with words or without. 
This voyage of discovery hasn't ended with Mom. 
She is now in an assisted living residence, a 10-minute walk away from my home. 
I visit her every other day. 
Her dementia had gotten to the point where it was unsafe for her to be in my house. 
It has a lot of stairs. 
She doesn't know my name anymore. 
(Voice breaking) But you know what? That's OK. 
She still recognizes my face and always has a big smile when she sees me. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) I don't take pictures of her anymore. 
That wouldn't be fair or ethical on my part. 
And she wouldn't understand the reasons for doing them. 
My father, my brother, (Voice breaking) my nephew, my partner and my best friend, all passed away suddenly. 
And I didn't have the chance to tell them how much I appreciated and loved them. 
With Mom, I need to be there and make it a very long goodbye. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) For me, it's about being present and really listening. 
Dependents want to feel a part of something, anything. 
It doesn't need to be something exceptionally profound that's shared -- it could be as simple as walks together. 
Give them a voice of interaction, participation, and a feeling of belonging. 
Make the time meaningful. 
Life, it's about wanting to live and not waiting to die. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Can I get a wave and a smile from everyone, please? 
(Laughter) This is for you, Mom. 
(Camera clicks) (Applause) 

At this very moment, with every breath we take, major delta cities across the globe are sinking, including New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, New Orleans, and as well as my city, Bangkok. 
Here is the usual version of climate change. 
This is mine. 
Nothing much, just a crocodile on the street. 
(Laughter) This is an urgent impact of climate change: over sinking cities. 
Here, you can see the urbanization of Bangkok, growing in every direction, shifting from porous, agricultural land -- the land that can breathe and absorb water -- to a concrete jungle. 
This is what parts of it look like after 30 minutes of rainfall. 
And every time it rains, I wish my car could turn into a boat. 
This land has no room for water. 
It has lost its absorbent capacity. 
The reality of Bangkok's metropolitan region is a city of 15 million people living, working and commuting on top of a shifting, muddy river delta. 
Bangkok is sinking more than one centimeter per year, which is four times faster than the rate of predicted sea level rise. 
And we could be below sea level by 2030, which will be here too soon. 
There is no coincidence that I am here as a landscape architect. 
As a child, I grew up in a row house next to the busy road always filled with traffic. 
In front of my house, there was a concrete parking lot, and that was my playground. 
The only living creature I would find, and had fun with, were these sneaky little plants trying to grow through the crack of the concrete pavement. 
My favorite game with friends was to dig a bigger and bigger hole through this crack to let this little plant creep out -- sneak out more and more. 
And yes, landscape architecture gives me the opportunity to continue my cracking ambition -- (Laughter) to connect this concrete land back to nature. 
Before, Thais -- my people -- we were adapted to the cycle of the wet and dry season, and you could call us amphibious. 
(Laughter) We lived both on land and on water. 
We were adapted to both. 
And flooding was a happy event, when the water fertilized our land. 
But now, flooding means ... 
disaster. 
In 2011, Thailand was hit by the most damaging and the most expensive flood disaster in our history. 
Flooding has turned central Thailand into an enormous lake. 
Here, you can see the scale of the flood in the center of the image, to the scale of Bangkok, outlined in yellow. 
The water was overflowing from the north, making its way across several provinces. 
Millions of my people, including me and my family, were displaced and homeless. 
Some had to escape the city. 
Many were terrified of losing their home and their belongings, so they stayed back in the flood with no electricity and clean water. 
For me, this flood reflects clearly that our modern infrastructure, and especially our notion of fighting flood with concrete, had made us so extremely vulnerable to the climate uncertainty. 
But in the heart of this disaster, I found my calling. 
I cannot just sit and wait as my city continues to sink. 
The city needed me, and I had the ability to fix this problem. 
Six years ago, I started my project. 
My teams and I won the design competition for Chulalongkorn Centenary Park. 
This was the big, bold mission of the first university in Thailand for celebrating its hundredth anniversary by giving this piece of land as a public park to our city. 
Having a park sounds very normal to many other cities, but not in Bangkok, which has one of the lowest public green space per capita among megacities in Asia. 
Our project's become the first new public park in almost 30 years. 
The 11-acre park -- a big green crack at the heart of Bangkok -- opened just last year. 
(Applause and cheers) Thank you. 
(Applause) For four years, we have pushed through countless meetings to convince and never give up to convincing that this park isn't just for beautification or recreation: it must help the city deal with water, it must help the city confront climate change. 
And here is how it works. 
Bangkok is a flat city, so we harnessed the power of gravity by inclining the whole park to collect every drop of rain. 
The gravity force pulls down the runoff from the highest point to the lowest point. 
This park has three main elements that work as one system. 
The first -- the green roof. 
This is the biggest green roof in Thailand, with the rainwater tanks and museum underneath. 
In the dry season, the collected rain can be used to water the park for up to a month. 
The runoff on the green roof then falls through wetlands with the native water plants that can help filter and help clean water. 
And at the lower end, the retention pond collects all of the water. 
At this pond, there are water bikes. 
People can pedal and help clean water. 
Their exercise becomes an active part of the park water system. 
When life gives you a flood, you have fun with the water. 
(Laughter) Centenary Park gives room for people and room for water, which is exactly what we and our cities need. 
This is an amphibious design. 
This park is not about getting rid of flood. 
It's about creating a way to live with it. 
And not a single drop of rain is wasted in this park. 
This park can hold and collect a million gallons of water. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Every given project, for me, is an opportunity to create more green cracks through this concrete jungle by using landscape architecture as a solution, like turning this concrete roof into an urban farm, which can help absorb rain; reduce urban heat island and grow food in the middle of the city; reuse the abandoned concrete structure to become a green pedestrian bridge; and another flood-proof park at Thammasat University, which nearly completes the biggest green roof on an academic campus yet in Southeast Asia. 
Severe flooding is our new normal, putting the southeast Asian region -- the region with the most coastline -- at extreme risk. 
Creating a park is just one solution. 
The awareness of climate change means we, in every profession we are involved, are increasingly obligated to understand the climate risk and put whatever we are working on as part of the solution. 
Because if our cities continue the way they are now, a similar catastrophe will happen again ... 
and again. 
Creating a solution in these sinking cities is like making the impossible possible. 
And for that, I would like to share one word that I always keep in mind, that is, "tangjai." 
The literal translation for "tang" is "to firmly stand," and "jai" means "heart." 
Firmly stand your heart at your goal. 
In Thai language, when you commit to do something, you put tangjai in front of your word, so your heart will be in your action. 
No matter how rough the path, how big the crack, you push through to your goal, because that's where your heart is. 
And yes, Thailand is home. 
This land is my only home, and that's where I firmly stand my heart. 
Where do you stand yours? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Kòp kun ka. 
(Applause and cheers) 

In 1992, a cargo ship carrying bath toys got caught in a storm. 
Shipping containers washed overboard, and the waves swept 28,000 rubber ducks and other toys into the North Pacific. 
But they didn’t stick together. 
Quite the opposite– the ducks have since washed up all over the world, and researchers have used their paths to chart a better understanding of ocean currents. 
Ocean currents are driven by a range of sources: the wind, tides, changes in water density, and the rotation of the Earth. 
The topography of the ocean floor and the shoreline modifies those motions, causing currents to speed up, slow down, or change direction. 
Ocean currents fall into two main categories: surface currents and deep ocean currents. 
Surface currents control the motion of the top 10 percent of the ocean’s water, while deep-ocean currents mobilize the other 90 percent. 
Though they have different causes, surface and deep ocean currents influence each other in an intricate dance that keeps the entire ocean moving. 
Near the shore, surface currents are driven by both the wind and tides, which draw water back and forth as the water level falls and rises. 
Meanwhile, in the open ocean, wind is the major force behind surface currents. 
As wind blows over the ocean, it drags the top layers of water along with it. 
That moving water pulls on the layers underneath, and those pull on the ones beneath them. 
In fact, water as deep as 400 meters is still affected by the wind at the ocean’s surface. 
If you zoom out to look at the patterns of surface currents all over the earth, you’ll see that they form big loops called gyres, which travel clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere. 
That’s because of the way the Earth’s rotation affects the wind patterns that give rise to these currents. 
If the earth didn’t rotate, air and water would simply move back and forth between low pressure at the equator and high pressure at the poles. 
But as the earth spins, air moving from the equator to the North Pole is deflected eastward, and air moving back down is deflected westward. 
The mirror image happens in the southern hemisphere, so that the major streams of wind form loop-like patterns around the ocean basins. 
This is called the Coriolis Effect. 
The winds push the ocean beneath them into the same rotating gyres. 
And because water holds onto heat more effectively than air, these currents help redistribute warmth around the globe. 
Unlike surface currents, deep ocean currents are driven primarily by changes in the density of seawater. 
As water moves towards the North Pole, it gets colder. 
It also has a higher concentration of salt, because the ice crystals that form trap water while leaving salt behind. 
This cold, salty water is more dense, so it sinks, and warmer surface water takes its place, setting up a vertical current called thermohaline circulation. 
Thermohaline circulation of deep water and wind-driven surface currents combine to form a winding loop called the Global Conveyor Belt. 
As water moves from the depths of the ocean to the surface, it carries nutrients that nourish the microorganisms which form the base of many ocean food chains. 
The global conveyor belt is the longest current in the world, snaking all around the globe. 
But it only moves a few centimeters per second. 
It could take a drop of water a thousand years to make the full trip. 
However, rising sea temperatures are causing the conveyor belt to seemingly slow down. 
Models show this causing havoc with weather systems on both sides of the Atlantic, and no one knows what would happen if it continues to slow or if it stopped altogether. 
The only way we’ll be able to forecast correctly and prepare accordingly will be to continue to study currents and the powerful forces that shape them. 

A garrulous grandmother and a roaming bandit face off on a dirt road. 
A Bible salesman lures a one-legged philosopher into a barn. 
A traveling handyman teaches a deaf woman her first word on an old plantation. 
From her farm in rural Georgia, surrounded by a flock of pet birds, Flannery O’Connor scribbled tales of outcasts, intruders and misfits staged in the world she knew best: the American South. 
She published two novels, but is perhaps best known for her short stories, which explored small-town life with stinging language, offbeat humor, and delightfully unsavory scenarios. 
In her spare time O’Connor drew cartoons, and her writing is also brimming with caricature. 
In her stories, a mother has a face “as broad and innocent as a cabbage,” a man has as much drive as a “floor mop,” and one woman’s body is shaped like “a funeral urn.” The names of her characters are equally sly. 
Take the story “The Life You Save May be Your Own,” where the one-handed drifter Tom Shiftlet wanders into the lives of an old woman named Lucynell Crater and her deaf and mute daughter. 
Though Mrs. Crater is self-assured, her isolated home is falling apart. 
At first, we may be suspicious of Shiftlet’s motives when he offers to help around the house, but O’Connor soon reveals the old woman to be just as scheming as her unexpected guest– and rattles the reader’s presumptions about who has the upper hand. 
For O’Connor, no subject was off limits. 
Though she was a devout Catholic, she wasn’t afraid to explore the possibility of pious thought and unpious behavior co-existing in the same person. 
In her novel The Violent Bear it Away, the main character grapples with the choice to become a man of God – but also sets fires and commits murder. 
The book opens with the reluctant prophet in a particularly compromising position: “Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave.” This leaves a passerby to “drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it […] with enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.” Though her own politics are still debated, O’Connor’s fiction could also be attuned to the racism of the South. 
In “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” she depicts a son raging at his mother’s bigotry. 
But the story reveals that he has his own blind spots and suggests that simply recognizing evil doesn’t exempt his character from scrutiny. 
Even as O’Connor probes the most unsavory aspects of humanity, she leaves the door to redemption open a crack. 
In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she redeems an insufferable grandmother for forgiving a hardened criminal, even as he closes in on her family. 
Though we might balk at the price the woman pays for this redemption, we’re forced to confront the nuance in moments we might otherwise consider purely violent or evil. 
O’Connor’s mastery of the grotesque and her explorations of the insularity and superstition of the South led her to be classified as a Southern Gothic writer. 
But her work pushed beyond the purely ridiculous and frightening characteristics associated with the genre to reveal the variety and nuance of human character. 
She knew some of this variety was uncomfortable, and that her stories could be an acquired taste – but she took pleasure in challenging her readers. 
O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39, after the disease had mostly confined her to her farm in Georgia for twelve years. 
During those years, she penned much of her most imaginative work. 
Her ability to flit between revulsion and revelation continues to draw readers to her endlessly surprising fictional worlds. 
As her character Tom Shiftlet notes, the body is “like a house: it don’t go anywhere, but the spirit, lady, is like an automobile: always on the move.” 

From Shakespeare’s plays to modern TV dramas, the unscrupulous schemer for whom the ends always justify the means has become a familiar character type we love to hate. 
So familiar, in fact, that for centuries we’ve had a single word to describe such characters: Machiavellian. 
But is it possible that we’ve been using that word wrong this whole time? 
The early 16th century statesman Niccoló Machiavelli wrote many works of history, philosophy, and drama. 
But his lasting notoriety comes from a brief political essay known as The Prince, framed as advice to current and future monarchs. 
Machiavelli wasn’t the first to do this– in fact there was an entire tradition of works known as “mirrors for princes” going back to antiquity. 
But unlike his predecessors, Machiavelli didn’t try to describe an ideal government or exhort his audience to rule justly and virtuously. 
Instead, he focused on the question of power– how to acquire it, and how to keep it. 
And in the decades after it was published, The Prince gained a diabolical reputation. 
During the European Wars of Religion, both Catholics and Protestants blamed Machiavelli for inspiring acts of violence and tyranny committed by their opponents. 
By the end of the century, Shakespeare was using “Machiavel” to denote an amoral opportunist, leading directly to our popular use of “Machiavellian” as a synonym for manipulative villainy. 
At first glance, The Prince’s reputation as a manual for tyranny seems well-deserved. 
Throughout, Machiavelli appears entirely unconcerned with morality, except insofar as it’s helpful or harmful to maintaining power. 
For instance, princes are told to consider all the atrocities necessary to seize power, and to commit them in a single stroke to ensure future stability. 
Attacking neighboring territories and oppressing religious minorities are mentioned as effective ways of occupying the public. 
Regarding a prince’s personal behavior, Machiavelli advises keeping up the appearance of virtues such as honesty or generosity, but being ready to abandon them as soon as one’s interests are threatened. 
Most famously, he notes that for a ruler, “it is much safer to be feared than loved.” The tract even ends with an appeal to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the recently installed ruler of Florence, urging him to unite the fragmented city-states of Italy under his rule. 
Many have justified Machiavelli as motivated by unsentimental realism and a desire for peace in an Italy torn by internal and external conflict. 
According to this view, Machiavelli was the first to understand a difficult truth: the greater good of political stability is worth whatever unsavory tactics are needed to attain it. 
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin suggested that rather than being amoral, The Prince hearkens back to ancient Greek morality, placing the glory of the state above the Christian ideal of individual salvation. 
But what we know about Machiavelli might not fit this picture. 
The author had served in his native Florence for 14 years as a diplomat, staunchly defending its elected republican government against would-be monarchs. 
When the Medici family seized power, he not only lost his position, but was even tortured and banished. 
With this in mind, it’s possible to read the pamphlet he wrote from exile not as a defense of princely rule, but a scathing description of how it operates. 
Indeed, Enlightenment figures like Spinoza saw it as warning free citizens of the various ways in which they can be subjugated by aspiring rulers. 
In fact, both readings might be true. 
Machiavelli may have written a manual for tyrannical rulers, but by sharing it, he also revealed the cards to those who would be ruled. 
In doing so, he revolutionized political philosophy, laying the foundations for Hobbes and future thinkers to study human affairs based on their concrete realities rather than preconceived ideals. 
Through his brutal and shocking honesty, Machiavelli sought to shatter popular delusions about what power really entails. 
And as he wrote to a friend shortly before his death, he hoped that people would “learn the way to Hell in order to flee from it." 

Do you remember your first kiss? 
Or that time you burned the roof of your mouth on a hot slice of pizza? 
What about playing tag or duck, duck, goose as a child? 
These are all instances where we're using touch to understand something. 
And it's the basis of haptic design. 
"Haptic" means of or relating to the sense of touch. 
And we've all been using that our entire lives. 
I was working on my computer when my friend, seeing me hunched over typing, walked over behind me. 
She put her left thumb into the left side of my lower back, while reaching her right index finger around to the front of my right shoulder. 
Instinctively, I sat up straight. 
In one quick and gentle gesture, she had communicated how to improve my posture. 
The paper I was working on at that very moment centered around developing new ways to teach movement using technology. 
I wanted to create a suit that could teach a person kung fu. 
(Laughter) But I had no idea how to communicate movement without an instructor being in the room. 
And in that moment, it became crystal clear: touch. 
If I had vibrating motors where she had placed each of her fingers, paired with motion-capture data of my current and optimal posture, I could simulate the entire experience without an instructor needing to be in the room. 
But there was still one important part of the puzzle that was missing. 
If I want you to raise your wrist two inches off of your lap, using vibration, how do I tell you to do that? 
Do I put a motor at the top of your wrist, so you know to lift up? 
Or do I put one at the bottom of your wrist, so it feels like you're being pushed up? 
There were no readily available answers because there was no commonly agreed-upon haptic language to communicate information with. 
So my cofounders and I set out to create that language. 
And the first device we built was not a kung fu suit. 
(Laughter) But in a way, it was even more impressive because of its simplicity and usefulness. 
We started with the use case of navigation, which is a simplified form of movement. 
We then created Wayband, a wrist-wearable device that could orient a user toward a destination, using vibrating cues. 
We would ask people to spin around and to stop in a way that they felt was the right way to go. 
Informally, we tried this with hundreds of people, and most could figure it out within about 15 seconds. 
It was that intuitive. 
Initially, we were just trying to get people out of their phones and back into the real world. 
But the more we experimented, the more we realized that those who stood to benefit most from our work were people who had little or no sight. 
When we first approached a blind organization, they told us, "Don't build a blind device. 
Build a device that everyone can use but that's optimized for the blind experience." 
We created our company WearWorks with three guiding principles: make cool stuff, create the greatest impact we can in our lifetimes and reimagine an entire world designed for touch. 
And on November 5, 2017, Wayband helped a person who was blind run the first 15 miles of the New York City Marathon without any sighted assistance. 
(Applause) It didn't get him through the entire race due to the heavy rain, but that didn't matter. 
(Laughter) We had proved the point: that it was possible to navigate a complex route using only touch. 
So, why touch? 
The skin has an innate sensitivity akin to the eyes' ability to recognize millions of colors or the ears' ability to recognize complex pitch and tone. 
Yet, as a communications channel, it's been largely relegated to Morse code-like cell phone notifications. 
If you were to suddenly receive a kiss or a punch, your reaction would be instinctive and immediate. 
Meanwhile, your brain would be playing catch-up on the back end to understand the details of what just occurred. 
And compared to instincts, conscious thought is pretty slow. 
But it's a lightning bolt compared to the snail's pace of language acquisition. 
I spent a considerable amount of time learning Spanish, Japanese, German and currently Swedish, with varying degrees of failure. 
(Laughter) But within those failures were kernels of how different languages are organized. 
That gave our team insight into how to use the linguistic order of well-established languages as inspiration for an entirely new haptic language, one based purely on touch. 
It also showed us when using language mechanics wasn't the best way to deliver information. 
In the same way a smile is a smile across every culture, what if there was some underlying mechanism of touch that transcended linguistic and cultural boundaries? 
A universal language, of sorts. 
You see, I could give you buzz-buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz, and you would eventually learn that that particular vibration means "stop." 
But as haptic designers, we challenged ourselves. 
What would it be like to design "stop?" 
Well, based on context, most of us have the experience of being in a vehicle and having that vehicle stop suddenly, along with our body's reaction to it. 
So if I wanted you to stop, I could send you a vibration pattern, sure. 
Or, I could design a haptic experience that just made stopping feel like it was the right thing to do. 
And that takes more than an arbitrary assignment of haptic cues to meanings. 
It takes a deep empathy. 
It also takes the ability to distill human experience into meaningful insights and then into haptic gestures and products. 
Haptic design is going to expand the human ability to sense and respond to our environments, both physical and virtual. 
There's a new frontier: touch. 
And it has the power to change how we all see the world around us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Claps of thunder and flashes of lightning illuminate a swelling sea, as a ship buckles beneath the waves. 
This is no ordinary storm, but a violent and vengeful tempest, and it sets the stage for Shakespeare’s most enigmatic play. 
As the skies clear, we are invited into a world that seems far removed from our own, but is rife with familiar concerns about freedom, power, and control. 
The Tempest is set on a desert island, exposed to the elements and ruled with magic and might by Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan. 
Betrayed by his brother Antonio, Prospero has been marooned on the island for twelve years with his daughter Miranda and his beloved books. 
In this time he’s learned the magic of the island and uses it to harness its elementary spirits. 
He also rules over the island’s only earthly inhabitant, the dejected and demonized Caliban. 
But after years of plotting revenge, Prospero’s foe is finally in sight. 
With the help of the fluttering sprite Ariel, the magician destroys his brother’s ship and washes its sailors ashore. 
Prospero’s plotting even extends to his daughter’s love life, whom he plans to fall for stranded prince Ferdinand. 
And as Prospero and Ariel close in on Antonio, Caliban joins forces with some drunken sailors, who hatch a comic plot to take the island. 
The play strips society down to its basest desires, with each faction in hot pursuit of power- be it over the land, other people, or their own destiny. 
But Shakespeare knows that power is always a moving target; and as he reveals these characters’ dark histories, we begin to wonder if this vicious cycle will ever end. 
Although Prospero was wronged by Antonio, he has long inflicted his own abuses on the island, hoarding its magical properties and natural re-sources for himself. 
Caliban especially resents this takeover. 
The son of Sycorax, a witch who previously ruled the island, he initially helped the exiles find their footing. 
But he’s since become their slave, and rants with furious regret: “And then I loved thee,/ And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle/ The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile./ Cursed be I that did so!” With his thunderous language and seething anger, Caliban constantly reminds Prospero of what came before: this island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou takest from me. 
Yet Sycorax also abused the island, and imprisoned Ariel until Prospero released him. 
Now Ariel spends the play hoping to repay his debt and earn his freedom, while Caliban is enslaved indefinitely, or at least as long as Prospero is in charge. 
For these reasons and many more, The Tempest has often been read as an exploration of colonialism, and the moral dilemmas that come with en-counters of “brave new world(s)." 
Questions of agency and justice hang over the play: is Caliban the rightful master of the land? 
Will Ariel flutter free? 
And is Prospero the mighty overseer- or is there some deeper magic at work, beyond any one character's grasp? 
Throughout the play, Ariel constantly reminds Prospero of the freedom he is owed. 
But the question lingers of whether the invader will be able to relinquish his grip. 
The question of ending one’s reign is particularly potent given that The Tempest is believed to be Shakespeare’s final play. 
In many ways Prospero’s actions echo that of the great entertainer him-self, who hatched elaborate plots, maneuvered those around him, and cast a spell over characters and audience alike. 
But by the end of his grand performance of power and control, Prospero’s final lines see him humbled by his audience - and the power that they hold over his creations. 
"With the help of your good hands./ Gentle breath of yours my sails/ Must fill or else my project fails,/ Which was to please." 
This evokes Shakespeare’s own role as the great entertainer who surrenders himself, ultimately, to our applause. 

Is it just me, or are there other people here that are a little bit disappointed with democracy? 
(Applause) So let's look at a few numbers. 
If we look across the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30 years has been just 67 percent. 
Now, if we go to Europe and we look at people that participated in EU parliamentary elections, the median turnout in those elections is just 42 percent. 
Now let's go to New York, and let's see how many people voted in the last election for mayor. 
We will find that only 24 percent of people showed up to vote. 
What that means is that, if "Friends" was still running, Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote. 
(Laughter) And you cannot blame them because people are tired of politicians. 
And people are tired of other people using the data that they have generated to communicate with their friends and family, to target political propaganda at them. 
But the thing about this is that this is not new. 
Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you before they use your zip code or your gender or your age, because the idea of targeting people with propaganda for political purposes is as old as politics. 
And the reason why that idea is there is because democracy has a basic vulnerability. 
This is the idea of a representative. 
In principle, democracy is the ability of people to exert power. 
But in practice, we have to delegate that power to a representative that can exert that power for us. 
That representative is a bottleneck, or a weak spot. 
It is the place that you want to target if you want to attack democracy because you can capture democracy by either capturing that representative or capturing the way that people choose it. 
So the big question is: Is this the end of history? 
Is this the best that we can do or, actually, are there alternatives? 
Some people have been thinking about alternatives, and one of the ideas that is out there is the idea of direct democracy. 
This is the idea of bypassing politicians completely and having people vote directly on issues, having people vote directly on bills. 
But this idea is naive because there's too many things that we would need to choose. 
If you look at the 114th US Congress, you will have seen that the House of Representatives considered more than 6,000 bills, the Senate considered more than 3,000 bills and they approved more than 300 laws. 
Those would be many decisions that each person would have to make a week on topics that they know little about. 
So there's a big cognitive bandwidth problem if we're going to try to think about direct democracy as a viable alternative. 
So some people think about the idea of liquid democracy, or fluid democracy, which is the idea that you endorse your political power to someone, who can endorse it to someone else, and, eventually, you create a large follower network in which, at the end, there's a few people that are making decisions on behalf of all of their followers and their followers. 
But this idea also doesn't solve the problem of the cognitive bandwidth and, to be honest, it's also quite similar to the idea of having a representative. 
So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to be a little bit provocative, and I'm going to ask you, well: What if, instead of trying to bypass politicians, we tried to automate them? 
The idea of automation is not new. 
It was started more than 300 years ago, when French weavers decided to automate the loom. 
The winner of that industrial war was Joseph-Marie Jacquard. 
He was a French weaver and merchant that married the loom with the steam engine to create autonomous looms. 
And in those autonomous looms, he gained control. 
He could now make fabrics that were more complex and more sophisticated than the ones they were able to do by hand. 
But also, by winning that industrial war, he laid out what has become the blueprint of automation. 
The way that we automate things for the last 300 years has always been the same: we first identify a need, then we create a tool to satisfy that need, like the loom, in this case, and then we study how people use that tool to automate that user. 
That's how we came from the mechanical loom to the autonomous loom, and that took us a thousand years. 
Now, it's taken us only a hundred years to use the same script to automate the car. 
But the thing is that, this time around, automation is kind of for real. 
This is a video that a colleague of mine from Toshiba shared with me that shows the factory that manufactures solid state drives. 
The entire factory is a robot. 
There are no humans in that factory. 
And the robots are soon to leave the factories and become part of our world, become part of our workforce. 
So what I do in my day job is actually create tools that integrate data for entire countries so that we can ultimately have the foundations that we need for a future in which we need to also manage those machines. 
But today, I'm not here to talk to you about these tools that integrate data for countries. 
But I'm here to talk to you about another idea that might help us think about how to use artificial intelligence in democracy. 
Because the tools that I build are designed for executive decisions. 
These are decisions that can be cast in some sort of term of objectivity -- public investment decisions. 
But there are decisions that are legislative, and these decisions that are legislative require communication among people that have different points of view, require participation, require debate, require deliberation. 
And for a long time, we have thought that, well, what we need to improve democracy is actually more communication. 
So all of the technologies that we have advanced in the context of democracy, whether they are newspapers or whether it is social media, have tried to provide us with more communication. 
But we've been down that rabbit hole, and we know that's not what's going to solve the problem. 
Because it's not a communication problem, it's a cognitive bandwidth problem. 
So if the problem is one of cognitive bandwidth, well, adding more communication to people is not going to be what's going to solve it. 
What we are going to need instead is to have other technologies that help us deal with some of the communication that we are overloaded with. 
Think of, like, a little avatar, a software agent, a digital Jiminy Cricket -- (Laughter) that basically is able to answer things on your behalf. 
And if we had that technology, we would be able to offload some of the communication and help, maybe, make better decisions or decisions at a larger scale. 
And the thing is that the idea of software agents is also not new. 
We already use them all the time. 
We use software agents to choose the way that we're going to drive to a certain location, the music that we're going to listen to or to get suggestions for the next books that we should read. 
So there is an obvious idea in the 21st century that was as obvious as the idea of putting together a steam engine with a loom at the time of Jacquard. 
And that idea is combining direct democracy with software agents. 
Imagine, for a second, a world in which, instead of having a representative that represents you and millions of other people, you can have a representative that represents only you, with your nuanced political views -- that weird combination of libertarian and liberal and maybe a little bit conservative on some issues and maybe very progressive on others. 
Politicians nowadays are packages, and they're full of compromises. 
But you might have someone that can represent only you, if you are willing to give up the idea that that representative is a human. 
If that representative is a software agent, we could have a senate that has as many senators as we have citizens. 
And those senators are going to be able to read every bill and they're going to be able to vote on each one of them. 
So there's an obvious idea that maybe we want to consider. 
But I understand that in this day and age, this idea might be quite scary. 
In fact, thinking of a robot coming from the future to help us run our governments sounds terrifying. 
But we've been there before. 
(Laughter) And actually he was quite a nice guy. 
So what would the Jacquard loom version of this idea look like? 
It would be a very simple system. 
Imagine a system that you log in and you create your avatar, and then you're going to start training your avatar. 
So you can provide your avatar with your reading habits, or connect it to your social media, or you can connect it to other data, for example by taking psychological tests. 
And the nice thing about this is that there's no deception. 
You are not providing data to communicate with your friends and family that then gets used in a political system. 
You are providing data to a system that is designed to be used to make political decisions on your behalf. 
Then you take that data and you choose a training algorithm, because it's an open marketplace in which different people can submit different algorithms to predict how you're going to vote, based on the data you have provided. 
And the system is open, so nobody controls the algorithms; there are algorithms that become more popular and others that become less popular. 
Eventually, you can audit the system. 
You can see how your avatar is working. 
If you like it, you can leave it on autopilot. 
If you want to be a little more controlling, you can actually choose that they ask you every time they're going to make a decision, or you can be anywhere in between. 
One of the reasons why we use democracy so little may be because democracy has a very bad user interface. 
And if we improve the user interface of democracy, we might be able to use it more. 
Of course, there's a lot of questions that you might have. 
Well, how do you train these avatars? 
How do you keep the data secure? 
How do you keep the systems distributed and auditable? 
How about my grandmother, who's 80 years old and doesn't know how to use the internet? 
Trust me, I've heard them all. 
So when you think about an idea like this, you have to beware of pessimists because they are known to have a problem for every solution. 
(Laughter) So I want to invite you to think about the bigger ideas. 
The questions I just showed you are little ideas because they are questions about how this would not work. 
The big ideas are ideas of: What else can you do with this if this would happen to work? 
And one of those ideas is, well, who writes the laws? 
In the beginning, we could have the avatars that we already have, voting on laws that are written by the senators or politicians that we already have. 
But if this were to work, you could write an algorithm that could try to write a law that would get a certain percentage of approval, and you could reverse the process. 
Now, you might think that this idea is ludicrous and we should not do it, but you cannot deny that it's an idea that is only possible in a world in which direct democracy and software agents are a viable form of participation. 
So how do we start the revolution? 
We don't start this revolution with picket fences or protests or by demanding our current politicians to be changed into robots. 
That's not going to work. 
This is much more simple, much slower and much more humble. 
We start this revolution by creating simple systems like this in grad schools, in libraries, in nonprofits. 
And we try to figure out all of those little questions and those little problems that we're going to have to figure out to make this idea something viable, to make this idea something that we can trust. 
And as we create those systems that have a hundred people, a thousand people, a hundred thousand people voting in ways that are not politically binding, we're going to develop trust in this idea, the world is going to change, and those that are as little as my daughter is right now are going to grow up. 
And by the time my daughter is my age, maybe this idea, that I know today is very crazy, might not be crazy to her and to her friends. 
And at that point, we will be at the end of our history, but they will be at the beginning of theirs. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change or global warming. 
Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. 
I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and to recycle paper to save resources. 
I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the Earth's climate. 
Because if we were, and if it was really happening, we wouldn't be talking about anything else. 
As soon as you'd turn on the TV, everything would be about that. 
Headlines, radio, newspapers, you would never read or hear about anything else, as if there was a world war going on. 
But no one ever talked about it. 
If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? 
Why were there no restrictions? 
Why wasn't it made illegal? 
To me, that did not add up. 
It was too unreal. 
So when I was 11, I became ill. 
I fell into depression, I stopped talking, and I stopped eating. 
In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. 
Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. 
That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary - now is one of those moments. 
(Applause) For those of us who are on the spectrum, almost everything is black or white. 
We aren't very good at lying, and we usually don't enjoy participating in this social game that the rest of you seem so fond of. 
(Laughter) I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones, and the rest of the people are pretty strange, (Laughter) especially when it comes to the sustainability crisis, where everyone keeps saying climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on like before. 
I don't understand that, because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. 
To me that is black or white. 
There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. 
Either we go on as a civilization or we don't. 
We have to change. 
Rich countries like Sweden need to start reducing emissions by at least 15 percent every year. 
And that is so that we can stay below a two-degree warming target. 
Yet, as the IPCC have recently demonstrated, aiming instead for 1.5 degrees Celsius would significantly reduce the climate impacts. 
But we can only imagine what that means for reducing emissions. 
You would think the media and every one of our leaders would be talking about nothing else, but they never even mention it. 
Nor does anyone ever mention the greenhouse gases already locked in the system. 
Nor that air pollution is hiding a warming so that when we stop burning fossil fuels, we already have an extra level of warming perhaps as high as 0.5 to 1.1 degrees Celsius. 
Furthermore does hardly anyone speak about the fact that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with up to 200 species going extinct every single day, that the extinction rate today is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than what is seen as normal. 
Nor does hardly anyone ever speak about the aspect of equity or climate justice, clearly stated everywhere in the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. 
That means that rich countries need to get down to zero emissions within 6 to 12 years, with today's emission speed. 
And that is so that people in poorer countries can have a chance to heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built, such as roads, schools, hospitals, clean drinking water, electricity, and so on. 
Because how can we expect countries like India or Nigeria to care about the climate crisis if we who already have everything don't care even a second about it or our actual commitments to the Paris Agreement? 
So, why are we not reducing our emissions? 
Why are they in fact still increasing? 
Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? 
Are we evil? 
No, of course not. 
People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn't have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life, and they don't know that rapid change is required. 
We all think we know, and we all think everybody knows, but we don't. 
Because how could we? 
If there really was a crisis, and if this crisis was caused by our emissions, you would at least see some signs. 
Not just flooded cities, tens of thousands of dead people, and whole nations leveled to piles of torn down buildings. 
You would see some restrictions. 
But no. 
And no one talks about it. 
There are no emergency meetings, no headlines, no breaking news. 
No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. 
Even most climate scientists or green politicians keep on flying around the world, eating meat and dairy. 
If I live to be 100, I will be alive in the year 2103. 
When you think about the future today, you don't think beyond the year 2050. 
By then, I will, in the best case, not even have lived half of my life. 
What happens next? 
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. 
If I have children or grandchildren, maybe they will spend that day with me. 
Maybe they will ask me about you, the people who were around, back in 2018. 
Maybe they will ask why you didn't do anything while there still was time to act. 
What we do or don't do right now will affect my entire life and the lives of my children and grandchildren. 
What we do or don't do right now, me and my generation can't undo in the future. 
So when school started in August of this year, I decided that this was enough. 
I set myself down on the ground outside the Swedish parliament. 
I school striked for the climate. 
Some people say that I should be in school instead. 
Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can "solve the climate crisis." 
But the climate crisis has already been solved. 
We already have all the facts and solutions. 
All we have to do is to wake up and change. 
And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? 
And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society. 
Some people say that Sweden is just a small country, and that it doesn't matter what we do, but I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not coming to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could all do together if you wanted to. 
(Applause) Now we're almost at the end of my talk, and this is where people usually start talking about hope, solar panels, wind power, circular economy, and so on, but I'm not going to do that. 
We've had 30 years of pep-talking and selling positive ideas. 
And I'm sorry, but it doesn't work. 
Because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now. 
They haven't. 
And yes, we do need hope, of course we do. 
But the one thing we need more than hope is action. 
Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. 
So instead of looking for hope, look for action. 
Then, and only then, hope will come. 
Today, we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. 
There are no politics to change that. 
There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. 
So we can't save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. 
Everything needs to change -- and it has to start today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm often asked why I do art, what do I want to say with my art photography, and what is the use of it? 
Once in a while I start to worry how to actually measure the impact from the art like we do with medicine or technology, where we can see the results and calculate it. 
Then I would finally be able to explain to my mother my art with real numbers. 
But my art is so far from metrics, and moreover, my photography is widely exposing the theme of escapism. 
My theory is that all of us struggle sometimes to escape in order to analyze our reality, appreciate it or change. 
I don't work with daily life as it is, and I'm not a documentary photographer in the common sense. 
But I am a documentary photographer in a different sense. 
I document dreams. 
I work with daily life as it could be, as I imagine it. 
I am a daydreamer, but at the same time I love things that are authentic and deal with our innermost nature, which I would never want to escape from. 
I adore complicated personalities, and real life inspires me to create my images. 
Real life inspires our escape, and sometimes that escape is very needed. 
I believe heroes are not created easily, and I choose to work with individuals who are survivors and facing everyday routines that are not always full of color, people who are on their way to a better life, fighting against life circumstances. 
Why do I choose people like that for my models? 
Because I've been in that position myself, when I had to learn how to survive in real life. 
I was a student living abroad in London. 
I was working at two places at the same time as a waitress. 
Obviously that wasn't my dream job, but I decided to play a game where I imagined that I am taking a role in a film, and in the film I am a waitress, and I need to act great. 
I used to dye my hair and brows to gingerette, I changed my hair to curly perm, I lost weight and made myself believe I am just a character acting in a film. 
That isn't forever, that is all just temporary. 
That helped me a lot. 
It motivated me to change my life and take a hard time as a game. 
Now, as an artist, I am creating different lives for my models in order to give them the experience of being someone else in reality. 
Through the photographic process, all of my models become like silent movie actors. 
They are captured at the moment when they believe in being someone else entirely. 
In order to create a new reality in its entirety, I physically create every single thing in my work, sometimes from outfits to the stage. 
Because I work with analogues, and I don't make any digital manipulations to my photographs, I need everything to take place in reality, in spite of the fact that nowadays, digitally, you can create pretty much everything. 
I don't like this path. 
Even if that reaches perfection, I see the beauty in authenticity of making, and that's impossible without flaws. 
A digitally manipulated photograph is not true for me. 
It doesn't capture anything real. 
It's not experienced, not motivating. 
It's like, instead of going traveling, you look at someone else's travel photographs. 
What I find so exciting is the ability to make people's dreams of being someone else a reality. 
That's like a drug which pushes me to keep working, even without metrics. 
One of my models had always dreamed of being seen as a warrior, but she wasn't able to do sports because of her health problems. 
Half a year ago, she passed away from heart disease at the age of 22. 
But two days before her death, the images we spent months working on together of her as a warrior she dreamed of becoming were published at a large exhibition in Milan by Vogue Magazine. 
All her life was about overcoming. 
Before she died, she had known that thousands of people saw her image from the land of escapism and believed in her as a brave and fearless warrior. 
For my work, I invite people to play a game like we all used to as children when we pretend to be someone else and that process made us really happy. 
To my mind it is important for grown-ups. 
We need these transformations to enact this in the name of art. 
It gives us the very real feeling of being important and powerful in order to influence our reality. 
I know this from my own personal experience. 
I have had so many versions of myself through my self-portraits that I've been many different characters. 
Being someone else in the land of escapism doesn't exactly give us numbers that we can gauge, but it's like a real lost form of magic which exists but can't be measured. 
There is a unique power in art to transform and lift our limits. 
Art creates what I call a conjured life, which helps our existence and pushes, motivates and inspires us to dwell and express ourselves without metrics or calculations. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Whether she’s describing bickering families, quiet declarations of love, or juicy gossip, Jane Austen’s writing often feels as though it was written just for you. 
Her dry wit and cheeky playfulness informs her heroines, whose conversational tone welcomes readers with a conspiratorial wink. 
It’s even been said that some readers feel like the author’s secret confidante, trading letters with their delightfully wicked friend Jane. 
But this unique brand of tongue-in-cheek humor is just one of the many feats found in her sly satires of society, civility, and sweeping romance. 
Written in the early nineteenth century, Austen's novels decode the sheltered lives of the upper classes in rural England. 
From resentment couched in pleasantries to arguing that masks attraction, her work explores the bewildering collision of emotions and etiquette. 
But while romance is a common thread in her work, Austen dismissed the sentimental style of writing so popular at the time. 
Instead of lofty love stories, her characters act naturally, and often awkwardly. 
They trade pragmatic advice, friendly jokes and not-so-friendly barbs about their arrogant peers. 
As they grapple with the endless rules of their society, Austen’s characters can usually find humor in all the hypocrisy, propriety, and small talk. 
As Mr. Bennet jokes to his favorite daughter, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?” And though her heroines might ridicule senseless social mores, Austen fully understood the practical importance of maintaining appearances. 
At the time she was writing, a wealthy marriage was a financial necessity for most young women, and she often explores the tension between the mythical quest for love, and the economic benefits of making a match. 
The savvy socialite Mary Crawford sums this up in "Mansfield Park;" “I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly: I do not like to have people throw themselves away.” Unsurprisingly, these themes were also present in Austen’s personal life. 
Born in 1775, she lived in the social circles found in her novels. 
Jane's parents supported her education, and provided space for her to write and publish her work anonymously. 
But writing was hardly lucrative work. 
And although she had sparks of chemistry, she never married. 
Elements of her circumstances can be found in many of her characters; often intelligent women with witty, pragmatic personalities, and rich inner lives. 
These headstrong heroines provide an entertaining anchor for their tumultuous romantic narratives. 
Like the irreverent Elizabeth Bennet of "Pride and Prejudice," whose devotion to her sisters’ love lives blinds her to a clumsy suitor. 
Or the iron-willed Anne Elliot of "Persuasion," who chooses to remain unmarried after the disappearance of her first love. 
And Elinor Dashwood, who fiercely protects her family at the cost of her own desires in "Sense and Sensibility." 
These women all encounter difficult choices about romantic, filial, and financial stability, and they resolve them without sacrificing their values– or their sense of humor. 
Of course, these characters are far from perfect. 
They often think they have all the answers. 
And by telling the story from their perspective, Austen tricks the viewer into believing their heroine knows best– only to pull the rug out from under the protagonist and the reader. 
In "Emma," the titular character feels surrounded by dull neighbors, and friends who can’t hope to match her wit. 
As her guests prattle on and on about nothing, the reader begins to agree– Emma is the only exciting character in this quiet neighborhood. 
Yet despite her swelling ego, Emma may not be as in control as she thinks – in life or love. 
And Austen’s intimate use of perspective makes these revelations doubly surprising, blindsiding both Emma and her audience. 
But rather than diminishing her host of heroines, these flaws only confirm “the inconsistency of all human characters.” Their complexity has kept Austen prominent on stage and screen, and made her work easily adaptable for modern sensibilities. 
So hopefully, new readers will continue to find a friend in Ms. Austen for many years to come. 

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

According to the UN, billions of people still live without an address. 
The economist Hernando de Soto said, "Without an address, you live outside the law. 
You might as well not exist." 
I'm here to tell you how my team and I are trying to change that. 
If you go to an online map and look at a favela in Brazil or a township in South Africa, you'll see a few streets but a lot of empty space. 
But if you flip to satellite view, there are thousands of people, homes and businesses in this vast, unmapped and unaddressed spaces. 
In Ghana's capital, Accra, there are numbers and letters scrawled onto the sides of walls, where they piloted address systems but not finished them. 
But these places, these unaddressed places, hold huge economic potential. 
Here's why the issue of addressing stuck with me. 
I worked in the music business for 10 years, and what you may not know about the music world is that every day, people struggle with the problems of addressing. 
So from the musicians who have to find the gigs to the production companies who bring the equipment, everyone somehow always gets lost. 
We even had to add someone to our schedules who was the person you called when you thought you'd arrived but then realized you hadn't. 
And we had some pretty bad days, like in Italy, where a truck driver unloaded all the equipment an hour north of Rome, not an hour south of Rome, and a slightly worse day where a keyboard player called me and said, "Chris, don't panic, but we may have just sound-checked at the wrong people's wedding." 
(Laughter) So not long after the fated Rome event, I chatted this through with a friend of mine who is a mathematician, and we thought it was a problem we could do something about. 
We thought, well, we could make a new system, but it shouldn't look like the old system. 
We agreed that addresses were bad. 
We knew we wanted something very precise, but GPS coordinates, latitude and longitude, were just too complicated. 
So we divided the world into three-meter squares. 
The world divides into around 57 trillion three-meter squares, and we found that there are enough combinations of three dictionary words that we could name every three-meter square in the world uniquely with just three words. 
We used 40,000 words, so that's 40,000 cubed, 64 trillion combinations of three words, which is more than enough for the 57-trillion-odd three-meter squares, with a few spare. 
So that's exactly what we did. 
We divided the world into three-meter squares, gave each one a unique, three-word identifier -- what we call a three-word address. 
So for example, right here, I'm standing at mustards.coupons.pinup, (Laughter) but over here ... 
I'm standing at pinched. singularly.tutorial. 
But we haven't just done this in English. 
We thought it was essential that people should be able to use this system in their own language. 
So far, we've built it into 14 languages, including French, Swahili and Arabic, and we're working on more now, like Xhosa, Zulu and Hindi. 
But this idea can do a lot more than just get my musicians to their gigs on time. 
If the 75 percent of countries that struggle with reliable addressing started using three-word addresses, there's a stack of far more important applications. 
In Durban, South Africa, an NGO called Gateway Health have distributed 11,000 three-word address signs to their community, so the pregnant mothers, when they go into labor, can call the emergency services and tell them exactly where to pick them up from, because otherwise, the ambulances have often taken hours to find them. 
In Mongolia, the National Post Service have adopted the system and are now doing deliveries to many people's houses for the first time. 
The UN are using it to geotag photos in disaster zones so they can deliver aid to exactly the right place. 
Even Domino's Pizza are using it in the Caribbean, because they haven't been able to find customers' homes, but they really want to get their pizza to them while its still hot. 
Shortly, you'll be able to get into a car, speak the three words, and the car will navigate you to that exact spot. 
In Africa, the continent has leapfrogged phone lines to go to mobile phones, bypassed traditional banks to go straight to mobile payments. 
We're really proud that the post services of three African countries -- Nigeria, Djibouti and Côte d'Ivoire, have gone straight to adopting three-word addresses, which means that people in those countries have a really simple way to explain where they live, today. 
For me, poor addressing was an annoying frustration, but for billions of people, it's a huge business inefficiency, severely hampers their infrastructure growth, and can cost lives. 
We're on a mission to change that, three words at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

HR jargon makes me crazy. 
We have to have all these stupid acronyms that describe things that nobody understands: OKRs and PIPs. 
I think we can run our businesses by just talking to each other like regular human beings. 
We might actually get more done. 
[The Way We Work] I really always wanted to be an HR professional, I wanted to be able to speak the language of management. 
And you know what I've learned after all this time? 
I don't think any of it matters. 
There's all kinds of things that we call "best practices" that aren't best practices at all. 
How do we know it's best? We don't measure this stuff. 
In fact, I've learned that "best practices" usually means copying what everybody else does. 
Our world is changing and evolving all the time. 
Here are some lessons to help you adapt. 
Lesson one: Your employees are adults. 
You know, we've created so many layers and so many processes and so many guidelines to keep those employees in place that we've ended up with systems that treat people like they're children. 
And they're not. 
Fully formed adults walk in the door every single day. 
They have rent payments, they have obligations, they're members of society, they want to create a difference in the world. 
So if we start with the assumption that everybody comes to work to do an amazing job, you'd be surprised what you get. 
Lesson two: The job of management isn't to control people, it's to build great teams. 
When managers build great teams, here's how you know it. 
They've done amazing stuff. 
Those are the metrics that really matter. 
Not the metrics of: "Do you come to work on time?" 
"Did you take your vacation?" "Did you follow the rules?" 
"Did you ask for permission?" 
After they do it, they should be free to move on. 
Careers are journeys. 
Nobody's going to want to do the same thing for 60 years. 
So the idea of keeping people for the sake of keeping them really hurts both of us. 
Instead, what if we created companies that were great places to be from? 
And everyone who leaves you becomes an ambassador for not only your product, but who you are and how you operate. 
And when you spread that kind of excitement throughout the world, then we make all of our companies better. 
Lesson four: Everyone in your company should understand the business. 
Now, based on the assumption that we've got smart adults here, the most important thing we can teach them is how our business works. 
When I look at companies that are moving fast, that are really innovative and that are doing amazing things with agility and speed, it's because they're collaborative. 
The best thing that we can do is constantly teach each other what we do, what matters to us, what we measure, what goodness looks like, so that we can all drive towards achieving the same thing. 
Lesson five: Everyone in your company should be able to handle the truth. 
You know why people say giving feedback is so hard? 
They don't practice. 
Let's take the annual performance review. 
What else do you do in your whole life that you're really good at that you only do once a year? 
Here's what I found: humans can hear anything if it's true. 
So let's rethink the word "feedback," and think about it as telling people the truth, the honest truth, about what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong, in the moment when they're doing it. 
That good thing you just did, whoo! 
That's exactly what I'm talking about. 
Go do that again. 
And people will do that again, today, three more times. 
Lesson six: Your company needs to live out its values. 
I was talking to a company not long ago, to the CEO. 
He was having trouble because the company was rocky and things weren't getting done on time, and he felt like things were sloppy. 
This also was a man who, I observed, never showed up to any meeting on time. 
Ever. 
If you're part of a leadership team, the most important thing that you can do to "uphold your values" is to live them. 
People can't be what they can't see. 
We say, "Yes, we're here for equality," and then we proudly pound our chest because we'd achieved 30 percent representation of women on an executive team. 
Well that's not equal, that's 30 percent. 
Lesson seven: All start-up ideas are stupid. 
I spend a lot of time with start-ups, and I have a lot of friends that work in larger, more established companies. 
They are always pooh-poohing the companies that I work with. 
"That is such a stupid idea." 
Well, guess what: all start-up ideas are stupid. 
If they were reasonable, somebody else would have already been doing them. 
Lesson eight: Every company needs to be excited for change. 
Beware of the smoke of nostalgia. 
If you find yourself saying, "Remember the way it used to be?" 
I want you to shift your thinking to say, "Think about the way it's going to be." 
If I had a dream company, I would walk in the door and I would say, "Everything's changed, all bets are off. 
We were running as fast as we can to the right, and now we'll take a hard left." 
And everybody would go "Yes!" 
It's a pretty exciting world out there, and it's changing all the time. 
The more we embrace it and get excited about it, the more fun we're going to have. 

Here are two images of a house. 
There’s one obvious difference, but to this patient, P.S., they looked completely identical. 
P.S. had suffered a stroke that damaged the right side of her brain, leaving her unaware of everything on her left side. 
But though she could discern no difference between the houses, when researchers asked her which she would prefer to live in, she chose the house that wasn’t burning— not once, but again and again. 
P.S.’s brain was still processing information from her whole field of vision. 
She could see both images and tell the difference between them, she just didn’t know it. 
If someone threw a ball at her left side, she might duck. 
But she wouldn’t have any awareness of the ball, or any idea why she ducked. 
P.S.’s condition, known as hemispatial neglect, reveals an important distinction between the brain’s processing of information and our experience of that processing. 
That experience is what we call consciousness. 
We are conscious of both the external world and our internal selves— we are aware of an image in much the same way we are aware of ourselves looking at an image, or our inner thoughts and emotions. 
But where does consciousness come from? 
Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have been trying to get to the bottom of this question for centuries— without reaching any consensus. 
One recent theory is that consciousness is the brain’s imperfect picture of its own activity. 
To understand this theory, it helps to have a clear idea of one important way the brain processes information from our senses. 
Based on sensory input, it builds models, which are continuously updating, simplified descriptions of objects and events in the world. 
Everything we know is based on these models. 
They never capture every detail of the things they describe, just enough for the brain to determine appropriate responses. 
For instance, one model built deep into the visual system codes white light as brightness without color. 
In reality, white light includes wavelengths that correspond to all the different colors we can see. 
Our perception of white light is wrong and oversimplified, but good enough for us to function. 
Likewise, the brain’s model of the physical body keeps track of the configuration of our limbs, but not of individual cells or even muscles, because that level of information isn’t needed to plan movement. 
If it didn’t have the model keeping track of the body’s size, shape, and how it is moving at any moment, we would quickly injure ourselves. 
The brain also needs models of itself. 
For example, the brain has the ability to pay attention to specific objects and events. 
It also controls that focus, shifting it from one thing to another, internal and external, according to our needs. 
Without the ability to direct our focus, we wouldn’t be able to assess threats, finish a meal, or function at all. 
To control focus effectively, the brain has to construct a model of its own attention. 
With 86 billion neurons constantly interacting with each other, there’s no way the brain’s model of its own information processing can be perfectly self-descriptive. 
But like the model of the body, or our conception of white light, it doesn’t have to be. 
Our certainty that we have a metaphysical, subjective experience may come from one of the brain’s models, a cut-corner description of what it means to process information in a focused and deep manner. 
Scientists have already begun trying to figure out how the brain creates that self model. 
MRI studies are a promising avenue for pinpointing the networks involved. 
These studies compare patterns of neural activation when someone is and isn’t conscious of a sensory stimulus, like an image. 
The results show that the areas needed for visual processing are activated whether or not the participant is aware of the image, but a whole additional network lights up only when they are conscious of seeing the image. 
Patients with hemispatial neglect, like P.S., typically have damage to one particular part of this network. 
More extensive damage to the network can sometimes lead to a vegetative state, with no sign of consciousness. 
Evidence like this brings us closer to understanding how consciousness is built into the brain, but there’s still much more to learn. 
For instance, the way neurons in the networks related to consciousness compute specific pieces of information is outside the scope of our current technology. 
As we approach questions of consciousness with science, we’ll open new lines of inquiry into human identity. 

Do you hear that? 
Do you know what that is? 
Silence. 
The sound of silence. 
Simon and Garfunkel wrote a song about it. 
But silence is a pretty rare commodity these days, and we're all paying a price for it in terms of our health -- a surprisingly big price, as it turns out. 
Luckily, there are things we can do right now, both individually and as a society, to better protect our health and give us more of the benefits of the sounds of silence. 
I assume that most of you know that too much noise is bad for your hearing. 
Whenever you leave a concert or a bar and you have that ringing in your ears, you can be certain that you have done some damage to your hearing, likely permanent. 
And that's very important. 
However, noise affects our health in many different ways beyond hearing. 
They're less well-known, but they're just as dangerous as the auditory effects. 
So what do we mean when we talk about noise? 
Well, noise is defined as unwanted sound, and as such, both has a physical component, the sound, and a psychological component, the circumstances that make the sound unwanted. 
A very good example is a rock concert. 
A person attending the rock concert, being exposed to 100 decibels, does not think of the music as noise. 
This person likes the band, and even paid a hundred dollars for the ticket, so no matter how loud the music, this person doesn't think of it as noise. 
In contrast, think of a person living three blocks away from the concert hall. 
That person is trying to read a book, but cannot concentrate because of the music. 
And although the sound pressure levels are much lower in this situation, this person still thinks of the music as noise, and it may trigger reactions that can, in the long run, have health consequences. 
So why are quiet spaces so important? 
Because noise affects our health in so many ways beyond hearing. 
However, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find quiet spaces in times of constantly increasing traffic, growing urbanization, construction sites, air-conditioning units, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, outdoor concerts and bars, personal music players, and your neighbors partying until 3am. 
Whew! 
In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that 1.6 million healthy life years are lost every year due to exposure to environmental noise in the Western European member states alone. 
One important effect of noise is that it disturbs communication. 
You may have to raise your voice to be understood. 
In extreme cases, you may even have to pause the conversation. 
It's also more likely to be misunderstood in a noisy environment. 
These are all likely reasons why studies have found that children who attend schools in noisy areas are more likely to lag behind their peers in academic performance. 
Another very important health effect of noise is the increased risk for cardiovascular disease in those who are exposed to relevant noise levels for prolonged periods of time. 
Noise is stress, especially if we have little or no control over it. 
Our body excretes stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that lead to changes in the composition of our blood and in the structure of our blood vessels, which have been shown to be stiffer after a single night of noise exposure. 
Epidemiological studies show associations between the noise exposure and an increased risk for high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke, and although the overall risk increases are relatively small, this still constitutes a major public health problem because noise is so ubiquitous, and so many people are exposed to relevant noise levels. 
A recent study found that US society could save 3.9 billion dollars each year by lowering environmental noise exposure by five decibels, just by saving costs for treating cardiovascular disease. 
There are other diseases like cancer, diabetes and obesity that have been linked to noise exposure, but we do not have enough evidence yet to, in fact, conclude that these diseases are caused by the noise. 
Yet another important effect of noise is sleep disturbance. 
Sleep is a very active mechanism that recuperates us and prepares us for the next wake period. 
A quiet bedroom is a cornerstone of what sleep researchers call "a good sleep hygiene." 
And our auditory system has a watchman function. 
It's constantly monitoring our environment for threats, even while we're sleeping. 
So noise in the bedroom can cause a delay in the time it takes us to fall asleep, it can wake us up during the night, and it can prevent our blood pressure from going down during the night. 
We have the hypothesis that if these noise-induced sleep disturbances continue for months and years, then an increased risk for cardiovascular disease is likely the consequence. 
However, we are often not aware of these noise-induced sleep disturbances, because we are unconscious while we're sleeping. 
In the past, we've done studies on the effects of traffic noise on sleep, and research subjects would often wake up in the morning and say, "Ah, I had a wonderful night, I fell asleep right away, never really woke up." 
When we would go back to the physiological signals we had recorded during the night, we would often see numerous awakenings and a severely fragmented sleep structure. 
These awakenings were too brief for the subjects to regain consciousness and to remember them during the next morning, but they may nevertheless have a profound impact on how restful our sleep is. 
So when is loud too loud? 
A good sign of too loud is once you start changing your behavior. 
You may have to raise your voice to be understood, or you increase the volume of your TV. 
You're avoiding outside areas, or you're closing your window. 
You're moving your bedroom to the basement of the house, or you even have sound insulation installed. 
Many people will move away to less noisy areas, but obviously not everybody can afford that. 
So what can we do right now to improve our sound environment and to better protect our health? 
Well, first of all, if something's too loud, speak up. 
For example, many owners of movie theaters seem to think that only people hard of hearing are still going to the movies. 
If you complain about the noise and nothing happens, demand a refund and leave. 
That's the language that managers typically do understand. 
Also, talk to your children about the health effects of noise and that listening to loud music today will have consequences when they're older. 
You can also move your bedroom to the quiet side of the house, where your own building shields you from road traffic noise. 
If you're looking to rent or buy a new place, make low noise a priority. 
Visit the property during different times of the day and talk to the neighbors about noise. 
You can wear noise-canceling headphones when you're traveling or if your office has high background noise levels. 
In general, seek out quiet spaces, especially on the weekend or when you're on vacation. 
Allow your system to wind down. 
I, very appropriately for this talk, attended a noise conference in Japan four years ago. 
When I returned to the United States and entered the airport, a wall of sound hit me. 
This tells you that we don't realize anymore the constant degree of noise pollution we're exposed to and how much we could profit from more quiet spaces. 
What else can we do about noise? 
Well, very much like a carbon footprint, we all have a noise footprint, and there are things we can do to make that noise footprint smaller. 
For example, don't start mowing your lawn at 7am on a Saturday morning. 
Your neighbors will thank you. 
Or use a rake instead of a leaf blower. 
In general, noise reduction at the source makes the most sense, so whenever you're looking to buy a new car, air-conditioning unit, blender, you name it, make low noise a priority. 
Many manufacturers will list the noise levels their devices generate, and some even advertise with them. 
Use that information. 
Many people think that stronger noise regulation and enforcement are good ideas, even obvious solutions, perhaps, but it's not as easy as you may think, because many of the activities that generate noise also generate revenue. 
Think about an airport and all the business that is associated with it. 
Our research tells politicians at what noise level they can expect a certain health effect, and that helps inform better noise policy. 
Robert Koch supposedly once said, "One day, mankind will fight noise as relentlessly as cholera and the pest." 
I think we're there, and I hope that we will win this fight, and when we do, we can all have a nice, quiet celebration. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was eight years old. 
I remember that day clearly like it happened just yesterday. 
My mother is a bidi roller. 
She hand-rolls country cigarettes to sustain our family. 
She is a hard worker and spent 10 to 12 hours every day rolling bidis. 
That particular day she came home and showed me her bidi-rolling wage book. 
She asked me how much money she has earned that week. 
I went through that book, and what caught my eyes were her thumbprints on each page. 
My mother has never been to school. 
She uses her thumbprints instead of a signature to keep a record of her earnings. 
On that day, for some reason, I wanted to teach her how to hold a pen and write her name. 
She was reluctant at first. 
She smiled innocently and said no. 
But deep down, I was sure she wanted to give it a try. 
With a little bit of perseverance and a lot of effort, we managed to write her name. 
Her hands were trembling, and her face was beaming with pride. 
As I watched her do this, for the first time in my life, I had a priceless feeling: that I could be of some use to this world. 
That feeling was very special, because I am not meant to be useful. 
In rural India, girls are generally considered worthless. 
They're a liability or a burden. 
If they are considered useful, it is only to cook dishes, keep the house clean or raise children. 
As a second daughter of my conservative Indian family, I was fairly clear from a very early age that no one expected anything from me. 
I was conditioned to believe that the three identities that defined me -- poor village girl -- meant that I was to live a life of no voice and no choice. 
These three identities forced me to think that I should never have been born. 
Yet, I was. 
All throughout my childhood, as I rolled bidis alongside my mother, I would wonder: What did my future hold? 
I often asked my mother, with a lot of anxiety, "Amma, will my life be different from yours? 
Will I have a chance to choose my life? 
Will I go to college?" 
And she would reply back, "Try to finish high school first." 
I am sure my mother did not mean to discourage me. 
She only wanted me to understand that my dreams might be too big for a girl in my village. 
When I was 13, I found the autobiography of Helen Keller. 
Helen became my inspiration. 
I admired her indomitable spirit. 
I wanted to have a college degree like her, so I fought with my father and my relatives to be sent to college, and it worked. 
During my final year of my undergraduate degree, I desperately wanted to escape from being forced into marriage, so I applied to a fellowship program in Delhi, which is about 1,600 miles away from my village. 
(Laughter) In fact, I recall that the only way I could fill out the application was during my commute to college. 
I did not have access to computers, so I had to borrow a college junior's cell phone. 
As a woman, I could not be seen with a cell phone, so I used to huddle his phone under my shawl and type as slowly as possible to ensure that I would not be heard. 
After many rounds of interviews, I got into the fellowship program with a full scholarship. 
My father was confused, my mother was worried -- (Applause) My father was confused, my mother was worried, but I felt butterflies in my stomach because I was going to step out of my village for the first time to study in the national capital. 
Of the 97 fellows selected that year, I was the only rural college graduate. 
There was no one there who looked like me or spoke like me. 
I felt alienated, intimidated and judged by many. 
One fellow called me "Coconut Girl." 
Can you guess why? 
Anyone? 
That's because I applied a lot of coconut oil to my hair. 
(Laughter) Another asked me where I had learned to speak English, and some of my peers did not prefer to have me on their assignment teams because they thought I would not be able to contribute to their discussion. 
I felt that many of my peers believed that a person from rural India could not supply anything of value, yet the majority of Indian population today is rural. 
I realized that stories like mine were considered to be an exception and never the expectation. 
I believe that all of us are born into a reality that we blindly accept until something awakens us and a new world opens up. 
When I saw my mother's first signature on her bidi-rolling wage book, when I felt the hot Delhi air against my face after a 50-hour train journey, when I finally felt free and let myself be, I saw a glimpse of that new world I longed for, a world where a girl like me is no longer a liability or a burden but a person of use, a person of value and a person of worthiness. 
By the time my fellowship ended, my life had changed. 
Not only had I traced my lost voice, but also had a choice to make myself useful. 
I was 22. 
I came back to my village to set up the Bodhi Tree Foundation, an institution that supports rural youth by providing them with education, life skills and opportunities. 
We work closely with our rural youth to change their life and to benefit our communities. 
How do I know my institution is working? 
Well, six months ago, we had a new joinee. 
Her name is Kaviarasi. 
I first spotted her in a local college in Tirunelveli during one of my training sessions. 
As you can see, she has a smile which you can never forget. 
We guided her to get an opportunity to study at Ashoka University, Delhi. 
The best part of her story is that she is now back at Bodhi Tree as a trainer working with dedication to make a change in the lives of others like her. 
Kaviarasi doesn't want to feel like an exception. 
She wants to be of use to others in this world. 
Recently, Kaviarasi mentored Anitha, who also comes from a remote, rural village, lives in a 10-foot-by-10-foot home, her parents are also farm laborers. 
Kaviarasi helped Anitha secure admission in a prestigious undergraduate program in a top university in India with a full scholarship. 
When Anitha's parents were reluctant to send her that far, we asked the district administration officials to speak to Anitha's parents, and it worked. 
And then there is Padma. 
Padma and I went to college together. 
She's the first in her entire village to attend graduation. 
She had been working with me at Bodhi Tree until one day she decides to go to graduate school. 
I asked her why. 
She told me that she wanted to make sure that she would never be a liability or a burden to anyone at any point in her life. 
Padma, Anitha and Kaviarasi grew up in the most tough families and communities one could only imagine. 
Yet the journey of finding my usefulness in this world served them in finding their usefulness to this world. 
Of course there are challenges. 
I'm aware change does not happen overnight. 
A lot of my work involves working with families and communities to help them understand why getting an education is useful for everyone. 
The quickest way to convince them is by doing. 
When they see their kids getting a real education, getting a real job, they begin to change. 
The best example is what happened at my home. 
I was recently given an award in recognition of my social work by the chief minister of my state. 
That meant I was going to be on television. 
(Laughter) Everyone was hooked on to the television that morning, including my parents. 
I would like to believe that seeing her daughter on television made my mother feel useful too. 
Hopefully, she will stop pressuring me to get married now. 
(Laughter) Finding my use has helped me to break free from the identities society thrusts on me -- poor village girl. 
Finding my use has helped me to break free from being boxed, caged and bottled. 
Finding my use has helped me to find my voice, my self-worth and my freedom. 
I leave you with this thought: Where do you feel useful to this world? 
Because the answer to that question is where you will find your voice and your freedom. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” In this passage from Sylvia Plath’s "The Bell Jar," a young woman imagines an uncertain future– and speaks to the universal fear of becoming paralyzed by the prospect of making the wrong choice. 
Although she considered other careers, Plath chose the artist’s way. 
Poetry was her calling. 
Under her shrewd eye and pen, everyday objects became haunting images: a “new statue in a drafty museum,” a shadow in a mirror, a slab of soap. 
Fiercely intelligent, penetrating and witty, Plath was also diagnosed with clinical depression. 
She used poetry to explore her own states of mind in the most intimate terms, and her breathtaking perspectives on emotion, nature and art continue to captivate and resonate. 
In her first collection of poems, "The Colossus," she wrote of a feeling of nothingness: "white: it is a complexion of the mind.” At the same time, she found solace in nature, from “a blue mist” “dragging the lake,” to white flowers that “tower and topple,” to blue mussels “clumped like bulbs.” After "The Colossus" she published "The Bell Jar," her only novel, which fictionalizes the time she spent working for Mademoiselle magazine in New York during college. 
The novel follows its heroine, Esther, as she slides into a severe depressive episode, but also includes wickedly funny and shrewd depictions of snobby fashion parties and dates with dull men. 
Shortly after the publication of "The Bell Jar," Plath died by suicide at age 30. 
Two years later, the collection of poems she wrote in a burst of creative energy during the months before her death was published under the title "Ariel." 
Widely considered her masterpiece, Ariel exemplifies the honesty and imagination Plath harnessed to capture her pain. 
In one of "Ariel's" most forceful poems, "Lady Lazarus," she explores her attempts to take her own life through Lazarus, the biblical figure who rose from the dead. 
She writes, “and I a smiling woman/ I am only thirty/ And like the cat I have nine times to die.” But the poem is also a testament to survival: “I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.” This unflinching language has made Plath an important touchstone for countless other readers and writers who sought to break the silence surrounding issues of trauma, frustration, and sexuality. 
"Ariel" is also filled with moving meditations on heartbreak and creativity. 
The title poem begins “Stasis in darkness/ Then the substanceless blue/ Pour of tor and distances.” This sets the scene for a naked ride on horseback in the early morning— one of Plath’s most memorable expressions of the elation of creative freedom. 
But it is also full of foreboding imagery, such as “a child's cry” that “melts in the wall” and a “red/eye, the cauldron of morning.” This darkness is echoed throughout the collection, which includes controversial references to the holocaust and the Kamikazes. 
Even the relics of seemingly happier times are described as crucifying the author: “My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.” Her domestic dissatisfaction and her husband’s mistreatment of her are constant themes in her later poetry. 
After her death, he inherited her estate, and has been accused of excluding some of her work from publication. 
Despite these possible omissions and her untimely death, what survives is one of the most extraordinary bodies of work by a twentieth century poet. 
While her work can be shocking in its rage and trauma, Plath casts her readers as witnesses– not only to the truth of her psychological life, but to her astounding ability to express what often remains inexpressible. 

We know about our universe’s past: the Big Bang theory predicts that all matter, time, and space began in an incredibly tiny, compact state about 14 billion years ago. 
And we know about the present: scientists’ observations of the movement of galaxies tell us that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. 
But what about the future? 
Do we know how our universe is going to end? 
Cosmologists have three possible answers for this question, called the Big Freeze, the Big Rip and the Big Crunch. 
To understand these three scenarios, imagine two objects representing galaxies. 
A short, tight rubber band is holding them together— that’s the attractive force of gravity. 
Meanwhile, two hooks are pulling them apart— that’s the repulsive force expanding the universe. 
Copy this system over and over again, and you have something approximating the real universe. 
The outcome of the battle between these two opposing forces determines how the end of the universe will play out. 
The Big Freeze scenario is what happens if the force pulling the objects apart is just strong enough to stretch the rubber band until it loses its elasticity. 
The expansion wouldn’t be able to accelerate anymore, but the universe would keep getting bigger. 
Clusters of galaxies would separate. 
The objects within the galaxies– suns, planets, and solar systems would move away from each other, until galaxies dissolved into lonely objects floating separately in the vast space. 
The light they emit would be redshifted to long wavelengths with very low, faint energies, and the gas emanating from them would be too thin to create new stars. 
The universe would become darker and colder, approaching a frozen state also known as the Big Chill, or the Heat Death of the Universe. 
But what if the repulsive force is so strong that it stretches the rubber band past its elastic limit, and actually tears it? 
If the expansion of the universe continues to accelerate, it will eventually overcome not only the gravitational force – tearing apart galaxies and solar systems– but also the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear forces which hold atoms and nuclei together. 
As a result, the matter that makes up stars breaks into tiny pieces. 
Even atoms and subatomic particles will be destroyed. 
That’s the Big Rip. 
What about the third scenario, where the rubber band wins out? 
That corresponds to a possible future in which the force of gravity brings the universe’s expansion to a halt— and then reverses it. 
Galaxies would start rushing towards each other, and as they clumped together their gravitational pull would get even stronger. 
Stars too would hurtle together and collide. 
Temperatures would rise as space would get tighter and tighter. 
The size of the universe would plummet until everything compressed into such a small space that even atoms and subatomic particles would have to crunch together. 
The result would be an incredibly dense, hot, compact universe — a lot like the state that preceded the Big Bang. 
This is the Big Crunch. 
Could this tiny point of matter explode in another Big Bang? 
Could the universe expand and contract over and over again, repeating its entire history? 
The theory describing such a universe is known as the Big Bounce. 
In fact, there’s no way to tell how many bounces could’ve already happened— or how many might happen in the future. 
Each bounce would wipe away any record of the universe’s previous history. 
Which one of those scenarios will be the real one? 
The answer depends on the exact shape of the universe, the amount of dark energy it holds, and changes in its expansion rate. 
As of now, our observations suggest that we’re heading for a Big Freeze. 
But the good news is that we’ve probably got about 10 to the 100th power years before the chill sets in — so don’t start stocking up on mittens just yet. 

Over the course of the 1960s, the FBI amassed almost two thousand documents in an investigation into one of America’s most celebrated minds. 
The subject of this inquiry was a writer named James Baldwin. 
At the time, the FBI investigated many artists and thinkers, but most of their files were a fraction the size of Baldwin’s. 
During the years when the FBI hounded him, he became one of the best-selling black authors in the world. 
So what made James Baldwin loom so large in the imaginations of both the public and the authorities? 
Born in Harlem in 1924, he was the oldest of nine children. 
At age fourteen, he began to work as a preacher. 
By delivering sermons, he developed his voice as a writer, but also grew conflicted about the Church’s stance on racial inequality and homosexuality. 
After high school, he began writing novels and essays while taking a series of odd jobs. 
But the issues that had driven him away from the Church were still inescapable in his daily life. 
Constantly confronted with racism and homophobia, he was angry and disillusioned, and yearned for a less restricted life. 
So in 1948, at the age of 24, he moved to Paris on a writing fellowship. 
From France, he published his first novel, "Go Tell it on the Mountain," in 1953. 
Set in Harlem, the book explores the Church as a source of both repression and hope. 
It was popular with both black and white readers. 
As he earned acclaim for his fiction, Baldwin gathered his thoughts on race, class, culture and exile in his 1955 extended essay, "Notes of a Native Son." 
Meanwhile, the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum in America. 
Black Americans were making incremental gains at registering to vote and voting, but were still denied basic dignities in schools, on buses, in the work force, and in the armed services. 
Though he lived primarily in France for the rest of his life, Baldwin was deeply invested in the movement, and keenly aware of his country’s unfulfilled promise. 
He had seen family, friends, and neighbors spiral into addiction, incarceration and suicide. 
He believed their fates originated from the constraints of a segregated society. 
In 1963, he published "The Fire Next Time," an arresting portrait of racial strife in which he held white America accountable, but he also went further, arguing that racism hurt white people too. 
In his view, everyone was inextricably enmeshed in the same social fabric. 
He had long believed that: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Baldwin’s role in the Civil Rights movement went beyond observing and reporting. 
He also traveled through the American South attending rallies giving lectures of his own. 
He debated both white politicians and black activists, including Malcolm X, and served as a liaison between black activists and intellectuals and white establishment leaders like Robert Kennedy. 
Because of Baldwin’s unique ability to articulate the causes of social turbulence in a way that white audiences were willing to hear, Kennedy and others tended to see him as an ambassador for black Americans — a label Baldwin rejected. 
And at the same time, his faculty with words led the FBI to view him as a threat. 
Even within the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin could sometimes feel like an outsider for his choice to live abroad, as well as his sexuality, which he explored openly in his writing at a time when homophobia ran rampant. 
Throughout his life, Baldwin considered it his role to bear witness. 
Unlike many of his peers, he lived to see some of the victories of the Civil Rights movement, but the continuing racial inequalities in the United States weighed heavily on him. 
Though he may have felt trapped in his moment in history, his words have made generations of people feel known, while guiding them toward a more nuanced understanding of society’s most complex issues. 

So, a little while ago, members of my family had three bits of minor surgery, about a half hour each, and we got three sets of bills. 
For the first one, the anesthesia bill alone was 2,000 dollars; the second one, 2,000 dollars; the third one, 6,000 dollars. 
So I'm a journalist. I'm like, what's up with that? 
I found out that I was actually, for the expensive one, being charged 1,419 dollars for a generic anti-nausea drug that I could buy online for two dollars and forty-nine cents. 
I had a long and unsatisfactory argument with the hospital, the insurer and my employer. 
Everybody agreed that this was totally fine. 
But it got me thinking, and the more I talked to people, the more I realized: nobody has any idea what stuff costs in health care. 
Not before, during or after that procedure or test do you have any idea what it's going to cost. 
It's only months later that you get an "explanation of benefits" that explains exactly nothing. 
So this came back to me a little while later. 
I had volunteered for a buyout from the New York Times, where I had worked for more than 20 years as a journalist. 
I was looking for my next act. 
It turned out that next act was to build a company telling people what stuff costs in health care. 
I won a "Shark Tank"-type pitch contest to do just that. 
Health costs ate up almost 18 percent of our gross domestic product last year, but nobody has any idea what stuff costs. 
But what if we did know? 
So we started out small. 
We called doctors and hospitals and asked them what they would accept as a cash payment for simple procedures. 
Some people were helpful. 
A lot of people hung up on us. 
Some people were just plain rude. 
They said, "We don't know," or, "Our lawyers won't let us tell you that," though we did get a lot of information. 
We found, for example, that here in the New York area, you could get an echocardiogram for 200 dollars in Brooklyn or for 2,150 dollars in Manhattan, just a few miles away. 
New Orleans, the same simple blood test, 19 dollars over here, 522 dollars just a few blocks away. 
San Francisco, the same MRI, 475 dollars or 6,221 dollars just 25 miles away. 
These pricing variations existed for all the procedures and all the cities that we surveyed. 
Then we started to ask people to tell us their health bills. 
In partnership with public radio station WNYC here in New York, we asked women to tell us the prices of their mammograms. 
People told us nobody would do that, that it was too personal. 
But in the space of three weeks, 400 women told us about their prices. 
Then we started to make it easier for people to share their data into our online searchable database. 
It's sort of like a mash-up of Kayak.com and the Waze traffic app for health care. 
(Laughter) We call it a community-created guide to health costs. 
Our survey and crowdsourcing work grew into partnerships with top newsrooms nationwide -- in New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and other places. 
We used the data to tell stories about people who were suffering and how to avoid that suffering, to avoid that "gotcha" bill. 
A woman in New Orleans saved nearly 4,000 dollars using our data. 
A San Francisco contributor saved nearly 1,300 dollars by putting away his insurance card and paying cash. 
There are a lot of people who are going to in-network hospitals and getting out-of-network bills. 
And then there was the hospital that continued to bill a dead man. 
We learned that thousands of people wanted to tell us their prices. 
They want to learn what stuff costs, find out how to argue a bill, help us solve this problem that's hurting them and their friends and families. 
We talked to people who had to sell a car to pay a health bill, go into bankruptcy, skip a treatment because of the cost. 
Imagine if you could afford the diagnosis but not the cure. 
We set off a huge conversation about costs involving doctors and hospitals, yes, but also their patients, or as we like to call them, people. 
(Laughter) We changed policy. 
A consumer protection bill that had been stalled in the Louisiana legislature for 10 years passed after we launched. 
Let's face it: this huge, slow-rolling public health crisis is a national emergency. 
And I don't think government's going to help us out anytime soon. 
But what if the answer was really simple: make all the prices public all the time. 
Would our individual bills go down? Our health premiums? 
Be really clear about this: this is a United States problem. 
In most of the rest of the developed world, sick people don't have to worry about money. 
It's also true that price transparency will not solve every problem. 
There will still be expensive treatments, huge friction from our insurance system. 
There will still be fraud and a massive problem with overtreatment and overdiagnosis. 
And not everything is shoppable. 
Not everybody wants the cheapest appendectomy or the cheapest cancer care. 
But when we talk about these clear effects, we're looking at a real issue that's actually very simple. 
When we first started calling for prices, we actually felt like we were going to be arrested. 
It seemed kind of transgressive to talk about medicine and health care in the same breath, and yet it became liberating, because we found not only data but also good and honest people out there in the system who want to help folks get the care they need at a price they can afford. 
And it got easier to ask. 
So I'll leave you with some questions. 
What if we all knew what stuff cost in health care in advance? 
What if, every time you Googled for an MRI, you got drop-downs telling you where to buy and for how much, the way you do when you Google for a laser printer? 
What if all of the time and energy and money that's spent hiding prices was squeezed out of the system? 
What if each one of us could pick the $19 test every time instead of the $522 one? 
Would our individual bills go down? 
Our premiums? 
I don't know, but if you don't ask, you'll never know. 
And you might save a ton of money. 
And I've got to think that a lot of us and the system itself would be a lot healthier. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine. 
And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. 
And I asked myself, why? 
I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. 
And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? 
So, I decided to investigate. 
I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. 
And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them. 
But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. 
It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it. 
So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? 
I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. 
I know a woman who's good at this. 
She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids." 
And he goes, "Oh, this is great, this is great." 
And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. 
And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. 
And she said, "Why wouldn't I thank it, even though they're supposed to do it?" 
So, the question is, why was I blocking it? 
Why were other people blocking it? 
Why can I say, "I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes," but I won't say, "Would you praise me this way?" 
And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me. 
I'm telling you where I'm insecure. 
I'm telling you where I need your help. 
And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy. 
Because what can you do with that data? 
You could neglect me. 
You could abuse it. 
Or you could actually meet my need. 
And I took my bike into the bike store-- I love this -- same bike, and they'd do something called "truing" the wheels. 
The guy said, "You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better." 
I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. 
So, I'm going to challenge all of you. 
I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. 
What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife -- go ask her, what does she need? 
Go home to your husband -- what does he need? 
Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you. 
And it's simple. 
And why should we care about this? 
We talk about world peace. 
How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? 
I think it starts household by household, under the same roof. 
So, let's make it right in our own backyard. 
And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. 
And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job. 
And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is the Hogeweyk. 
It's a neighborhood in a small town very near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. 
There are 27 houses for six, seven people each. 
There's a small mall with a restaurant, a pub, a supermarket, a club room. 
There are streets, alleys, there's a theater. 
It actually is a nursing home. 
A nursing home for people that live with an advanced dementia and that need 24-7 care and support. 
Dementia is a terrible disease, and we still don't have any cure for it. 
It's getting to be a major problem in the world, for the people, for the politicians, for the world -- it's getting to be a big problem. 
We see that we have waiting lists in the nursing homes. 
Most people that come to the nursing homes with dementia are women. 
And that's also because women are used to taking care of people, so they can manage to take care of their husband with dementia, but the other way around is not so easy for the gentlemen. 
Dementia is a disease that affects the brain. 
The brain is confused. 
People don't know anymore what the time is, what's going on, who people are. 
They're very confused. 
And because of that confusion, they get to be anxious, depressed, aggressive. 
This is a traditional nursing home. 
I worked there in 1992. 
I was a care manager. 
And we often spoke together about the fact that what we were doing there was not what we wanted for our parents, for our friends, for ourselves. 
And one day, we said, "When we keep on saying this, nothing is going to change. 
We are in charge here. 
We should do something about this, so that we do want to have our parents here." 
We talked about that, and what we saw every day was that the people that lived in our nursing home were confused about their environment, because what they saw was a hospital-like environment, with doctors and nurses and paramedics in uniform, and they lived on a ward. 
And they didn't understand why they lived there. 
And they looked for the place to get away. 
They looked and hoped to find the door to go home again. 
And we said what we are doing in this situation is offering these people that already have a confused brain some more confusion. 
We were adding confusion to confusion. 
And that was not what these people needed. 
These people wanted to have a life, and the help, our help, to deal with that dementia. 
These people wanted to live in a normal house, not in a ward. 
They wanted to have a normal household, where they would smell their dinner on the stove in the kitchen. 
Or be free to go to the kitchen and grab something to eat or drink. 
That's what these people needed. 
And that's what we should organize for them. 
And we said we should organize this like at home, so they wouldn't live with a group of 15 or 20 or 30, like in a ward. 
No, a small group of people, six or seven, family-like. 
Like living with friends. 
And we should find a way to select people based on their ideas about life so that they did have a good chance to become friends, when they lived together. 
And we interviewed all the families of the residents about "what is important for your father," "what's important for your mother," "what is their life like," "what do they want." 
And we found seven groups, and we call them lifestyle groups. 
And for instance, we found this formal lifestyle. 
In this lifestyle, people have a more formal way of interacting with each other, a distant way. 
Their daily rhythm starts later in the day, ends later in the day. 
Classical music is more heard in this lifestyle group than in other lifestyle groups. 
And their menu, well, is more French cuisine than traditional Dutch. 
(Laughter) In contrary to the craftsman lifestyle. 
That's a very traditional lifestyle, and they get up early in the morning, go to bed early, because they have worked hard their whole life, mostly with their hands, very often had a very small family business, a small farm, a shop, or like Mr. B, he was a farmhand. 
And he told me that he would go to his work every morning with a paper bag with his lunch and one cigar. 
That one cigar was the only luxury he could afford for himself. 
And after lunch, he would have that one cigar. 
And until the day he died in the Hogeweyk, he was in this little shed, every day, after lunch, to smoke his cigar. 
This is my mother. 
She's of the cultural lifestyle, she's been living in the Hogeweyk six weeks now. 
And that lifestyle is about traveling, meeting other people, other cultures, interest in arts and music. 
There are more lifestyles. 
But that's what we talked about, and that's what we did. 
But that's not life in a house with a group of people, like-minded people, your own life, your own household. 
There's more in life, everybody wants fun in life and a meaningful life. 
We are social animals -- we need a social life. 
And that's what we started. 
We want to go out of our house and do some shopping, and meet other people. 
Or go to the pub, have a beer with friends. 
Or like Mr. W -- he likes to go out every day, see if there are nice ladies around. 
(Laughter) And he's very courteous to them, and he hopes for smiles and he gets them. 
And he dances with them in the pub. 
It's a feast every day. 
There are people that would rather go to the restaurant, have a wine with friends, or lunch or dinner with friends and celebrate life. 
And my mother, she takes a walk in the park, and sits on a bench in the sun, hoping that a passerby will come and sit next to her and have a conversation about life or about the ducks in the pond. 
That social life is important. 
It means that you're part of society, that you belong. 
And that's what we people need. 
Even if you're living with advanced dementia. 
This is what I see from my office window. 
And one day, I saw a lady coming from one side, and the other lady from the other side, and they met at the corner. 
And I knew both ladies very well. 
I often saw them walking around outside. 
And now and then, I tried to have a conversation with them, but their conversation was ... 
rather hard to understand. 
But I saw them meeting, and I saw them talking, and I saw them gesturing. 
And they had fun together. 
And then they said goodbye, and each went their own way. 
And that's what you want in life, meeting other people and being part of society. 
And that's what I saw happening. 
The Hogeweyk has become a place where people with very advanced dementia can live, have freedom and safety, because the professionals working there and the volunteers working there know how to deal with dementia. 
And the professionals know how to do their professional work in a way that it fits in a natural way in the life of our residents. 
And that means that the management has to provide everything those people need to do their work. 
It needs a management that dares to do this. 
To do things differently than we always have done in a traditional nursing home. 
We see that it works. 
We think this can be done everywhere, because this is not for the rich. 
We've been doing this with the same budget as any traditional nursing home has in our country. 
We work only with the state budget. 
(Applause) Because it has to do with thinking different, and looking at the person in front of you and looking at what does this person need now. 
And it's about a smile, it's about thinking different, it's about how you act, and that costs nothing. 
And there's something else: it's about making choices. 
It's about making choices what you spend your money on. 
I always say, "Red curtains are as expensive as gray ones." 
(Laughter) It's possible, everywhere. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few weeks ago, somebody tweeted during the midterm elections in the United States that Election Day should be made a holiday. 
And I retweeted, saying, "Well, you're welcome to come to my country and vote. 
You'll get the whole week off to allow the military to count it." 
I come from Togo, by the way. 
It is a beautiful country located in West Africa. 
There are some cool, interesting facts about my country. 
Togo has been ruled by the same family for 51 years, making us the oldest autocracy in Africa. 
That's a record. 
We have a second-coolest record: we have been ranked three times as the unhappiest country on earth. 
You are all invited. 
(Laughter) So just to let you know, it's not very cool to live under an autocracy. 
But the interesting thing is that I have met, throughout the course of my activism, so many people from different countries, and when I tell them about Togo, their reaction is always, "How can you guys allow the same people to terrorize you for 51 years? 
You know, like, you Togolese, you must be very patient." 
That's their diplomatic way of saying "stupid." 
(Laughter) And when you live in a free country, there's this tendency of assuming that those who are oppressed tolerate their oppression or are comfortable with it, and democracy is projected as a progressive form of governance in such a way that those people who don't live under democratic countries are seen as people who are not intellectually or maybe morally as advanced as others. 
But it's not the case. 
The reason why people have that perception has to do with the way stories are covered about dictatorships. 
In the course of my activism, I have had to interview with so many news outlets out there, and usually it would always start with, "What got you started? 
What inspired you?" 
And I reply, "I wasn't inspired. I was triggered." 
And it goes on. "Well, what triggered you?" 
And I go on about how my father was arrested when I was 13, and tortured, all the history ... I don't want to get into details now, because you'll start sleeping. 
But the thing is, at the end of the day, what interests them the most is: How was he tortured? 
For how many days? How many people died? 
They are interested in the abuse, in the killing, because they believe that will gain attention and sympathy. 
But in reality, it serves the purpose of the dictator. 
It helps them advertise their cruelty. 
In 2011, I cofounded a movement I call "Faure Must Go," because Faure is the first name of our president. 
Togo is a French-speaking country, by the way, but I chose English because I had my issues with France as well. 
But then -- (Laughter) But then, when I started Faure Must Go, I made a video, and I came on camera, and I said, "Well, Faure Gnassingbé, I give you 60 days to resign as president, because if you don't, we the youth in Togo will organize and we will bring you down, because you have killed over 500 of our countrymen to seize power when your father died. 
We have not chosen you. 
You are an imposter, and we will remove you." 
But I was the only known face of the movement. 
Why? Because I was the only stupid one. 
(Laughter) And the backlashes followed. 
My family started receiving threats. 
My siblings called me one morning. 
They said, "You know what? 
When they come here to kill you, we don't want to die with you, so move out." 
So yes, I moved out. 
And I'm so angry at them, so I haven't talked to them in five years. 
Anyway, moving forward ... 
For the past nine years, I have been working with countries to raise awareness of Togo, to help the people of Togo overcome their fear so they, too, can come and say they want change. 
I have received a lot of persecution that I cannot disclose, a lot of threats, a lot of abuse, psychologically. 
But I don't like talking about them, because I know that my job as an activist is to mobilize, is to organize, is to help every single Togolese citizen understand that, as citizens, we hold the power, we are the boss and we decide. 
And the punishment that the dictators are using to intimidate them must not prevent us from getting what we want. 
That is why I said it is very important to cover the stories of activists in the way that it helps mobilize people, not in the way that it helps deter their action and force even more their subjugation to the oppressive system. 
During these years that I've been an activist, there are days that I felt like quitting because I couldn't take it. 
Well then, what kept me going? 
The one thing that kept me going: I remember the story of my grandfather, and how he used to walk 465 miles from his village to the city, just to protest for independence. 
Then I remember the sacrifice of my father, who was tortured so many times for daring to protest against the regime. 
Back in the '70s, they would write pamphlets to raise awareness on the dictatorship, and because they couldn't afford to make copies, they would reproduce the same pamphlet 500 times each and distribute them. 
It got to a point where the military knew their handwriting, so as soon as they stumbled upon one, they'd go and get them. 
But I look at that and I'm like, you know, today you have a blog. 
I don't have to copy the same thing 500 times. 
I blog and thousands of people read it. 
By the way, in Togo, they like calling me the WhatsApp girl, because I am always on WhatsApp attacking the government. 
(Laughter) So it's much easier. 
When I'm angry at the government, I just make an angry note, and I send it out and thousands of people share it. 
I'm rarely this composed. I'm always angry, by the way. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So I was talking about the necessity to showcase our stories, because when I think about the sacrifices that were made for us, it helped me keep going. 
One of the very first actions of our Faure Must Go movement was to come up with a petition, asking citizens to sign so that we can demand new elections, as the constitution allows. 
People were scared to put their names because, they said, they don't want to get in trouble. 
Even in the diaspora, people were scared. 
They were like, "We have family at home." 
But there was this woman who was in her 60s. 
When she heard about it, she took the petition, and she went home, and by herself she collected over 1,000 [signatures]. 
That inspired me so much, and I was like, if a 60-year-old that has nothing more to gain in this regime can do this for us, the young ones, then why should I quit? 
It is the stories of resistance, the stories of defiance, the stories of resilience, that inspire people to get involved, not the stories of abuse and killings and hurt, because as humans, it's only natural for us to be scared. 
I would like to share with you a few characteristics of dictatorships so that you can assess your own country and see if you are also at risk of joining us. 
(Laughter and cheers) (Applause) Number one thing to look at: concentration of power. 
Is the power in your country concentrated in the hands of a few, an elite? 
It can be a political elite, ideological elite. 
And you have a strongman, because we always have one guy who is presented as the messiah who will save us from the world. 
The second point is propaganda. 
Dictators feed on propaganda. 
They like giving the impression that they are the saviors, and without them, the country will fall apart. 
And they are always fighting some foreign forces, you know? 
The Christians, the Jewish, the Muslims, the voodoo priests are coming for you. 
The Communists, when they get here, we'll all be broke. 
These kinds of things. 
And our president, in particular, he fights pirates. 
(Laughter) I am very serious. 
Last year, he bought a boat that's 13 million dollars to fight pirates, and 60 percent of our people are starving. 
So they are always protecting us from some foreign forces. 
And this leads to point three: militarization. 
Dictators survive by instigating fear, and they use the military to suppress dissident voices, even though they try to give the impression that the military is to protect the nation. 
And they suppress institutions and destroy them so that they don't have to be held accountable. 
So do you have a heavily militarized country? 
And this leads to point four, what I call human cruelty. 
You know when we talk about animals, we say animal cruelty when animals are abused, because there's no charter acknowledged by the UN saying animal rights charter. 
Point one: all animals are created equal. So you don't have that. 
So whenever animals are abused, we say animal cruelty. 
But when it comes to humans, we say human rights abuses, because we assume that all humans have rights. 
But some of us are actually still fighting for our right to have rights. 
So in that condition, I don't talk about human rights abuse or violation. 
When you live in a country and you have an issue with the president and the worst thing that can happen is he bans you from the presidency, you are lucky. 
When you come to my country and have an issue with the president, you just run, disappear; you vanish from the universe, because they can still find you in Turkey. 
So people like myself, we don't get to live in Togo anymore. 
And people like myself, we don't get to live in the same place for more than a month, because we don't want to be traced. 
The way they abuse people, the type of cruelty that happens in all impunity under dictatorships are beyond human imagination. 
The stories of some of the activists that were killed, their bodies dumped in the sea, that were tortured to the point where they lost their hearing or their sight -- those stories still haunt me. 
And sometimes, as an activist, I am less concerned about dying than how it will happen. 
Sometimes I just sit down and I imagine all scenarios. 
What are they going to do? Are they going to cut my ears first? 
Or are they going to cut my tongue because I'm always insulting them? 
It sounds cruel, but it is the reality. 
We live in a very cruel world. 
Dictators are cruel monsters, and I am not saying it to be nice. 
So yes, that is the final characteristic. 
The list goes on, but that's the final thing that I want to share about autocracies, so that you look at your country and see if there are risks there. 
It is important that you acknowledge the gains of freedom that you have today, because some people had to give their lives for you to have it. 
So don't take this for granted. 
But then at the same time, you also need to know that no country is actually destined to be oppressed, while at the same time, no country or no people are immune to oppression and dictatorship. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 
That day, nearly a quarter million people gathered on the national mall to demand an end to the discrimination, segregation, violence, and economic exclusion black people still faced across the United States. 
None of it would have been possible without the march’s chief organizer – a man named Bayard Rustin. 
Rustin grew up in a Quaker household, and began peacefully protesting racial segregation in high school. 
He remained committed to pacifism throughout his life, and was jailed in 1944 as a conscientious objector to World War II. 
During his two-year imprisonment, he protested the segregated facilities from within. 
Wherever Rustin went, he organized and advocated, and was constantly attuned to the methods, groups, and people who could help further messages of equality. 
He joined the Communist Party when black American’s civil rights were one of its priorities, but soon became disillusioned by the party’s authoritarian leanings and left. 
In 1948, he traveled to India to learn the peaceful resistance strategies of the recently assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. 
He returned to the United States armed with strategies for peaceful protest, including civil disobedience. 
He began to work with Martin Luther King Jr in 1955, and shared these ideas with him. 
As King’s prominence increased, Rustin became his main advisor, as well as a key strategist in the broader civil rights movement. 
He brought his organizing expertise to the 1956 bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama —in fact, he had organized and participated in a transportation protest that helped inspire the boycotts almost a decade before. 
His largest-scale organizing project came in 1963, when he led the planning for the national march on Washington. 
The possibility of riots that could injure marchers and undermine their message of peaceful protest was a huge concern. 
Rustin not only worked with the DC police and hospitals to prepare, but organized and trained a volunteer force of 2,000 security marshals. 
In spite of his deft management, some of the other organizers did not want Rustin to march in front with other leaders from the south, because of his homosexuality. 
Despite these slights, Rustin maintained his focus, and on the day of the march he delivered the marchers' demands in a speech directed at President John F. Kennedy. 
The march itself proceeded smoothly, without any violence. 
It has been credited with helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices. 
In spite of his decades of service, Rustin’s positions on certain political issues were unpopular among his peers. 
Some thought he wasn’t critical enough of the Vietnam War, or that he was too eager to collaborate with the political establishment including the president and congress. 
Others were uncomfortable with his former communist affiliation. 
But ultimately, both his belief in collaboration with the government and his membership to the communist party had been driven by his desire to maximize tangible gains in liberties for black Americans, and to do so as quickly as possible. 
Rustin was passed over for several influential roles in the 1960s and 70s, but he never stopped his activism. 
In the 1980s, he publicly came out as gay, and was instrumental in drawing attention to the AIDS crisis until his death in 1987. 
In 2013, fifty years after the March On Washington, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising Rustin’s “march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love.” 

I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. 
At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. 
I learned very few things in addition since (Laughter) -- but made a whole number of them into projects since. 
These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland: "Everybody always thinks they are right." 
They were combined in the media. 
"Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on." 
We're doing changing media. 
This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. 
You can't help but actually ripping that spider web apart. 
All of these things are pieces of graphic design. 
We do them for our clients. 
They are commissioned. 
I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there's always a client attached to them. 
These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that's lined with fashion stores. 
"Worrying solves nothing." 
"Money does not make me happy" appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. 
The printer lost the file, didn't tell us. 
When the magazine -- actually, when I got the subscription -- it was 12 following pages. 
It said, "Money does does make me happy." 
And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. 
So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz. 
It just says "Money," and if you look down the side street, it says, "does not make me happy." 
We had a show that just came down last week in New York. 
We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they've learned into the steam in the window. 
Everybody participated -- Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli. 
Singapore was quite in discussion. 
This is a little spot that we filmed there that's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore. 
And, of course, it's one that's dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments -- some banal, some a bit more profound -- all originally had come out of my diary. 
And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. 
If it's -- see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it. 
And the very last one is a billboard. 
This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. 
This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. 
We let that lie around in the sun. 
As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. 
After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said, "Complaining is silly. Either act or forget." 
Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. 
(Laughter) Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

To empower girls, you need to educate them. 
That was my dream. 
And so I built a school, and in the process, I learned something much bigger. 
When you empower a girl, you transform a community. 
School is just a start. 
I grew up in rural Kenya in a small village called Enoosaen. 
I was the first of eight children, and I spent my childhood helping my mother cook, clean, farm and take care of my siblings. 
Like other Maasai girls, I was engaged from a very young age to be married. 
But as I reached puberty, I underwent female genital mutilation, known as FGM. 
This picture shows some of the tools that are used to perform FGM on girls. 
FGM was supposed to mark the end of my childhood and, by extension, my education. 
But I negotiated with my father in order to stay in school -- even after going through FGM. 
Years later I went to university. 
And in order to get my community's support, I promised to come back one day to repay that support. 
But years later, when I went back to my village, not much had changed. 
Girls were still going through FGM, still leaving school, still getting married to men older than their fathers and still having children when they're teenagers. 
I did not want to see any more girls go through that. 
That's when I knew what I needed to do to give back to my community. 
I built a school just for girls so that they can be free from FGM and early marriage. 
At my first enrollment -- (Applause and cheers) At my first enrollment, I had hoped for 10 girls. 
100 came. 
(Cheers and applause) I started to realize just how big this dream was, and soon I learned that my school could be the foundation -- but it wasn't going to be enough. 
So that first year, I enrolled these 30 girls. 
Some had been abused, others were orphans, and some came from families that are very traditional, that had never sent any girl to school. 
So school started. 
Though the girls seemed excited to be there, they were having difficulty staying awake. 
What was going on? 
They had a teacher, they had books, there was a new classroom on the way, but ... 
They were determined to be there, but they had no energy. 
Then I realized they were hungry, so I quickly found a cook and food. 
Soon thereafter, I learned that a classroom was not enough. 
I needed a boarding school. 
Not only were the girls tired and hungry from chores and long walks to school and back home, they were also not safe. 
It's a sad truth, but girls are often assaulted, raped and even kidnapped on their way to school. 
So before a girl could learn math or history, she needed to feel safe, she needed to be rested and be well-nourished. 
So let me tell you about some of my girls. 
This is Faith. 
Faith comes from a very traditional family in the community. 
Her older sister had already gone through FGM and already married, but Faith was so determined. 
She really loved learning, and she wanted to come to my school when she heard about it. 
So she asked her father, her mother -- anyone to bring her to my school. 
They all refused. 
Faith did something very brave. 
She stole an egg from her mother's house, went to the market, sold the egg and bought a single pencil. 
Then she walked five miles, clenching that pencil, trying to enroll. 
She arrived -- (Applause) She arrived tired and hungry, but determined. 
I listened to her story, and we enrolled her in my school. 
But getting into my school was only just the start. 
Faith needed food, she needed medicine, she needed counseling -- all of which we provided. 
And she also met adults who already believed in her. 
Supported by this community, Faith was ready to learn. 
This is Faith. 
Six months of schooling, now she's a happy sixth grader who dreams of becoming a pilot someday, and her family now supports her, and best of all, her younger sisters will follow in her footsteps. 
(Applause) Child marriage is expected to cost the global economy trillions of dollars over the next 15 years. 
We can talk numbers, but in a real lifetime, what child marriage will cost my village is the doctor, the teacher, the entrepreneur, the true partner our men will need in the future ... 
real ways women can help us lift out of poverty. 
So I came to realize once again, as I did when I needed help to go to university, that while I could dream or have a dream, I could not make it come true all by myself. 
So I went back to the elders who helped me more than a decade ago. 
I needed their support once again if I was going to be successful. 
So I formed a community board with religious leaders, parents and some teachers from other schools. 
I needed allies in the government and in the community to help advance my goal. 
I needed especially the support of the chief to help me enforce the no-FGM policy in my school. 
At first he was resistant, but I persisted -- (Laughter) and now he's our greatest ally. 
(Applause) I also needed the fathers. 
That brings me to Linet. 
Linet's father, Momposhi, did not believe in the education of girls. 
In fact, he himself never went to school. 
But Linet's mother believed in Linet and brought her to enroll in my school, and I knew she belonged with us. 
I just had to find a way to get Momposhi to believe in Linet, too. 
So I used the pretense of revealing Linet's grade to get Momposhi to come. 
He came, and he started noticing his daughter being promising as a student. 
With each visit, he built a strong relationship with his daughter -- noticing not just her grades but also accepting her as someone with full potential. 
So when Linet was accepted in one of the top national high schools after eighth grade, Momposhi was bursting with pride and went around the village telling everyone how proud and how smart his daughter was. 
(Laughter) Can you imagine? 
He brought Linet to the new school himself. 
It was the first time either of them had ever been to Nairobi. 
Today Linet is studying at university in Australia -- (Applause and cheers) and Momposhi is our greatest advocate in the community. 
I also brought mothers to the table, including my own. 
That's my mother in one of our training programs. 
And our mothers are involved in the education of their own children. 
I also brought grandmothers into the mix. 
(Laughter) In my community, grandmothers are the proud keepers of our stories and cultures, and I wanted my girls to learn and embrace our rich Maasai culture. 
Today, grandmothers do story time with the girls, and it's a beautiful way our community remains connected. 
I also ... 
started working with the boys! 
(Laughter) What would happen if the boys grew up with the same mindset as their fathers before them? 
I'll tell you, not much will change. 
So I enlisted support from an organization called I'm Worth Defending: a group of young, progressive leaders led by Alfred and George. 
Together we created a training program for boys and girls who could not attend my school, sharing vital information about gender equality, health and human rights. 
Today we have reached over 10,000 boys and girls and counting. 
(Applause) It turns out it truly does take a village to make this kind of a dream come true. 
(Laughter) That's what you're seeing today, where nearly 400 girls have not gone through FGM in my village, in a region where nearly 80 percent of women have been cut. 
Believe me, these girls, they are sharing their experiences with their sisters, their cousins and their friends. 
They're so interested. 
Over time, this is becoming the new normal and it's being embraced by the same, same community -- my community. 
So what does transforming communities mean to Kenya? 
President Obama visited Kenya in 2015, and he met with representatives from organizations trying to help improve communities. 
Guess what? 
He met Linet! 
(Laughter) (Applause) Together they talked about a Kenya where all girls have the same opportunities, where Linet is a leader and where communities like Enoosaen are thriving because its members -- all its members -- have opportunities. 
Helping the communities see that each daughter is a treasure, every sister is full of potential, and helping every single girl see that value in herself. 
There is no limit to what that future will cost. 
Not every girl who comes to my school will be a PhD, but every single one of them will achieve her full potential and will become an advocate for her children and her grandchildren for years to come. 
Today my dreams are informed by what I learned from them and what I've learned from you. 
My journey led me out of Enoosaen and back again. 
And in the process, I was embraced by the world, and you have become my village. 
So I make a new promise to you, my elders, my sisters and my friends, that I am going to keep dreaming and keep going until girls like Linet and Faith achieve their dreams and I see mine: that all communities give every single woman and every single girl their dreams come true. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) Thank you, thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

A few years ago, I always had this thing happening to me, especially at family gatherings like teas with aunts and uncles or something like this. 
When people come up to you, and they ask you, "So, what are you doing?" 
And I would have this magical one-word reply, which would make everybody happy: "Medicine. 
I'm going to be a doctor." 
Very easy, that's it, everybody's happy and pleased. 
And it could be so easy, but this effect really only lasts for 30 seconds with me, because that's then the time when one of them would ask, "So, in what area of medicine? 
What specialty do you want to go into?" 
And then I would have to strip down in all honesty and just say, "OK, so I'm fascinated with the colon. 
It all started with the anus, and now it's basically the whole intestinal tract." 
(Laughter) And this would be the moment when the enthusiasm trickled, and it would maybe also get, like, awkwardly silent in the room, and I would think this was terribly sad, because I do believe our bowels are quite charming. 
(Laughter) And while we're in a time where many people are thinking about what new superfood smoothie to make or if gluten is maybe bad for them, actually, hardly anyone seems to care about the organ where this happens, the concrete anatomy and the mechanisms behind it. 
And sometimes it seems to me like we're all trying to figure out this magic trick, but nobody's checking out the magician, just because he has, like, an embarrassing hairstyle or something. 
And actually, there are reasons science disliked the gut for a long time; I have to say this. 
So, it's complex. 
There's a lot of surface area -- about 40 times the area of our skin. 
Then, in such a tight pipe, there are so many immune cells that are being trained there. 
We have 100 trillion bacteria doing all sorts of things -- producing little molecules. 
Then there's about 20 different hormones, so we are on a very different level than our genitals, for example. 
And the nervous system of our gut is so complex that when we cut out a piece, it's independent enough that when we poke it, it mumbles back at us, friendly. 
(Laughter) But at least those reasons are also the reasons why it's so fascinating and important. 
It took me three steps to love the gut. 
So today, I invite you to follow me on those three steps. 
The very first was just looking at it and asking questions like, "How does it work?" 
and "Why does it have to look so weird for that sometimes?" 
And it actually wasn't me asking the first kind of these questions, but my roommate. 
After one heavy night of partying, he came into our shared-room kitchen, and he said, "Giulia, you study medicine. How does pooping work?" 
(Laughter) And I did study medicine but I had no idea, so I had to go up to my room and look it up in different books. 
And I found something interesting, I thought, at that time. 
So it turns out, we don't only have this outer sphincter, we also have an inner sphincter muscle. 
The outer sphincter we all know, we can control it, we know what's going on there; the inner one, we really don't. 
So what happens is, when there are leftovers from digestion, they're being delivered to the inner one first. 
This inner one will open in a reflex and let through a little bit for testing. 
(Laughter) So, there are sensory cells that will analyze what has been delivered: Is it gaseous or is it solid? 
And they will then send this information up to our brain, and this is the moment when our brain knows, "Oh, I have to go to the toilet." 
(Laughter) The brain will then do what it's designed to do with its amazing consciousness. 
It will mediate with our surroundings, and it will say something like, "So, I checked. 
We are at this TEDx conference -- " (Laughter) (Applause) Gaseous? 
Maybe, if you're sitting on the sides, and you know you can pull it off silently. 
(Laughter) But solid -- maybe later. 
(Laughter) Since our outer sphincter and the brain is connected with nervous cells, they coordinate, cooperate, and they put it back in a waiting line -- (Laughter) for other times, like, for example, when we're at home sitting on the couch, we have nothing better to do, we are free to go. 
(Laughter) Us humans are actually one of the very few animals that do this in such an advanced and clean way. 
To be honest, I had some newfound respect for that nice, inner sphincter dude -- not connected to nerves that care too much about the outer world or the time -- just caring about me for once. 
I thought that was nice. 
And I used to not be a great fan of public restrooms, but now I can go anywhere, because I consider it more when that inner muscle puts a suggestion on my daily agenda. 
(Laughter) And also I learned something else, which was: looking closely at something I might have shied away from -- maybe the weirdest part of myself -- left me feeling more fearless, and also appreciating myself more. 
And I think this happens a lot of times when you look at the gut, actually. 
Like those funny rumbling noises that happen when you're in a group of friends or at the office conference table, going, like, "Merrr, merrr..." 
This is not because we're hungry. 
This is because our small intestine is actually a huge neat freak, and it takes the time in between digestion to clean everything up, resulting in those eight meters of gut -- really, seven of them -- being very clean and hardly smelling like anything. 
It will, to achieve this, create a strong muscular wave that moves everything forward that's been leftover after digestion. 
This can sometimes create a sound, but doesn't necessarily have to always. 
So what we're embarrassed of is really a sign of something keeping our insides fine and tidy. 
Or this weird, crooked shape of our stomach -- a bit Quasimodo-ish. 
This actually makes us be able to put pressure on our belly without vomiting, like when we're laughing and when we're doing sports, because the pressure will go up and not so much sideways. 
This also creates this air bubble that's usually always very visible in X-rays, for example, and can sometimes, with some people, when it gets too big, create discomfort or even some sensations of pain. 
But for most of the people, is just results that it's far easier to burp when you're laying on your left side instead of your right. 
And soon I moved a bit further and started to look at the whole picture of our body and health. 
This was actually after I had heard that someone I knew a little bit had killed himself. 
It happened that I had been sitting next to that person the day before, and I smelled that he had very bad breath. 
And when I learned of the suicide the next day, I thought: Could the gut have something to do with it? 
And I frantically started searching if there were scientific papers on the connection of gut and brain. 
And to my surprise, I found many. 
It turns out it's maybe not as simple as we sometimes think. 
We tend to think our brain makes these commands and then sends them down to the other organs, and they all have to listen. 
But really, it's more that 10 percent of the nerves that connect brain and gut deliver information from the brain to the gut. 
We know this, for example, in stressful situations, when there are transmitters from the brain that are being sensed by our gut, so the gut will try to lower all the work, and not be working and taking away blood and energy to save energy for problem-solving. 
This can go as far as nervous vomiting or nervous diarrhea to get rid of food that it then doesn't want to digest. 
Maybe more interestingly, 90 percent of the nervous fibers that connect gut and brain deliver information from our gut to our brain. 
And when you think about it a little bit, it does make sense, because our brain is very isolated. 
It's in this bony skull surrounded by a thick skin, and it needs information to put together a feeling of "How am I, as a whole body, doing?" 
And the gut, actually, is possibly the most important advisor for the brain because it's our largest sensory organ, collecting information not only on the quality of our nutrients, but really also on how are so many of our immune cells doing, or things like the hormones in our blood that it can sense. 
And it can package this information, and send it up to the brain. 
It can, there, not reach areas like visual cortex or word formations -- otherwise, when we digest, we would see funny colors or we would make funny noises -- no. 
But it can reach areas for things like morality, fear or emotional processing or areas for self-awareness. 
So it does make sense that when our body and our brain are putting together this feeling of, "How am I, as a whole body, doing?" 
that the gut has something to contribute to this process. 
And it also makes sense that people who have conditions like irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease have a higher risk of having anxiety or depression. 
I think this is good information to share, because many people will think, "I have this gut thing, and maybe I also have this mental health thing." 
And maybe -- because science is not clear on that right now -- it's really just that the brain is feeling sympathy with their gut. 
This has yet to grow in evidence until it can come to practice. 
But just knowing about these kinds of research that's out there at the moment helps me in my daily life. 
And it makes me think differently of my moods and not externalize so much all the time. 
I feel oftentimes during the day we are a brain and a screen, and we will tend to look for answers right there and maybe the work is stupid or our neighbor -- but really, moods can also come from within. 
And just knowing this helped me, for example, when I sometimes wake up too early, and I start to worry and wander around with my thoughts. 
Then I think, "Stop. What did I eat yesterday? 
Did I stress myself out too much? 
Did I eat too late or something?" 
And then maybe get up and make myself a tea, something light to digest. 
And as simple as that sounds, I think it's been surprisingly good for me. 
Step three took me further away from our body, and to really understanding bacteria differently. 
The research we have today is creating a new definition of what real cleanliness is. 
And it's not the hygiene hypothesis -- I think many maybe know this. 
So it states that when you have too little microbes in your environment because you clean all the time, that's not really a good thing, because people get more allergies or autoimmune diseases then. 
So I knew this hypothesis, and I thought I wouldn't learn so much from looking at cleanliness in the gut. 
But I was wrong. 
It turns out, real cleanliness is not about killing off bacteria right away. 
Real cleanliness is a bit different. 
When we look at the facts, 95 percent of all bacteria on this planet don't harm us -- they can't, they don't have the genes to do so. 
Many, actually, help us a lot, and scientists at the moment are looking into things like: Do some bacteria help us clean the gut? 
Do they help us digest? 
Do they make us put on weight or have a lean figure although we're eating lots? 
Are others making us feel more courageous or even more resilient to stress? 
So you see, there are more questions when it comes to cleanliness. 
And, actually, the thing is, it's about a healthy balance, I think. 
You can't avoid the bad all the time. 
This is simply not possible; there's always something bad around. 
So what really the whole deal is when you look at a clean gut, it's about having good bacteria, enough of them, and then some bad. 
Our immune system needs the bad, too, so it knows what it's looking out for. 
So I started having this different perspective on cleanliness and a few weeks later, I held a talk at my university, and I made a mistake by 1,000. 
And I went home and I realized in that moment, I was like, "Ah! I made a mistake by 1,000. 
Oh God, that's so much, and that's so embarrassing." 
And I started to think about this, I was like, "Ugh!" 
And after a while I said, "OK, I made this one mistake, but then I also told so many good and right and helpful things, so I think it's OK, you know? 
It's a clean thing." 
And then I was like, "Oh, wait. 
Maybe I took my perspective on cleanliness further." 
And it's my theory at the moment that maybe we all do. 
Take it a bit further than just cleaning our living room, where maybe we make it to sort like a life hygiene. 
Knowing that this is about fostering the good just as much as trying to shelter yourself from the bad had a very calming effect on me. 
So in that sense, I hope today I told you mostly good and helpful things, and thank you for your time, for listening to me. 
(Applause) 

Congratulations. 
By being here, listening, alive, a member of a growing species, you are one of history's greatest winners -- the culmination of a success story four billion years in the making. 
You are life's one percent. 
The losers, the 99 percent of species who have ever lived, are dead -- killed by fire, flood, asteroids, predation, starvation, ice, heat and the cold math of natural selection. 
Your ancestors, back to the earliest fishes, overcame all these challenges. 
You are here because of golden opportunities made possible by mass extinction. 
(Laughter) It's true. 
The same is true of your co-winners and relatives. 
The 34,000 kinds of fishes. 
How did we all get so lucky? 
Will we continue to win? 
I am a fish paleobiologist who uses big data -- the fossil record -- to study how some species win and others lose. 
The living can't tell us; they know nothing but winning. 
So, we must speak with the dead. 
How do we make dead fishes talk? 
Museums contain multitudes of beautiful fish fossils, but their real beauty emerges when combined with the larger number of ugly, broken fossils, and reduced to ones and zeros. 
I can trawl a 500-million-year database for evolutionary patterns. 
For example, fish forms can be captured by coordinates and transformed to reveal major pathways of change and trends through time. 
Here is the story of the winners and losers of just one pivotal event I discovered using fossil data. 
Let's travel back 360 million years -- six times as long ago as the last dinosaur -- to the Devonian period; a strange world. 
Armored predators with razor-edge jaws dominated alongside huge fishes with arm bones in their fins. 
Crab-like fishes scuttled across the sea floor. 
The few ray-fin relatives of salmon and tuna cowered at the bottom of the food chain. 
The few early sharks lived offshore in fear. 
Your few four-legged ancestors, the tetrapods, struggled in tropical river plains. 
Ecosystems were crowded. 
There was no escape, no opportunity in sight. 
Then the world ended. 
(Laughter) No, it is a good thing. 
96 percent of all fish species died during the Hangenberg event, 359 million years ago: an interval of fire and ice. 
A crowded world was disrupted and swept away. 
Now, you might think that's the end of the story. 
The mighty fell, the meek inherited the earth, and here we are. 
But winning is not that simple. 
The handful of survivors came from many groups -- all greatly outnumbered by their own dead. 
They ranged from top predator to bottom-feeder, big to small, marine to freshwater. 
The extinction was a filter. 
It merely leveled the playing field. 
What really counted was what survivors did over the next several million years in that devastated world. 
The former overlords should have had an advantage. 
They became even larger, storing energy, investing in their young, spreading across the globe, feasting on fishes, keeping what had always worked, and biding their time. 
Yet they merely persisted for a while, declining without innovating, becoming living fossils. 
They were too stuck in their ways and are now largely forgotten. 
A few of the long-suffering ray-fins, sharks and four-legged tetrapods went the opposite direction. 
They became smaller -- living fast, dying young, eating little and reproducing rapidly. 
They tried new foods, different homes, strange heads and weird bodies. 
(Laughter) And they found opportunity, proliferated, and won the future for their 60,000 living species, including you. 
That's why they look familiar. 
You know their names. 
Winning is not about random events or an arms race. 
Rather, survivors went down alternative, evolutionary pathways. 
Some found incredible success, while others became dead fish walking. 
(Laughter) A real scientific term. 
(Laughter) I am now investigating how these pathways to victory and defeat repeat across time. 
My lab has already compiled thousands upon thousands of dead fishes, but many more remain. 
However, it is already clear that your ancestors' survival through mass extinction, and their responses in the aftermath made you who you are today. 
What does this tell us for the future? 
As long as a handful of species survive, life will recover. 
The versatile and the lucky will not just replace what was lost, but win in new forms. 
It just might take several million years. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Following a devastating nuclear war, Lilith Iyapo awakens after 250 years of stasis to find herself surrounded by a group of aliens called the Oankali. 
These highly evolved beings want to trade DNA by breeding with humans so that each species’ genes can diversify and fortify the other. 
The only alternative they offer is sterilization of the entire human race. 
Should humanity take the leap into the biological unknown, or hold on to its identity and perish? 
Questions like this haunt Octavia Butler’s "Dawn," the first in her trilogy "Lilith’s Brood." 
A visionary storyteller who upended science fiction, Butler built stunning worlds throughout her work– and explored dilemmas that keep us awake at night. 
Born in 1947, Butler grew up shy and introverted in Pasadena, California. 
She dreamt up stories from an early age, and was soon scribbling these scenarios on paper. 
At twelve, she begged her mother for a typewriter after enduring a campy science fiction film called "Devil Girl From Mars." 
Unimpressed with what she saw, Butler knew she could tell a better story. 
Much science fiction features white male heroes who blast aliens or become saviors of brown people. 
Butler wanted to write diverse characters for diverse audiences. 
She brought nuance and depth to the representation of their experiences. 
For Butler, imagination was not only for planting the seeds of science fiction– but also a strategy for surviving an unjust world on one’s own terms. 
Her work often takes troubling features of the world such as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, class, or ability, and invites the reader to contemplate them in new contexts. 
One of her most beloved novels, the "Parable of the Sower," follows this pattern. 
It tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina as she makes her way through a near-future California, ruined by corporate greed, inequality, and environmental destruction. 
As she struggles with hyperempathy, or a condition in the novel that causes her to feel others’ pain, and less often, their pleasure. 
Lauren embarks on a quest with a group of refugees to find a place to thrive. 
There, they seek to live in accordance with Lauren’s found religion, Earthseed, which is based on the principle that humans must adapt to an ever-changing world. 
Lauren’s quest had roots in a real life event– California Prop 187, which attempted to deny undocumented immigrants fundamental human rights, before it was deemed unconstitutional. 
Butler frequently incorporated contemporary news into her writing. 
In her 1998 sequel to "The Parable of the Sower," "Parable of the Talents," she wrote of a presidential candidate who controls Americans with virtual reality and “shock collars.” His slogan? “Make America great again.” While people have noted her prescience, Butler was also interested in re-examining history. 
For instance, "Kindred" tells the story of a woman who is repeatedly pulled back in time to the Maryland plantation of her ancestors. 
Early on, she learns that her mission is to save the life of the white man who will rape her great grandmother. 
If she doesn’t save him, she herself will cease to exist. 
This grim dilemma forces Dana to confront the ongoing trauma of slavery and sexual violence against Black women. 
With her stories of women founding new societies, time travelers overcoming historical strife, and interspecies bonding, Butler had a profound influence on the growing popularity of Afrofuturism. 
That’s a cultural movement where Black writers and artists who are inspired by the past, present and future, produce works that incorporate magic, history, technology and much more. 
As Lauren comes to learn in "Parable of the Sower," "All that you touch you Change. 
All that you Change Changes you. 
The only lasting truth is Change.” 

Have you ever heard of typosquatting? 
Well, typosquatting is where companies like Google post advertisements on websites that are commonly miskeyed, and then they sit back and rake in millions banking on the fact that you're visiting something like gmale.com or mikerowesoft.com. 
(Laughter) It just seems kind of silly, doesn't it? 
How about this? 
On February 28, an engineer at Amazon made a similar, seemingly small key error. 
Only I say seemingly small because this one little typo on Amazon's supercode produced a massive internet slowdown that cost the company over 160 million dollars in the span of just four hours. 
But this is actually really scary. 
You see, recently, an employee at the New England Compound, which is a pharmaceutical manufacturer, didn't clean a lab properly and now 76 people have died and 700 more have contracted meningitis. 
I mean, these examples are crazy, right? 
When did we come to live in a world where these types of typos, common errors, this do-your-best attitude or just good enough was acceptable? 
At some point, we've stopped valuing perfection, and now, these are the type of results that we get. 
You see, I think that we should all seek perfection, all the time, and I think we need to get to it quick. 
You see, I run a training facility where I'm responsible for the education of professional delivery drivers, and in my line of work, we have a unique understanding of the cost of failure, the cost of just 99 percent, because in the world of professional driving, just 99 percent of the job means somebody dies. 
Look, a hundred people die every day due to vehicular crashes. 
Think about that for a second. 
That's like the equivalent of four commercial airliners crashing every week, yet we still can't convince ourselves to pay perfect attention behind the wheel. 
So I teach my drivers to value perfection. 
It's why I have them memorize our 131-word defensive driving program perfectly, and then I have them rewrite it. 
One wrong word, one misspelled word, one missing comma, it's a failed test. 
It's why I do uniform inspections daily. 
Undershirts are white or brown only, shoes are black or brown polished leather and frankly, don't come to my class wrinkled and expect me to let you stay. 
It's why I insist that my drivers are on time. 
Don't be late, not to class, not to break, not to lunch. 
When you're supposed to be somewhere, be there. 
You see, I do this so that my students understand that when I'm training them to drive a car and I say, "Clear every intersection," they understand that I mean every traffic signal, every cross street, every side street, every parking lot, every dirt road, every crosswalk, every intersection without fail. 
Now, new students will often ask me why my class is so difficult, strict, or uniform, and the answer is simple. 
You see, perfectionism is an attitude developed in the small things and then applied to the larger job. 
So basically, if you can't get the little things right, you're going to fail when it counts, and when you're driving a car, it counts. 
A car traveling at 55 miles an hour covers the length of an American football field in just under four and a half seconds, but just so happens to be the same amount of time it takes the average person to check a text message. 
So I don't allow my drivers to lose focus, and I don't accept anything less than perfection out of them. 
And you know what? 
I'm tired of everybody else accepting 99 percent as good enough. 
I mean, being less than perfect has real consequences, doesn't it? 
Think about it. 
If the makers of our credit cards were only 99.9 percent effective, there would be over a million cards in circulation today that had the wrong information on the magnetic strip on the back. 
Or, if the Webster's Dictionary was only 99.9 percent accurate, it would have 470 misspelled words in it. 
How about this? 
If our doctors were only 99.9 percent correct, then every year, 4,453,000 prescriptions would be written incorrectly, and probably even scarier, 11 newborns would be given to the wrong parents every day in the United States. 
(Laughter) And those are just the odds, thank you. 
(Laughter) The reality is that the US government crashed a 1.4-billion-dollar aircraft because the maintenance crew only did 99 percent of their job. 
Someone forgot to check a sensor. 
The reality is that 16 people are now dead, 180 have now been injured, and 34 million cars are being recalled because the producers of a car airbag produced and distributed a product that they thought was, you know, good enough. 
The reality is that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in America. 
250,000 people die each year because somebody who probably thought they were doing their job good enough messed up. 
And you don't believe me? 
Well, I can certainly understand why. 
You see, it's hard for us to believe anything these days when less than 50 percent of what news pundits say is actually grounded in fact. 
(Laughter) So it comes down to this: trying our best is not good enough. 
So how do we change? 
We seek perfection and settle for nothing less. 
Now, I know. I need to give you a minute on that, because I know what you've been told. 
It probably goes something like, perfection is impossible for humans, so therefore, seeking perfection will not only ruin your self-esteem but it will render you a failure. 
But there's the irony. 
See, today we're all so afraid of that word failure, but the truth is, we need to fail. 
Failure is a natural stepping stone towards perfection, but at some point, because we became so afraid of that idea of failure and so afraid of that idea of perfection, we dismissed it because of what might happen to our egos when we fall short. 
I mean, do you really think that failure's going to ruin you? 
Or is that just the easy answer that gets us slow websites, scary healthcare and dangerous roads? 
I mean, are you ready to make perfection the bad guy in all this? 
Look, failure and imperfection are basically the same thing. 
We all know that imperfection exists all around us. 
Nothing and nobody is perfect. 
But at some point, because it was too difficult or too painful, we decided to dismiss our natural ability to deal with failure and replace it with a lower acceptance level. 
And now we're all forced to sit back and just accept this new norm or good-enough attitude and the results that come with it. 
So even with all that said, people will still tell me, you know, "Didn't the medical staff, the maintenance crew, the engineer, didn't they try their best, and isn't that good enough?" 
Well, truthfully, not for me and especially not in these examples. 
Yeah, but, you know, trying to be perfect is so stressful, right? 
And, you know, Oprah talked about it, universities study it, I bet your high school counselor even warned you about it. 
Stress is bad for us, isn't it? 
Well, maybe, but to say that seeking perfection is too stressful is like saying that exercise is too exhausting. 
In both cases, if you want the results, you've got to endure the pain. 
So truthfully, saying that seeking perfection is too stressful is just an excuse to be lazy. 
But here's the really scary part. 
Today, doctors, therapists and the nearly 10-billion- dollar-a-year self-help industry are all advocating against the idea of perfection under this guise that somehow not trying to be perfect will save your self-esteem and protect your ego. 
But, see, it's not working, because the self-help industry today has a higher recidivism rate because it's more focused on teaching you how to accept being a failure and lower your acceptance level than it is about pushing you to be perfect. 
See, these doctors, therapists and self-help gurus are all focused on a symptom and not the illness. 
The true illness in our society today is our unwillingness to confront failure. 
See, we're more comfortable resting on our efforts than we are with focusing on our results. 
Like at Dublin Jerome High School in Ohio, where they name 30 percent of a graduating class valedictorian. 
I mean, come on, right? 
Somebody had the highest GPA. 
I guarantee you it wasn't a 72-way tie. 
(Laughter) But, see, we're more comfortable offering up an equal outcome than we are with confronting the failure, the loser or the underachiever. 
And when everybody gets a prize, everybody advances, or everybody gets a pay raise despite results, the perfectionist in all of us is left to wonder, what do I have to do to get better? 
How do I raise above the crowd? 
And see, if we continue to cultivate this culture, where nobody fails or nobody is told that they will fail, then nobody's going to reach their potential, either. 
Failure and loss are necessary for success. 
It's the acceptance of failure that's not. 
Michelangelo is credited with saying that the greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but it's too low and we reach it. 
Failure should be a motivating force, not some type of pathetic excuse to give up. 
So I have an idea. 
Instead of defining perfectionism as a destructive intolerance for failure, why don't we try giving it a new definition? 
Why don't we try defining perfectionism as a willingness to do what is difficult to achieve what is right? 
You see, then we can agree that failure is a good thing in our quest for perfection, and when we seek perfection without fear of failure, just think about what we can accomplish. 
Like NBA superstar Steph Curry: he hit 77 three-point shots in a row. 
Think about that. 
The guy was able to accurately deliver a nine-and-a-half inch ball through an 18-inch rim that's suspended 10 feet in the air from nearly 24 feet away almost 80 times without failure. 
Or like the computer programmers at the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, who have now written a program that uses 420,000 lines of near-flawless code to control every aspect of igniting four million pounds of rocket fuel and putting a 120-ton spaceship into orbit. 
Or maybe like the researchers at the Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, who have now developed a device that can complete human genome coding in just 26 hours. 
So this device is able to diagnose genetic diseases in babies and newborns sooner, giving doctors an opportunity to start treatments earlier and potentially save the baby's life. 
See, that's what happens when we seek perfection. 
So maybe we should be more like the professional athlete, or we should be more like that tireless programmer, or like that passionate researcher. 
Then we could stop fearing failure and we could stop living in a world filled with the consequences of good enough. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been doing some thinking. 
I'm going to kill my dad. 
I called my sister. 
"Listen, I've been doing some thinking. 
I'm going to kill Dad. 
I'm going to take him to Oregon, find some heroin, and give it to him." 
My dad has frontotemporal lobe dementia, or FTD. 
It's a confusing disease that hits people in their 50s or 60s. 
It can completely change someone's personality, making them paranoid and even violent. 
My dad's been sick for a decade, but three years ago he got really sick, and we had to move him out of his house -- the house that I grew up in, the house that he built with his own hands. 
My strapping, cool dad with the falsetto singing voice had to move into a facility for round-the-clock care when he was just 65. 
At first my mom and sisters and I made the mistake of putting him in a regular nursing home. 
It was really pretty; it had plush carpet and afternoon art classes and a dog named Diane. 
But then I got a phone call. 
"Ms. Malone, we've arrested your father." 
"What?" 
"Well, he threatened everybody with cutlery. 
And then he yanked the curtains off the wall, and then he tried to throw plants out the window. 
And then, well, he pulled all the old ladies out of their wheelchairs." 
"All the old ladies?" 
(Laughter) "What a cowboy." 
(Laughter) After he got kicked out of there, we bounced him between a bunch of state-run facilities before finding a treatment center specifically for people with dementia. 
At first, he kind of liked it, but over time his health declined, and one day I walked in and found him sitting hunched over on the ground wearing a onesie -- those kinds of outfits that zip in the back. 
I watched him for about an hour as he yanked at it, trying to find a way out of this thing. 
And it's supposed to be practical, but to me it looked like a straightjacket. 
And so I ran out. 
I left him there. 
I sat in my truck -- his old truck -- hunched over, this really deep guttural cry coming out of the pit of my belly. 
I just couldn't believe that my father, the Adonis of my youth, my really dear friend, would think that this kind of life was worth living anymore. 
We're programmed to prioritize productivity. 
So when a person -- an Adonis in this case -- is no longer productive in the way we expect him to be, the way that he expects himself to be, what value does that life have left? 
That day in the truck, all I could imagine was that my dad was being tortured and his body was the vessel of that torture. 
I've got to get him out of that body. 
I've got to get him out of that body; I'm going to kill Dad. 
I call my sister. 
"Beth," she said. 
"You don't want to live the rest of your life knowing that you killed your father. 
And you'd be arrested I think, because he can't condone it. 
And you don't even know how to buy heroin." 
(Laughter) It's true, I don't. 
(Laughter) The truth is we talk about his death a lot. 
When will it happen? What will it be like? 
But I wish that we would have talked about death when we were all healthy. 
What does my best death look like? 
What does your best death look like? 
But my family didn't know to do that. 
And my sister was right. 
I shouldn't murder Dad with heroin, but I've got to get him out of that body. 
So I went to a psychic. 
And then a priest, and then a support group, and they all said the same thing: sometimes people hang on when they're worried about loved ones. 
Just tell them you're safe, and it's OK to go when you're ready. 
So I went to see Dad. 
I found him hunched over on the ground in the onesie. 
He was staring past me and just kind of looking at the ground. 
I gave him a ginger ale and just started talking about nothing in particular, but as I was talking, he sneezed from the ginger ale. 
And the sneeze -- it jerked his body upright, sparking him back to life a little bit. 
And he just kept drinking and sneezing and sparking, over and over and over again until it stopped. 
And I heard, "Heheheheheh, heheheheheh ... 
this is so fabulous. 
This is so fabulous." 
His eyes were open and he was looking at me, and I said, "Hi, Dad!" 
and he said, "Hiya, Beth." 
And I opened my mouth to tell him, right? 
"Dad, if you want to die, you can die. 
We're all OK." 
But as I opened my mouth to tell him, all I could say was, "Dad! 
I miss you." 
And then he said, "Well, I miss you, too." 
And then I just fell over because I'm just a mess. 
So I fell over and I sat there with him because for the first time in a long time he seemed kind of OK. 
And I memorized his hands, feeling so grateful that his spirit was still attached to his body. 
And in that moment I realized I'm not responsible for this person. 
I'm not his doctor, I'm not his mother, I'm certainly not his God, and maybe the best way to help him and me is to resume our roles as father and daughter. 
And so we just sat there, calm and quiet like we've always done. 
Nobody was productive. 
Both of us are still strong. 
"OK, Dad. I'm going to go, but I'll see you tomorrow." 
"OK," he said. 
"Hey, this is a pretty nice hacienda." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was four years old, my dad taught me the Taos Pueblo Hoop Dance, a traditional dance born hundreds of years ago in Southwestern USA. 
A series of hoops are created out of willow wood, and they're threaded together to create formations of the natural world, showing the many beauties of life. 
In this dance, you're circling in a constant spin, mimicking the movement of the Sun and the passage of time. 
Watching this dance was magic to me. 
Like with a time capsule, I was taking a look through a cultural window to the past. 
I felt a deeper connection to how my ancestors used to look at the world around them. 
Since then, I've always been obsessed with time capsules. 
They take on many forms, but the common thread is that they're uncontrollably fascinating to us as human beings, because they're portals to a memory, and they hold the important power of keeping stories alive. 
As a filmmaker and composer, it's been my journey to find my voice, reclaim the stories of my heritage and the past and infuse them into music and film time capsules to share. 
To tell you a bit about how I found my voice, I'd like to share a bit about how I grew up. 
In Southern California, I grew up in a multigenerational home, meaning I lived under the same roof as my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. 
My mother is Dutch-Indonesian and Chinese with immigrant parents, and my father is Ojibwe and an enrolled tribal member of the Prairie Band's Potawatomi Tribe in Northeastern Kansas. 
So one weekend I'd be learning how to fold dumplings, and the next, I'd be traditional-style dancing at a powwow, immersed in the powerful sounds of drums and singers. 
Being surrounded by many cultures was the norm, but also a very confusing experience. 
It was really hard for me to find my voice, because I never felt I was enough -- never Chinese, Dutch-Indonesian or Native enough. 
Because I never felt I was a part of any community, I sought to learn the stories of my heritage and connect them together to rediscover my own. 
The first medium I felt gave me a voice was music. 
With layers of sounds and multiple instruments, I could create soundscapes and worlds that were much bigger than my own. 
Through music, I'm inviting you into a sonic portal of my memories and emotions, and I'm holding up a mirror to yours. 
One of my favorite instruments to play is the guzheng zither, a Chinese harp-like instrument. 
While the hoop dance is hundreds of years old, the guzheng has more than 2,000 years of history. 
I'm playing the styles that greatly influence me today, like electronic music, with an instrument that was used to play traditional folk music long ago. 
And I noticed an interesting connection: the zither is tuned to the pentatonic scale, a scale that is universally known in so many parts of music around the world, including Native American folk songs. 
In both Chinese and Native folk, I sense this inherent sound of longing and holding onto the past, an emotion that greatly drives the music I create today. 
At the time, I wondered if I could make this feeling of immersion even more powerful, by layering visuals and music -- visuals and images on top of the music. 
So I turned to internet tutorials to learn editing software, went to community college to save money and created films. 
After a few years experimenting, I was 17 and had something I wanted to tell and preserve. 
It started with a question: What happens when a story is forgotten? 
I lead with this in my latest documentary film, "Smoke That Travels," which immerses people into the world of music, song, color and dance, as I explore my fear that a part of my identity, my Native heritage, will be forgotten in time. 
Many indigenous languages are dying due to historically forced assimilation. 
From the late 1800s to the early 1970s, Natives were forced into boarding schools, where they were violently punished if they practiced traditional ways or spoke their native language, most of which were orally passed down. 
As of now, there are 567 federally recognized tribes in the United States, when there used to be countless more. 
In my father's words, "Being Native is not about wearing long hair in braids. 
It's not about feathers or beadwork. 
It's about the way we all center ourselves in the world as human beings." 
After traveling with this film for over a year, I met indigenous people from around the world, from the Ainu of Japan, Sami of Scandinavia, the Maori and many more. 
And they were all dealing with the exact same struggle to preserve their language and culture. 
At this moment, I not only realize the power storytelling has to connect all of us as human beings but the responsibility that comes with this power. 
It can become incredibly dangerous when our stories are rewritten or ignored, because when we are denied identity, we become invisible. 
We're all storytellers. 
Reclaiming our narratives and just listening to each other's can create a portal that can transcend time itself. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A sky blue canvas ripped open by an enormous skull. 
Teeth bared through visceral slashes of oil and spray-paint. 
In 2017, this untitled artwork was auctioned off for over 110 million dollars. 
But it’s not the work of some old master. 
These strokes of genius belong to 21 year old black Brooklynite Jean-Michel Basquiat – one of America’s most charismatic painters, and currently, its highest sold. 
Born in 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat spent his childhood making art and mischief in Boerum Hill. 
While he never attended art school, he learned by wandering through New York galleries, and listening to the music his father played at home. 
He drew inspiration from unexpected places, scribbling his own versions of cartoons, comic books and biblical scenes on scrap paper from his father’s office. 
But it was a medical encyclopedia that arguably exerted the most powerful influence on Basquiat. 
When young Jean-Michael was hit by a car, his mother brought a copy of "Grey’s Anatomy" to his hospital bed. 
It ignited a lifelong fascination with anatomy that manifested in the skulls, sinew and guts of his later work – which frequently explores both the power and vulnerability of marginalized bodies. 
By 17, he launched his first foray into the art world with his friend Al Diaz. 
They spray painted cryptic statements and symbols all over Lower Manhattan, signed with the mysterious moniker SAMO. 
These humorous, profound, and rebellious declarations were strategically scattered throughout Soho’s art scene. 
And after revealing himself as the artist, Basquiat leveraged SAMO’s success to enter the scene himself; selling postcards, playing clubs with his avant-garde band, and boldly seeking out his heroes. 
By 21, he’d turned to painting full time. 
His process was a sort of calculated improvisation. 
Like Beat writers who composed their work by shredding and reassembling scraps of writing, Basquiat used similar cut-up techniques to remix his materials. 
When he couldn't afford canvases, he fashioned them out of discarded wood he found on the street. 
He used oil stick, crayons, spray paint and pencil and pulled quotes from the menus, comic books and textbooks he kept open on the studio floor. 
He kept these sources open on his studio floor, often working on multiple projects at once. 
Pulling in splintered anatomy, reimagined historical scenes, and skulls transplanted from classical still-lives, Basquiat repurposed both present day experiences and art history into an inventive visual language. 
He worked as if inserting himself into the legacy of artists he borrowed from, producing collages that were just as much in conversation with art history as they were with each other. 
For instance, "Toussaint L’Overture versus Savonarola" and "Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta" offer two distinct visions of Basquiat’s historical and contemporary concerns. 
But they echo each other in the details, such as the reappearing head that also resurfaces in "PPCD." 
All these pieces form a network that offers physical evidence of Basquiat’s restless and prolific mind. 
These chaotic canvases won rapid acclaim and attention. 
But despite his increasingly mainstream audience, Basquiat insisted on depicting challenging themes of identity and oppression. 
Marginalized figures take center stage, such as prisoners, cooks and janitors. 
His obsession with bodies, history, and representation can be found in works evoking the Atlantic slave trade and African history, as well as pieces focusing on contemporary race relations. 
In less than a decade, Basquiat made thousands of paintings and drawings- along with sculpture, fragments of poetry and music. 
His output accelerated alongside his meteoric rise to fame, but his life and work were cut tragically short when he died from a drug overdose at the age of 27. 
After his death, Basquiat’s work only increased in value- but the energy and flair of his pieces have impacted much more than their financial worth. 
Today, his influence swirls around us in music, poetry, fashion and film- and his art retains the power to shock, inspire, and get under our skin. 

This is an elementary school in Columbus, Ohio. 
And inside of this school there was a student named D. 
When D started school here he was six years old: cute as a button, with a smile that brightened the entire room. 
But after a few months in school, D became angry, and that smile faded. 
D began to do things like flip tables, throw desks and chairs, yell at teachers, stand in windowsills, run in and out of the classroom and even running out of the school. 
Sometimes these fits of anger would put the entire school into lockdown mode until D could get himself back together, which could sometimes take over an hour. 
No one in the school knew how to help D. 
I know this because I was the principal at this school. 
And what I quickly and collectively learned with my staff was that this situation was more extreme than anything we had ever been trained for. 
Every time that D lashed out, I kept thinking to myself: what did I miss during my principal prep coursework? 
What am I supposed to do with a kid like D? 
And how am I going to stop him from impeding the learning of all the other students? 
And yet after we did everything that we thought we knew, such as talking to D and taking away privileges and parent phone calls home, the only real option we had left to do was to kick him out, and I knew that would not help him. 
This scenario is not unique to D. 
Students all over the world are struggling with their education. 
And though we didn't come up with a fail-safe solution, we did come up with a simple idea: that in order for kids like D to not only survive in school but to thrive, we somehow had to figure out a way to not only teach them how to read and write but also how to help them deal with and manage their own emotions. 
And in doing that, we were able to move our school from one of the lowest-performing schools in the state of Ohio, with an F rating, all the way up to a C in just a matter of a few years. 
So it might sound obvious, right? 
Of course teachers should be focused on the emotional well-being of their kids. 
But in reality, when you're in a classroom full of 30 students and one of them's throwing tables at you, it's far easier to exclude that child than to figure out what's going on inside of his head. 
But what we learned about D, and for kids like D, was that small changes can make huge differences, and it's possible to start right now. 
You don't need bigger budgets or grand strategic plans, you simply need smarter ways of thinking about what you have and where you have it. 
In education, we tend to always look outside the box for answers, and we rarely spend enough time, money and effort developing what we already have inside the box. 
And this is how meaningful change can happen fast. 
So here's what I learned about D. 
I was wanting to dig a little bit deeper to figure out how he had become so angry. 
And what I learned was his father had left the home and his mother was working long shifts in order to support the family, which left no adult for D to connect with -- and he was in charge of taking care of his younger brother when he got home from school. 
Might I remind you that D was six years old? 
Can't say that I blame him for having some trouble transitioning into the school environment. 
But yet we had to figure out a way to help him with these big emotions all while teaching him core skills of reading and math. 
And three things helped us most. 
First, we had to figure out where he was struggling the most. 
And like most young kids, arrival at school can be a tough transition time as they're moving from a less structured home environment to a more structured school environment. 
So what we did for D was we created a calming area for him in our time-out room, which we had equipped with rocking chairs and soft cushions and books, and we allowed D to go to this place in the morning, away from the other kids, allowing him time to transition back into the school environment on his own terms. 
And as we began to learn more about D, we learned other strategies that helped him calm down. 
For example, D loved to help younger students, so we made him a kindergarten helper, and he went into the kindergarten classroom and taught students how to write their letters. 
And he was actually successful with a few of them that the teacher was unable to reach. 
And believe it or not, D actually helped calm some of those kindergarten students down, signalling to us that the influence of peers on behavior was far greater than anything we adults could ever do. 
We used humor and song with him. 
Yes, I know it sounds really silly that the principal and the teachers would actually laugh with kids, but you can imagine the shock on D's face when the principal's cracking a joke or singing a song from the radio station, which almost always ended in a laugh, shortening the length of his outburst and helping us to connect with him in his world. 
So I know some you are like, "It's really not practical to lay on this kind of special treatment for every student," but we actually made it happen. 
Because once we figured out the tools and tactics that worked for D, our teachers were able to roll that out and use them with other students. 
We began to proactively address student behavior instead of simply react to it. 
Our teachers actually took time during the lesson plan to teach kids how to identify their feelings and appropriate, healthy coping strategies for dealing with them, such as counting to 10, grabbing a fidget spinner or taking a quick walk. 
We incorporated brain breaks throughout the day, allowing kids to sing songs, do yoga poses and participate in structured physical activities. 
And for those kids that struggle with sitting for long periods of time, we invested in flexible seating, such as rocking chairs and exercise bikes, and even floor elliptical machines, allowing kids to pedal underneath their desks. 
These changes encouraged kids to stay in the classroom, helping them to focus and learn. 
And when less kids are disrupting, all kids do better. 
And here's the magical thing: it didn't cost us a whole lot of extra money. 
We simply thought differently about what we had. 
For example, every public school has an instructional supply line. 
An instructional supply could be a book, it could be a whiteboard, it could be flexible seating, it could be a fidget spinner, it could even be painting the walls of a school a more calming color, allowing students to thrive. 
It's not that we didn't invest in the academic tools -- obviously -- but we took the social tools seriously, too. 
And the results speak for themselves. 
By taking the emotional development of our kids seriously and helping them manage their emotions, we saw huge growth in our reading and math scores, far exceeding the one year of expected growth and outscoring many schools with our same demographic. 
The second thing we did to help our kids manage their emotions was we used leverage. 
As a not-so-funded public school, we didn't have the support staff to address the chaos that our kids might be facing at home, and we certainly weren't trained or funded to address it directly. 
So we started to reach out to local groups, community agencies, and even the Ohio State University. 
Our partnership with the Ohio State University afforded us college students not only studying education but also school psychology and school social work. 
These students were paired with our teachers to help our most struggling students. 
And everyone benefitted because our teachers got access to the latest college-level thinking, and those college students got real-world, life experiences in the classroom. 
Our partnership with our local Nationwide Children's Hospital afforded us -- they're building us a health clinic within our school, providing health and mental health resources for our students. 
And our kids benefitted from this, too. 
Our absences continued to go down, and our kids had access to counseling that they could access during the school day. 
And perhaps the biggest change was not in D or in the kids at all. 
It was in the adults in the room. 
Teachers are typically good at planning for and delivering academic instruction, but when you throw in disruptive behavior, it can feel completely outside the scope of the job. 
But by us taking the emotional development of our kids seriously, we moved from a philosophy of exclusion -- you disrupt, get out -- to one of trust and respect. 
It wasn't easy, but we felt at heart, it was a positive way to make change, and I'm in awe at the teachers that took that leap with me. 
As part of our personal professional development plan, we studied the research of Dr. Bruce Perry and his research on the effects of different childhood experiences on the developing child's brain. 
And what we learned was that some of our students' experiences, such as an absent parent, chaotic home life, poverty and illness, create real trauma on developing brains. 
Yes, trauma. 
I know it's a very strong word, but it helped us to reframe and understand the behaviors that we were seeing. 
And those difficult home experiences created real barbed-wire barriers to learning, and we had to figure out a way over it. 
So our teachers continued to practice with lesson plans, doing shorter lesson plans with a single focus, allowing kids to engage, and continued to incorporate these movement breaks, allowing kids to jump up and down in class and dance for two minutes straight, because we learned that taking breaks helps the learner retain new information. 
And might I add that the "Cha-Cha Slide" provides a perfect short dance party. 
(Laughter) I saw teachers say, "What happened to you?" 
instead of "What's wrong with you?" 
or "How can I help you?" instead of "Get out." 
And this investment in our kids made huge differences, and we continue to see rises in our academic scores. 
I'm happy to say that when D got to fourth grade, he rarely got into trouble. 
He became a leader in the school, and this behavior became contagious with other students. 
We saw and felt our school climate continue to improve, making it a happy and safe place not only for children but for adults, despite any outside influence. 
Fast-forward to today, I now work with an alternative education program with high school students who struggle to function in traditional high school setting. 
I recently reviewed some of their histories. 
Many of them are 17 to 18 years old, experimenting with drugs, in and out of the juvenile detention system and expelled from school. 
And what I discovered was that many of them exhibit the same behaviors that I saw in six-year-old D. 
So I can't help but wonder: if these kids would've learned healthy coping strategies early on when times get tough, would they now be able to survive in a regular high school? 
I can't say for sure, but I have to tell you I believe that it would've helped. 
And it's time for all of us to take the social and emotional development of our kids seriously. 
The time is now for us to step up and say what we need to do for our kids. 
If we teach kids how to read and write, and they graduate but yet they don't know how to manage emotions, what will our communities look like? 
I tell people: you can invest now or you will pay later. 
The time is now for us to invest in our kids. 
They're our future citizens, not just numbers that can or cannot pass a test. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

Nobody likes to make a mistake. 
And I made a whopping one. 
And figuring out what I did wrong led to a discovery that completely changes the way we think about the Earth and Moon. 
I'm a planetary scientist, and my favorite thing to do is smash planets together. 
(Laughter) In my lab, I can shoot at rocks using cannons like this one. 
(Cannon shot) (Laughter) In my experiments, I can generate the extreme conditions during planet formation. 
And with computer models, I can collide whole planets together to make them grow, or I can destroy them. 
(Laughter) I want to understand how to make the Earth and the Moon and why the Earth is so different from other planets. 
The leading idea for the origin of the Earth and Moon is called the "giant impact theory." 
The theory states that a Mars-sized body struck the young Earth, and the Moon formed from the debris disk around the planet. 
The theory can explain so many things about the Moon, but it has a huge flaw: it predicts that the Moon is mostly made from the Mars-sized planet, that the Earth and the Moon are made from different materials. 
But that's not what we see. 
The Earth and the Moon are actually like identical twins. 
The genetic code of planets is written in the isotopes of the elements. 
The Earth and Moon have identical isotopes. 
That means that the Earth and Moon are made from the same materials. 
It's really strange that the Earth and the Moon are twins. 
All of the planets are made from different materials, so they all have different isotopes, they all have their own genetic code. 
No other planetary bodies have the same genetic relationship. 
Only the Earth and Moon are twins. 
When I started working on the origin of the Moon, there were scientists that wanted to reject the whole idea of the giant impact. 
They didn't see any way for this theory to explain the special relationship between the Earth and the Moon. 
We were all trying to think of new ideas. 
The problem was, there weren't any better ideas. 
All of the other ideas had even bigger flaws. 
So we were trying to rescue the giant impact theory. 
A young scientist in my group suggested that we try changing the spin of the giant impact. 
Maybe making the Earth spin faster could mix more material and explain the Moon. 
The Mars-sized impactor had been chosen because it could make the Moon and make the length of Earth's day. 
People really liked that part of the model. 
But what if something else determined the length of Earth's day? 
Then there would be many more possible giant impacts that could make the Moon. 
I was curious about what could happen, so I tried simulating faster-spinning giant impacts, and I found that it is possible to make a disk out of the same mixture of materials as the planet. 
We were pretty excited. 
Maybe this was the way to explain the Moon. 
The problem is, we also found that that's just not very likely. 
Most of the time, the disk is different from the planet, and it looked like making our Moon this way would be an astronomical coincidence, and it was just hard for everyone to accept the idea that the Moon's special connection to Earth was an accident. 
The giant impact theory was still in trouble, and we were still trying to figure out how to make the Moon. 
Then came the day when I realized my mistake. 
My student and I were looking at the data from these fast-spinning giant impacts. 
On that day, we weren't actually thinking about the Moon, we were looking at the planet. 
The planet gets super-hot and partially vaporized from the energy of the impact. 
But the data didn't look like a planet. 
It looked really strange. 
The planet was weirdly connected to the disk. 
I got that super-excited feeling when something really wrong might be something really interesting. 
In all of my calculations, I had assumed there was a planet with a separate disk around it. 
Calculating what was in the disk as how we tested whether an impact could make the Moon. 
But it didn't look that simple anymore. 
We were making the mistake of thinking that a planet was always going to look like a planet. 
On that day, I knew that a giant impact was making something completely new. 
I've had eureka moments. 
This was not one of them. 
(Laughter) I really didn't know what was going on. 
I had this strange, new object in front of me and the challenge to try and figure it out. 
What do you do when faced with the unknown? 
How do you even start? 
We questioned everything: What is a planet? 
When is a planet no longer a planet anymore? 
We played with new ideas. 
We had to get rid of our old way of thinking, and by playing, I could throw away all of the data, all of the rules of the real world, and free my mind to explore. 
And by making a mental space where I could try out outrageous ideas and then bring them back into the real world to test them, I could learn. 
And by playing, we learned so much. 
I combined my lab experiments with computer models and discovered that after most giant impacts, the Earth is so hot, there's no surface. 
There's just a deep layer of gas that gets denser and denser with depth. 
The Earth would have been like Jupiter. 
There's nothing to stand on. 
And that was just part of the problem. 
I wanted to understand the whole problem. 
I couldn't let go of the challenge to figure out what was really going on in giant impacts. 
It took almost two years of throwing away old ideas and building new ones that we understood the data and knew what it meant for the Moon. 
I discovered a new type of astronomical object. 
It's not a planet. 
It's made from planets. 
A planet is a body whose self-gravity is strong enough to give it its rounded shape. 
It spins around all together. 
Make it hotter and spin it faster, the equator gets bigger and bigger until it reaches a tipping point. 
Push past the tipping point, and the material at the equator spreads into a disk. 
It's now broken all the rules of being a planet. 
It can't spin around together anymore, its shape keeps changing as it gets bigger and bigger; the planet has become something new. 
We gave our discovery its name: synestia. 
We named it after the goddess Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth and home, because we think the Earth became one. 
The prefix means "all together," to emphasize the connection between all of the material. 
A synestia is what a planet becomes when heat and spin push it over the limit of a spheroidal shape. 
Would you like to see a synestia? 
(Cheers) In this visualization of one of my simulations, the young Earth is already spinning quickly from a previous giant impact. 
Its shape is deformed, but our planet would be recognizable by the water on its surface. 
The energy from the impact vaporizes the surface, the water, the atmosphere, and mixes all of the gases together in just a few hours. 
We discovered that many giant impacts make synestias, but these burning, bright objects don't live very long. 
They cool down, shrink and turn back into planets. 
While rocky planets like Earth were growing, they probably turned into synestias one or more times. 
A synestia gives us a new way to solve the problem of the origin of the Moon. 
We propose that the Moon formed inside a huge, vaporous synestia. 
The Moon grew from magma rain that condensed out of the rock vapor. 
The Moon's special connection to Earth is because the Moon formed inside the Earth when Earth was a synestia. 
The Moon could have orbited inside the synestia for years, hidden from view. 
The Moon is revealed by the synestia cooling and shrinking inside of its orbit. 
The synestia turns into planet Earth only after cooling for hundreds of years longer. 
In our new theory, the giant impact makes a synestia, and the synestia divides into two new bodies, creating our isotopically identical Earth and Moon. 
Synestias have been created throughout the universe. 
And we only just realized that by finding them in our imagination: What else am I missing in the world around me? 
What is hidden from my view by my own assumptions? 
The next time you look at the Moon, remember: the things you think you know may be the opportunity to discover something truly amazing. 
(Applause) 

The informal markets of Africa are stereotypically seen as chaotic and lackadaisical. 
The downside of hearing the word "informal" is this automatic grand association we have, which is very negative, and it's had significant consequences and economic losses, easily adding -- or subtracting -- 40 to 60 percent of the profit margin for the informal markets alone. 
As part of a task of mapping the informal trade ecosystem, we've done an extensive literature review of all the reports and research on cross-border trade in East Africa, going back 20 years. 
This was to prepare us for fieldwork to understand what was the problem, what was holding back informal trade in the informal sector. 
What we discovered over the last 20 years was, nobody had distinguished between illicit -- which is like smuggling or contraband in the informal sector -- from the legal but unrecorded, such as tomatoes, oranges, fruit. 
This criminalization -- what in Swahili refers to as "biashara," which is the trade or the commerce, versus "magendo," which is the smuggling or contraband -- this criminalization of the informal sector, in English, by not distinguishing between these aspects, easily can cost each African economy between 60 to 80 percent addition on the annual GDP growth rate, because we are not recognizing the engine of what keeps the economies running. 
The informal sector is growing jobs at four times the rate of the traditional formal economy, or "modern" economy, as many call it. 
It offers employment and income generation opportunities to the most "unskilled" in conventional disciplines. 
But can you make a french fry machine out of an old car? 
So, this, ladies and gentlemen, is what so desperately needs to be recognized. 
As long as the current assumptions hold that this is criminal, this is shadow, this is illegal, there will be no attempt at integrating the informal economic ecosystem with the formal or even the global one. 
I'm going to tell you a story of Teresia, a trader who overturned all our assumptions, made us question all the stereotypes that we'd gone in on, based on 20 years of literature review. 
Teresia sells clothes under a tree in a town called Malaba, on the border of Uganda and Kenya. 
You think it's very simple, don't you? 
We'll go hang up new clothes from the branches, put out the tarp, settle down, wait for customers, and there we have it. 
She was everything we were expecting according to the literature, to the research, right down to she was a single mom driven to trade, supporting her kids. 
So what overturned our assumptions? 
What surprised us? 
First, Teresia paid the county government market fees every single working day for the privilege of setting up shop under her tree. 
She's been doing it for seven years, and she's been getting receipts. 
She keeps records. 
We're seeing not a marginal, underprivileged, vulnerable African woman trader by the side of the road -- no. 
We were seeing somebody who's keeping sales records for years; somebody who had an entire ecosystem of retail that comes in from Uganda to pick up inventory; someone who's got handcarts bringing the goods in, or the mobile money agent who comes to collect cash at the end of the evening. 
Can you guess how much Teresia spends, on average, each month on inventory -- stocks of new clothes that she gets from Nairobi? 
One thousand five hundred US dollars. 
That's around 20,000 US dollars invested in trade goods and services every year. 
This is Teresia, the invisible one, the hidden middle. 
And she's only the first rung of the small entrepreneurs, the micro-businesses that can be found in these market towns. 
At least in the larger Malaba border, she's at the first rung. 
The people further up the value chain are easily running three lines of business, investing 2,500 to 3,000 US dollars every month. 
So the problem turned out that it wasn't the criminalization; you can't really criminalize someone you're charging receipts from. 
It's the lack of recognition of their skilled occupations. 
The bank systems and structures have no means to recognize them as micro-businesses, much less the fact that, you know, her tree doesn't have a forwarding address. 
So she's trapped in the middle. 
She's falling through the cracks of our assumptions. 
You know all those microloans to help African women traders? 
They're going to loan her 50 dollars or 100 dollars. 
What's she going to do with it? 
She spends 10 times that amount every month just on inventory -- we're not talking about the additional services or the support ecosystem. 
These are the ones who fit neither the policy stereotype of the low-skilled and the marginalized, nor the white-collar, salaried office worker or civil servant with a pension that the middle classes are allegedly composed of. 
Instead, what we have here are the proto-SMEs these are the fertile seeds of businesses and enterprises that keep the engines running. 
They put food on your table. 
Even here in this hotel, the invisible ones -- the butchers, the bakers the candlestick makers -- they make the machines that make your french fries and they make your beds. 
These are the invisible businesswomen trading across borders, all on the side of the road, and so they're invisible to data gatherers. 
And they're mashed together with the vast informal sector that doesn't bother to distinguish between smugglers and tax evaders and those running illegal whatnot, and the ladies who trade, and who put food on the table and send their kids to university. 
So that's really what I'm asking here. 
That's all that we need to start by doing. 
Can we start by recognizing the skills, the occupations? 
We could transform the informal economy by beginning with this recognition and then designing the customized doorways for them to enter or integrate with the formal, with the global, with the entire system. 
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 
(Applause) 

I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me when I was between seven and 10 years old. 
And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them -- how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war. 
So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. 
And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. 
And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance. 
I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and I didn't have money to go to a movie. But I found that on the -- I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers [that] he was going to talk. 
And I thought, well, since I can't go to the movies, at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers. 
And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting. 
Instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans had been traumatized by the war, and now they're projecting flying saucers into the sky. 
He talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war. 
And this seemed very interesting to me. 
And I started reading his books after that lecture. 
And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about. 
Then I came to this country to study psychology and I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. 
This is a typical result that many people have presented, and there are many variations on it. 
But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. 
And that hasn't changed at all. 
Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. 
But you find essentially the same results, namely, that after a certain basic point -- which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level -- increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are. 
In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness. 
So my research has been focused more on -- after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience, I tried to understand: where -- in everyday life, in our normal experience -- do we feel really happy? 
And to start those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people -- first artists and scientists, and so forth -- trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing. 
This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s. 
And the interview was 40 pages long. 
But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview. 
And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. 
And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state. 
Now, "ecstasy" in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. 
And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. 
So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. 
And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement -- whether it's China, Greece, the Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians -- what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life. 
We know the temples they built, where people could come to experience a different reality. 
We know about the circuses, the arenas, the theaters. 
These are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form. 
Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this, which is also -- this place, this arena, which is built like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also. 
We are participating in a reality that is different from that of the everyday life that we're used to. 
But this man doesn't need to go there. 
He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks, and as he does that, he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination. 
So once he gets to that point of beginning to create, like Jennifer did in her improvisation, a new reality -- that is, a moment of ecstasy -- he enters that different reality. 
Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. 
And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. 
But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. 
And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. 
That's why you can't hear more than two people. 
You can't understand more than two people talking to you. 
Well, when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man is, he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. 
He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. 
His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness, because he doesn't have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that he exists. 
So existence is temporarily suspended. 
And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself. 
Now, I could look at my hand for two weeks, and I wouldn't feel any awe or wonder, because I can't compose. (Laughter) So what it's telling you here is that obviously this automatic, spontaneous process that he's describing can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. 
And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. 
Whether it's mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before. 
Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. 
And because all of these people I started interviewing -- this was an interview which is over 30 years old -- so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that I called this type of experience the "flow experience." 
And it happens in different realms. 
For instance, a poet describes it in this form. 
This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. 
And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. 
This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky -- a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked. 
But it happens in other activities. 
For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. 
And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. 
You don't think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth. 
It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called "Good Business," where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. 
You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. 
And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can't have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. 
Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. 
She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. 
It's kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you're working. 
This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product -- they didn't have a product, they didn't have anything, but they had an idea. 
And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart's content. 
I couldn't improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace. 
Now, when we do studies -- we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people -- from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds -- who enjoy their work. 
And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. 
There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. 
You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. 
And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake. 
In our studies, we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme. 
And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day, and whenever they go off you say what you're doing, how you feel, where you are, what you're thinking about. 
And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skill that they feel they have at that moment. 
So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram. 
That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else. 
But you have a kind of a set point there, which would be in the middle. 
If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. 
And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do -- play the piano, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you. 
And then the other areas become less and less positive. 
Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there. 
Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill. 
So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that's where they're pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that -- going back to flow -- then they develop higher skills. 
Control is also a good place to be, because there you feel comfortable, but not very excited. 
It's not very challenging any more. 
And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges. 
So those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into. 
The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal. 
Relaxation is fine -- you still feel OK. 
Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative: you don't feel that you're doing anything, you don't use your skills, there's no challenge. 
Unfortunately, a lot of people's experience is in apathy. 
The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television; the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting. 
Even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it. 
So the question we are trying to address -- and I'm way over time -- is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel. 
And that is the kind of challenge that we're trying to understand. 
And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don't. 
And that's what our mandate is, in a way, to do. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 2004, a new company called Vemma Nutrition started offering a life-changing opportunity to earn full time income for part time work. 
Vemma’s offer was open to everybody, regardless of prior experience or education. 
There were only two steps to start get started earning: purchase a $500-600 kit of their liquid nutrition products, and recruit two more members to do the same. 
Vemma Nutrition Company grew quickly, becoming a global operation that brought in 30,000 new members per month at its peak. 
There was just one problem— while the company generated $200 million of annual revenue by 2013, the vast majority of participants earned less than they paid in. 
Vemma was eventually charged with operating a pyramid scheme: a common type of fraud where members make money by recruiting more people to buy in. 
Typically, the founder solicits an initial group of people to buy in and promote the scheme. 
They are then encouraged to recruit others and promised part of the money those people invest, while the founder also takes a share. 
The pattern repeats for each group of new participants, with money from recent arrivals funneled to those who recruited them. 
This differs from a Ponzi scheme, where the founders recruit new members and secretly use their fees to pay existing members, who think the payments come from a legitimate investment. 
As a pyramid scheme grows, it becomes increasingly difficult for new recruits to make money. 
That’s because the number of participants expands exponentially. 
Take a structure where each person has to recruit six more to earn a profit. 
The founder recruits six people to start, and each of them recruits six more. 
There are 36 people in that second round of recruits, who then each recruit 6 people— a total of 216 new recruits. 
By the twelfth round of recruiting, the 2.1 billion newest members would have to recruit over 13 billion more people total to make money– more than the entire world population. 
In this scenario, the most recent recruits, over 80% of the scheme’s participants, lose all the money they paid in. 
And in real life, many earlier joiners lose out too. 
Pyramid schemes are illegal in most countries, but they can be difficult to detect. 
They are presented as many different things, including gifting groups, investment clubs, and multi-level marketing businesses. 
The distinction between pyramid schemes and legitimate multi-level marketing can be particularly hazy. 
In theory, the difference is that the members of the multi-level marketing companies primarily earn compensation from selling a particular product or a service to retail customers, while pyramid schemes primarily compensate members for recruitment of new sellers. 
In practice, though, many multi-level marketing companies make it all but impossible for members to profit purely through sales. 
And many pyramid schemes, like Vemma Nutrition, disguise themselves as legal multi-level marketing businesses, using a product or service to hide the pay-and-recruit structure. 
Many pyramid schemes also capitalize on already existing trust within churches, immigrant communities, or other tightly knit groups. 
The first few members are encouraged to report a good experience before they actually start making a profit. 
Others in their network follow their example, and the schemes balloon in size before it comes clear that most members aren’t actually profiting. 
Often, the victims are embarrassed into silence. 
Pyramid schemes entice people with the promise of opportunity and empowerment. 
So when members don’t end up making money, they can blame themselves rather than the scheme, thinking they weren’t tenacious enough to earn the returns promised. 
Some victims keep trying, investing in multiple schemes, and losing money each time. 
In spite of all these factors, there are ways to spot a pyramid scheme. 
Time pressure is one red flag— be wary of directives to “act now or miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Promises of large, life-altering amounts of income are also suspect. 
And finally, a legitimate multi-level marketing business shouldn’t require members to pay for the opportunity to sell a product or service. 
Pyramid schemes can be incredibly destructive to individuals, communities, and even entire countries. 
But you can fight fire with fire by sending this video to three people you know, and encouraging them to do the same. 

I was six when I had the first chance to learn what patience means. 
My grandmother gave me a magic box as a birthday present, which neither of us knew would become a gift for life. 
I became obsessed with magic, and at 20, I became an amateur dove magician. 
This act of magic requires that I train my doves to sit and wait inside my clothing. 
As a young magician, I was always in a rush to make them appear, but my teacher told me the secret to the success of this magical act is to make my doves appear only after they've waited patiently in my tuxedo. 
It has to be a mindful kind of patience, the kind that took me some years to master. 
When life took me to Shanghai seven years ago, the mindful patience I learned became almost impossible to practice. 
In China, where everyone and everything is in a hurry, you need to outperform over 1.3 billion other people to build a better life. 
You hack the system, bend the rules, circumvent the boundaries. 
It is the same when it comes to food ... 
except that when it comes to food, impatience can have dire consequences. 
In the haste to grow more, sell more, 4,000 years of agriculture in a country of rich natural resources is spoiled by the overuse of chemicals and pesticides. 
In 2016, the Chinese government revealed half a million food safety violations in just nine months. 
Alarmingly, one in every four diabetics in the world now comes from China. 
The stories around food are scary and somewhat overwhelming, and I told myself it's time to bring a mindful patience into the impatience. 
When I say mindful patience, I don't mean the ability to wait. 
I mean knowing how to act while waiting. 
And so, while I wait for the day when a sustainable food system becomes a reality in China, I launched one of China's first online farmers market to bring local, organically grown produce to families. 
When we went live, 18 months ago, the food we could sell then was somewhat dismal. 
We had no fruit and hardly any meat to sell, as none that was sent to the lab passed our zero tolerance test towards pesticides, chemicals, antibiotics and hormones. 
I told our very anxious employees that we would not give up until we've met every local farmer in China. 
Today, we supply 240 types of produce from 57 local farmers. 
After almost one year of searching, we finally found chemical-free bananas grown in the backyards of villagers on Hainan Island. 
And only two hours away from Shanghai, on an island that even Google Maps does not have coordinates for, we found a place where cows eat grass and roam free under the blue sky. 
We also work hard on logistics. 
We deliver our customers' orders in as fast as three hours on electric vehicles, and we use biodegradable, reusable boxes to minimize our environmental footprint. 
I have no doubt that our offerings will continue to grow, but it will take time, and I know a lot more people are needed to shape the future of good food. 
So last year, I founded China's first food tech accelerator and VC platform to help start-ups to shape the future of good food the way they want, be that through using edible insects as a more sustainable source of protein or using essential oils to keep food fresh for longer. 
So, you may still ask: Why are you trying to build a sustainable food system by driving a patient movement in a country where it's almost a crime to take it slow? 
Because, for me, the real secret to success is patience -- a mindful kind of patience that requires knowing how to act while waiting, the kind of patience I learned with my grandmother's magic box. 
After all, we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. 
We borrow it from our children. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Reaching heights of over 100 meters, Californian sequoias tower over Earth’s other estimated 60,000 tree species. 
Growing in the misty Sierra Nevada mountains, their massive trunks support the tallest known trees in the world. 
But even these behemoths seem to have their limits. 
No sequoia on record has been able to grow taller than 130 meters – and many researchers say these trees won’t beat that cap even if they live for thousands of years to come. 
So what exactly is stopping these trees from growing taller, forever? 
It all comes down to sap. 
In order for trees to grow, they need to bring sugars obtained from photosynthesis and nutrients brought in through the root system to wherever growth is happening. 
And just like blood circulates in the human body, trees are designed to circulate two kinds of sap throughout their bodies – carrying all the substances a tree’s cells need to live. 
The first is phloem sap. 
Containing the sugars generated in leaves during photosynthesis, phloem sap is thick, like honey, and flows down the plant’s phloem tissue to distribute sugar throughout the tree. 
By the end of its journey, the phloem sap has thinned into a watery substance, pooling at the base of the tree. 
Right beside the phloem is the tree’s other tissue type: the xylem. 
This tissue is packed with nutrients and ions like calcium, potassium, and iron, which the tree has absorbed through its roots. 
Here at the tree’s base, there are more of these particles in one tissue than the other, so the water from the phloem sap is absorbed into the xylem to correct the balance. 
This process, called osmotic movement, creates nutrient-rich xylem sap, which will then travel up the trunk to spread those nutrients through the tree. 
But this journey faces a formidable obstacle: gravity. 
To accomplish this herculean task, the xylem relies on three forces: transpiration, capillary action, and root pressure. 
As part of photosynthesis, leaves open and close pores called stomata. 
These openings allow oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of the leaf, but they also create an opening through which water evaporates. 
This evaporation, called transpiration, creates negative pressure in the xylem, pulling watery xylem sap up the tree. 
This pull is aided by a fundamental property of water called capillary action. 
In narrow tubes, the attraction between water molecules and the adhesive forces between the water and its environment can beat out gravity. 
This capillary motion is in full effect in xylem filaments thinner than human hair. 
And where these two forces pull the sap, the osmotic movement at the tree’s base creates root pressure, pushing fresh xylem sap up the trunk. 
Together these forces launch sap to dizzying heights, distributing nutrients, and growing new leaves to photosynthesize – far above the tree’s roots. 
But despite these sophisticated systems, every centimeter is a fight against gravity. 
As trees grow taller and taller, the supply of these vital fluids begins to dwindle. 
At a certain height, trees can no longer afford the lost water that evaporates during photosynthesis. 
And without the photosynthesis needed to support additional growth, the tree instead turns its resources towards existing branches. 
This model, known as the “hydraulic limitation hypothesis,” is currently our best explanation for why trees have limited heights, even in perfect growing conditions. 
And using this model alongside growth rates and known needs for nutrients and photosynthesis, researchers have been able to propose height limits for specific species. 
So far these limits have held up – even the world’s tallest tree still falls about fifteen meters below the cap. 
Researchers are still investigating the possible explanations for this limit, and there may not be one universal reason why trees stop growing. 
But until we learn more, the height of trees is yet another way that gravity, literally, shapes life on Earth. 

In 1925, Frida Kahlo was on her way home from school in Mexico City when the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar. 
She suffered near-fatal injuries to her spine, pelvis and hips, and was bedridden for months afterward. 
During her recovery, she had a special easel attached to her bed so she could practice painting techniques. 
When she set to work, she began to paint the world according to her own singular vision. 
Over the course of her life, she would establish herself as the creator and muse behind extraordinary art. 
Though you may have met Kahlo's gaze before, her work provides an opportunity to see the world through her eyes. 
She painted friends and family, still lives and spiritual scenes; but it was her mesmerizing self-portraits which first caught the world’s attention. 
In an early work, "Self Portrait with Velvet Dress," the focus is on her strong brows, facial hair, long neck and formidable stare. 
Such features remained, but Kahlo soon began to present herself in more unusual ways. 
For example, "The Broken Column" uses symbolism, religious imagery and a ruptured landscape to reveal her physical and mental state. 
In 1928, Kahlo started dating fellow painter Diego Rivera. 
They became lifelong partners and cultivated an eccentric celebrity. 
Together, they traveled the world and dedicated themselves to art, Communist politics and Mexican nationalism. 
Kahlo and Rivera shared a deep affinity with Mexicanidad, a movement which celebrated indigenous culture after the Revolution. 
In her daily life, Kahlo wore traditional Tehuana dress and immersed herself in native spirituality. 
And in her work, she constantly referenced Mexican folk painting, incorporating its bright colors and references to death, religion and nature. 
With her imagery of giant floating flowers, undulating landscapes, transplanted body parts and billowing clouds of demons, Kahlo has often been associated with Surrealism. 
But while surrealists used dreamlike images to explore the unconscious mind, Kahlo used them to represent her physical body and life experiences. 
Two of her most-explored experiences were her physical disabilities and her marriage. 
As a result of the bus accident, she experienced life-long health complications and endured many hospitalizations. 
She often contemplated the physical and psychological effects of disability in her work; painting herself in agony, recuperating from operations, or including objects such as her back brace and wheelchair. 
Meanwhile, her relationship with Rivera was tempestuous, marked by infidelity on both sides. 
At one point they even divorced, then remarried a year later. 
During this period, she painted the double self-portrait "The Two Fridas," which speaks to the anguish of loss and a splintered sense of self. 
The Frida to the left has a broken heart, which drips blood onto her old-fashioned Victorian dress. 
She symbolizes a version of the artist who is wounded by the past– but is also connected by an artery to a second self. 
This Frida is dressed in Tehuana attire– and although she remembers Diego with the tiny portrait in her hand, her heart remains intact. 
Together, the two suggest a position caught between past and present, individuality and dependency. 
Kahlo died in 1954 at the age of 47. 
In the years after her death, she experienced a surge in popularity that has lasted to this day. 
And although her image has proliferated, Kahlo’s body of work reminds us that there are no simple truths about the life, work and legacy of the woman behind the icon. 
Rather, she put multiple versions of her reality on display– and provided us with a few entry-ways into the contents of her soul. 

What if you could make your sleep more efficient? 
As a sleep scientist, this is the question that has captivated me for the past 10 years. 
Because while the lightbulb and technology have brought about a world of 24-hour work and productivity, it has come at the cost of our naturally occurring circadian rhythm and our body's need for sleep. 
The circadian rhythm dictates our energy level throughout the day, and only recently we've been conducting a global experiment on this rhythm, which is putting our sleep health and ultimately our life quality in jeopardy. 
Because of this, we aren't getting the sleep we need, with the average American sleeping a whole hour less than they did in the 1940s. 
For some reason, we decided to wear it as a badge of honor that we can get by on not enough sleep. 
This all adds up to a real health crisis. 
Most of us know that poor sleep is linked to diseases like Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes. 
And if you go untreated with a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, you're more likely to get many of these illnesses. 
But did you know about sleep's impact on your mental states? 
Poor sleep makes us make risky, rash decisions and is a drain on our capacity for empathy. 
When sleep deprivation literally makes us more sensitive to our own pain, it's not so surprising that we have a hard time relating to others and just generally being a good and healthy person when we're sleep-deprived. 
Scientists are now starting to understand how not only the quantity but also the quality of sleep impacts our health and well-being. 
My research focuses on what many scientists believe is the most regenerative stage of sleep: deep sleep. 
We now know that generally speaking, there are three stages of sleep: light sleep, rapid eye movement or REM and deep sleep. 
We measure these stages by connecting electrodes to the scalp, chin and chest. 
In light sleep and REM, our brain waves are very similar to our brain waves in waking life. 
But our brain waves in deep sleep have these long-burst brain waves that are very different from our waking life brain waves. 
These long-burst brain waves are called delta waves. 
When we don't get the deep sleep we need, it inhibits our ability to learn and for our cells and bodies to recover. 
Deep sleep is how we convert all those interactions that we make during the day into our long-term memory and personalities. 
As we get older, we're more likely to lose these regenerative delta waves. 
So in way, deep sleep and delta waves are actually a marker for biological youth. 
So naturally, I wanted to get more deep sleep for myself and I literally tried almost every gadget, gizmo, device and hack out there -- consumer-grade, clinical-grade, what have you. 
I learned a lot, and I found I really do need, like most people, eight hours of sleep. 
I even shifted my circadian component by changing my meals, exercise and light exposure, but I still couldn't find a way to get a deeper night of sleep ... 
that is until I met Dr. Dmitry Gerashchenko from Harvard Medical School. 
Dmitry told me about a new finding in the literature, where a lab out of Germany showed that if you could play certain sounds at the right time in people's sleep, you could actually make sleep deeper and more efficient. 
And what's more, is that this lab showed that you actually could improve next-day memory performance with this sound. 
Dmitry and I teamed up, and we began working on a way to build this technology. 
With our research lab collaborators at Penn State, we designed experiments in order to validate our system. 
And we've since received grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health to develop this deep-sleep stimulating technology. 
Here's how it works. 
People came into the lab and we hooked them up to a number of devices, two of which I have on right here -- not a fashion statement. 
(Laughter) When we detected that people were in deep sleep, we played the deep-sleep stimulating sounds that were shown to make them have deeper sleep. 
I'm going to demo this sound for you right now. 
(Repeating sound waves) Pretty weird, right? 
(Laughter) So that sound is actually at the same burst frequency as your brain waves when your brain is in deep sleep. 
That sound pattern actually primes your mind to have more of these regenerative delta waves. 
When we asked participants the next day about the sounds, they were completely unaware that we played the sounds, yet their brains responded with more of these delta waves. 
Here's an image of someone's brain waves from the study that we conducted. 
See the bottom panel? 
This shows the sound being played at that burst frequency. 
Now look at the brain waves in the upper part of the graph. 
You can see from the graph that the sound is actually producing more of these regenerative delta waves. 
We learned that we could accurately track sleep without hooking people up to electrodes and make people sleep deeper. 
We're continuing to develop the right sound environment and sleep habitat to improve people's sleep health. 
Our sleep isn't as regenerative as it could be, but maybe one day soon, we could wear a small device and get more out of our sleep. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe. 
But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962, it was anything but radical: still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia. 
Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. 
And that's what we're doing. 
So Wikipedia -- you just saw the little demonstration of it -- it's a freely licensed encyclopedia. 
It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages. 
It's written using wiki software -- which is the type of software he just demonstrated -- so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. 
And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff. 
So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization, he's exactly describing Wikipedia. 
And what I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside. 
So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization. 
And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. 
And so, if you think about what that means, it means a lot more than just building a cool website. 
We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions. 
And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet. 
And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model, because that empowers local entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to -- they can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it -- and you can do it commercially or non-commercially. 
So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world. 
We're funded by donations from the public, and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia. 
So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was. 
And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is. 
So we've got over 600,000 articles in English. 
We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages. 
The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French -- all the Western-European languages are quite big. 
But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia, which is surprising to a lot of people. 
A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet, but for us, we're truly global. 
We're in many, many languages. 
How popular we've gotten to be -- we're a top-50 website and we're more popular than the New York Times. 
So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion. 
This shows the growth of Wikipedia -- we're the blue line there -- and this is the New York Times over there. 
And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge, enormous corporate operation with I have no idea how many hundreds of employees. 
We have exactly one employee, and that employee is our lead software developer. 
And he's only been our employee since January 2005, all the other growth before that ... 
So the servers are managed by a ragtag band of volunteers. 
All the editing is done by volunteers. 
And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine. 
People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?" 
or "Who does that?" 
It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. 
We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. 
These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. 
I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something, anything about the servers. 
You could never afford to do this in a company. 
You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia. 
So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly, so it's really gotten to be a huge thing. 
And everything is managed by the volunteers. 
And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars. 
And that's essentially our main cost. 
We could actually do without the employee. 
We hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia, so we actually hired him, so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes. 
So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is, why isn't it all rubbish? 
Well, it's pretty good. 
It isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect, given our completely chaotic model. 
So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me, you think, "Oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish." 
But when we've seen quality tests -- and there haven't been enough of these yet and I'm really encouraging people to do more, comparing Wikipedia to traditional things -- we win hands down. 
So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia, which is much, much smaller than English, to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus multimedial, and we won across the board. 
They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality, and we were very pleased with that result. 
So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy. 
The media has covered this somewhat extensively. 
It started out with an article in Red Herring. 
The reporters called me up and they -- I mean, I have to say they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious, it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community. 
And so they quote me as saying, "They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia." 
What I actually said is they're not contentious at all. 
So it's a slight misquote. 
And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. 
Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004." 
This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there. 
So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really controversies at all. 
Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. 
And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality. 
The real struggle is not between the right and the left -- that's where most people assume -- but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. 
And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities. 
The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004, and it wasn't because they were contentious; it was just because there was routine vandalism -- which happens sometimes even on stage ... 
(Laughter) Sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalized Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly. 
And I said -- you know, I always say, please don't do that. 
So how do we do this? 
How do we manage the quality control? 
How does it work? 
So there's a few elements, mostly social policies and some elements of the software. 
So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point of view policy. 
This is something that I set down, from the very beginning, as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. 
It's a social concept of cooperation, so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity. 
The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. 
But we have this jargon term of neutrality, which has its own long history within the community, which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. 
We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. 
So this neutrality policy is really important for us because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done. 
So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. 
By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right. 
If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community. 
So, real-time peer review. 
Every single change on the site goes to the "Recent changes" page. 
So as soon as he made his change, it went to the "Recent changes" page. 
That recent changes page was also fed into an IRC channel, which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools. 
And people can get RSS feeds -- they can get email notifications of changes. 
And then users can set up their own personal watch list. 
So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists, because it is sometimes vandalized. 
And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change. 
There's a "new pages feed," for example, so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it's created. 
This is really important because a lot of new pages are just garbage that has to be deleted, you know, "ASDFASDF." 
But also, that's some of the most interesting and fun things, some of the new articles. 
People will start an article on some interesting topic, other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better. 
So we do have edits by anonymous users, which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia. 
So, Chris was able to do his change -- he didn't have to log in or anything; he just went on the website and made a change. 
But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. 
And that's a really important thing to understand: the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. 
And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists. 
All these people know each other. 
These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site, and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing. 
The standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality. 
We don't always meet those standards, but that's what we're striving for. 
And so that tight community is who really cares for the site, and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met. 
It's my job to say that, but it's actually true. 
The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people. 
The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. 
This is an example of a page history on "flat Earth," and you can see some changes that were made. 
What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see, "OK, I understand now." 
When somebody goes and looks at -- they see that someone, an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page. 
That sounds suspicious. Who is this person? 
Somebody looks at it -- they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place -- to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this. 
So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page. 
Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended. 
Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software. 
All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages. 
And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. 
The example I've got up here is the Votes for Deletion page. 
So, I mentioned earlier, people type "ASDFASDF" -- it needs to be deleted. 
Cases like that, the administrators just delete it. 
There's no reason to have a big argument about it. 
But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is, is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia? 
Is the information verifiable? Is it a hoax? Is it true? Is it what? 
So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this. 
And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page. 
And in the particular example we have here, it's a film, "Twisted Issues," and the first person says, "Now this is supposedly a film. It fails the Google test miserably." 
The Google test is you look in Google and see if it's there, because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't exist at all. 
It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research. 
So somebody says, "Delete it, please. Delete it -- it's not notable." 
And then somebody says, "Wait, I found it. I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide: the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'" So the next persons says, "Clean it up." 
Somebody says, "I've found it on IMDB. Keep, keep, keep." 
And what's interesting about this is that the software is -- these votes are just text typed into a page. 
This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue. 
Now it is true that at the end of the day, an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say, "OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it." 
But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it, because if those last two keeps say, "Wait a minute. Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book, and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow, so please don't delete it," then it would survive. 
And it also matters who the people are who are voting. 
Like I say, it's a tight-knit community. 
Down here at the bottom, "Keep, real movie," RickK. 
RickK is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes and votes for deletion. 
His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he's doing. 
So how is all this governed? 
People really want to know about administrators, things like that. 
So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but workable mix of consensus -- meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral -- some amount of democracy -- all of the administrators -- these are the people who have the ability to delete pages. 
That doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages. 
They still have to follow all the rules -- but they're elected by the community. 
Sometimes people -- random trolls on the Internet -- like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. 
I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. 
There's a certain amount of aristocracy. 
You got a hint of that when I mentioned, like, RickK's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know. 
I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected to the board from the community -- to the Board of the Foundation, with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it. 
And I always embarrass her because I say, "Well, Angela, for example, could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia, because she's so admired and so powerful." 
But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person who you know would never, ever break any rules of Wikipedia. 
And I also like to say she's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ... 
And then there's monarchy, and that's my role on the community, so ... 
(Laughter) I was describing this in Berlin once, and the next day in the newspaper the headline said, "I am the Queen of England." 
(Laughter) And that's not exactly what I said, but -- (Laughter) the point is my role in the community -- Within the free software world, there's been a long-standing tradition of the "benevolent dictator" model. 
So if you look at most of the major free software projects, they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator. 
Well, I don't like the term "benevolent dictator," and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world. 
It just isn't appropriate. 
But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy, a certain amount of -- sometimes we have to make a decision and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes. 
So as an example of how this can be important: we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia, and they said, "Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website, and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like. 
And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send -- we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted." 
Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up. 
That's neo-Nazi math for you. 
They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18. 
But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article. 
Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18, so there was no real danger to our democratic processes. 
On the other hand, people said, "But what are we going to do? 
I mean, this could happen. 
What if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote?" 
Then I said, "Well, fuck it, we'll just change the rules." 
That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. 
And so, as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. 
Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave -- I can't tell anyone what to do. 
So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, it's important to understand that our wiki model is the way we work, but we are not fanatical web anarchists. 
In fact, we're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately, the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it. 
(Applause) Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders. 
Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success. 
It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased. 
Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers and how do you see Wikipedia changing education? 
Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia. 
There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. 
It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. 
And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it. 
The last time I got an email from a journalist saying, "Why do academics hate Wikipedia?" 
I sent it from my Harvard email address because I was recently appointed a fellow there. 
And I said, "Well, they don't all hate it." 
(Laughter) But I think there's going to be huge impacts. 
And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the Wikibooks project, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. 
And that's a much bigger project. 
It's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition. 
But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. 
We don't mean we're going to Spam them with AOL-style CDs. 
We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use. 
And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it. 
The Wikibooks project is an effort to do that. 
And I think that we're going to see -- it may not even come from us; there's all kinds of innovation going on. 
But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education. 

Since their emergence over 200,000 years ago, modern humans have established homes and communities all over the planet. 
But they didn’t do it alone. 
Whatever corner of the globe you find homo sapiens in today, you’re likely to find another species nearby: Canis lupus familiaris. 
Whether they’re herding, hunting, sledding, or slouching the sheer variety of domestic dogs is staggering. 
But what makes the story of man’s best friend so surprising is that they all evolved from a creature often seen as one of our oldest rivals: Canis lupus, or the gray wolf. 
When our Paleolithic ancestors first settled Eurasia roughly 100,000 years ago, wolves were one of their main rivals at the top of the food chain. 
Able to exert over 300 lbs. of pressure in one bone-crushing bite and sniff out prey more than a mile away, these formidable predators didn’t have much competition. 
Much like human hunter-gatherers, they lived and hunted in complex social groups consisting of a few nuclear families, and used their social skills to cooperatively take down larger creatures. 
Using these group tactics, they operated as effective persistence hunters, relying not on outrunning their prey, but pursuing it to the point of exhaustion. 
But when pitted against the similar strengths of their invasive new neighbors, wolves found themselves at a crossroads. 
For most packs, these bourgeoning bipeds represented a serious threat to their territory. 
But for some wolves, especially those without a pack, human camps offered new opportunities. 
Wolves that showed less aggression towards humans could come closer to their encampments, feeding on leftovers. 
And as these more docile scavengers outlasted their aggressive brethren, their genetic traits were passed on, gradually breeding tamer wolves in areas near human populations. 
Over time humans found a multitude of uses for these docile wolves. 
They helped to track and hunt prey, and might have served as sentinels to guard camps and warn of approaching enemies. 
Their similar social structure made it easy to integrate with human families and learn to understand their commands. 
Eventually they moved from the fringes of our communities into our homes, becoming humanity’s first domesticated animal. 
The earliest of these Proto-Dogs or Wolf-Dogs, seem to have appeared around 33,000 years ago, and would not have looked all that different from their wild cousins. 
They were primarily distinguished by their smaller size and a shorter snout full of comparatively smaller teeth. 
But as human cultures and occupations became more diverse and specialized, so did our friends. 
Short stocky dogs to herd livestock by nipping their heels; elongated dogs to flush badgers and foxes out of burrows; thin and sleek dogs for racing; and large, muscular dogs for guard duty. 
With the emergence of kennel clubs and dog shows during England’s Victorian era, these dog types were standardized into breeds, with many new ones bred purely for appearance. 
Sadly, while all dog breeds are the product of artificial selection, some are healthier than others. 
Many of these aesthetic characteristics come with congenital health problems, such as difficulty breathing or being prone to spinal injuries. 
Humanity’s longest experiment in controlled evolution has had other side effects as well. 
Generations of selection for tameness have favored more juvenile and submissive traits that were pleasing to humans. 
This phenomenon of selecting traits associated with youth is known as neoteny, and can be seen in many domestic animals. 
Thousands of years of co-evolution may even have bonded us chemically. 
Not only can canines understand our emotions and body language, but when dogs and humans interact, both our bodies release oxytocin; a hormone commonly associated with feelings of love and protectiveness. 
It might be difficult to fathom how every Pomeranian, Chihuahua, and Poodle are descended from fierce wolves. 
But the diversity of breeds today is the result of a relationship that precedes cities, agriculture, and even the disappearance of our Neanderthal cousins. 
And it’s heartening to know that given enough time, even our most dangerous rivals can become our fiercest friends. 

In 132 CE, Chinese polymath Zhang Heng presented the Han court with his latest invention. 
This large vase, he claimed, could tell them whenever an earthquake occurred in their kingdom– including the direction they should send aid. 
The court was somewhat skeptical, especially when the device triggered on a seemingly quiet afternoon. 
But when messengers came for help days later, their doubts turned to gratitude. 
Today, we no longer rely on pots to identify seismic events, but earthquakes still offer a unique challenge to those trying to track them. 
So why are earthquakes so hard to anticipate, and how could we get better at predicting them? 
To answer that, we need to understand some theories behind how earthquakes occur. 
Earth’s crust is made from several vast, jagged slabs of rock called tectonic plates, each riding on a hot, partially molten layer of Earth’s mantle. 
This causes the plates to spread very slowly, at anywhere from 1 to 20 centimeters per year. 
But these tiny movements are powerful enough to cause deep cracks in the interacting plates. 
And in unstable zones, the intensifying pressure may ultimately trigger an earthquake. 
It’s hard enough to monitor these miniscule movements, but the factors that turn shifts into seismic events are far more varied. 
Different fault lines juxtapose different rocks– some of which are stronger–or weaker– under pressure. 
Diverse rocks also react differently to friction and high temperatures. 
Some partially melt, and can release lubricating fluids made of superheated minerals that reduce fault line friction. 
But some are left dry, prone to dangerous build-ups of pressure. 
And all these faults are subject to varying gravitational forces, as well as the currents of hot rocks moving throughout Earth’s mantle. 
So which of these hidden variables should we be analyzing, and how do they fit into our growing prediction toolkit? 
Because some of these forces occur at largely constant rates, the behavior of the plates is somewhat cyclical. 
Today, many of our most reliable clues come from long-term forecasting, related to when and where earthquakes have previously occurred. 
At the scale of millennia, this allows us to make predictions about when highly active faults, like the San Andreas, are overdue for a massive earthquake. 
But due to the many variables involved, this method can only predict very loose timeframes. 
To predict more imminent events, researchers have investigated the vibrations Earth elicits before a quake. 
Geologists have long used seismometers to track and map these tiny shifts in the earth’s crust. 
And today, most smartphones are also capable of recording primary seismic waves. 
With a network of phones around the globe, scientists could potentially crowdsource a rich, detailed warning system that alerts people to incoming quakes. 
Unfortunately, phones might not be able to provide the advance notice needed to enact safety protocols. 
But such detailed readings would still be useful for prediction tools like NASA’s Quakesim software, which can use a rigorous blend of geological data to identify regions at risk. 
However, recent studies indicate the most telling signs of a quake might be invisible to all these sensors. 
In 2011, just before an earthquake struck the east coast of Japan, nearby researchers recorded surprisingly high concentrations of the radioactive isotope pair: radon and thoron. 
As stress builds up in the crust right before an earthquake, microfractures allow these gases to escape to the surface. 
These scientists think that if we built a vast network of radon-thoron detectors in earthquake-prone areas, it could become a promising warning system– potentially predicting quakes a week in advance. 
Of course, none of these technologies would be as helpful as simply looking deep inside the earth itself. 
With a deeper view we might be able to track and predict large-scale geological changes in real time, possibly saving tens of thousands of lives a year. 
But for now, these technologies can help us prepare and respond quickly to areas in need– without waiting for directions from a vase. 

(Music: "East Virginia") (Banjo) (Singing) I'm from old East Virginia. 
North Carolina I did go. 
I met a fair, young maiden. 
Her name I did not know. 
(Banjo) Don't that road look rough and rocky? 
Don't that sea look wide and deep? 
Don't my darlin' look the sweetest ... 
When she's in my arms asleep? 
(Banjo) Her hair was a dark-brown curly. 
Her cheeks were chestnut red. 
On her breast she wore a white lilly. 
Through the night, the tears she shed. 
(Banjo) Captain, Captain, I am dyin'. 
Won't you take these words for me? 
Take them back to old East Virginia. 
Tell my darlin' she is free. 
(Banjo) (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) That was a song called "East Virginia" I learned from a man named Clifton Hicks who lives down in Georgia. 
The next song ... 
I have for you is called "John Brown's Dream." 
It's an old dance tune. 
And you may notice that the banjo that I'm holding looks a little different than banjos you might be used to seeing or the one I just played, for example. 
And this banjo is sort of an earlier model. 
Banjos kind of evolved like a human has. 
And I like to say that the sound that comes out of this banjo is a sound that was just a little closer to the source, which is Africa, and some people forget that, so, yeah ... 
(Banjo tuning) (Music: "John Brown's Dream") (Banjo) (Banjo continues) (Singing) John Brown's dream, John Brown's dream the devil was dead. 
I'm gonna get that, get that, get that, I'm gonna get that pretty little girl. 
(Banjo) John Brown's dream, John Brown's dream the devil was dead. 
(Banjo) Come on, Liza, Liza, Liza. 
Come on, Liza we'll be pickin' it again. 
I'm gonna get that, get that, get that, I'm gonna get that pretty little girl. 
(Banjo) (Music ends) (Applause and cheers) Thank you very much. 

So in the run-up to the 2016 election, I was, like most of us, watching the rise in discord and vitriol and nastiness in our public spaces. 
It was this crazy uptick in polarization. 
It was both disheartening and distressing. 
And so I started thinking, with a fellow journalist, Jeremy Hay, about how we might practice our craft differently. 
How we might go to the heart of divides, to places of conflict, like journalists always have, but then, once there, do something really different. 
We knew we wanted to take the core tools of our craft -- careful vetting of information, diligent research, curiosity, a commitment to serving the public good -- to serving our democracy -- and do something new. 
And so we mapped out this process, what we call dialogue journalism, for going to the heart of social and political divides, and then, once there, building journalism-supported conversations between people on opposite sides of polarizing issues. 
But how actually to do this in a world that's so divided, so deeply divided -- when we live in a world in which cousins and aunts and uncles can't talk to one another, when we often live in separate and distinct news ecosystems, and when we reflexively and habitually malign and dismiss those with whom we disagree? 
But we wanted to try. 
And so right after the 2016 election, in that time between the election and the inauguration, we partnered with the Alabama Media Group to do something really different. 
We brought 25 Trump supporters from Alabama together in conversation with 25 Clinton supporters from California. 
And we brought them together in a closed, moderated Facebook group that we kept open for a month. 
What we wanted to do was to give them a place to engage with genuine curiosity and openness. 
And we wanted to support them in building relationships, not just with each other but with us as journalists. 
And then we wanted to supply facts and information -- facts and information that they could actually receive and process and use to undergird their conversations. 
And so as a prelude to this conversation, the first step in what we call dialogue journalism, we asked what they thought the other side thought of them. 
So when we asked the Trump supporters from Alabama what they thought the Clinton supporters in California thought of them, this is some of what they said. 
"They think we are religious Bible thumpers." 
"That we're backwards and hickish, and stupid." 
"They think that we all have Confederate flags in our yards, that we're racist and sexist and uneducated." 
"They think we're barefoot and pregnant, with dirt driveways." 
"And they think we're all prissy butts and that we walk around in hoop skirts with cotton fields in the background." 
And then we asked that same question of the Californians: "What do you think the Alabamians think about you?" 
And they said this: "That we're crazy, liberal Californians." 
"That we're not patriotic." 
"We're snobby and we're elitist." 
"We're godless and we're permissive with our children." 
"And that we're focused on our careers, not our family." 
"That we're elitist, pie-in-the-sky intellectuals, rich people, Whole Foods-eating, very out of touch." 
So by asking questions like this at the start of every conversation and by identifying and sharing stereotypes, we find that people -- people on all sides -- begin to see the simplistic and often mean-spirited caricatures they carry. 
And in that -- after that, we can move into a process of genuine conversation. 
So in the two years since that launch -- California/Alabama Project -- we've gone on to host dialogues and partnerships with media organizations across the country. 
And they've been about some of our most contentious issues: guns, immigration, race, education. 
And what we found, remarkably, is that real dialogue is in fact possible. 
And that when given a chance and structure around doing so, many, not all, but many of our fellow citizens are eager to engage with the other. 
Too often journalists have sharpened divides in the name of drama or readership or in service to our own views. 
And too often we've gone to each side quoting a partisan voice on one side and a partisan voice on the other with a telling anecdotal lead and a pithy final quote, all of which readers are keen to mine for bias. 
But our dialogue-based process has a slower pace and a different center. 
And our work is guided by the principle that dialogue across difference is essential to a functioning democracy, and that journalism and journalists have a multifaceted role to play in supporting that. 
So how do we work? 
At every stage, we're as transparent as possible about our methods and our motives. 
At every stage, we take time to answer people's questions -- explain why we're doing what we're doing. 
We tell people that it's not a trap: no one's there to tell you you're stupid, no one's there to tell you your experience doesn't matter. 
And we always ask for a really different sort of behavior, a repatterning away from the reflexive name-calling, so entrenched in our discourse that most of us, on all sides, don't even notice it anymore. 
So people often come into our conversations a bit angrily. 
They say things like, "How can you believe X?" 
and "How can you read Y?" 
and "Can you believe that this happened?" 
But generally, in this miracle that delights us every time, people begin to introduce themselves. 
And they begin to explain who they are and where they come from, and they begin to ask questions of one another. 
And slowly, over time, people circle back again and again to difficult topics, each time with a little more empathy, a little more nuance, a little more curiosity. 
And our journalists and moderators work really hard to support this because it's not a debate, it's not a battle, it's not a Sunday morning talk show. 
It's not the flinging of talking points. 
It's not the stacking of memes and gifs or articles with headlines that prove a point. 
And it's not about scoring political victories with question traps. 
So what we've learned is that our state of discord is bad for everyone. 
It is a deeply unhappy state of being. 
And people tell us this again and again. 
They say they appreciate the chance to engage respectfully, with curiosity and with openness, and that they're glad and relieved for a chance to put down their arms. 
And so we do our work in direct challenge to the political climate in our country right now, and we do it knowing that it is difficult, challenging work to hold and support people in opposing backgrounds in conversation. 
And we do it knowing democracy depends on our ability to address our shared problems together. 
And we do this work by putting community at the heart of our journalistic process, by putting our egos to the side to listen first, to listen deeply, to listen around and through our own biases, our own habits of thought, and to support others in doing the same. 
And we do this work knowing that journalism as an institution is struggling, and that it has always had a role to play and will continue to have a role to play in supporting the exchange of ideas and views. 
For many of the participants in our groups, there are lasting reverberations. 
Many people have become Facebook friends and in-real-life friends too, across political lines. 
After we closed that first Trump/Clinton project, about two-thirds of the women went on to form their own Facebook group and they chose a moderator from each state and they continue to talk about difficult and challenging issues. 
People tell us again and again that they're grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this work, grateful to know that people on the other side aren't crazy, grateful that they've had a chance to connect with people they wouldn't have otherwise talked to. 
A lot of what we've seen and learned, despite the fact that we call ourselves Spaceship Media, is not at all rocket science. 
If you call people names, if you label them, if you insult them, they are not inclined to listen to you. 
Snark doesn't help, shame doesn't help, condescension doesn't help. 
Genuine communication takes practice and effort and restraint and self-awareness. 
There isn't an algorithm to solve where we are. 
Because real human connection is in fact real human connection. 
So lead with curiosity, emphasize discussion not debate, get out of your silo, because real connection across difference ... 
this is a salve that our democracy sorely needs. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The talented young herbalist named Xu Xian was in trouble. 
It should have been a victorious moment– he had just opened his very own medicine shop. 
But he bought his supplies from his former employer, and the resentful man sold him rotten herbs. 
As Xu Xian wondered what to do with this useless inventory, patients flooded into his shop. 
A plague had stricken the city, and he had nothing to treat them. 
Just as he was starting to panic, his wife, Bai Su Zhen, produced a recipe to use the rotten herbs as medicine. 
Her remedy cured all the plague-afflicted citizens immediately. 
Xu Xian’s former boss even had to buy back some of the rotten herbs to treat his own family. 
Shortly after, a monk named Fa Hai approached Xu Xian, warning him that there was a demon in his house. 
The demon, he said, was Bai Su Zhen. 
Xu Xian laughed. 
His kindhearted, resourceful wife was not a demon. 
Fa Hai insisted. 
He told Xu Xian to serve his wife realgar wine on the 5th day of the 5th month, when demons’ powers are weakest. 
If she wasn’t a demon, he explained, it wouldn’t hurt her. 
Xu Xian dismissed the monk politely, with no intention of serving Bai Su Zhen the wine. 
But as the day approached, he decided to try it. 
As soon as the wine touched Bai Su Zhen’s lips, she ran to the bedroom, claiming she wasn’t feeling well. 
Xu Xian prepared some medicine and went to check on her. 
But instead of his wife, he found a giant white serpent with a bloody forked tongue in the bed. 
He collapsed, killed by the shock. 
When Bai Su Zhen opened her eyes, she realized immediately what must have happened. 
The truth was that Bai Su Zhen was an immortal snake with formidable magical powers. 
She had used her powers to take a human form and improve her and her husband’s fortunes. 
Her magic couldn’t revive Xu Xian, but she had one more idea to save him: an herb that could grant longevity and even bring the dead back to life, guarded by the Old Man of the South Pole in the forbidden peaks of the Kun Lun Mountains. 
She rode to the mountains on a cloud, then continued on foot passed gateways and arches until she reached one marked “beyond mortals” hanging over a silver bridge. 
On the other side, two of the Old Man’s disciples guarded the herb. 
Bai Su Zhen disguised herself as a monk and told them she’d come to invite the Old Man to a gathering of the gods. 
While they relayed her message, she plucked some leaves from the herb and ran. 
The servants realized they had been tricked and chased her. 
Bai Su Zhen coughed up a magic ball and threw it at one. 
As the other closed in on her, she put the herb under her tongue for safekeeping, but its magic forced both of them into their true forms. 
As the crane’s long beak clamped around her, the Old Man appeared. 
Why, he asked, would she risk her life to steal his herb when she was already immortal? 
Bai Su Zhen explained her love for Xu Xian. 
Even if he didn’t want to be with her now that he knew she was a demon, she was determined to bring him back to life. 
The two had a karmic connection dating back more than a thousand years. 
When Bai Su Zhen was a small snake, a beggar was about to kill her, but a kind passerby rescued her. 
Her rescuer was Xu Xian in a past life. 
Touched by her willingness to risk her life for him, the Old Man permitted her to leave the mountain with the immortal herb. 
Bai Su Zhen returned home to revive Xu Xian. 
When he opened his eyes, the terrified look frozen on his face became a smile. 
Demon or not, he was still happy to see his wife. 

First Kiss Her mouth fell into my mouth like a summer snow, like a 5th season, like a fresh Eden, like Eden when Eve made God whimper with the liquid tilt of her hips— her kiss hurt like that— I mean, it was as if she’d mixed the sweat of an angel with the taste of a tangerine, I swear. My mouth had been a helmet forever greased with secrets, my mouth a dead-end street a little bit lit by teeth—my heart, a clam slammed shut at the bottom of a dark, but her mouth pulled up like a baby-blue Cadillac packed with canaries driven by a toucan—I swear those lips said bright wings when we kissed, wild and precise—as if she were teaching a seahorse to speak— her mouth so careful, chumming the first vowel from my throat until my brain was a piano banged loud, hammered like that— it was like, I swear her tongue was Saturn’s 7th moon— hot like that, hot and cold and circling, circling, turning me into a glad planet— sun on one side, night pouring her slow hand over the other: one fire flying the kite of another. 
Her kiss, I swear—if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist. 
That’d be it, but even sweeter— like a riot of peg-legged priests on pogo-sticks, up and up, this way and this, not falling but on and on like that, badly behaved but holy—I swear! That kiss: both lips utterly committed to the world like a Peace Corps, like a free store, forever and always a new city—no locks, no walls, just doors—like that, I swear, like that. 

In the 1600s the Dutch East India Company employed hundreds of ships to trade gold, porcelain, spices, and silks around the globe. 
But running this massive operation wasn’t cheap. 
In order to fund their expensive voyages, the company turned to private citizens– individuals who could invest money to support the trip in exchange for a share of the ship’s profits. 
This practice allowed the company to afford even grander voyages, increasing profits for both themselves and their savvy investors. 
Selling these shares in coffee houses and shipping ports across the continent, the Dutch East India Company unknowingly invented the world’s first stock market. 
Since then, companies have been collecting funds from willing investors to support all kinds of businesses. 
And today, the stock market has schools, careers, and even whole television channels dedicated to understanding it. 
But the modern stock market is significantly more complicated than its original incarnation. 
So how do companies and investors use the market today? 
Let’s imagine a new coffee company that decides to launch on the market. 
First, the company will advertise itself to big investors. 
If they think the company is a good idea, they get the first crack at investing, and then sponsor the company’s initial public offering, or IPO. 
This launches the company onto the official public market, where any company or individual who believes the business could be profitable might buy a stock. 
Buying stocks makes those investors partial owners in the business. 
Their investment helps the company to grow, and as it becomes more successful, more buyers may see potential and start buying stocks. 
As demand for those stocks increases, so does their price, increasing the cost for prospective buyers, and raising the value of the company's stocks people already own. 
For the company, this increased interest helps fund new initiatives, and also boosts its overall market value by showing how many people are willing to invest in their idea. 
However, if for some reason a company starts to seem less profitable the reverse can also happen. 
If investors think their stock value is going to decline, they’ll sell their stocks with the hopes of making a profit before the company loses more value. 
As stocks are sold and demand for the stock goes down, the stock price falls, and with it, the company’s market value. 
This can leave investors with big losses– unless the company starts to look profitable again. 
This see-saw of supply and demand is influenced by many factors. 
Companies are under the unavoidable influence of market forces– such as the fluctuating price of materials, changes in production technology, and the shifting costs of labor. 
Investors may be worried about changes in leadership, bad publicity, or larger factors like new laws and trade policies. 
And of course, plenty of investors are simply ready to sell valuable stocks and pursue personal interests. 
All these variables cause day-to-day noise in the market, which can make companies appear more or less successful. 
And in the stock market, appearing to lose value often leads to losing investors, and in turn, losing actual value. 
Human confidence in the market has the power to trigger everything from economic booms to financial crises. 
And this difficult-to-track variable is why most professionals promote reliable long term investing over trying to make quick cash. 
However, experts are constantly building tools in efforts to increase their chances of success in this highly unpredictable system. 
But the stock market is not just for the rich and powerful. 
With the dawn of the Internet, everyday investors can buy stocks in many of the exact same ways a large investor would. 
And as more people educate themselves about this complex system they too can trade stocks, support the businesses they believe in, and pursue their financial goals. 
The first step is getting invested. 

So I have a confession to make. 
I only recently learned how to drive. 
And it was really hard. 
Now, this wasn't an older brain thing. 
Do you remember what it was like when you first learned how to drive? 
When every decision you made was so conscious and deliberate? 
I'd come home from my lessons completely wiped out mentally. 
Now, as a cognitive scientist I know that this is because I was using a lot of something called executive function. 
Executive function is our amazing ability to consciously control our thoughts, emotions and actions in order to achieve goals ... 
like learning how to drive. 
It's what we use when we need to break away from habit, inhibit our impulses and plan ahead. 
But we can see it most clearly when things go wrong. 
Like, have you ever accidentally poured orange juice on your cereal? 
(Laughter) Or, ever start scrolling on Facebook and suddenly realize you've missed a meeting? 
(Laughter) Or maybe this one's more familiar: Ever plan to stop at the store on the way home from work and then drive all the way home instead on autopilot? 
(Laughter) These things happen to everyone. 
And we usually call it absentmindedness, but what's really happening is we're experiencing a lapse in executive function. 
So we use executive function every day in all aspects of our lives. 
And over the past 30 years, researchers have found that it predicts all kinds of good things in childhood and beyond, like social skills, academic achievement, mental and physical health, making money, saving money and even staying out of jail. 
Sounds great, doesn't it? 
So it's no surprise that researchers like me are so interested in understanding it and figuring out ways to improve it. 
But lately, executive function has become a huge self-improvement buzzword. 
People think you can improve it through brain-training iPhone apps and computer games, or by practicing it in a specific way, like playing chess. 
And researchers are trying to train it in the lab in the hopes of improving it and other things related to it, like intelligence. 
Well, I'm here to tell you that this way of thinking about executive function is all wrong. 
Brain training won't improve executive function in a broad sense because it involves exercising it in a narrow way, outside of the real-world contexts in which we actually use it. 
So you can master that executive function app on your phone, but that's not going to help you stop pouring OJ on your Cheeerios twice a week. 
(Laughter) If you really want to improve your executive function in a way that matters for your life, you have to understand how it's influenced by context. 
Let me show you what I mean. 
There's a great test that we use in the lab to measure executive function in young children called the "dimensional change card sort." 
In this task, kids have to sort cards in one way -- like by shape -- over and over until they build up a habit. 
And then they're asked to switch and sort the same cards in another way, like by color. 
Now, really young kids struggle with this. 
Three- and four-year-olds will usually keep sorting the cards in the old way no matter how many times you remind them of what they should be doing. 
(Video) Woman: If it's blue, put it here. If it's red, put it here. 
Here's a blue one. 
OK, so now we're going to play a different game. 
We're not going to play the color game anymore. 
Now we're going to play the shape game, and in the shape game, all the stars go here and all the trucks go here, OK? 
Stars go here, trucks go here. 
Where do the stars go? 
And where do the trucks go? 
Excellent. 
OK, stars go here, trucks go here. 
Here's a truck. 
(Laughter) Stars go here, trucks go here. 
Here's a star. 
(Laughter) SB: So it's really compelling, and it's really obvious when she fails to use her executive function. 
But here's the thing: we could train her on this task and others like it and eventually she'd improve, but does that mean that she would've improved her executive function outside of the lab? 
No, because in the real world, she'll need to use executive function to do a lot more than switching between shape and color. 
She'll need to switch from adding to multiplying or from playing to tidying up or from thinking about her own feelings to thinking about her friend. 
And success in real-world situations depends on things like how motivated you are and what your peers are doing. 
And it also depends on the strategies that you execute when you're using executive function in a particular situation. 
So what I'm saying is that context really matters. 
Now let me give you an example from my research. 
I recently brought in a bunch of kids to do the classic marshmallow test, which is a measure of delay of gratification that also likely requires a lot of executive function. 
So you may have heard about this test, but basically, kids are given a choice. 
They can have one marshmallow right away, or if they can wait for me to go to the other room and get more marshmallows, they can have two instead. 
Now, most kids really want that second marshmallow, but the key question is: How long can they wait? 
(Laughter) Now, I added a twist to look at the effects of context. 
I told each kid that they were in a group, like the green group, and I even gave them a green T-shirt to wear. 
And I said, "Your group waited for two marshmallows, and this other group, the orange group, did not." 
Or I said the opposite: "Your group didn't wait for two marshmallows and this other group did." 
And then I left the kid alone in the room and I watched on a webcam to see how long they waited. 
(Laughter) So what I found was that kids who believed that their group waited for two marshmallows were themselves more likely to wait. 
So they were influenced by a peer group that they'd never even met. 
(Laughter) Pretty cool, isn't it? 
Well, so with this result I still didn't know if they were just copying their group or if it was something deeper than that. 
So I brought in some more kids, and after the marshmallow test, I showed them pictures of pairs of kids, and I told them, "One of these kids likes to have things right away, like cookies and stickers. 
And the other kid likes to wait so that they can have more of these things." 
And then I asked them, "Which one of these two kids do you like more and who would you want to play with?" 
And what I found was that kids who believed that their group waited tended to prefer other kids who liked to wait for things. 
So learning what their group did made them value waiting more. 
And not only that, these kids likely used executive function to generate strategies to help themselves wait, like sitting on their hands or turning away from the marshmallow or singing a song to distract themselves. 
(Laughter) So what this all shows is just how much context matters. 
It's not that these kids had good executive function or bad, it's that the context helped them use it better. 
So what does this mean for you and for your kids? 
Well, let's say that you want to learn Spanish. 
You could try changing your context and surrounding yourself with other people who also want to learn, and even better if these are people that you really like. 
That way you'll be more motivated to use executive function. 
Or let's say that you want to help your child do better on her math homework. 
You could teach her strategies to use executive function in that particular context, like putting her phone away before she starts studying or planning to reward herself after studying for an hour. 
Now, I don't want to make it sound like context is everything. 
Executive function is really complex, and it's shaped by numerous factors. 
But what I want you to remember is if you want to improve your executive function in some aspect of your life, don't look for quick fixes. 
Think about the context and how you can make your goals matter more to you, and how you can use strategies to help yourself in that particular situation. 
I think the ancient Greeks said it best when they said, "Know thyself." 
And a key part of this is knowing how context shapes your behavior and how you can use that knowledge to change for the better. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So what if there were a highly obvious problem right in front of you? 
One that everyone was talking about, one that affected you directly. 
Would you do everything within your power to fix things before they got worse? 
Don't be so sure. 
We are all much more likely than any of us would like to admit to miss what's right in front of our eyes. 
And in fact, we're sometimes most likely to turn away from things precisely because of the threat that they represent to us, in business, life and the world. 
So I want to give you an example from my world, economic policy. 
So when Alan Greenspan was head of the Federal Reserve, his entire job was to watch out for problems in the US economy and to make sure that they didn't spin out of control. 
So, after 2006, when real estate prices peaked, more and more and more respected leaders and institutions started to sound the alarm bells about risky lending and dangerous market bubbles. 
As you know, in 2008 it all came tumbling down. 
Banks collapsed, global stock markets lost nearly half their value, millions and millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure. 
And at the bottom, nearly one in 10 Americans was out of work. 
So after things calmed down a little bit, Greenspan and many others came out with a postmortem and said, "Nobody could have predicted that crisis." 
They called it "a black swan." 
Something that was unimaginable, unforeseeable and completely improbable. 
A total surprise. 
Except it wasn't always such a surprise. 
For example, my Manhattan apartment nearly doubled in value in less than four years. 
I saw the writing on the wall and I sold it. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, a lot of other people also saw the warning, spoke out publicly and they were ignored. 
So we didn't know exactly what the crisis was going to look like, not the exact parameters, but we could all tell that the thing coming at us was as dangerous, visible and predictable as a giant gray rhino charging right at us. 
The black swan lends itself to the idea that we don't have power over our futures. 
And unfortunately, the less control that we think we have, the more likely we are to downplay it or ignore it entirely. 
And this dangerous dynamic masks another problem: that most of the problems that we're facing are so probable and obvious, they're things that we can see, but we still don't do anything about. 
So I created the gray rhino metaphor to meet what I felt was an urgent need. 
To help us to take a fresh look, with the same passion that people had for the black swan, but this time, for the things that were highly obvious, highly probable, but still neglected. 
Those are the gray rhinos. 
Once you start looking for gray rhinos, you see them in the headlines every day. 
And so what I see in the headlines is another big gray rhino, a new highly probable financial crisis. 
And I wonder if we've learned anything in the last 10 years. 
So if you listen to Washington or Wall Street, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that only smooth sailing laid ahead. 
But in China, where I spend a lot of time, the conversation is totally different. 
The entire economic team, all the way up to president Xi Jinping himself, talk very specifically and clearly about financial risks as gray rhinos, and how they can tame them. 
Now, to be sure, China and the US have very, very different systems of government, which affects what they're able to do or not. 
And many of the root causes for their economic problems are totally different. 
But it's no secret that both countries have problems with debt, with inequality and with economic productivity. 
So how come the conversations are so different? 
You could actually ask this question, not just about countries, but about just about everyone. 
The auto companies that put safety first and the ones that don't bother to recall their shoddy cars until after people die. 
The grandparents who, in preparing for the inevitable -- the ones who have the eulogy written, the menu for the funeral lunch. 
(Laughter) My grandparents did. 
(Laughter) And everything but the final date chiseled into the gravestone. 
But then you have the grandparents on the other side, who don't put their final affairs in order, who don't get rid of all the junk they've been hoarding for decades and decades and leave their kids to deal with it. 
So what makes the difference between one side and the other? 
Why do some people see things and deal with them, and the other ones just look away? 
So the first one has to do with culture, society, the people around you. 
If you think that someone around you is going to help pick you up when you fall, you're much more likely to see a danger as being smaller. 
And that allows us to take good chances, not just the bad ones. 
For example, like risking criticism when you talk about the danger that nobody wants you to talk about. 
Or taking the opportunities that are kind of scary, so in their own way are gray rhinos. 
So the US has a very individualist culture -- go it alone. 
And paradoxically, this makes many Americans much less open to change and taking good risks. 
In China, by contrast, people believe that the government is going to keep problems from happening, which might not always be what happens, but people believe it. 
They believe they can rely on their families, so that makes them more likely to take certain risks. 
Like buying Beijing real estate, or like being more open about the fact that they need to change direction, and in fact, the pace of change in China is absolutely amazing. 
Second of all, how much do you know about a situation, how much are you willing to learn? 
And are you willing to see things even when it's not what you want? 
So many of us are so unlikely to pay attention to the things that we just want to black out, we don't like them. 
We pay attention to what we want to see, what we like, what we agree with. 
But we have the opportunity and the ability to correct those blind spots. 
I spend a lot of time talking with people of all walks of life about the gray rhinos in their life and their attitudes. 
And you might think that the people who are more afraid of risk, who are more sensitive to them, would be the ones who would be less open to change. 
But the opposite is actually true. 
I've found that the people who are wiling to recognize the problems around them and make plans are the ones who are able to tolerate more risk, good risk, and deal with the bad risk. 
And it's because as we seek information, we increase our power to do something about the things that we're afraid of. 
And that brings me to my third point. 
How much control do you feel that you have over the gray rhinos in your life? 
One of the reasons we don't act is that we often feel too helpless. 
Think of climate change, it can feel so big, that not a single one of us could make a difference. 
So some people go about life denying it. 
Other people blame everyone except themselves. 
Like my friend who says he's not ever going to give up his SUV until they stop building coal plants in China. 
But we have an opportunity to change. 
No two of us are the same. 
Every single one of us has the opportunity to change our attitudes, our own and those of people around us. 
So today, I want to invite all of you to join me in helping to spark an open and honest conversation with the people around you, about the gray rhinos in our world, and be brutally honest about how well we're dealing with them. 
I hear so many times in the States, "Well, of course we should deal with obvious problems, but if you don't see what's in front of you, you're either dumb or ignorant." 
That's what they say, and I could not disagree more. 
If you don't see what's in front of you, you're not dumb, you're not ignorant, you're human. 
And once we all recognize that shared vulnerability, that gives us the power to open our eyes, to see what's in front of us and to act before we get trampled. 
(Applause) 

So for the past 12 years, I've been obsessed with this idea that climate change is an information issue that computers will help us fight. 
I went from data science to climate policy research, from tech to public service, in pursuit of better data to avoid the wasted energy, resources, opportunities that lead to runaway carbon emissions. 
Until one day, running in the streets with a friend, it hit me: the same cars, factories, power plants whose emissions are wrecking our climate over time also release harmful, local pollutants that threaten our health right here and right now. 
All this time I'd focused on the long-term environmental risk when I should have been up in arms about the immediate health impact of pollutants in the air. 
Air pollution is a burning public health crisis. 
It kills seven million people every year, it costs five trillion dollars to the world economy and, worst, it robs us of our most precious gift, the years in our lives: six months of life expectancy in my hometown of Paris and up to three, four, five years in parts of India and China. 
And in the US, more people die from car exhaust than from car accidents. 
So how do we protect ourselves from pollution? 
The reason it's difficult is an information gap. 
We simply lack the data to understand our exposure. 
And that's because the way we monitor air quality today is designed not to help people breathe but to help governments govern. 
Most major cities operate networks of air-quality monitoring stations like this one in London, to decide when to cut traffic or when to shut down factories. 
And these machines are like the computers from the '60s that filled entire rooms. 
They're incredibly precise but incredibly large, heavy, costly -- so much that you can only deploy just a few of them, and they cannot move. 
So to governments, air pollution looks like this. 
But for the rest of us, air quality looks like this. 
It changes all the time: hour by hour, street by street, up to eight times within a single city block. 
And even more from indoor to outdoor. 
So unless you happen to be walking right next to one of those stations, they just cannot tell you what you breathe. 
So what would environmental protection look like if it was designed for the age of the smartphone? 
So for the past three years, my team and I have been building a technology that helps you know what you breathe and fits in your hand. 
Flow is a personal air-quality tracker that you can wear with you on a backpack, a bike, a stroller. 
It's packed with miniature sensors that monitor the most important pollutants in the air around you, like nitrogen oxides, the exhaust gas from cars, or particulate matter that gets into your bloodstream and creates strokes and heart issues. 
Or volatile organic compounds, the thousands of chemicals in everyday products that we end up breathing. 
And that makes this data actionable and helps you understand what you're breathing by telling you where and when you've been exposed to poor air quality, and that way you can make informed decisions to take action against pollution. 
You can change the products you use at home, you can find the best route to cycle to work, you can run when pollution is not peaking and you can find the best park to bring your children out. 
Over time you build better habits to decrease your exposure to pollution, and by tracking air quality around them, cyclists, commuters, parents will also contribute to mapping air quality in their city. 
So we're building more than a device, but a community. 
And last summer, we sent early prototypes of our technology to 100 volunteers in London, and together they mapped air quality across 1,000 miles of sidewalk and 20 percent of all of central London. 
So our goal now is to scale this work around the world, to crowdsource data so we can map air quality on every street, to build an unprecedented database so scientists can research pollution, and to empower citizens, civic leaders, policy makers to support clean-air policies for change. 
Because this can and must change. 
Remember cigarettes in bars? 
It took decades of lung cancer research and second-hand smoking studies, but eventually, we reached a tipping point and we passed smoking-ban laws. 
We must reach the same tipping point for air quality and I believe we will. 
In the past couple years alone, governments have fined carmakers record amounts for cheating on emission standards. 
Cities have passed congestion charges or built bike lanes -- like Paris that turned this highway, right next to my home, in the middle of the city, into a waterfront park. 
And now mayors around the world are thinking of banning diesel outright by 2025, 2030, 2035. 
But how much faster could we go, how many lives could we save? 
Technology alone will not solve climate change, nor will it make air pollution disappear overnight. 
But it can make the quality of our air much more transparent, and if we can empower people to take action to improve their own health, then together we can act to bring an end to our pollution. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

"It gets easier, right?" 
These are the words I often hear from young parents who are new to the game of worrying about their children. 
I tell them that it doesn't. 
It gets different, but there's always something to worry about as parents. 
I remember how I would lie half-awake at night listening to my son breathe when he was young and had asthma, and then, when he was a teen, until I heard the front door chime open, and I knew that he was home safe. 
Worrying about our kids comes with the territory. 
Now, many of these worries are about basic issues, like what they eat, where they are, who they're with. 
But we also need to keep an eye on new behaviors and fads. 
The latest craze is something that may not yet be on everyone's radar as a serious health concern, and that is the newfound popularity of vaping, or inhaling sweet aerosols produced by vaporizing e-liquids in e-cigarettes. 
E-cigarettes, or "vapes," as they are commonly called, are flying off the shelves like candy. 
This year, the e-cigarette market is expected to drive 26 billion dollars in sales worldwide. 
Over the next six years, that volume is expected to double. 
We have a lot of serious concerns about the health impact of vaping, and unfortunately, not nearly enough answers. 
This becomes even more concerning when you think of who uses e-cigarettes. 
E-cigarette use, at least in the US, has grown rapidly among youth and young adults -- our kids, our most vulnerable population. 
There was a 900 percent growth in the use of e-cigarettes by youth between 2012 and 2015. 
The most recent estimates suggest that approximately 3.6 million high school and middle school students have used e-cigarettes in the US. 
Now, e-cigarettes were originally created to offer smokers a cleaner form of nicotine to help with their cigarette addiction. 
In the US, these devices come under the FDA's jurisdiction as a tobacco product. 
But the science on these devices has not been able to keep up with the rapid market growth, so regulations on the components of these devices and e-liquids are lagging. 
Current regulations do restrict sales of these devices to anyone under the age of 18, but these do not seem to have had much of an impact on the explosion in the use of these devices by teens. 
You know, the first time I heard of and saw an e-cigarette, I knew right away that teens would love it. 
These devices are technology on a stick, a perfect fit for the smartphone generation -- small, rechargeable, easy to use, easy to modify, nice smelling -- some even sync with your smartphone to let you know how much you have vaped. 
Even I was very drawn to these very clever devices. 
And since I had spent a long time researching teen and adult addictions, I immediately realized that these devices fit perfectly into the teen psyche. 
Teens are impulsive, and they love to try new things. 
They're also craving independence, and they love to make things their own. 
E-cigarettes meet these needs perfectly by allowing them the chance to both innovate and personalize their vape experience. 
They can choose from over 15,000 different e-liquid flavors and multiple nicotine concentrations. 
They can even create their own nicotine flavor combination. 
They can change how much vapor is produced from these devices by modifying the puff volume and the constituents and the power and temperature of the devices. 
They can even use these devices for "cloud chasing." 
Cloud chasing, also called vape tricks or smoke tricks, involves producing large vape clouds with quirky shapes and names, like rings, dragons, ghosts ... 
Cloud chasers can even participate in cloud competitions and win prizes for creating the most innovative shaped clouds. 
Teens can also change the strength and throat hit from the vapor by either vaporizing the e-liquid at higher temperatures or dripping the e-liquid directly onto a heated coil. 
They can even use these devices for marijuana vaping. 
And since the devices use lower temperatures and do not combust or burn the marijuana, they can do this very discreetly, without the distinctive smell of burnt marijuana. 
So they can really make these vape experiences their own, which may explain the astounding rise in the use of these devices by youth. 
E-cigarettes are technically a very simple device. 
There is a receptacle for the e-liquid which can be a tank, a pod or a plug. 
There is a battery that charges the coil, which then vaporizes the e-liquid. 
And then there is a mouthpiece, where the user can actually draw from the e-cigarette. 
In 2017, there were 466 e-cigarette devices in the marketplace. 
These range from cigarette-like devices which are also called "cigalikes" to tank systems, which are also called "pens." 
And then there are modified devices, which are also called "mods." 
Mods look nothing like a cigarette, and they come in various shapes and sizes, with different kinds of attachments and user adjustments. 
They're very popular for cloud chasing. 
The most recent entrance into the marketplace are the pod devices, which contain the e-liquid in a pod. 
These are very popular, by the way, among teens. 
An example of this is the Juul, which not only looks like a USB device but can also be plugged into a USB outlet to charge. 
Many teens do not even think that these are e-cigarettes, which has led to the use of terms like "juuling" instead of "vaping." 
Many of these devices are so discreet and produce so little vapor that teens are using them in classrooms and hiding them in objects like Sharpie pens, their clothes, their books. 
Now, many teens think that these devices produce water vapor, and therefore, they are safe to use. 
But this could not be further from the truth. 
What is produced is not even a vapor, it's an aerosol, and let me tell you, the difference is quite pronounced. 
Aerosols contain many finely suspended particles of liquids and gases that are created from whatever is in the e-liquid. 
So an aerosol could contain propylene glycol and glycerin, which are solvents in the e-liquid. 
Now, these solvents are known to be safe for edible use, so for use in products that you eat, but we know very little about their safety following long-term inhalational exposure. 
The e-liquids can also contain alcohol, sometimes in high levels, and inhaling alcohol is known to have toxic effects on the brain. 
I told you earlier that the e-liquids contain over 15,000 different flavors. 
Here are some examples, some with very catchy but familiar names like "Skittles" and "Fruit Loops," and others with more exotic names like "Dragon's Milk" and "Tiger's Blood" and "Unicorn Puke." 
The e-liquid or the aerosol can also contain metallic particles like chromium, cadmium and lead. 
These are generated from the heating coil in the devices and are also known to have many toxic effects on vital organs. 
So no, let me make this very clear: what is produced is definitely not water vapor. 
Exposure of the teen brain to nicotine through e-cigarettes is also very concerning. 
The teen brain is very sensitive to even low levels of nicotine and gets very easily addicted. 
In fact, we have known for a long time that 90 percent of smokers start smoking cigarettes prior to the age of 18. 
Those who start early are more addicted and have a harder time quitting smoking. 
In other words, and to quote a past FDA commissioner, "Nicotine addiction ... is a pediatric disease." 
E-cigarettes can expose teens to a lot of nicotine. 
Many of these devices contain the amount of nicotine that is in a full pack of cigarettes. 
The more recent pod devices contain a nicotine salt, which has a smoother taste and is much easier to use and can produce rapid increases in brain nicotine levels. 
Teens who use e-cigarettes regularly report symptoms of craving -- feeling anxious when they don't have their e-cigarettes. 
All these are hallmarks of a behavioral addiction. 
E-cigarettes are not only addictive but they also affect many other organs in the body. 
So nicotine, which is in e-cigarettes, for example, binds to a receptor called the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, which plays a key role in the functioning of almost all organ systems in the human body. 
And chronic exposure to nicotine changes the functioning of these systems. 
So as an example, chronic exposure to nicotine decreases the flexibility of the blood vessels and changes how the heart responds to acute challenges like stress. 
The teen brain is not only sensitive to the addictive effects of nicotine but also to its toxic effects. 
In adolescent animals, nicotine is a very well-established neurotoxin, and it decreases learning, memory and attention processes and increases hyperactivity symptoms. 
Teens who use tobacco products are more likely to use marijuana and alcohol and also develop depression and anxiety as a teen or as an adult. 
So nicotine addiction through e-cigarettes could be leading them down the path of other addictions and other mental health problems. 
Now, in adolescent animals, nicotine also produces epigenetic changes, or heritable changes in gene expression, for example, in the genes involved in asthma. 
So teens who use nicotine may not only be harming themselves but they could be harming their future generations. 
You know, the very existence of e-cigarettes could have led to an entire generation of nicotine-addicted youth. 
Easy access to these devices could have led to more experimentation with marijuana and many other vaporizable substances by youth. 
While there is no doubt that providing smokers with a cleaner form of nicotine is and should continue to be a critical goal, we still do not know if these devices help smokers quit smoking, and we know very little about the long-term effects of these devices. 
What we do know is that youth -- lots of youth -- are using these devices. 
In fact, the FDA commissioner recently used the term "epidemic" to describe e-cigarette use in the US. 
While trying to solve one huge public health problem, cigarette smoking, we may have created another colossal one. 
Our lack of vigilance in the earlier years around cigarette smoking led to a cigarette epidemic and many, many cigarette-related diseases. 
We do not want to repeat the same mistakes with e-cigarettes. 
So now is the time for action, for regulations that address the appeal and access of these devices to youth. 
Do smokers really need 15,000 kid-friendly flavors to quit smoking? 
Do they need so many different kinds of devices? 
Is it a good idea to have devices which are so easy to hide and so easy to use? 
We recently heard that the FDA plans to introduce stricter regulations on sales of these devices that contain e-liquid flavors in retail locations like convenience stores and gas stations, and also introduce stricter regulations on sales of devices to minors over the internet. 
Is this going to be sufficient to change this rapid increase in youth uptake? 
We need to ask and answer such critical questions. 
Now is also the time for a serious public education campaign. 
Teens and their parents need to know that while e-cigarettes may contain less toxins than cigarettes, they're certainly not benign. 
Exposure of their bodies to the chemicals produced by these devices could be changing them in ways they may not like and setting them up for future unknown toxicities and health problems. 
You know, when I said earlier that e-cigarettes were a perfect fit for the smartphone generation, I was not kidding. 
We live in a technology-crazed world, where the latest device and technology gets a lot of attention just because it is technology and because it is the latest thing. 
More and more over the next few years and for the rest of our lives, we are going to see technologies coming into the marketplace that may not raise any health flags at first, simply because they don't look unhealthy or they're not a medical device. 
For example, we could see devices that may make it easier to go longer without sleep or help us lose weight -- a personal goal of mine -- or achieve any number of other goals that we as consumers are very, very interested in. 
But many of these devices may come with unacceptable risks to our own health. 
So if we want to protect our health and the health of our children, perhaps we should get out of the habit of automatically celebrating such new technology and get into the habit of looking at them with a critical eye, perhaps even through a medical lens. 
Because, you know something? 
Our health, the health of our children and our future generations is far too valuable to let it go up in smoke -- or even in aerosol. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm Denice Frohman, and this is "Accents." 
my mom holds her accent like a shotgun, with two good hands. 
her tongue, all brass knuckle slipping in between her lips her hips, are all laughter and wind clap. 
she speaks a sanchocho of spanish and english, pushing up and against one another, in rapid fire there is no telling my mama to be "quiet," my mama don't know "quiet." 
her voice is one size better fit all and you best not tell her to hush, she waited too many years for her voice to arrive to be told it needed house keeping. 
English sits in her mouth remixed so "strawberry" becomes "eh-strawbeddy" and "cookie" becomes "eh-cookie" and kitchen, key chain, and chicken all sound the same. 
my mama doesn't say "yes" she says, "ah ha" and suddenly the sky in her mouth becomes a Hector Lavoe song. 
her tongue can't lay itself down flat enough for the English language, it got too much hip too much bone too much conga too much cuatro to two step got too many piano keys in between her teeth, it got too much clave too much hand clap got too much salsa to sit still it be an anxious child wanting to make Play-Doh out of concrete English be too neat for her kind of wonderful. 
her words spill in conversation between women whose hands are all they got sometimes our hands are all we got and accents that remind us that we are still bomba, still plena you say "wepa" and a stranger becomes your hermano, you say "dale" and a crowd becomes a family reunion. 
my mother's tongue is a telegram from her mother decorated with the coqui's of el campo so even when her lips can barely stretch themselves around english, her accent is a stubborn compass always pointing her towards home. 

Arcane books of forbidden lore, disturbing secrets in the family bloodline, and terrors so unspeakable the very thought of them might drive you mad. 
By now, these have become standard elements in many modern horror stories. 
But they were largely popularized by a single author– one whose name has become an adjective for the particular type of terror he inspired. 
Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft grew up admiring the Gothic horror stories written by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Chambers. 
But by the time he began writing in 1917, World War I had cast a long shadow over the arts. 
People had seen real horrors, and were no longer frightened of fantastical folklore. 
Lovecraft sought to invent a new kind of terror, one that responded to the rapid scientific progress of his era. 
His stories often used scientific elements to lend eerie plausibility. 
In "The Colour out of Space," a strange meteorite falls near a farmhouse, mutating the farm into a nightmarish hellscape. 
Others incorporated scientific methodology into their form. 
"At the Mountains of Madness" is written as a report of an Antarctic expedition that unearths things better left undiscovered. 
In others, mathematics themselves become a source of horror, as impossible geometric configurations wreak havoc on the minds of any who behold them. 
Like then-recent discoveries of subatomic particles or X-rays, the forces in Lovecraft’s fiction were powerful, yet often invisible and indescribable. 
Rather than recognizable monsters, graphic violence, or startling shocks, the terror of “Lovecraftian” horror lies in what’s not directly portrayed– but left instead to the dark depths of our imagination. 
Lovecraft’s dozens of short stories, novellas, and poems often take place in the same fictional continuity, with recurring characters, locations, and mythologies. 
At first glance, they appear to be set within Lovecraft’s contemporary New England. 
But beneath the surface of this seemingly similar reality lie dark masters, for whom Earth’s inhabitants are mere playthings. 
More like primordial forces than mere deities, Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones lurk at the corners of our reality. 
Beings such as Yog-Sothoth, “who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time.” Or the blind, idiot god Azathoth, whose destructive impulses are stalled only by the “maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.” These beings exist beyond our conceptions of reality, their true forms as inscrutable as their motives. 
Lovecraft’s protagonists– often researchers, anthropologists, or antiquarians– stumble onto hints of their existence. 
But even these indirect glimpses are enough to drive them insane. 
And if they survive, the reader is left with no feeling of triumph, only cosmic indifference– the terrible sense that we are but insignificant specks at the mercy of unfathomable forces. 
But perhaps the greatest power these creatures had was their appeal to Lovecraft’s contemporaries. 
During his lifetime, Lovecraft corresponded with other writers, encouraging them to employ elements and characters from his stories in their own. 
References to Lovecraftian gods or arcane tomes can be found in many stories by his pen pals, such as Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch. 
Today, this shared universe is called the Cthulhu Mythos, named after Lovecraft’s infamous blend of dragon and octopus. 
Unfortunately, Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown found a less savory expression in his personal views. 
The author held strong racist views, and some of his works include crude stereotypes and slurs. 
But the rich world he created would outlive his personal prejudices. 
And after Lovecraft’s death, the Cthulhu Mythos was adopted by a wide variety of authors, often reimagining them from diverse perspectives that transcend the author’s prejudices. 
Despite his literary legacy, Lovecraft was never able to find financial success. 
He died unknown and penniless at the age of 46– a victim of the universe’s cosmic indifference. 
But his work has inspired numerous short stories, novels, tabletop games, and cultural icons. 
And as long as humans feel a sense of dread about our unknown future, Lovecraftian horror will have a place in the darkest corners of our imagination. 

So, I have a pretty fun job, which is to figure out what makes people happy. 
It's so fun, it might almost seen a little frivolous, especially at a time where we're being confronted with some pretty depressing headlines. 
But it turns out that studying happiness might provide a key to solving some of the toughest problems we're facing. 
It's taken me almost a decade to figure this out. 
Pretty early on in my career, I published a paper in "Science" with my collaborators, entitled, "Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness." 
I was very confident in this conclusion, except for one thing: it didn't seem to apply to me. 
(Laughter) I hardly ever gave money to charity, and when I did, I didn't feel that warm glow I was expecting. 
So I started to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with my research or something wrong with me. 
My own lackluster emotional response to giving was especially puzzling because my follow-up studies revealed that even toddlers exhibited joy from giving to others. 
In one experiment, my colleagues Kiley Hamlin, Lara Aknin and I brought kids just under the age of two into the lab. 
Now, as you might imagine, we had to work with a resource that toddlers really care about, so we used the toddler equivalent of gold, namely, Goldfish crackers. 
(Laughter) We gave kids this windfall of Goldfish for themselves and a chance to give some of their Goldfish away to a puppet named Monkey. 
(Video) Researcher: I found even more treats, and I'm going to give them all to you. 
Toddler: Ooh. Thank you. 
Researcher: But, you know, I don't see any more treats. 
Will you give one to Monkey? 
Toddler: Yeah. Researcher: Yeah? 
Toddler: Yeah. 
Here. 
Researcher: Ooh, yummy. Mmmm. 
Toddler: All gone, he ate it. 
Elizabeth Dunn: Now, we trained research assistants to watch these videos and code toddlers' emotional reactions. 
Of course, we didn't tell them our hypotheses. 
The data revealed that toddlers were pretty happy when they got this pile of Goldfish for themselves, but they were actually even happier when they got to give some of their Goldfish away. 
And this warm glow of giving persists into adulthood. 
When we analyzed surveys from more than 200,000 adults across the globe, we saw that nearly a third of the world's population reported giving at least some money to charity in the past month. 
Remarkably, in every major region of the world, people who gave money to charity were happier than those who did not, even after taking into account their own personal financial situation. 
And this correlation wasn't trivial. 
It looked like giving to charity made about the same difference for happiness as having twice as much income. 
Now, as a researcher, if you're lucky enough to stumble on an effect that replicates around the world in children and adults alike, you start to wonder: Could this be part of human nature? 
We know that pleasure reinforces adaptive behaviors like eating and sex that help perpetuate our species, and it looked to me like giving might be one of those behaviors. 
I was really excited about these ideas, and I wrote about them in the "New York Times." 
One of the people who read this article was my accountant. 
(Laughter) Yeah. 
At tax time, I found myself seated across from him, watching as he slowly tapped his pen on the charitable giving line of my tax return with this look of, like, poorly concealed disapproval. 
(Laughter) Despite building my career by showing how great giving can feel, I actually wasn't doing very much of it. 
So I resolved to give more. 
Around that time, devastating stories about the Syrian refugee crisis were everywhere. 
I really wanted to help, so I pulled out my credit card. 
I knew my donations would probably make a difference for someone somewhere, but going to the website of an effective charity and entering my Visa number still just didn't feel like enough. 
That's when I learned about the Group of Five. 
The Canadian government allows any five Canadians to privately sponsor a family of refugees. 
You have to raise enough money to support the family for their first year in Canada, and then they literally get on a plane to your city. 
One of the things that I think is so cool about this program is that no one is allowed to do it alone. 
And instead of a Group of Five, we ended up partnering with a community organization and forming a group of 25. 
After almost two years of paperwork and waiting, we learned that our family would be arriving in Vancouver in less than six weeks. 
They had four sons and a daughter, so we raced to find them a place to live. 
We were very lucky to find them a house, but it needed quite a bit of work. 
So my friends came out on evenings and weekends and painted and cleaned and assembled furniture. 
When the big day came, we filled their fridge with milk and fresh fruit and headed to the airport to meet our family. 
It was a little overwhelming for everyone, especially the four-year-old. 
His mother was reunited with her sister who had come to Canada earlier through the same program. 
They hadn't seen each other in 15 years. 
When you hear that more than 5.6 million refugees have fled Syria, you're faced with this tragedy that the human brain hasn't really evolved to comprehend. 
It's so abstract. 
Before, if any of us had been asked to donate 15 hours a month to help out with the refugee crisis, we probably would have said no. 
But as soon as we took our family to their new home in Vancouver, we all had the same realization: we were just going to do whatever it took to help them be happy. 
This experience made me think a little more deeply about my research. 
Back in my lab, we'd seen the benefits of giving spike when people felt a real sense of connection with those they were helping and could easily envision the difference they were making in those individuals' lives. 
For example, in one experiment, we gave participants an opportunity to donate a bit of money to either UNICEF or Spread the Net. 
We chose these charities intentionally, because they were partners and shared the same critically important goal of promoting children's health. 
But I think UNICEF is just such a big, broad charity that it can be a little hard to envision how your own small donation will make a difference. 
In contrast, Spread the Net offers donors a concrete promise: for every 10 dollars donated, they provide one bed net to protect a child from malaria. 
We saw that the more money people gave to Spread the Net, the happier they reported feeling afterward. 
In contrast, this emotional return on investment was completely eliminated when people gave money to UNICEF. 
So this suggests that just giving money to a worthwhile charity isn't always enough. 
You need to be able to envision how, exactly, your dollars are going to make a difference. 
Of course, the Group of Five program takes this idea to a whole new level. 
When we first took on this project, we would talk about when the refugees would arrive. 
Now, we just refer to them as our family. 
Recently, we took the kids ice skating, and later that day, my six-year-old, Oliver, asked me, "Mommy, who is the oldest kid in our family?" 
I assumed he was talking about his plethora of cousins, and he was talking about them, but also about our Syrian family. 
Since our family arrived, so many people and organizations have offered to help, providing everything from free dental fillings to summer camps. 
It's made me see the goodness that exists in our community. 
Thanks to one donation, the kids got to go to bike camp, and every day of the week, some member of our group tried to be there to cheer for them. 
I happened to be there the day the training wheels were supposed to come off, and let me tell you, the four-year-old did not think this was a good idea. 
So I went over and talked to him about the long-term benefits of riding without training wheels. 
(Laughter) Then I remembered that he was four and barely spoke English. 
So I reverted to two words he definitely knew: ice cream. 
You try without training wheels, I'll buy you ice cream. 
Here's what happened next. 
(Video) ED: Yes. Yeah! 
Kid: I'm gonna try. 
ED: Oh my God! Look at you go! 
(Squealing) Look at you go! You're doing it all by yourself! 
(Audience) (Laughter) (Video) ED: Good job! 
(Audience) (Laughter) (Applause) ED: So this is the kind of helping that human beings evolved to enjoy, but for 40 years, Canada was the only country in the world that allowed private citizens to sponsor refugees. 
Now -- Canada! 
(Applause) It's pretty great. 
Now Australia and the UK are starting up similar programs. 
Just imagine how different the refugee crisis could look if more countries made this possible. 
Creating these kinds of meaningful connections between individuals provides an opportunity to deal with challenges that feel overwhelming. 
One of those challenges lies just blocks from where I'm standing right now, in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. 
By some measures, it's the poorest urban postal code in Canada. 
We actually debated whether to bring over a family of refugees, because there are so many people right here already struggling. 
My friend Evan told me that when he was a kid and his parents drove through this neighborhood, he would duck down in the back seat. 
But Evan's parents never would have guessed that when he grew up, he would open up the doors of a local restaurant and invite this community inside to enjoy three-course dinners. 
The program that Evan helped build is called "Plenty of Plates," and the goal is not just to provide free meals but to create moments of connection between people who otherwise might never make eye contact. 
Each night, a local business sponsors the dinner and sends a team of volunteers who help make and serve the meal. 
Afterward, the leftovers get distributed to people who are out on the street, and importantly, there's enough money left to provide a thousand free lunches for this community in the days that follow. 
But the benefits of this program extend beyond food. 
For the volunteers, it provides an opportunity to engage with people, to sit down and hear their stories. 
After this experience, one volunteer changed his commute so that instead of avoiding this neighborhood, he walks through it, smiling or making eye contact as he passes familiar faces. 
All of us are capable of finding joy in giving. 
But we shouldn't expect this to happen automatically. 
Spending money helping others doesn't necessarily promote happiness. 
Instead, it matters how we do it. 
And if we want people to give more, we need to subvert the way we think about charitable giving. 
We need to create opportunities to give that enable us to appreciate our shared humanity. 
If any of you work for a charity, don't reward your donors with pens or calendars. 
(Applause) Reward them with the opportunity to see the specific impact that their generosity is having and to connect with the individuals and communities they're helping. 
We're used to thinking about giving as something we should do. 
And it is. 
But in thinking about it this way, we're missing out on one of the best parts of being human: that we have evolved to find joy in helping others. 
Let's stop thinking about giving as just this moral obligation and start thinking of it as a source of pleasure. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Black holes are among the most destructive objects in the universe. 
Anything that gets too close to the central singularity of a black hole, be it an asteroid, planet, or star, risks being torn apart by its extreme gravitational field. 
And if the approaching object happens to cross the black hole’s event horizon, it’ll disappear and never re-emerge, adding to the black hole’s mass and expanding its radius in the process. 
There is nothing we could throw at a black hole that would do the least bit of damage to it. 
Even another black hole won’t destroy it– the two will simply merge into a larger black hole, releasing a bit of energy as gravitational waves in the process. 
By some accounts, it’s possible that the universe may eventually consist entirely of black holes in a very distant future. 
And yet, there may be a way to destroy, or “evaporate,” these objects after all. 
If the theory is true, all we need to do is to wait. 
In 1974, Stephen Hawking theorized a process that could lead a black hole to gradually lose mass. 
Hawking radiation, as it came to be known, is based on a well-established phenomenon called quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. 
According to quantum mechanics, a given point in spacetime fluctuates between multiple possible energy states. 
These fluctuations are driven by the continuous creation and destruction of virtual particle pairs, which consist of a particle and its oppositely charged antiparticle. 
Normally, the two collide and annihilate each other shortly after appearing, preserving the total energy. 
But what happens when they appear just at the edge of a black hole’s event horizon? 
If they’re positioned just right, one of the particles could escape the black hole’s pull while its counterpart falls in. 
It would then annihilate another oppositely charged particle within the event horizon of the black hole, reducing the black hole’s mass. 
Meanwhile, to an outside observer, it would look like the black hole had emitted the escaped particle. 
Thus, unless a black hole continues to absorb additional matter and energy, it’ll evaporate particle by particle, at an excruciatingly slow rate. 
How slow? 
A branch of physics, called black hole thermodynamics, gives us an answer. 
When everyday objects or celestial bodies release energy to their environment, we perceive that as heat, and can use their energy emission to measure their temperature. 
Black hole thermodynamics suggests that we can similarly define the “temperature” of a black hole. 
It theorizes that the more massive the black hole, the lower its temperature. 
The universe’s largest black holes would give off temperatures of the order of 10 to the -17th power Kelvin, very close to absolute zero. 
Meanwhile, one with the mass of the asteroid Vesta would have a temperature close to 200 degrees Celsius, thus releasing a lot of energy in the form of Hawking Radiation to the cold outside environment. 
The smaller the black hole, the hotter it seems to be burning– and the sooner it’ll burn out completely. 
Just how soon? 
Well, don’t hold your breath. 
First of all, most black holes accrete, or absorb matter and energy, more quickly than they emit Hawking radiation. 
But even if a black hole with the mass of our Sun stopped accreting, it would take 10 to the 67th power years– many many magnitudes longer than the current age of the Universe— to fully evaporate. 
When a black hole reaches about 230 metric tons, it’ll have only one more second to live. 
In that final second, its event horizon becomes increasingly tiny, until finally releasing all of its energy back into the universe. 
And while Hawking radiation has never been directly observed, some scientists believe that certain gamma ray flashes detected in the sky are actually traces of the last moments of small, primordial black holes formed at the dawn of time. 
Eventually, in an almost inconceivably distant future, the universe may be left as a cold and dark place. 
But if Stephen Hawking was right, before that happens, the normally terrifying and otherwise impervious black holes will end their existence in a final blaze of glory. 

Ever since computers were invented, we've been trying to make them smarter and more powerful. 
From the abacus, to room-sized machines, to desktops, to computers in our pockets. 
And are now designing artificial intelligence to automate tasks that would require human intelligence. 
If you look at the history of computing, we've always treated computers as external devices that compute and act on our behalf. 
What I want to do is I want to weave computing, AI and internet as part of us. 
As part of human cognition, freeing us to interact with the world around us. 
Integrate human and machine intelligence right inside our own bodies to augment us, instead of diminishing us or replacing us. 
Could we combine what people do best, such as creative and intuitive thinking, with what computers do best, such as processing information and perfectly memorizing stuff? 
Could this whole be better than the sum of its parts? 
We have a device that could make that possible. 
It's called AlterEgo, and it's a wearable device that gives you the experience of a conversational AI that lives inside your head, that you could talk to in likeness to talking to yourself internally. 
We have a new prototype that we're showing here, for the first time at TED, and here's how it works. 
Normally, when we speak, the brain sends neurosignals through the nerves to your internal speech systems, to activate them and your vocal cords to produce speech. 
One of the most complex cognitive and motor tasks that we do as human beings. 
Now, imagine talking to yourself without vocalizing, without moving your mouth, without moving your jaw, but by simply articulating those words internally. 
Thereby very subtly engaging your internal speech systems, such as your tongue and back of your palate. 
When that happens, the brain sends extremely weak signals to these internal speech systems. 
AlterEgo has sensors, embedded in a thin plastic, flexible and transparent device that sits on your neck just like a sticker. 
These sensors pick up on these internal signals sourced deep within the mouth cavity, right from the surface of the skin. 
An AI program running in the background then tries to figure out what the user's trying to say. 
It then feeds back an answer to the user by means of bone conduction, audio conducted through the skull into the user's inner ear, that the user hears, overlaid on top of the user's natural hearing of the environment, without blocking it. 
The combination of all these parts, the input, the output and the AI, gives a net subjective experience of an interface inside your head that you could talk to in likeness to talking to yourself. 
Just to be very clear, the device does not record or read your thoughts. 
It records deliberate information that you want to communicate through deliberate engagement of your internal speech systems. 
People don't want to be read, they want to write. 
Which is why we designed the system to deliberately record from the peripheral nervous system. 
Which is why the control in all situations resides with the user. 
I want to stop here for a second and show you a live demo. 
What I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask Eric a question. 
And he's going to search for that information without vocalizing, without typing, without moving his fingers, without moving his mouth. 
Simply by internally asking that question. 
The AI will then figure out the answer and feed it back to Eric, through audio, through the device. 
While you see a laptop in front of him, he's not using it. 
Everything lives on the device. 
All he needs is that sticker device to interface with the AI and the internet. 
So, Eric, what's the weather in Vancouver like, right now? 
What you see on the screen are the words that Eric is speaking to himself right now. 
This is happening in real time. 
Eric: It's 50 degrees and rainy here in Vancouver. 
Arnav Kapur: What happened is that the AI sent the answer through audio, through the device, back to Eric. 
What could the implications of something like this be? 
Imagine perfectly memorizing things, where you perfectly record information that you silently speak, and then hear them later when you want to, internally searching for information, crunching numbers at speeds computers do, silently texting other people. 
Suddenly becoming multilingual, so that you internally speak in one language, and hear the translation in your head in another. 
The potential could be far-reaching. 
There are millions of people around the world who struggle with using natural speech. 
People with conditions such as ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, stroke and oral cancer, amongst many other conditions. 
For them, communicating is a painstakingly slow and tiring process. 
This is Doug. 
Doug was diagnosed with ALS about 12 years ago and has since lost the ability to speak. 
Today, he uses an on-screen keyboard where he types in individual letters using his head movements. 
And it takes several minutes to communicate a single sentence. 
So we went to Doug and asked him what were the first words he'd like to use or say, using our system. 
Perhaps a greeting, like, "Hello, how are you?" 
Or indicate that he needed help with something. 
What Doug said that he wanted to use our system for is to reboot the old system he had, because that old system kept on crashing. 
(Laughter) We never could have predicted that. 
I'm going to show you a short clip of Doug using our system for the first time. 
(Voice) Reboot computer. 
AK: What you just saw there was Doug communicating or speaking in real time for the first time since he lost the ability to speak. 
There are millions of people who might be able to communicate in real time like Doug, with other people, with their friends and with their families. 
My hope is to be able to help them express their thoughts and ideas. 
I believe computing, AI and the internet would disappear into us as extensions of our cognition, instead of being external entities or adversaries, amplifying human ingenuity, giving us unimaginable abilities and unlocking our true potential. 
And perhaps even freeing us to becoming better at being human. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) Shoham Arad: Come over here. 
OK. 
I want to ask you a couple of questions, they're going to clear the stage. 
I feel like this is amazing, it's innovative, it's creepy, it's terrifying. 
Can you tell us what I think ... 
I think there are some uncomfortable feelings around this. 
Tell us, is this reading your thoughts, will it in five years, is there a weaponized version of this, what does it look like? 
AK: So our first design principle, before we started working on this, was to not render ethics as an afterthought. 
So we wanted to bake ethics right into the design. 
We flipped the design. 
Instead of reading from the brain directly, we're reading from the voluntary nervous system that you deliberately have to engage to communicate with the device, while still bringing the benefits of a thinking or a thought device. 
The best of both worlds in a way. 
SA: OK, I think people are going to have a lot more questions for you. 
Also, you said that it's a sticker. 
So right now it sits just right here? 
Is that the final iteration, what the final design you hope looks like? 
AK: Our goal is for the technology to disappear completely. 
SA: What does that mean? 
AK: If you're wearing it, I shouldn't be able to see it. 
You don't want technology on your face, you want it in the background, to augment you in the background. 
So we have a sticker version that conforms to the skin, that looks like the skin, but we're trying to make an even smaller version that would sit right here. 
SA: OK. 
I feel like if anyone has any questions they want to ask Arnav, he'll be here all week. 
OK, thank you so much, Arnav. 
AK: Thanks, Shoham. 

Great creativity. In times of need, we need great creativity. 
Discuss. Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful. 
Great creativity can spread tolerance, champion freedom, make education seem like a bright idea. 
(Laughter) Great creativity can turn a spotlight on deprivation, or show that deprivation ain't necessarily so. 
Great creativity can make politicians electable, or parties unelectable. 
It can make war seem like tragedy or farce. 
Creativity is the meme-maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips. 
It's the pathfinder that shows us a simple road through an impenetrable moral maze. 
Science is clever, but great creativity is something less knowable, more magical. And now we need that magic. 
This is a time of need. 
Our climate is changing quickly, too quickly. 
And great creativity is needed to do what it does so well: to provoke us to think differently with dramatic creative statements. 
To tempt us to act differently with delightful creative scraps. 
Here is one such scrap from an initiative I'm involved in using creativity to inspire people to be greener. 
(Video) Man: You know, rather than drive today, I'm going to walk. 
Narrator: And so he walked, and as he walked he saw things. 
Strange and wonderful things he would not otherwise have seen. 
A deer with an itchy leg. A flying motorcycle. 
A father and daughter separated from a bicycle by a mysterious wall. 
And then he stopped. Walking in front of him was her. 
The woman who as a child had skipped with him through fields and broken his heart. 
Sure, she had aged a little. 
In fact, she had aged a lot. 
But he felt all his old passion for her return. 
"Ford," he called softly. For that was her name. 
"Don't say another word, Gusty," she said, for that was his name. 
"I know a tent next to a caravan, exactly 300 yards from here. 
Let's go there and make love. In the tent." 
Ford undressed. She spread one leg, and then the other. 
Gusty entered her boldly and made love to her rhythmically while she filmed him, because she was a keen amateur pornographer. 
The earth moved for both of them. 
And they lived together happily ever after. 
And all because he decided to walk that day. 
(Applause) Andy Hobsbawm: We've got the science, we've had the debate. 
The moral imperative is on the table. 
Great creativity is needed to take it all, make it simple and sharp. 
To make it connect. To make it make people want to act. 
So this is a call, a plea, to the incredibly talented TED community. 
Let's get creative against climate change. 
And let's do it soon. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Xu Xian had just received yet another invitation to the opening ceremony of the new Jin Shan Temple. 
His wife, Bai Su Zhen, had warned him not to attend. 
Since she was in fact a benevolent white snake spirit in human form, their marriage had already weathered attacks by meddling monks. 
But devout Buddhist that he was, Xu Xian felt obligated to make an appearance. 
What they didn’t know was that these invitations had come from none other than Fa Hai– the misguided monk who had tried to separate the young lovers, almost killing Xu Xian in the process. 
The monk confronted Xu Xian, telling him that because he consorted with a demon, he must remain at the monastery and cleanse his soul. 
Xu Xian protested, but Fa Hai would not let him escape. 
At home, Bai Su Zhen was uneasy. 
Her husband had departed so quickly that she hadn’t been able to tell him she was pregnant with his child. 
And now he had been gone so long she sensed something must be wrong. 
She made her way to the temple, and upon encountering Fa Hai the monk threw his prayer mat, which erupted into fire and smoke. 
Weakened from her pregnancy, Bai Su Zhen desperately summoned a fleet of shrimp soldiers and crab generals to subdue the monk, and waves to put out the blaze. 
But the water also flooded the surrounding area, drowning many innocent villagers. 
For the first time, Bai Su Zhen had harmed humans, and she fell out of the gods’ favor. 
With their blessing retracted, Fa Hai attempted to trap her in his magical alms bowl. 
But just when all hope seemed lost, a bright glow came from within her belly, saving her from the mad monk’s magic. 
The couple fled home, grateful to the mysterious power that had saved them, and soon after, Bai Su Zhen gave birth to their son, Xu Shi Lin. 
Yet despite this joyous occasion, Xu Xian was uneasy. 
He was shaken by his wife’s accidental act of destruction, and he feared the misfortune it might bring upon their home. 
Not a month later, Fa Hai appeared at their doorstep. 
He offered Xu Xian an alms bowl to ensure good fortune for his newborn son. 
Still wary of the monk, but also remembering Bai Su Zhen’s destructive act, Xu Xian accepted the gift. 
But as soon as the bowl entered their home, it flew to Bai Su Zhen’s head and trapped her inside. 
Against the family’s wishes, Fa Hai buried the bowl beneath the Lei Feng Pagoda. 
And when Xu Xian begged him to release his wife, the monk sternly replied: “She will be free when the iron tree blooms.” Overcome with guilt, Xu Xian ran away to a monastery, leaving Shi Lin in the care of his aunt. 
But there was something neither of them knew. 
The boy was the reincarnation of Wen Qu Xing, the wisdom god, sent to the family to reward Xu Xian’s devotion. 
It was this power that had protected Bai Su Zhen at the temple, and as he grew, so did his wisdom. 
At age 19, Shi Lin went to the capital city to take the nation-wide imperial exam and obtained the highest score in all the empire. 
The Emperor himself bestowed Shi Lin’s prize: an ornate hat decorated with jewel-encrusted flowers. 
But though he returned home in glory, the fate of his parents still weighed heavy on his mind. 
Coaxing his father from exile, Shi Lin took him to visit the Lei Feng Pagoda to pay respects to his mother. 
Kneeling before it, he placed his jeweled prize on the iron tree as an offering. 
Suddenly, the ground opened and Bai Su Zhen stepped out. 
With her sins absolved by the tribute of a god, and a blossom on the iron tree, Shi Lin had freed his mother, and reunited his family– both mortal and divine. 

What drives someone to kill in cold blood? 
What goes through the murderer’s mind? 
And what kind of a society breeds such people? 
Over 150 years ago Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky took these questions up in what would become one of the best-known works of Russian literature: "Crime and Punishment." 
First serialized in a literary magazine in 1866, the novel tells the story of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a young law student in Saint Petersburg. 
Raskolnikov lives in abject poverty, and at the start of the story has run out of funds to continue his studies. 
Letters from his rural home only add to his distress when he realizes how much his mother and sister have sacrificed for his success. 
Increasingly desperate after selling the last of his valuables to an elderly pawnbroker, he resolves on a plan to murder and rob her. 
But the impact of carrying out this unthinkable act proves to be more than he was prepared for. 
Though the novel is sometimes cited as one of the first psychological thrillers, its scope reaches far beyond Raskolnikov’s inner turmoil. 
From dank taverns to dilapidated apartments and claustrophobic police stations, the underbelly of 19th century Saint Petersburg is brought to life by Dostoyevsky’s searing prose. 
We’re introduced to characters such as Marmeladov, a miserable former official who has drank his family into ruin, and Svidrigailov, an unhinged and lecherous nobleman. 
As Raskolnikov’s own family arrives in town, their moral innocence stands in stark contrast to the depravity of those around them, even as their fates grow increasingly intertwined. 
This bleak portrait of Russian society reflects the author’s own complex life experiences and evolving ideas. 
As a young writer who left behind a promising military career, Fyodor had been attracted to ideas of socialism and reform, and joined a circle of intellectuals to discuss radical texts banned by the Imperial government. 
Upon exposure, members of this group, including Dostoyevsky, were arrested. 
Many were sentenced to death, only to be subjected to a mock execution and last-minute pardon from the Tsar. 
Dostoyevsky spent the next four years in a Siberian labor camp before being released in 1854. 
The experience left him with a far more pessimistic view of social reform, and his focus shifted toward spiritual concerns. 
In the 1864 novella "Notes from Underground," he expounded on his belief that utopian Western philosophies could never satisfy the contradictory yearnings of the human soul. 
"Crime and Punishment" was conceived and completed the following year, picking up on many of the same themes. 
In many ways, the novel follows a common narrative thread where a promising youth is seduced and corrupted by the dangers of urban life. 
But its social critique cuts far deeper. 
Raskolnikov rationalizes that his own advancement at the cost of the exploitative pawnbroker’s death would be a net benefit to society. 
In doing so, he echoes the doctrines of egoism and utilitarianism embraced by many of Dostoyevsky’s contemporary intellectuals. 
And in believing that his intelligence allows him to transcend moral taboos, Raskolnikov cuts himself off from his own humanity. 
Yet although the book is deeply concerned with morality, "Crime and Punishment" never comes across as merely moralizing, with each character given their own distinctive and convincing voice. 
One of the most remarkable things about "Crime and Punishment" is its ability to thrill despite the details of the central murder being revealed in the first act. 
Raskolnikov’s crime is clear. 
But it’s only through Dostoyevsky’s gripping account of the ensuing social and psychological turmoil that we learn the true nature of his punishment– and the possibility of redemption. 

I'd like to introduce you to an interesting person named Ötzi. 
He lives in Italy at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology because he's a mummy. 
This is an artist's rendition of what he might have looked like when he was alive 5,300 years ago. 
You want to see what he looks like today? 
(Laughter) OK, brace yourselves, gross mummy pic coming at you. 
So, he's not as handsome as he used to be, but he's actually in great shape for a mummy because he was discovered frozen in ice. 
Ötzi is the oldest mummy that's been discovered with preserved skin. 
5,300 years is super old, older than the Egyptian pyramids, and Ötzi's skin is covered in 61 black tattoos, all lines and crosses on parts of his body where he might have experienced pain. 
So scientists think that they might have been used to mark sites for some kind of therapy, like acupuncture. 
So clearly, if the oldest skin we've seen is all tattooed up, tattooing is a very ancient practice. 
But fast-forward to today and tattoos are everywhere. 
Almost one in four Americans has a tattoo, it's a multibillion-dollar industry, and whether you love tattoos or hate them, this talk will change the way you think about them. 
So, why are tattoos so popular? 
Unlike Ötzi, most of us today use tattoos for some kind of self-expression. 
Personally, I love tattoos because I love art and there is something so wonderful to me, almost romantic, about the way a tattoo as an art form cannot be commodified. 
Right? Your tattoo lives and dies with you. 
It can't be bought or sold or traded, so its only value is really personal to you, and I love that. 
Now, I tend to gravitate towards really colorful tattoos because I'm obsessed with color. 
I teach a whole course on it at my university. 
But my very first tattoo was an all-black tattoo like Ötzi's. 
Yep, I did that clichéd thing that young people do sometimes and I got a tattoo in a language I can't even read. 
(Laughter) OK, but I was 19 years old, I had just returned from my first trip overseas, I was in Japan in the mountains meditating in Buddhist monasteries, and it was a really meaningful experience to me, so I wanted to commemorate it with this Japanese and Chinese character for "mountain." 
Now, here's what blows my mind. 
My 14-year-old tattoo and Ötzi's 5,300-year-old tattoos are made of the same exact stuff: soot, that black powdery carbon dust that gets left behind in the fireplace when you burn stuff. 
And if you zoom way, way in on either my tattoo or Ötzi's tattoos, you'll find that they all look something like this. 
A tattoo is nothing more than a bunch of tiny pigment particles, soot in this case, that get trapped in the dermis, which is the layer of tissue right underneath the surface of the skin. 
So in over five thousand years, we've done very little to update tattoo technology, apart from getting access to more colors and slightly more efficient methods of installation. 
While I'm an artist, I'm also a scientist, and I direct a laboratory that researches nanotechnology, which is the science of building things with ultratiny building blocks, thousands of times smaller even than the width of a human hair. 
And I began to ask myself, how could nanotechnology serve tattooing? 
If tattoos are just a bunch of particles in the skin, could we swap those particles out for ones that do something more interesting? 
Here's my big idea: I believe that tattoos can give you superpowers. 
(Laughter) Now, I don't mean they're going to make us fly, but I do think that we can have superpowers in the sense that tattoos can give us new abilities that we don't currently possess. 
By upgrading the particles, we can engineer tattooing so that it will change not only the appearance of our skin, but also the function of our skin. 
Let me show you. 
This is a diagram of a microcapsule. 
It's a tiny hollow particle with a protective outer shell, about the size of a tattoo pigment, and you can fill the inside with practically whatever you want. 
So what if we put interesting materials inside of these microcapsules and made tattoo inks with them? 
What sorts of things could we make a tattoo do? 
What problems could we solve? 
What human limitations could we overcome? 
Well, here's one idea: one of our weaknesses as humans is that we can't see ultraviolet, or UV, light. 
That's the high-energy part of sunlight that causes sunburn and increases our risk of skin cancer. 
Many animals and insects can actually see UV light, but we can't. 
If we could, we'd be able to see sunscreen when it was applied on our skin. 
Unfortunately, most of us don't wear sunscreen, and those of us who do can't really tell when it wears off, because it's invisible. 
It's the main reason we treat over five million cases of preventable skin cancer every year in the US alone, costing our economy over five billion dollars annually. 
So how could we overcome this human weakness with a tattoo? 
Well, if the problem is that we can't see UV rays, maybe we can make a tattoo detect them for us. 
So I thought, why don't we take some microcapsules, load it up with a UV-sensitive, color-changing dye, and make a tattoo ink out of that? 
Now, one of the troubles of being a tattoo technologist is finding willing test subjects. 
(Laughter) And when it came time to test this tattoo ink, I thought it best not to torture my poor graduate students. 
So I decided to tattoo a couple of spots on my own arm instead. 
And It actually worked. Check it out! 
I call these tattoos solar freckles because they're powered by sunshine. 
And right now, they're invisible, but as soon as I expose them to a UV light, acting as the Sun -- there they are, blue spots. 
Now, I'm not wearing sunscreen in this video, but if I was, those blue spots would not appear, and then when my sunscreen wore off later, the solar freckles would reappear in UV light and I would know that it was time to reapply sunscreen. 
So these tattoos act as a real-time, naked-eye indicator of your skin's UV exposure. 
And of course, I think there are lots of really cool, artistic things you could do with a color-changing tattoo like this, but I hope that it will also help us solve a big problem in skin protection. 
(Applause) Let me give you another example. 
Normal human body temperature is about 97 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit, and if you fall outside of that range, you need to seek medical attention right away. 
Now, the problem is that humans can't detect our own body temperature without a thermometer. 
Sure, you could try the old hand-on-the-forehead trick, but there's zero scientific evidence to back that up. 
(Laughter) So what if we could create a tattooable thermometer that you could access anytime? 
Well, remember how the solar freckles used a UV-sensitive dye inside of the microcapsules of the tattoo ink? 
Well, you could also put heat-sensitive dyes inside of microcapsules and you could make different tattoo inks that change color at different temperatures. 
Suppose it was 96, 98, and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. 
If you place those inks side by side, now you have a temperature scale tuned to the human body. 
In this video, you can see the different patches of tattoos disappearing sequentially as the pigskin we tested them on is heated up. 
So if you were to place a tattoo like this in a location that was stable to external temperature fluctuations -- maybe inside of the mouth, perhaps on the back of the lip? -- then you'd be able to read your body temperature anytime by just glancing at your tattoo in the mirror. 
Amazing, right? 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Another limitation that we have as humans is that our skin doesn't conduct electricity, and that can be a good thing, but not necessarily -- (Laughter) if you have an electronic biomedical implant, like a pacemaker for example. 
Right now, if you have a pacemaker, you need surgery every five or 10 years to replace the battery when it dies. 
And wouldn't it be nice if, instead, we could simply recharge the battery through a patch of conducting skin? 
Well, if you were to try to tackle that problem with a tattoo, the first step would be to make a tattoo that conducts electricity. 
So we've been working on a conducting tattoo ink in my lab. 
And right now, we're able to increase the conductivity of skin over 300-fold with our conducting tattoo ink. 
Now, we have a long way to go before we reach the conductivity of something like a copper wire, but we're making progress and I'm really excited about this because I think that it could open up a whole new world of possibility for tattoos. 
I envision a future where tattoos enable us -- tattooable wires and tattooable electronics enable us to merge our technologies with our bodies so that they feel more like extensions of ourselves rather than external devices. 
So these are a few examples of the new abilities that we can gain by using nanotechnology to upgrade our tattoos, but this really is only the beginning. 
I believe the sky is the limit for what we can do with high-tech tattoos. 
In the future, tattoos will not only be beautiful, they'll be functional too. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been at MIT for 44 years. 
I went to TED I. 
All the other TEDs -- and I went to them all, under Ricky's regime -- I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it. 
And if you read the press, last week it actually said I quit the Media Lab. 
I didn't quit the Media Lab, I stepped down as chairman -- which was a kind of ridiculous title, but someone else has taken it on -- and one of the things you can do as a professor is you stay on as a professor. 
And I will now do for the rest of my life the One Laptop Per Child, which I've sort of been doing for a year and a half, anyway. 
So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why we're doing it, how we're doing it and then what we're doing. 
And at some point I'll even pass around what the $100 laptop might be like. 
I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues, and so I figured I'd start with the three that at least drove me to do this. 
And the first is pretty obvious. 
It's amazing when you meet a head of state, and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" 
They will not say "children" at first, and then when you say, "children," they will pretty quickly agree with you. 
And so that isn't very hard. 
(Laughter) Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education and can never be without some element of education. 
So that's certainly part of it. 
And the third is a little bit less obvious. 
And that is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up and reach it. 
Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen through teaching, whether it's people standing up, like I'm doing now, or a book, or something. 
But it was really through teaching. 
And one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking, in the sense that a lot of it is driven by the learner himself or herself. 
So with those as the principles -- some of you may know Seymour Papert. 
This is back in 1982, when we were working in Senegal. 
Because some people think that the $100 laptop just happened a year ago, or two years ago, or we were struck by lightning -- this actually has gone back a long time, and in fact, back to the '60s. 
Here we're in the '80s. 
Steve Jobs had given us some laptops. We were in Senegal. 
It didn't scale but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries and learning pretty quickly that these kids, even though English wasn't their language, the Latin alphabet barely was their language, but they could just swim like fish. 
They could play these like pianos. 
A little bit more recently, I got involved personally. 
And these are two anecdotes -- one was in Cambodia, in a village that has no electricity, no water, no television, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. 
And these kids, their first English word is "Google" and they only know Skype. 
They just use Skype. 
And they go home at night -- they've got a broadband connection in a hut that doesn't have electricity. 
The parents love it, because when they open up the laptops, it's the brightest light source in the house. 
And talk about where metaphors and reality mix -- this is the actual school. 
In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine to legislate one laptop per child in the year 2002. 
Now at the time, I think it's fair to say that 80 percent of the teachers were -- let me say, apprehensive. 
Really, they were actually against it. 
And they really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, more schools, whatever. 
And now, three and a half years later, guess what? 
They're reporting five things: drop of truancy to almost zero, attending parent-teacher meetings -- which nobody did and now almost everybody does -- drop in discipline problems, increase in student participation. 
Teachers are now saying it's kind of fun to teach. 
Kids are engaged -- they have laptops! -- and then the fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night because the teachers are getting too much email from the kids asking them for help. 
So when you see that kind of thing -- this is not something that you have to test. 
The days of pilot projects are over, when people say, "We'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works." 
Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. 
And this is what we're doing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. 
It's a nonprofit association. 
It raised about 20 million dollars to do the engineering to just get this built, and then have it produced afterwards. 
Scale is truly important. 
And it's not important because you can buy components at a lower price, OK? 
It's because you can go to a manufacturer -- and I will leave the name out -- but we wanted a small display, doesn't have to have perfect color uniformity. 
It can even have a pixel or two missing. 
And this particular manufacturer said, "We're not interested in that. We're interested in the living room. 
We're interested in perfect color uniformity. 
You're not part of our strategic plan." 
And I said, "That's kind of too bad, because we need 100 million units a year." 
(Laughter) And they said, "Oh, well, maybe we could become part of your strategic plan." 
And that's why scale counts. 
And that's why we will not launch this without five to 10 million units in the first run. 
And the idea is to launch with enough scale that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that's why I said seven to 10 million there. 
And we're doing it without a sales-and-marketing team. 
I mean, you're looking at the sales-and-marketing team. 
We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree and launch it, and then the others can follow. 
We have partners. 
The others are all playing to pending. 
And this has been in the press a great deal. 
It's the so-called Green Machine that we introduced with Kofi Annan in November at the World Summit that was held in Tunisia. 
Now once people start looking at this, they say, "Ah, this is a laptop project." 
Well, no, it's not a laptop project. It's an education project. 
And the fun part -- and I'm quite focused on it -- I tell people I used to be a light bulb, but now I'm a laser -- I'm just going to get that thing built, and it turns out it's not so hard. 
Because laptop economics are the following: I say 50 percent here -- it's more like 60, 60 percent of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing, distribution and profit. 
Now we have none of those, OK? 
None of those figure into our cost, because first of all, we sell it at cost, and the governments distribute it. 
It gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. 
So that piece disappears. 
Now the display on your laptop costs, in rough numbers, 10 dollars a diagonal inch. 
That can drop to eight; it can drop to seven but it's not going to drop to two, or to one and a half, unless we do some pretty clever things. 
It's the rest -- that little brown box -- that is pretty fascinating, because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. 
It's a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity. 
(Laughter) And we have a situation today which is incredible. 
I've been using laptops since their inception. 
And my laptop runs slower, less reliably and less pleasantly than it ever has before. 
And this year is worse. 
(Applause) People clap, sometimes you even get standing ovations, and I say, "What the hell's wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there?" 
And somebody -- to remain nameless -- called our laptop a "gadget" recently. 
And I said, "God, our laptop's going to go like a bat out of hell. 
When you open it up, it's going to go 'bing.'" It'll be on. 
It'll be just like it was in 1985, when you bought an Apple Macintosh 512. 
It worked really well. 
And we've been going steadily downhill. 
Now, people ask all the time what it is. 
That's what it is. 
The two pieces that are probably notable: it'll be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network, and then just need one or two points of backhaul. 
You can serve a couple of thousand kids with two megabits. 
So you really can bring into a village, and then the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well. 
The dual mode display -- the idea is to have a display that both works outdoors -- isn't it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? 
Well, you can't see it. 
And one of the reasons you can't see it is because it's backlighting most of the time, most cell phones. 
Now, what we're doing is, we're doing one that will be both frontlit and backlit. 
And whether you manually switch it or you do it in the software is to be seen. 
And when it's frontlit, it's black and white at three times the resolution. 
That's why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. 
And in about 30 days, we'll know for sure whether this works. 
Probably the most important piece there is that the kids really can do the maintenance. 
And this is again something that people don't believe, but I really think it's quite true. 
That's the machine we showed in Tunis. 
This is more the direction that we're going to go. 
And it's something that we didn't think was possible. 
Now, I'm going to pass this around. 
This isn't a design, OK? 
So this is just a mechanical engineering sort of embodiment of it for you to play with. 
The working one is at MIT. 
At least you can decide whether it goes left or -- Chris Anderson: Before you do it, for the people down in simulcast -- Nicholas Negroponte: Sorry! I forgot. CA: Just show it off a bit. 
So wherever the camera is -- OK, good point. Thank you, Chris. 
The idea was that it would be not only a laptop, but that it could transform into an electronic book. 
So it's sort of an electronic book. 
This is where when you go outside, it's in black and white. 
The games buttons are missing, but it'll also be a games machine, book machine. 
Set it up this way, and it's a television set. 
Etc., etc. -- is that enough for simulcast? OK, sorry. 
I'll let Jim decide which way to send it afterwards. 
OK. Seven countries. 
(Laughter) I say "maybe" for Massachusetts, because they actually have to do a bid. 
By law you've got to bid, and so on and so forth. 
In the other cases, they don't have to do bids. 
They can decide -- it's the federal government in each case. 
It's kind of agonizing, because a lot of people say, "Let's do it at the state level," because states are more nimble than the feds, just because of size. 
And yet we count. 
We're really dealing with the federal government. 
We're really dealing with ministries of education. 
And if you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls. 
Everybody thinks they know about education, a lot of culture is built into it as well. 
It's really hard. And so it's certainly the hard road. 
If you look at the countries, they're pretty geoculturally distributed. 
Have they all agreed? No, not completely. 
Probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active and most agreed. 
We're purposely not signing anything with anybody until we actually have the working ones. 
And since I visit each one of those countries within at least every three months, I'm just going around the world every three weeks. 
Here's sort of the schedule and I put at the bottom we might give some away free in two years at this meeting. 
Everybody says it's a $100 laptop -- you can't do it. 
We're coming in probably at 135, to start, then drift down. 
And that's very important, because so many things hit the market at a price and then drift up. 
It's kind of the loss leader, and then as soon as it looks interesting, it can't be afforded, or it can't be scaled out. 
So we're targeting 50 dollars in 2010. 
The gray market's a big issue. 
And one of the ways -- just one -- but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market is to make something that is so utterly unique -- It's a little bit like the fact that automobiles -- thousands of automobiles are stolen every day in the United States. 
Not one single post-office truck is stolen. 
Because there's no market for post-office trucks. 
It looks like a post-office truck. 
You can spray paint it. You can do anything you want. 
I just learned recently: in South Africa, no white Volvos are stolen. 
Period. None. Zero. 
So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo. 
Each government has a task force. 
This perhaps is less interesting, but we're trying to get the governments to all work together and it's not easy. 
The economics of this is to start with the federal governments and then later, to subsequently go to other -- whether it's child-to-child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe of the same gender, maybe of the same age. 
An uncle gives a niece or a nephew that as a birthday present. 
I mean, there are all sorts of things that will happen, and they'll be very, very exciting. 
And everybody says -- I say -- it's an education project. 
Are we providing the software? 
The answer is: The system certainly has software, but no, we're not providing the education content. 
That is really done in the countries. 
But we are certainly constructionists. 
And we certainly believe in learning by doing and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968, to more modern things, like Scratch, if you've ever even heard of it, are very, very much part of it. 
Are we dreaming? Is this real? 
The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort, a nonprofit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually. 
(Laughter) But the one thing that people could criticize was, "Great idea, but these guys can't do it." 
And that could either mean these guys, professors and so on couldn't do it, or that it's not possible. 
Well, on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one-third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared. 
So it's not a matter of whether it's going to happen. 
And if it comes out at 138 dollars, so what? 
If it comes out six months late, so what? 
That's a pretty soft landing. 
Thank you. 

Thank you very much. 
Well, I would like to start with testicles. 
(Laughter) Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more. 
(Laughter) In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior. 
So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness. 
And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a lack of sleep. 
This is the best news that I have for you today. 
(Laughter) From this point, it may only get worse. 
Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep, but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't get enough, both for your brain and for your body. 
Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget. 
But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information. 
And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories. 
So let me show you the data. 
Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. 
So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group. 
Now the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision. 
There's no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it's miserable for everyone involved. 
And then the next day, we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity. 
And then we're going to test them to see how effective that learning has been. 
And that's what you're looking at here on the vertical axis. 
And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40-percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep. 
I think this should be concerning, considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. 
In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably -- 40 percent. 
And we've gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities. 
And there's a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus. 
And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain. 
It's very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. 
And when you look at this structure in those people who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. 
Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever. 
So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files -- they were just being bounced. 
You couldn't effectively commit new experiences to memory. 
So that's the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you, but let me just come back to that control group for a second. 
Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep? 
Well, we can ask a very different question: What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day? 
And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we've discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that have riding on top of them these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles. 
And it's the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night, shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain, and therefore protecting them, making them safe. 
And it is important that we understand what during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits, because there are real medical and societal implications. 
And let me just tell you about one area that we've moved this work out into, clinically, which is the context of aging and dementia. 
Because it's of course no secret that, as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline. 
But what we've also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets worse, especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing. 
And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things, they're not simply co-occurring, they are significantly interrelated. 
And it suggests that the disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we've discovered, in Alzheimer's disease as well. 
Now, I know this is remarkably depressing news. 
It's in the mail. It's coming at you. 
But there's a potential silver lining here. 
Unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging, for example changes in the physical structure of the brain, that's fiendishly difficult to treat. 
But that sleep is a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of aging and Alzheimer's is exciting because we may be able to do something about it. 
And one way that we are approaching this at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills, by the way. 
Unfortunately, they are blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep. 
Instead, we're actually developing a method based on this. 
It's called direct current brain stimulation. 
You insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small you typically don't feel it, but it has a measurable impact. 
Now if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy adults, as if you're sort of singing in time with those deep-sleep brainwaves, not only can you amplify the size of those deep-sleep brainwaves, but in doing so, we can almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep. 
The question now is whether we can translate this same affordable, potentially portable piece of technology into older adults and those with dementia. 
Can we restore back some healthy quality of deep sleep, and in doing so, can we salvage aspects of their learning and memory function? 
That is my real hope now. 
That's one of our moon-shot goals, as it were. 
So that's an example of sleep for your brain, but sleep is just as essential for your body. 
We've already spoken about sleep loss and your reproductive system. 
Or I could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system, and that all it takes is one hour. 
Because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight saving time. 
Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24-percent increase in heart attacks that following day. 
In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, we see a 21-percent reduction in heart attacks. 
Isn't that incredible? 
And you see exactly the same profile for car crashes, road traffic accidents, even suicide rates. 
But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this: sleep loss and your immune system. 
And here, I'll introduce these delightful blue elements in the image. 
They are called natural killer cells, and you can think of natural killer cells almost like the secret service agents of your immune system. 
They are very good at identifying dangerous, unwanted elements and eliminating them. 
In fact, what they're doing here is destroying a cancerous tumor mass. 
So what you wish for is a virile set of these immune assassins at all times, and tragically, that's what you don't have if you're not sleeping enough. 
So here in this experiment, you're not going to have your sleep deprived for an entire night, you're simply going to have your sleep restricted to four hours for one single night, and then we're going to look to see what's the percent reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer. 
And it's not small -- it's not 10 percent, it's not 20 percent. 
There was a 70-percent drop in natural killer cell activity. 
That's a concerning state of immune deficiency, and you can perhaps understand why we're now finding significant links between short sleep duration and your risk for the development of numerous forms of cancer. 
Currently, that list includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate and cancer of the breast. 
In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen, because of a disruption of your sleep-wake rhythms. 
So you may have heard of that old maxim that you can sleep when you're dead. 
Well, I'm being quite serious now -- it is mortally unwise advice. 
We know this from epidemiological studies across millions of individuals. 
There's a simple truth: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. 
Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. 
And if increasing your risk for the development of cancer or even Alzheimer's disease were not sufficiently disquieting, we have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetic code. 
So here in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, and then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hours of sleep a night. 
And there were two critical findings. 
First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity, caused by a lack of sleep. 
The second result was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. 
The other half were decreased. 
Now those genes that were switched off by a lack of sleep were genes associated with your immune system, so once again, you can see that immune deficiency. 
In contrast, those genes that were actually upregulated or increased by way of a lack of sleep, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body, and genes associated with stress, and, as a consequence, cardiovascular disease. 
There is simply no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. 
It's rather like a broken water pipe in your home. 
Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology, even tampering with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative. 
And at this point, you may be thinking, "Oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep? 
What are you tips for good sleep?" 
Well, beyond avoiding the damaging and harmful impact of alcohol and caffeine on sleep, and if you're struggling with sleep at night, avoiding naps during the day, I have two pieces of advice for you. 
The first is regularity. 
Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. 
Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep. 
The second is keep it cool. 
Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. 
So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. 
That's going to be optimal for the sleep of most people. 
And then finally, in taking a step back, then, what is the mission-critical statement here? 
Well, I think it may be this: sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. 
Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity. 
It is your life-support system, and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. 
And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, even the safety and the education of our children. 
It's a silent sleep loss epidemic, and it's fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges that we face in the 21st century. 
I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, and without embarrassment or that unfortunate stigma of laziness. 
And in doing so, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, the Swiss Army knife of health, as it were. 
And with that soapbox rant over, I will simply say, good night, good luck, and above all ... 
Thank you very much indeed. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you so much. 
David Biello: No, no, no. Stay there for a second. 
Good job not running away, though. I appreciate that. 
So that was terrifying. 
Matt Walker: You're welcome. DB: Yes, thank you, thank you. 
Since we can't catch up on sleep, what are we supposed to do? 
What do we do when we're, like, tossing and turning in bed late at night or doing shift work or whatever else? 
MW: So you're right, we can't catch up on sleep. 
Sleep is not like the bank. 
You can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time. 
I should also note the reason that it's so catastrophic and that our health deteriorates so quickly, first, it's because human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent reason. 
DB: Because we're smart. 
MW: And I make that point because it means that Mother Nature, throughout the course of evolution, has never had to face the challenge of this thing called sleep deprivation. 
So she's never developed a safety net, and that's why when you undersleep, things just sort of implode so quickly, both within the brain and the body. 
So you just have to prioritize. 
DB: OK, but tossing and turning in bed, what do I do? 
MW: So if you are staying in bed awake for too long, you should get out of bed and go to a different room and do something different. 
The reason is because your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness, and you need to break that association. 
So only return to bed when you are sleepy, and that way you will relearn the association that you once had, which is your bed is the place of sleep. 
So the analogy would be, you'd never sit at the dinner table, waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed, waiting to get sleepy? 
DB: Well, thank you for that wake-up call. 
Great job, Matt. 
MW: You're very welcome. Thank you very much. 

In 1995, the British Medical Journal published an astonishing report about a 29-year-old builder. 
He accidentally jumped onto a 15-centimeter nail, which pierced straight through his steel-toed boot. 
He was in such agonizing pain that even the smallest movement was unbearable. 
But when the doctors took off his boot, they faced a surprising sight: the nail had never touched his foot at all. 
For hundreds of years, scientists thought that pain was a direct response to damage. 
By that logic, the more severe an injury is, the more pain it should cause. 
But as we’ve learned more about the science of pain, we’ve discovered that pain and tissue damage don’t always go hand in hand, even when the body’s threat signaling mechanisms are fully functioning. 
We’re capable of experiencing severe pain out of proportion to an actual injury, and even pain without any injury, like the builder, or the well-documented cases of male partners of pregnant women experiencing pain during the pregnancy or labor. 
What’s going on here? 
There are actually two phenomena at play: the experience of pain, and a biological process called nociception. 
Nociception is part of the nervous system’s protective response to harmful or potentially harmful stimuli. 
Sensors in specialized nerve endings detect mechanical, thermal, and chemical threats. 
If enough sensors are activated, electrical signals shoot up the nerve to the spine and on to the brain. 
The brain weighs the importance of these signals and produces pain if it decides the body needs protection. 
Typically, pain helps the body avoid further injury or damage. 
But there are a whole set of factors besides nociception that can influence the experience of pain— and make pain less useful. 
First, there are biological factors that amplify nociceptive signals to the brain. 
If nerve fibers are activated repeatedly, the brain may decide they need to be more sensitive to adequately protect the body from threats. 
More stress sensors can be added to nerve fibers until they become so sensitive that even light touches to the skin spark intense electrical signals. 
In other cases, nerves adapt to send signals more efficiently, amplifying the message. 
These forms of amplification are most common in people experiencing chronic pain, which is defined as pain lasting more than 3 months. 
When the nervous system is nudged into an ongoing state of high alert, pain can outlast physical injury. 
This creates a vicious cycle in which the longer pain persists, the more difficult it becomes to reverse. 
Psychological factors clearly play a role in pain too, potentially by influencing nociception and by influencing the brain directly. 
A person’s emotional state, memories, beliefs about pain and expectations about treatment can all influence how much pain they experience. 
In one study, children who reported believing they had no control over pain actually experienced more intense pain than those who believed they had some control. 
Features of the environment matter too: In one experiment, volunteers with a cold rod placed on the back of their hand reported feeling more pain when they were shown a red light than a blue one, even though the rod was the same temperature each time. 
Finally, social factors like the availability of family support can affect perception of pain. 
All of this means that a multi-pronged approach to pain treatment that includes pain specialists, physical therapists, clinical psychologists, nurses and other healthcare professionals is often most effective. 
We’re only beginning to uncover the mechanisms behind the experience of pain, but there are some promising areas of research. 
Until recently, we thought the glial cells surrounding neurons were just support structures, but now we know they have a huge role in influencing nociception. 
Studies have shown that disabling certain brain circuits in the amygdala can eliminate pain in rats. 
And genetic testing in people with rare disorders that prevent them from feeling pain have pinpointed several other possible targets for drugs and perhaps eventually gene therapy. 

On the red tiles in my family's den I would dance and sing to the made-for-TV movie "Gypsy," starring Bette Midler. 
(Singing) "I had a dream. 
A wonderful dream, papa." 
I would sing it with the urgency and the burning desire of a nine-year-old who did, in fact, have a dream. 
My dream was to be an actress. 
And it's true that I never saw anyone who looked like me in television or in films, and sure, my family and friends and teachers all constantly warned me that people like me didn't make it in Hollywood. 
But I was an American. 
I had been taught to believe that anyone could achieve anything, regardless of the color of their skin, the fact that my parents immigrated from Honduras, the fact that I had no money. 
I didn't need my dream to be easy, I just needed it to be possible. 
And when I was 15, I got my first professional audition. 
It was a commercial for cable subscriptions or bail bonds, I don't really remember. 
(Laughter) What I do remember is that the casting director asked me, "Could you do that again, but just this time, sound more Latina." 
"Um, OK. 
So you want me to do it in Spanish?" I asked. 
"No, no, do it in English, just sound Latina." 
"Well, I am a Latina, so isn't this what a Latina sounds like?" 
There was a long and awkward silence, and then finally, "OK, sweetie, never mind, thank you for coming in, bye!" 
It took me most of the car ride home to realize that by "sound more Latina" she was asking me to speak in broken English. 
And I couldn't figure out why the fact that I was an actual, real-life, authentic Latina didn't really seem to matter. 
Anyway, I didn't get the job. 
I didn't get a lot of the jobs people were willing to see me for: the gang-banger's girlfriend, the sassy shoplifter, pregnant chola number two. 
(Laughter) These were the kinds of roles that existed for someone like me. 
Someone they looked at and saw as too brown, too fat, too poor, too unsophisticated. 
These roles were stereotypes and couldn't have been further from my own reality or from the roles I dreamt of playing. 
I wanted to play people who were complex and multidimensional, people who existed in the center of their own lives. 
Not cardboard cutouts that stood in the background of someone else's. 
But when I dared to say that to my manager -- that's the person I pay to help me find opportunity -- his response was, "Someone has to tell that girl she has unrealistic expectations." 
And he wasn't wrong. 
I mean, I fired him, but he wasn't wrong. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Because whenever I did try to get a role that wasn't a poorly written stereotype, I would hear, "We're not looking to cast this role diversely." 
Or, "We love her, but she's too specifically ethnic." 
Or, "Unfortunately, we already have one Latino in this movie." 
I kept receiving the same message again and again and again. 
That my identity was an obstacle I had to overcome. 
And so I thought, "Come at me, obstacle. 
I'm an American. My name is America. 
I trained my whole life for this, I'll just follow the playbook, I'll work harder." 
And so I did, I worked my hardest to overcome all the things that people said were wrong with me. 
I stayed out of the sun so that my skin wouldn't get too brown, I straightened my curls into submission. 
I constantly tried to lose weight, I bought fancier and more expensive clothes. 
All so that when people looked at me, they wouldn't see a too fat, too brown, too poor Latina. 
They would see what I was capable of. 
And maybe they would give me a chance. 
And in an ironic twist of fate, when I finally did get a role that would make all my dreams come true, it was a role that required me to be exactly who I was. 
Ana in "Real Women Have Curves" was a brown, poor, fat Latina. 
I had never seen anyone like her, anyone like me, existing in the center of her own life story. 
I traveled throughout the US and to multiple countries with this film where people, regardless of their age, ethnicity, body type, saw themselves in Ana. 
A 17-year-old chubby Mexican American girl struggling against cultural norms to fulfill her unlikely dream. 
In spite of what I had been told my whole life, I saw firsthand that people actually did want to see stories about people like me. 
And that my unrealistic expectations to see myself authentically represented in the culture were other people’s expectations, too. 
"Real Women Have Curves" was a critical, cultural and financial success. 
"Great," I thought, "We did it! 
We proved our stories have value. 
Things are going to change now." 
But I watched as very little happened. 
There was no watershed. 
No one in the industry was rushing to tell more stories about the audience that was hungry and willing to pay to see them. 
Four years later, when I got to play Ugly Betty, I saw the same phenomenon play out. 
"Ugly Betty" premiered in the US to 16 million viewers and was nominated for 11 Emmys in its first year. 
(Applause) But in spite of "Ugly Betty's" success, there would not be another television show led by a Latina actress on American television for eight years. 
It's been 12 years since I became the first and only Latina to ever win an Emmy in a lead category. 
That is not a point of pride. 
That is a point of deep frustration. 
Not because awards prove our worth, but because who we see thriving in the world teaches us how to see ourselves, how to think about our own value, how to dream about our futures. 
And anytime I begin to doubt that, I remember that there was a little girl, living in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. 
And somehow, she got her hands on some DVDs of an American television show in which she saw her own dream of becoming a writer reflected. 
In her autobiography, Malala wrote, "I had become interested in journalism after seeing how my own words could make a difference and also from watching the "Ugly Betty" DVDs about life at an American magazine." 
(Applause) For 17 years of my career, I have witnessed the power our voices have when they can access presence in the culture. 
I've seen it. 
I've lived it, we've all seen it. 
In entertainment, in politics, in business, in social change. 
We cannot deny it -- presence creates possibility. 
But for the last 17 years, I've also heard the same excuses for why some of us can access presence in the culture and some of us can't. 
Our stories don't have an audience, our experiences won't resonate in the mainstream, our voices are too big a financial risk. 
Just a few years ago, my agent called to explain to me why I wasn't getting a role in a movie. 
He said, "They loved you and they really, really do want to cast diversely, but the movie isn't financeable until they cast the white role first." 
He delivered the message with a broken heart and with a tone that communicated, "I understand how messed up this is." 
But nonetheless, just like hundreds of times before, I felt the tears roll down my face. 
And the pang of rejection rise up in me and then the voice of shame scolding me, "You are a grown woman, stop crying over a job." 
I went through this process for years of accepting the failure as my own and then feeling deep shame that I couldn't overcome the obstacles. 
But this time, I heard a new voice. 
A voice that said, "I'm tired. 
I've had enough." 
A voice that understood my tears and my pain were not about losing a job. 
They were about what was actually being said about me. 
What had been said about me my whole life by executives and producers and directors and writers and agents and managers and teachers and friends and family. 
That I was a person of less value. 
I thought sunscreen and straightening irons would bring about change in this deeply entrenched value system. 
But what I realized in that moment was that I was never actually asking the system to change. 
I was asking it to let me in, and those aren't the same thing. 
I couldn't change what a system believed about me, while I believed what the system believed about me. 
And I did. 
I, like everyone around me, believed that it wasn't possible for me to exist in my dream as I was. 
And I went about trying to make myself invisible. 
What this revealed to me was that it is possible to be the person who genuinely wants to see change while also being the person whose actions keep things the way they are. 
And what it's led me to believe is that change isn't going to come by identifying the good guys and the bad guys. 
That conversation lets us all off the hook. 
Because most of us are neither one of those. 
Change will come when each of us has the courage to question our own fundamental values and beliefs. 
And then see to it that our actions lead to our best intentions. 
I am just one of millions of people who have been told that in order to fulfill my dreams, in order to contribute my talents to the world I have to resist the truth of who I am. 
I for one, am ready to stop resisting and to start existing as my full and authentic self. 
If I could go back and say anything to that nine-year-old, dancing in the den, dreaming her dreams, I would say, my identity is not my obstacle. 
My identity is my superpower. 
Because the truth is, I am what the world looks like. 
You are what the world looks like. 
Collectively, we are what the world actually looks like. 
And in order for our systems to reflect that, they don't have to create a new reality. 
They just have to stop resisting the one we already live in. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm an astronomer who builds telescopes. 
I build telescopes because, number one, they are awesome. 
But number two, I believe if you want to discover a new thing about the universe, you have to look at the universe in a new way. 
New technologies in astronomy -- things like lenses, photographic plates, all the way up to space telescopes -- each gave us new ways to see the universe and directly led to a new understanding of our place in it. 
But those discoveries come with a cost. 
It took thousands of people and 44 years to get the Hubble Space Telescope from an idea into orbit. 
It takes time, it takes a tolerance for failure, it takes individual people choosing every day not to give up. 
I know how hard that choice is because I live it. 
The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and still keep going, because that's how telescopes get built. 
The telescope I helped build is called the faint intergalactic-medium red-shifted emission balloon, which is a mouthful, so we call it "FIREBall." 
And don't worry, it is not going to explode at the end of this story. 
I've been working on FIREBall for more than 10 years and now lead the team of incredible people who built it. 
FIREBall is designed to observe some of the faintest structures known: huge clouds of hydrogen gas. 
These clouds are giant. 
They are even bigger than whatever you're thinking of. 
They are huge, huge clouds of hydrogen that we think flow into and out of galaxies. 
I work on FIREBall because what I really want is to take our view of the universe from one with just light from stars to one where we can see and measure every atom that exists. 
That's all that I want to do. 
(Laughter) But observing at least some of those atoms is crucial to our understanding of why galaxies look the way they do. 
I want to know how that hydrogen gas gets into a galaxy and creates a star. 
My work on FIREBall started in 2008, working not on the telescope but on the light sensor, which is the heart of any telescope. 
This new sensor was being developed by a team that I joined at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 
And our goal was to prove that this sensor would work really well to detect that hydrogen gas. 
In my work on this, I destroyed several very, very, very expensive sensors before realizing that the machine I was using created a plasma that shorted out anything electrical that we put in it. 
We used a different machine, there were other challenges, and it took years to get it right. 
But when that first sensor worked, it was glorious. 
And our sensors are now 10 times better than the previous state of the art and are getting put into all kinds of new telescopes. 
Our sensors will give us a new way to see the universe and our place in it. 
So, sensors done, time to build a telescope. 
And FIREBall is weird as far as telescopes go, because it's not in space, and it's not on the ground. 
Instead, it hangs on a cable from a giant balloon and observes for one night only from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere, at the very edge of space. 
This is partly because the edge of space is much cheaper than actual space. 
(Laughter) So building it, of course, more failures: mirrors that failed, scratched mirrors that had to be remade; cooling system failures, an entire system that had to be remade; calibration failures, we ran tests again and again and again and again; failures when you literally least expect them: we had an adorable but super angry baby falcon that landed on our spectrograph tank one day. 
(Laughter) Although to be fair, this was the greatest day in the history of this project. 
(Laughter) I really loved that falcon. 
But falcon damage fixed, we got it built for an August 2017 launch attempt -- and then failed to launch, due to six weeks of continuous rain in the New Mexico desert. 
(Laughter) Our spirits dampened, we showed up again, August 2018, year 10. 
And on the morning of September 22nd, we finally got the telescope launched. 
(Applause) I have put so much of myself -- my whole life -- into this project, and I, like, still can't believe that that happened. 
And I have this picture that's taken right around sunset on that day of our balloon, FIREBall hanging from it, and the nearly full moon. 
And I love this picture. 
God, I love it. 
But I look at it, and it makes me want to cry, because when fully inflated, these balloons are spherical, and this one isn't. 
It's shaped like a teardrop. 
And that's because there is a hole in it. 
Sometimes balloons fail, too. 
FIREBall crash-landed in the New Mexico desert, and we didn't get the data that we wanted. 
And at the end of that day, I thought to myself, "Why am I doing this?" 
And I've thought a lot about why since that day. 
And I've realized that all of my work has been full of things that break and fail, that we don't understand and they fail, that we just get wrong the first time, and so they fail. 
I think about the thousands of people who built Hubble and how many failures they endured. 
There were countless failures, heartbreaking failures, even when it was in space. 
And none of those failures were a reason for them to give up. 
I think about why I love my job. 
I want to know what is happening in the universe. 
You all want to know what's happening in the universe, too. 
I want to know what's going on with that hydrogen. 
And so I've realized that discovery is mostly a process of finding things that don't work, and failure is inevitable when you're pushing the limits of knowledge. 
And that's what I want to do. 
So I'm choosing to keep going. 
And our team is going to do what everyone who has ever built anything before us has done: we're going to try again, in 2020. 
And it might feel like a failure today -- and it really does -- but it's only going to stay a failure if I give up. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

The Devil has come to town. 
But don’t worry – all he wants to do is stage a magic show. 
This absurd premise forms the central plot of Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece, "The Master and Margarita." 
Written in Moscow during the 1930s, this surreal blend of political satire, historical fiction, and occult mysticism has earned a legacy as one of the 20th century’s greatest novels– and one of its strangest. 
The story begins when a meeting between two members of Moscow’s literary elite is interrupted by a strange gentleman named Woland, who presents himself as a foreign scholar invited to give a presentation on black magic. 
As the stranger engages the two companions in a philosophical debate and makes ominous predictions about their fates, the reader is suddenly transported to 1st century Jerusalem. 
There a tormented Pontius Pilate reluctantly sentences Jesus of Nazareth to death. 
With the narrative shifting between the two settings, Woland and his entourage– Azazello, Koroviev, Hella, and a giant cat named Behemoth– are seen to have uncanny magical powers, which they use to stage their performance while leaving a trail of havoc and confusion in their wake. 
Much of the novel’s dark humor comes not only from this demonic mischief, but also the backdrop against which it occurs. 
Bulgakov’s story takes place in the same setting where it was written– the USSR at the height of the Stalinist period. 
There, artists and authors worked under strict censorship, subject to imprisonment, exile, or execution if they were seen as undermining state ideology. 
Even when approved, their work– along with housing, travel, and everything else– was governed by a convoluted bureaucracy. 
In the novel, Woland manipulates this system along with the fabric of reality, to hilarious results. 
As heads are separated from bodies and money rains from the sky, the citizens of Moscow react with petty-self interest, illustrating how Soviet society bred greed and cynicism despite its ideals. 
And the matter-of-fact narration deliberately blends the strangeness of the supernatural events with the everyday absurdity of Soviet life. 
So how did Bulgakov manage to publish such a subversive novel under an oppressive regime? 
Well… he didn’t. 
He worked on "The Master and Margarita" for over ten years. 
But while Stalin’s personal favor may have kept Bulgakov safe from severe persecution, many of his plays and writings were kept from production, leaving him safe but effectively silenced. 
Upon the author’s death in 1940, the manuscript remained unpublished. 
A censored version was eventually printed in the 1960s, while copies of the unabridged manuscript continued to circulate among underground literary circles. 
The full text was only published in 1973, over 30 years after its completion. 
Bulgakov’s experiences with censorship and artistic frustration lend an autobiographical air to the second part of the novel, when we are finally introduced to its namesake. 
"The Master" is a nameless author who’s worked for years on a novel but burned the manuscript after it was rejected by publishers– just as Bulgakov had done with his own work. 
Yet the true protagonist is the Master’s mistress Margarita. 
Her devotion to her lover’s abandoned dream bears a strange connection to the diabolical company’s escapades– and carries the story to its surreal climax. 
Despite its dark humor and complex structure, "The Master and Margarita" is, at its heart, a meditation on art, love, and redemption, that never loses itself in cynicism. 
And the book’s long overdue publication and survival against the odds is a testament to what Woland tells the Master: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” 

In 2019, humanity received a warning: 30 of the world's leading scientists released the results of a massive three-year study into global agriculture and declared that meat production is destroying our planet and jeopardizing global health. 
One of the study's authors explained that "humanity now poses a threat to the stability of the planet ... 
[This requires] nothing less than a new global agricultural revolution." 
As somebody who's spent the last two decades advocating a shift away from industrial meat production, I wanted to believe that this clarion call was going to make a difference. 
The thing is, I've seen this sort of thing again and again and again for decades. 
Here's 2018 from the journal "Nature," 2017 from "Bioscience Journal," 2016 from the National Academy of Sciences. 
The main point of these studies tends to be climate change. 
But antibiotic resistance represents just as big of a threat. 
We are feeding massive doses of antibiotics to farm animals. 
These antibiotics are then mutating into superbugs that threaten to render antibiotics obsolete within all of our lifetimes. 
You want a scare? 
Google: "the end of working antibiotics." 
I'm going to get one thing out of the way: I am not here to tell anybody what to eat. 
Individual action is great, but antibiotic resistance and climate change -- they require more. 
Besides, convincing the world to eat less meat hasn't worked. 
For 50 years, environmentalists, global health experts and animal activists have been begging the public to eat less meat. 
And yet, per capita meat consumption is as high as it's been in recorded history. 
The average North American last year ate more than 200 pounds of meat. 
And I didn't eat any. 
(Laughter) Which means somebody out there ate 400 pounds of meat. 
(Laughter) On our current trajectory, we're going to need to be producing 70 to 100 percent more meat by 2050. 
This requires a global solution. 
What we need to do is we need to produce the meat that people love, but we need to produce it in a whole new way. 
I've got a couple of ideas. 
Idea number one: let's grow meat from plants. 
Instead of growing plants, feeding them to animals, and all of that inefficiency, let's grow those plants, let's biomimic meat with them, let's make plant-based meat. 
Idea number two: for actual animal meat, let's grow it directly from cells. 
Instead of growing live animals, let's grow the cells directly. 
It takes six weeks to grow a chicken to slaughter weight. 
Grow the cells directly, you can get that same growth in six days. 
This is what that looks like at scale. 
It's your friendly neighborhood meat brewery. 
(Laughter) I want to make two points about this. 
The first one is, we believe we can do it. 
In recent years, some companies have been producing meat from plants that consumers cannot distinguish from actual animal meat, and there are now dozens of companies growing actual animal meat directly from cells. 
This plant-based and cell-based meat gives consumers everything that they love about meat -- the taste, the texture and so on -- but with no need for antibiotics and with a fraction of the adverse impact on the climate. 
And because these two technologies are so much more efficient, at production scale these products will be cheaper. 
But one quick point about that -- it's not going to be easy. 
These plant-based companies have spent small fortunes on their burgers, and cell-based meat has not yet been commercialized at all. 
So we're going to need all hands on deck to make these the global meat industry. 
For starters, we need the present meat industry. 
We don't want to disrupt the meat industry, we want to transform it. 
We need their economies of scale, their global supply chain, their marketing expertise and their massive consumer base. 
We also need governments. 
Governments spend tens of billions of dollars every single year on research and development focused on global health and the environment. 
They should be putting some of that money into optimizing and perfecting the production of plant-based and cell-based meat. 
Look, tens of thousands of people died from antibiotic-resistant superbugs in North America just last year. 
By 2050, that number is going to be 10 million per year globally. 
And climate change represents an existential threat to huge portions of our global family, including some of the poorest people on the face of the planet. 
Climate change, antibiotic resistance -- these are global emergencies. 
Meat production is exacerbating these emergencies on a global scale. 
But we are not going to decrease meat consumption unless we give consumers alternatives that cost the same or less and that taste the same or better. 
We have the solution. 
Let's make meat from plants. Let's grow it directly from cells. 
It's past time that we mobilize the resources that are necessary to create the next global agricultural revolution. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"The Opposites Game" For Patricia Maisch This day my students and I play the Opposites Game with a line from Emily Dickinson. My life had stood a loaded gun, it goes and I write it on the board, pausing so they can call out the antonyms – My Your Life Death Had stood ? Will sit A Many Loaded Empty Gun ? 
Gun. 
For a moment, very much like the one between lightning and its sound, the children just stare at me, and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers – Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That's stupid, cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe a hug, but not a book, no way is it a book. With this, the others gather their thoughts and suddenly it’s a shouting match. No one can agree, for every student there’s a final answer. It's a song, a prayer, I mean a promise, like a wedding ring, and later a baby. Or what’s that person who delivers babies? 
A midwife? Yes, a midwife. No, that’s wrong. You're so wrong you’ll never be right again. It's a whisper, a star, it's saying I love you into your hand and then touching someone's ear. Are you crazy? Are you the president of Stupid-land? You should be, When's the election? 
It’s a teddy bear, a sword, a perfect, perfect peach. 
Go back to the first one, it's a flower, a white rose. 
When the bell rings, I reach for an eraser but a girl snatches it from my hand. Nothing's decided, she says, We’re not done here. I leave all the answers on the board. The next day some of them have stopped talking to each other, they’ve taken sides. 
There's a Flower club. And a Kitten club. And two boys calling themselves The Snowballs. The rest have stuck with the original game, which was to try to write something like poetry. 
It's a diamond, it's a dance, the opposite of a gun is a museum in France. 
It's the moon, it's a mirror, it's the sound of a bell and the hearer. 
The arguing starts again, more shouting, and finally a new club. For the first time I dare to push them. 
Maybe all of you are right, I say. 
Well, maybe. Maybe it's everything we said. Maybe it’s everything we didn't say. It's words and the spaces for words. 
They're looking at each other now. It's everything in this room and outside this room and down the street and in the sky. 
It's everyone on campus and at the mall, and all the people waiting at the hospital. And at the post office. And, yeah, it's a flower, too. All the flowers. The whole garden. 
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it. 
Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem. 
Your death will sit through many empty poems. 

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

The world is getting closer to achieving one of the most important public health goals of our time: eradicating HIV. 
And to do this, we won’t even have to cure the disease. 
We simply have to stop HIV from being transmitted until eventually it fizzles out. 
Once, this goal would have seemed impossible. 
HIV has caused millions of deaths and is one of the most devastating diseases that humanity has ever known. 
But we’re now at a point where new advances such as one-pill, once-a-day medications are helping us tackle HIV in effective ways. 
HIV is a retrovirus– meaning it integrates copies of itself into an infected cell’s DNA, allowing it to replicate and infect other cells. 
HIV has evolved numerous ways to evade the human immune system, which makes it difficult to cure. 
But by developing ways to block HIV replication, we can stop the spread of HIV itself. 
That’s where antiretrovirals– a.k.a. ARVs– come in. 
ARVs are a group of drugs which work in different ways to combat HIV. 
Some block HIV’s access into immune cells, and others work by stopping the virus itself from replicating. 
ARVs also work preventatively in people who don’t have HIV. 
This type of approach is called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. 
PrEP works by accumulating in a person’s body and preventing HIV from establishing itself. 
That means an HIV-negative person who may be at risk of contracting the disease can take certain ARVs to protect themselves, before they become exposed. 
Here’s where it gets especially interesting: In people with HIV, ARVs can also dramatically reduce HIV transmission. 
This is called “Treatment as Prevention.” On a global scale, this has the potential to end the HIV epidemic. 
It’s based on the idea that someone with HIV who takes ARV’s can lower the virus level in their bodies until it becomes undetectable. 
That doesn’t mean the virus is gone; it could still be lurking within cells, ready to reactivate if treatment stops. 
But so long as it’s kept dormant with drugs, HIV remains undetectable. 
And when HIV is undetectable, it’s untransmittable, too. 
In theory this means that by testing everyone who’s at risk of HIV and treating those who test positive, we could stop transmission and eventually eradicate HIV. 
In the real world, however, things are more complex. 
Many at-risk HIV negative people across the world do not have access to PrEP or ARVs, and those who are HIV positive may experience challenges to taking ARVs. 
These problems are often greatest in countries where the burden of HIV is highest. 
Getting these medications depends on access to a functioning healthcare system– and this isn’t something everyone has. 
That’s part of the reason why stopping the spread of HIV for good will require a significant investment of resources to improve those systems. 
One study carried out by the UNAIDS estimated that between 20-30 billion dollars per year would be needed to achieve a nearly 90% reduction in new HIV infections by 2030. 
This investment would ensure more people would get tested in the first place, and more would be able to access and maintain treatment. 
Achieving this goal and improving healthcare in general is in everyone’s best interest, from individual people to society as a whole. 
We have roadmaps that could allow us to bring the HIV epidemic to an end in the near future, with the possibility of eradicating the disease altogether several generations in the future. 
In the period from 1996 to 2017 we almost halved the number of new HIV infections, and for the millions of people who still live with the virus, ARV treatments enable most to lead long and healthy lives. 
With continued and increased investments, we can get transmission rates low enough to end HIV once and for all. 
A world without HIV is no longer inconceivable: it’s closer than ever. 

Hi I'm Andrea Gibson and this is my poem "The Nutritionist." 
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables Said if I could get down 13 turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. 
Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. 
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight Said for 20 dollars she’d tell me what to do I handed her the twenty, she said “stop worrying darling, you will find a good man soon.” The first psychotherapist said I should spend 3 hours a day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. 
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. 
The yogi told me to stretch everything but truth, said focus on the outbreaths, said everyone finds happiness if they can care more about what they can give than what they get. 
The pharmacist said klonopin, lamictil, lithium, Xanax. 
The doctor said an antipsychotic might help me forget what the trauma said The trauma said don’t write this poem. 
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones But my bones said “Tyler Clementi dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said “write the poem.” To the lamplight. 
Considering the river bed. 
To the chandelier of your fate hanging by a thread. 
To everyday you could not get out of bed. 
To the bulls eye of your wrist To anyone who has ever wanted to die. 
I have been told, sometimes, the most healing thing we can do- Is remind ourselves over and over and over Other people feel this too The tomorrow that has come and gone And it has not gotten better When you are half finished writing that letter to your mother that says “I swear to God I tried” But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back There is no bruise like the bruise loneliness kicks into your spine So let me tell you I know there are days it looks like the whole world is dancing in the streets when you break down like the doors of their looted buildings You are not alone and wondering who will be convicted of the crime of insisting you keep loading your grief into the chamber of your shame You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside Some days I know my smile looks like the gutter of a falling house But my hands are always holding tight to the ripchord of believing A life can be rich like the soil Make food of decay Turn wound into highway Pick me up in a truck with that bumper sticker that says “it is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society” I have never trusted anyone with the pulled back bow of my spine the way I trust the ones who come undone at the throat Screaming for their pulse to find the fight to pound Four nights before Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington bridge I was sitting in a hotel room in my own town Calculating exactly what I had to swallow to keep a bottle of sleeping pills down What I know about living is the pain is never just ours Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo So I keep a listening for the moment when the grief becomes a window When I can see what I couldn’t see before, through the glass of my most battered dream, I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds. 
So the next time I tell you how easily I come out of my skin, don’t try to put me back in just say here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better but knowing there is a chance our hearts may have only just skinned their knees knowing there is a chance the worst day might still be coming let me say right now for the record, I’m still gonna be here asking this world to dance, even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet you- you stay here with me, okay? 
You stay here with me. 
Raising your bite against the bitter dark Your bright longing Your brilliant fists of loss Friend if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other, my god that’s plenty my god that’s enough my god that is so so much for the light to give each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over “Live” “Live” “Live” 

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. 
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

My name is Safia Elhillo, and this poem is called "to make use of water." 
dilute i forget the arabic word for economy i forget the english word for عسل forget the arabic word for incense & english word for مسكين arabic word for sandwich english for صيدلية & مطعم & وله ‎ /stupid girl, atlantic got your tongue/ blur back home we are plagued by a politeness so dense even the doctors cannot call things what they are my grandfather’s left eye swirled thick with smoke what my new mouth can call glaucoma while the arabic still translates to the white water swim i want to go home dissolve i want to go home drown half don’t even make it out or across you get to be ungrateful you get to be homesick from safe inside your blue american passport do you even understand what was lost to bring you here 

"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. 
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

“All the World’s a Stage” from "As You Like It" by William Shakespeare All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. 
At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. 
And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. 
Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. 
And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. 
The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. 
Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. 

I'm Clint Smith and this is "Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class." 
You, it seems, are the manifestation of several lifetimes of toil. 
Brown v. Board in flesh. 
Most days the classroom feels like an antechamber. 
You are deemed expert on all things Morrison, King, Malcolm, Rosa. 
Hell, weren’t you sitting on that bus, too? 
You are every- body’s best friend until you are not. 
Hip-hop lyricologist. 
Presumed athlete. 
Free & Reduced sideshow. 
Exception and caricature. 
Too black and too white all at once. 
If you are successful it is because of affirmative action. 
If you fail it is because you were destined to. 
You are invisible until they turn on the Friday night lights. 
Here you are star before they render you asteroid. 
Before they watch you turn to dust. 

I'm Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz and this is "Three Months After." 
To want to disappear is different from wanting to die. 
To disappear and to not have to explain to anyone, to talk to anyone. 
To move to somewhere where no one knows you, where you don't have to look at a single laughing face. 
To elope with this grief who is not your enemy This grief who maybe now is your best friend. 
This grief who is your husband, the thing you curl into every night, falling asleep in its arms. 
Who wakes up early to make you your cold thankless breakfast. 
To go to that place where every surface is a blade. 
A sharp thing on which to hang your sorry flesh to feel something, anything, other than this. 

I'm Aracelis Girmay, and this is, "For Estefani, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card." 
Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle, meaning sun. 
Six green, vertical lines, with color all from the top, meaning flowers. 
The first time I peel back the five squares of Scotch tape, unfold the crooked-crease fold of art class paper. 
I am in my living room. It is June. 
Inside of the card, there is one long word, and then Estefani’s name: Loisfoeribari Estefani Loisfoeribari? 
Loisfoeribari: The scientific, Latinate way of saying hibiscus. 
Loisforeribari: A direction, as in: are you going North? South? East? West? Loisfoeribari? 
I try, over and over, to read the word out loud. 
Loisfoeribari. 
LoISFOeribari. 
LoiSFOEribari. 
LoisFOERibARI. 
What is this word? I imagine using it in sentences like, “Man, I have to go back to the house, I forgot my Loisfoeribari.” or “There’s nothing better than rain, hot rain, open windows with music, and a tall glass of Loisfoeribari.” or “How are we getting to Pittsburgh? Should we drive or take the Loisfoeribari?” I have lived four minutes with this word not knowing what it means. 
It is the end of the year. I consider writing my student, Estefani, a letter that goes: To The BRILLIANT Estefani! 
Hola, querida, I hope that you are well. 
I’ve just opened the card that you made me, and it is beautiful. 
I really love the way you filled the sky with birds. 
I believe that you are chula, chulita, and super fly! 
Yes, the card is beautiful. 
I only have one question for you. 
What does the word ‘Loisfoeribari’ mean? 
I try the word again. Loisfoeribari. 
Loisfoeribari. Loisfoeribari. 
I try the word in Spanish. 
Loisfoeribari Lo-ees-fo-eh-dee-bah-dee Lo-ees-fo-eh-dee-bah-dee and then, slowly, Lo is fo e ri bari Lo is fo eribari love is for everybody love is for every every body love love love everybody love everybody love love is love everybody everybody is love love love for love for everybody for love is everybody love is for every love is for every body love love love for body love body body is love love is body every body is love is every love for every love is love for love everybody love love love love for everybody Love is for everybody. 

My day starts just like yours. 
(Laughter) When I wake up in the morning, I check my phone, and then I have a cup of coffee. 
But then my day truly starts. 
It may not be like yours, because I live my life as an artwork. 
Picture yourself in a giant jewelry box with all the beautiful things that you have ever seen in your life. 
Then imagine that your body is a canvas. 
And on that canvas, you have a mission to create a masterpiece using the contents of your giant jewelry box. 
Once you've created your masterpiece, you might think, "Wow, I created that. 
This is who I am today." 
Then you would pick up your house keys, walk out the door into the real world, maybe take public transport to the center of the town ... 
Possibly walk along the streets or even go shopping. 
That's my life, every day. 
When I walk out the door, these artworks are me. 
I am art. 
I have lived as art my entire adult life. 
Living as art is how I became myself. 
I was brought up in a small village called Fillongley, in England, and it was last mentioned in the "Domesday Book," so that's the mentality. 
(Laughter) I was raised by my grandparents, and they were antiques dealers, so I grew up surrounded by history and beautiful things. 
I had the most amazing dress-up box. 
So as you can imagine, it started then. 
I moved to London when I was 17 to become a model. 
And then I went to study photography. 
I wasn't really happy with myself at the time, so I was always looking for escapism. 
I studied the works of David LaChapelle and Steven Arnold, photographers who both curated and created worlds that were mind-blowing to me. 
So I decided one day to cross over from the superficial fashion world to the superficial art world. 
(Laughter) I decided to live my life as a work of art. 
I spend hours, sometimes months, making things. 
My go-to tool is a safety pin, like this -- (Laughter) They're never big enough. 
(Laughter) And I use my fabrics time and time again, so I recycle everything that I use. 
When I get dressed I'm guided by color, texture and shape. 
I rarely have a theme. 
I find beautiful objects from all over the world, and I curate them into 3-D tapestries over a base layer that covers my whole body shape ... 
because I'm not very happy with my body. 
(Laughs) I ask myself, "Should I take something off or should I put something on? 
100 pieces, maybe?" 
And sometimes, I do that. 
I promise you it's not too uncomfortable -- well, just a little -- (Laughter) I might have a safety pin poking at me sometimes when I'm having a conversation with you, so I'll kind of go off -- (Laughter) It usually takes me about 20 minutes to get ready, which nobody ever believes. 
It's true -- sometimes. 
So, it's my version of a t-shirt and jeans. 
(Laughter) When I get dressed, I build like an architect. 
I carefully place things till I feel they belong. 
Then, I get a lot of my ideas from lucid dreaming. 
I actually go to sleep to come up with my ideas, and I've taught myself to wake up to write them down. 
I wear things till they fall apart, and then, I give them a new life. 
The gold outfit, for example -- it was the outfit that I wore to the Houses of Parliament in London. 
It's made of armor, sequins and broken jewelry, and I was the first person to wear armor to Parliament since Oliver Cromwell banned it in the 17th century. 
Things don't need to be expensive to be beautiful. 
Try making outfits out of bin liners or trash you found out on the streets. 
You never know, they might end up on the pages of "Vogue." 
There's over 6,000 pieces in my collection, ranging from 2,000-year-old Roman rings to ancient Buddhist artifacts. 
I believe in sharing what I do and what I have with others, so I decided to create an art exhibition, which is currently traveling to museums around the world. 
It contains an army of me -- life-size sculptures as you can see behind me, they're here -- they are my life, really. 
They're kind of like 3-D tapestries of my existence as living as art. 
They contain plastic crystals mixed with diamonds, beer cans and royal silks all in one look. 
I like the fact that the viewer can never make the assumption about what's real and what's fake. 
I find it important to explore and share cultures through my works. 
I use clothing as a means to investigate and appreciate people from all over the world. 
Sometimes, people think I'm a performer or a drag queen. 
I'm not. 
Although my life appears to be a performance, it's not. 
It's very real. 
People respond to me as they would any other type of artwork. 
Many people are fascinated and engaged. 
Some people walk around me, staring, shy at first. 
Then they come up to me and they say they love or absolutely hate what I do. 
I sometimes respond, and other times I let the art talk for itself. 
The most annoying thing in the world is when people want to touch the artwork. 
But I understand. 
But like a lot of contemporary art, many people are dismissive. 
Some people are critical, others are abusive. 
I think it comes from the fear of the different -- the unknown. 
There are so many reactions to what I do, and I've just learned not to take them personally. 
I've never lived as Daniel Lismore, the person. 
I've lived as Daniel Lismore, the artwork. 
And I've faced every obstacle as an artwork. 
It can be hard ... 
especially if your wardrobe takes up a 40-foot container, three storage units and 30 boxes from IKEA -- (Laughter) and sometimes, it can be very difficult, getting into cars, and sometimes -- well, this morning I didn't fit through my bathroom door, so that was a problem. 
(Laughter) What does it mean to be yourself? 
People say it all the time, but what does it truly mean, and why does it matter? 
How does life change when you choose to be unapologetically yourself? 
I've had to face struggles and triumphs whilst living my life as art. 
I've been put on private jets and flown around the world. 
My work's been displayed in prestigious museums, and I've had the opportunity -- that is my grandparents, by the way, they're the people that raised me, and there I am -- (Laughs) (Applause) So I've been put on private jets, flown around the world, and yet, it's not been that easy because at times, I've been homeless, I've been spat at, I've been abused, sometimes daily, bullied my entire life, rejected by countless individuals, and I've been stabbed. 
But what hurt the most was being put on the "Worst Dressed" list. 
(Laughter) It can be hard, being yourself, but I've found it's the best way. 
There's the "Worst Dressed." 
(Laughs) As the quote goes, "Everyone else is already taken." 
I've come to realize that confidence is a concept you can choose. 
I've come to realize that authenticity is necessary, and it's powerful. 
I've tried to spend time being like other people. 
It didn't work. 
It's a lot of hard work, not being yourself. 
I have a few questions for you all. 
Who are you? 
How many versions of you are there? 
And I have one final question: Are you using them all to your advantage? 
In reality, everyone is capable of creating their own masterpiece. 
You should try it sometime. 
It's quite fun. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

"The Road Not Taken" By Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. 
Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. 
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 

Do you think the things we build today will be considered wonders in the future? 
Think of Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Machu Picchu and Easter Island. 
Now, they're all pretty different from what we're doing today, with those massive stones, assembled in complex but seemingly illogical ways, and all traces of their construction erased, shrouding them in mystery. 
It seems like people could not have possibly built these things, because people didn't. 
They were carefully crafted by a primordial race of giants known as Cyclops. 
(Laughter) And I've been collaborating with these monsters to learn their secrets for moving those massive stones. 
And as it turns out, Cyclops aren't even that strong. 
They're just really smart about getting material to work for them. 
Now, the videos you see behind me of large, stone-like, wobbly creatures are the results of this collaboration. 
OK, so Cyclops might be a mythical creature, but those wonders are still real. 
People made them. 
But they also made the myths that surround them, and when it comes to wonders, there's this thick connective tissue between mythology and reality. 
Take Easter Island, for example. 
When the Dutch explorers first encountered the island, they asked the people of Rapa Nui how their ancestors could have possibly moved those massive statues. 
And the Rapa Nui said, "Our ancestors didn't move the statues, because the statues walked themselves." 
For centuries, this was dismissed, but actually it's true. 
The statues, known as moai, were transported standing, pivoting from side to side. 
OK? 
As spectacular as the moai are for visitors today, you have to imagine being there then, with colossal moai marching around the island. 
Because the real memorial was not the objects themselves, it was the cultural ritual of bringing a stone to life. 
So as an architect, I've been chasing that dream. 
How can we shift our idea of construction to accommodate that mythical side? 
So what I've been doing is challenging myself with putting on a series of performances of the ancient but pretty straightforward task of just moving and standing big heavy objects, like this 16-foot-tall megalith designed to walk across land and stand vertically; or this 4,000-pound behemoth that springs itself to life to dance onstage. 
And what I've found is that by thinking of architecture not as an end product but as a performance from conception to completion, we end up rediscovering some really smart ways to build things today. 
You know, so much of the discussion surrounding our future focuses on technology, efficiency and speed. 
But if I've learned anything from Cyclops, it's that wonders can be smart, spectacular and sustainable -- because of their mass and their mystery. 
And while people still want to know how those ancient wonders were built, I've been asking Cyclops how to create the mystery that compels people to ask that very question. 
Because in an era where we design buildings to last 30, maybe 60 years, I would love to learn how to create something that could entertain for an eternity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to talk today about how reading can change our lives and about the limits of that change. 
I want to talk to you about how reading can give us a shareable world of powerful human connection. 
But also about how that connection is always partial. 
How reading is ultimately a lonely, idiosyncratic undertaking. 
The writer who changed my life was the great African American novelist James Baldwin. 
When I was growing up in Western Michigan in the 1980s, there weren't many Asian American writers interested in social change. 
And so I think I turned to James Baldwin as a way to fill this void, as a way to feel racially conscious. 
But perhaps because I knew I wasn't myself African American, I also felt challenged and indicted by his words. 
Especially these words: "There are liberals who have all the proper attitudes, but no real convictions. 
When the chips are down and you somehow expect them to deliver, they are somehow not there." 
They are somehow not there. 
I took those words very literally. 
Where should I put myself? 
I went to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions in the United States. 
This is a place shaped by a powerful history. 
In the 1960s, African Americans risked their lives to fight for education, to fight for the right to vote. 
I wanted to be a part of that change, to help young teenagers graduate and go to college. 
When I got to the Mississippi Delta, it was a place that was still poor, still segregated, still dramatically in need of change. 
My school, where I was placed, had no library, no guidance counselor, but it did have a police officer. 
Half the teachers were substitutes and when students got into fights, the school would send them to the local county jail. 
This is the school where I met Patrick. 
He was 15 and held back twice, he was in the eighth grade. 
He was quiet, introspective, like he was always in deep thought. 
And he hated seeing other people fight. 
I saw him once jump between two girls when they got into a fight and he got himself knocked to the ground. 
Patrick had just one problem. 
He wouldn't come to school. 
He said that sometimes school was just too depressing because people were always fighting and teachers were quitting. 
And also, his mother worked two jobs and was just too tired to make him come. 
So I made it my job to get him to come to school. 
And because I was crazy and 22 and zealously optimistic, my strategy was just to show up at his house and say, "Hey, why don't you come to school?" 
And this strategy actually worked, he started to come to school every day. 
And he started to flourish in my class. 
He was writing poetry, he was reading books. 
He was coming to school every day. 
Around the same time that I had figured out how to connect to Patrick, I got into law school at Harvard. 
I once again faced this question, where should I put myself, where do I put my body? 
And I thought to myself that the Mississippi Delta was a place where people with money, people with opportunity, those people leave. 
And the people who stay behind are the people who don't have the chance to leave. 
I didn't want to be a person who left. 
I wanted to be a person who stayed. 
On the other hand, I was lonely and tired. 
And so I convinced myself that I could do more change on a larger scale if I had a prestigious law degree. 
So I left. 
Three years later, when I was about to graduate from law school, my friend called me and told me that Patrick had got into a fight and killed someone. 
I was devastated. 
Part of me didn't believe it, but part of me also knew that it was true. 
I flew down to see Patrick. 
I visited him in jail. 
And he told me that it was true. 
That he had killed someone. 
And he didn't want to talk more about it. 
I asked him what had happened with school and he said that he had dropped out the year after I left. 
And then he wanted to tell me something else. 
He looked down and he said that he had had a baby daughter who was just born. 
And he felt like he had let her down. 
That was it, our conversation was rushed and awkward. 
When I stepped outside the jail, a voice inside me said, "Come back. 
If you don't come back now, you'll never come back." 
So I graduated from law school and I went back. 
I went back to see Patrick, I went back to see if I could help him with his legal case. 
And this time, when I saw him a second time, I thought I had this great idea, I said, "Hey, Patrick, why don't you write a letter to your daughter, so that you can keep her on your mind?" 
And I handed him a pen and a piece of paper, and he started to write. 
But when I saw the paper that he handed back to me, I was shocked. 
I didn't recognize his handwriting, he had made simple spelling mistakes. 
And I thought to myself that as a teacher, I knew that a student could dramatically improve in a very quick amount of time, but I never thought that a student could dramatically regress. 
What even pained me more, was seeing what he had written to his daughter. 
He had written, "I'm sorry for my mistakes, I'm sorry for not being there for you." 
And this was all he felt he had to say to her. 
And I asked myself how can I convince him that he has more to say, parts of himself that he doesn't need to apologize for. 
I wanted him to feel that he had something worthwhile to share with his daughter. 
For every day the next seven months, I visited him and brought books. 
My tote bag became a little library. 
I brought James Baldwin, I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis. 
I brought guidebooks to trees, to birds, and what would become his favorite book, the dictionary. 
On some days, we would sit for hours in silence, both of us reading. 
And on other days, we would read together, we would read poetry. 
We started by reading haikus, hundreds of haikus, a deceptively simple masterpiece. 
And I would ask him, "Share with me your favorite haikus." 
And some of them are quite funny. 
So there's this by Issa: "Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually." 
And this: "Napped half the day, no one punished me!" 
And this gorgeous one, which is about the first day of snow falling, "Deer licking first frost from each other's coats." 
There's something mysterious and gorgeous just about the way a poem looks. 
The empty space is as important as the words themselves. 
We read this poem by W.S. Merwin, which he wrote after he saw his wife working in the garden and realized that they would spend the rest of their lives together. 
"Let me imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will be spring We will be no older than we ever were The worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which morning slowly comes to itself" I asked Patrick what his favorite line was, and he said, "We will be no older than we ever were." 
He said it reminded him of a place where time just stops, where time doesn't matter anymore. 
And I asked him if he had a place like that, where time lasts forever. 
And he said, "My mother." 
When you read a poem alongside someone else, the poem changes in meaning. 
Because it becomes personal to that person, becomes personal to you. 
We then read books, we read so many books, we read the memoir of Frederick Douglass, an American slave who taught himself to read and write and who escaped to freedom because of his literacy. 
I had grown up thinking of Frederick Douglass as a hero and I thought of this story as one of uplift and hope. 
But this book put Patrick in a kind of panic. 
He fixated on a story Douglass told of how, over Christmas, masters give slaves gin as a way to prove to them that they can't handle freedom. 
Because slaves would be stumbling on the fields. 
Patrick said he related to this. 
He said that there are people in jail who, like slaves, don't want to think about their condition, because it's too painful. 
Too painful to think about the past, too painful to think about how far we have to go. 
His favorite line was this line: "Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! 
It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me." 
Patrick said that Douglass was brave to write, to keep thinking. 
But Patrick would never know how much he seemed like Douglass to me. 
How he kept reading, even though it put him in a panic. 
He finished the book before I did, reading it in a concrete stairway with no light. 
And then we went on to read one of my favorite books, Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead," which is an extended letter from a father to his son. 
He loved this line: "I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life ... 
you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle." 
Something about this language, its love, its longing, its voice, rekindled Patrick's desire to write. 
And he would fill notebooks upon notebooks with letters to his daughter. 
In these beautiful, intricate letters, he would imagine him and his daughter going canoeing down the Mississippi river. 
He would imagine them finding a mountain stream with perfectly clear water. 
As I watched Patrick write, I thought to myself, and I now ask all of you, how many of you have written a letter to somebody you feel you have let down? 
It is just much easier to put those people out of your mind. 
But Patrick showed up every day, facing his daughter, holding himself accountable to her, word by word with intense concentration. 
I wanted in my own life to put myself at risk in that way. 
Because that risk reveals the strength of one's heart. 
Let me take a step back and just ask an uncomfortable question. 
Who am I to tell this story, as in this Patrick story? 
Patrick's the one who lived with this pain and I have never been hungry a day in my life. 
I thought about this question a lot, but what I want to say is that this story is not just about Patrick. 
It's about us, it's about the inequality between us. 
The world of plenty that Patrick and his parents and his grandparents have been shut out of. 
In this story, I represent that world of plenty. 
And in telling this story, I didn't want to hide myself. 
Hide the power that I do have. 
In telling this story, I wanted to expose that power and then to ask, how do we diminish the distance between us? 
Reading is one way to close that distance. 
It gives us a quiet universe that we can share together, that we can share in equally. 
You're probably wondering now what happened to Patrick. 
Did reading save his life? 
It did and it didn't. 
When Patrick got out of prison, his journey was excruciating. 
Employers turned him away because of his record, his best friend, his mother, died at age 43 from heart disease and diabetes. 
He's been homeless, he's been hungry. 
So people say a lot of things about reading that feel exaggerated to me. 
Being literate didn't stop him form being discriminated against. 
It didn't stop his mother from dying. 
So what can reading do? 
I have a few answers to end with today. 
Reading charged his inner life with mystery, with imagination, with beauty. 
Reading gave him images that gave him joy: mountain, ocean, deer, frost. 
Words that taste of a free, natural world. 
Reading gave him a language for what he had lost. 
How precious are these lines from the poet Derek Walcott? 
Patrick memorized this poem. 
"Days that I have held, days that I have lost, days that outgrow, like daughters, my harboring arms." 
Reading taught him his own courage. 
Remember that he kept reading Frederick Douglass, even though it was painful. 
He kept being conscious, even though being conscious hurts. 
Reading is a form of thinking, that's why it's difficult to read because we have to think. 
And Patrick chose to think, rather than to not think. 
And last, reading gave him a language to speak to his daughter. 
Reading inspired him to want to write. 
The link between reading and writing is so powerful. 
When we begin to read, we begin to find the words. 
And he found the words to imagine the two of them together. 
He found the words to tell her how much he loved her. 
Reading also changed our relationship with each other. 
It gave us an occasion for intimacy, to see beyond our points of view. 
And reading took an unequal relationship and gave us a momentary equality. 
When you meet somebody as a reader, you meet him for the first time, newly, freshly. 
There is no way you can know what his favorite line will be. 
What memories and private griefs he has. 
And you face the ultimate privacy of his inner life. 
And then you start to wonder, "Well, what is my inner life made of? 
What do I have that's worthwhile to share with another?" 
I want to close on some of my favorite lines from Patrick's letters to his daughter. 
"The river is shadowy in some places but the light shines through the cracks of trees ... 
On some branches hang plenty of mulberries. 
You stretch your arm straight out to grab some." 
And this lovely letter, where he writes, "Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the words. 
I know this poem by heart and I would like you to know it, too." 
Thank you so much everyone. 
(Applause) 

I have a friend named Kaveh Akbar, who is a fellow poet. 
And Kaveh found this photo online of the anatomical heart of a blue whale that scientists had hung on a hook from the ceiling, which is how they were able to observe that the heart of a blue whale is big enough that a person can stand up fully inside of it. 
And when Kaveh shared this photo online, he did so with the caption, "This is another reminder that the universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing." 
And when I first saw that, I was horrified. 
I was like, "Come on, man! I'm trying to invent new metaphors! 
I'm trying to discover beauty that hasn't been discovered yet. 
What do you mean, the universe is always going to get there before me?" 
And I know this isn't a uniquely poet problem, but on days when the world feels especially big or especially impossible or especially full of grandeur, those are the days when I feel, "What do I possibly have to contribute to all of this?" 
Not long ago, I saw this video that some of you may have seen. 
It makes the internet rounds every couple of months. 
There are these birds that are called starlings, and they fly in what's called a "murmuration," which is generally just a big cloud of birds. 
And someone happened to catch a quick video on their phone of these starlings flying. 
And at first, it's just an amorphous blob, and then there's a moment where the birds shift, and they form the shape of a starling in the sky! 
(Laughter) And as soon as I saw it, I was like, (Gasps) "The universe has already written the poem you were planning on writing!" 
(Laughter) Except, for the first time, it didn't fill me with despair. 
Instead, I thought, "OK. 
Maybe it's not my job to invent something new. 
Maybe instead it's my job to listen to what the universe is showing me and to keep myself open to what the universe offers, so that when it's my turn, I can hold something to the light, just for a moment, just for as long as I have. 
The universe has already written the poem that you were planning on writing. 
And this is why you can do nothing but point at the flock of starlings whose bodies rise and fall in inherited choreography, swarming the sky in a sweeping curtain that, for one blistering moment, forms the unmistakeable shape of a giant bird flapping against the sky. 
It is why your mouth forms an "o" that is not a gasp, but rather, the beginning of, "Oh. Of course." 
As in, of course the heart of a blue whale is as large as a house with chambers tall enough to fit a person standing. 
Of course a fig becomes possible when a lady wasp lays her eggs inside a flower, dies and decomposes, the fruit, evidence of her transformation. 
Sometimes, the poem is so bright, your silly language will not stick to it. 
Sometimes, the poem is so true, nobody will believe you. 
I am a bird made of birds. 
This blue heart a house you can stand up inside of. 
I am dying here inside this flower. 
It is OK. 
It is what I was put here to do. 
Take this fruit. 
It is what I have to offer. 
It may not be first, or ever best, but it is the only way to be sure that I lived at all. 
(Applause) 

I met 273 start-up founders last year. 
And each one was looking for money. 
As a tech investor, my goal was to sort through everyone that I met and make a quick determination about which ones had the potential to make something really big. 
But what makes a great founder? 
This is a question I ask myself daily. 
Some venture capitalists place bets based on a founder's previous background. 
Did they go to an Ivy League school? 
Have they worked at a blue-chip company? 
Have they built out a big vision before? 
Effectively, how smart is this person? 
Other VCs asses a founder's emotional quotient, or EQ. 
How well will this person build teams and build rapport across customers and clients? 
I have a different methodology to assess start-up founders, though, and it's not complicated. 
I look for signs of one specific trait. 
Not IQ, not EQ. 
It's adaptability: how well a person reacts to the inevitability of change, and lots of it. 
That's the single most important determinant for me. 
I subscribe to the belief that adaptability itself is a form of intelligence, and our adaptability quotient, or AQ, is something that can be measured, tested and improved. 
AQ isn't just useful for start-up founders, however. 
I think it's increasingly important for all of us. 
Because the world is speeding up. 
We know that the rate of technological change is accelerating, which is forcing our brains to react. 
Whether you're navigating changing job conditions brought on by automation, shifting geopolitics in a more globalized world, or simply changing family dynamics and personal relationships. 
Each of us, as individuals, groups, corporations and even governments are being forced to grapple with more change than ever before in human history. 
So, how do we assess our adaptability? 
I use three tricks when meeting with founders. 
Here's the first. 
Think back to your most recent job interview. 
What kind of questions were you asked? 
Probably some variation of, "Tell me about a time when," right? 
Instead, to interview for adaptability, I like to ask "what if" questions. 
What if your main revenue stream were to dry up overnight? 
What if a heat wave prevented every single customer from being able to visit your store? 
Asking "what if," instead of asking about the past, forces the brain to simulate. 
To picture multiple possible versions of the future. 
The strength of that vision, as well as how many distinct scenarios someone can conjure, tells me a lot. 
Practicing simulations is a sort of safe testing ground for improving adaptability. 
Instead of testing how you take in and retain information, like an IQ test might, it tests how you manipulate information, given a constraint, in order to achieve a specific goal. 
The second trick that I use to assess adaptability in founders is to look for signs of unlearning. 
Active unlearners seek to challenge what they presume to already know, and instead, override that data with new information. 
Kind of like a computer running a disk cleanup. 
Take the example of Destin Sandlin, who programed his bicycle to turn left when he steered it right and vice versa. 
He called this his Backwards Brain Bike, and it took him nearly eight months just to learn how to ride it kind of, sort of normally. 
The fact that Destin was able to unlearn his regular bike in favor of a new one, though, signals something awesome about our adaptability. 
It's not fixed. 
Instead, each of us has the capacity to improve it, through dedication and hard work. 
On the last page of Gandhi's autobiography, he wrote, "I must reduce myself to zero." 
At many points in his very full life, he was still seeking to return to a beginner's mindset, to zero. 
To unlearn. 
In this way, I think it's pretty safe to say Gandhi had a high AQ score. 
(Laughter) The third and final trick that I use to assess a founder's adaptability is to look for people who infuse exploration into their life and their business. 
There's a sort of natural tension between exploration and exploitation. 
And collectively, all of us tend to overvalue exploitation. 
Here's what I mean. 
In the year 2000, a man finagled his way into a meeting with John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster, and proposed a partnership to manage Blockbuster's fledgling online business. 
The CEO John laughed him out of the room, saying, "I have millions of existing customers and thousands of successful retail stores. 
I really need to focus on the money." 
The other man in the meeting, however, turned out to be Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. 
In 2018, Netflix brought in 15.8 billion dollars, while Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, directly 10 years after that meeting. 
The Blockbuster CEO was too focused on exploiting his already successful business model, so much so that he couldn't see around the next corner. 
In that way, his previous success became the enemy of his adaptability potential. 
For the founders that I work with, I frame exploration as a state of constant seeking. 
To never fall too far in love with your wins but rather continue to proactively seek out what might kill you next. 
When I first started exploring adaptability, the thing I found most exciting is that we can improve it. 
Each of us has the capacity to become more adaptable. 
But think of it like a muscle: it's got to be exercised. 
And don't get discouraged if it takes a while. 
Remember Destin Sandlin? 
It took him eight months just to learn how to ride a bike. 
Over time, using the tricks that I use on founders -- asking "what if" questions, actively unlearning and prioritizing exploration over exploitation can put you in the driver's seat -- so that the next time something big changes, you're already prepared. 
We're entering a future where IQ and EQ both matter way less than how fast you're able to adapt. 
So I hope that these tools help you to raise your own AQ. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"Who’s there?" 
Whispered in the dark, this question begins a tale of conspiracy, deception and moral ambiguity. 
And in a play where everyone has something to hide, its answer is far from simple. 
Written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601, "Hamlet" depicts its titular character haunted by the past, but immobilized by the future. 
Mere months after the sudden death of his father, Hamlet returns from school a stranger to his own home, and deeply unsure of what might be lurking in the shadows. 
But his brooding takes a turn when he’s visited by a ghost that bears his father’s face. 
The phantom claims to be the victim of a “murder most foul,” and convinces Hamlet that his uncle Claudius usurped the throne and stole queen Gertrude’s heart. 
The prince’s mourning turns to rage, and he begins to plots his revenge on the new king and his court of conspirators. 
The play is an odd sort of tragedy, lacking either the abrupt brutality or all-consuming romance that characterize Shakespeare’s other work in the genre. 
Instead it plumbs the depths of its protagonist’s indecisiveness, and the tragic consequences thereof. 
The ghost’s revelation draws Hamlet into multiple dilemmas– what should he do, who can he trust, and what role might he play in the course of justice? 
These questions are complicated by a tangled web of characters, forcing Hamlet to negotiate friends, family, court counselors, and love interests– many of whom possess ulterior motives. 
The prince constantly delays and dithers over how to relate to others, and how he should carry out revenge. 
This can make Hamlet more than a little exasperating, but it also makes him one of the most human characters Shakespeare ever created. 
Rather than rushing into things, Hamlet becomes consumed with the awful machinations of thinking itself. 
And over the course of the play, his endless questions come to echo throughout our own racing minds. 
To accomplish this, Shakespeare employs his most introspective language. 
From the usurping king’s blazing contemplation of heaven and hell, to the prince’s own cackling meditation on mortality, Shakespeare uses melancholic monologues to breathtaking effect. 
This is perhaps best exemplified in Hamlet’s most famous declaration of angst: "To be or not to be—that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And, by opposing, end them." 
This monologue personifies Hamlet’s existential dilemma: being torn between thought and action, unable to choose between life and death. 
But his endless questioning raises yet another anxiety: is Hamlet’s madness part of a performance to confuse his enemies, or are we watching a character on the brink of insanity? 
These questions weigh heavily on Hamlet’s interactions with every character. 
And since he spends much of the play facing inward, he often fails to see the destruction left in his wake. 
He’s particularly cruel to Ophelia, his doomed love interest who is brought to madness by the prince’s erratic behavior. 
Her fate is one example of how tragedy could have been easily avoided, and shows the ripple effect of Hamlet’s toxic mind games. 
Similar warning signs of tragedy are constantly overlooked throughout the play. 
Sometimes, these oversights occur because of willful blindness– such as when Ophelia’s father dismisses Hamlet’s alarming actions as mere lovesickness. 
At other points, tragedy stems from deliberate duplicity– as when a case of mistaken identity leads to yet more bloodshed. 
These moments leave us with the uncomfortable knowledge that tragedy evolves from human error– even if our mistake is to leave things undecided. 
For all these reasons, perhaps the one thing we never doubt is Hamlet’s humanity. 
But we must constantly grapple with who the “real” Hamlet might be. 
Is he a noble son avenging his father? 
Or a mad prince creating courtly chaos? 
Should he act or observe, doubt or trust? 
Who is he? Why is he here? 
And who’s out there– waiting in the dark? 

Most of the forest lives in the shadow of the giants that make up the highest canopy. 
These are the oldest trees, with hundreds of children and thousands of grandchildren. 
They check in with their neighbors, sharing food, supplies, and wisdom gained over their long lives. 
They do all this rooted in place, unable to speak, reach out, or move around. 
The secret to their success lies under the forest floor, where vast root systems support the towering trunks above. 
Partnering with these roots are symbiotic fungi called mycorrhizae. 
These fungi have countless branching, thread-like hyphae that together make up the mycelium. 
The mycelium spreads across a much larger area than the tree root system and connect the roots of different trees together. 
These connections form mycorrhizal networks. 
Through mycorrhizal networks, fungi can pass resources and signaling molecules between trees. 
We know the oldest trees have the largest mycorrhizal networks with the most connections to other trees, but these connections are incredibly complicated to trace. 
That’s because there are about a hundred species of mycorrhizal fungi– and an individual tree might be colonized by dozens of different fungal organisms, each of which connects to a unique set of other trees, which in turn each have their own unique set of fungal associations. 
To get a sense of how substances flow through this network, let’s zoom in on sugars, as they travel from a mature tree to a neighboring seedling. 
Sugar’s journey starts high above the ground, in the leaves of the tallest trees above the canopy. 
The leaves use the ample sunlight up there to create sugars through photosynthesis. 
This essential fuel then travels through the tree to the base of the trunk in the thick sap. 
From there, sugar flows down to the roots. 
Mycorrhizal fungi encounter the tips of the roots and either surround or penetrate the outer root cells, depending on the type of fungi. 
Fungi cannot produce sugars, though they need them for fuel just like trees do. 
They can, however, collect nutrients from the soil much more efficiently than tree roots— and pass these nutrients into the tree roots. 
In general, substances flow from where they are more abundant to where they are less abundant, or from source to sink. 
That means that the sugars flow from the tree roots into the fungal hyphae. 
Once the sugars enter the fungus, they travel along the hyphae through pores between cells or through special hollow transporter hyphae. 
The fungus absorbs some of the sugars, but some travels on and enters the roots of a neighboring tree, a seedling that grows in the shade and has less opportunity to photosynthesize sugars. 
But why does fungus transport resources from tree to tree? 
This is one of the mysteries of the mycorrhizal networks. 
It makes sense for fungus to exchange soil nutrients and sugar with a tree— both parties benefit. 
The fungus likely benefits in less obvious ways from being part of a network between trees, but the exact ways aren’t totally clear. 
Maybe the fungus benefits from having connections with as many different trees as possible, and maximizes its connections by shuttling molecules between trees. 
Or maybe plants reduce their contributions to fungi if the fungi don’t facilitate exchanges between trees. 
Whatever the reasons, these fungi pass an incredible amount of information between trees. 
Through the mycorrhizae, trees can tell when nutrients or signaling molecules are coming from a member of their own species or not. 
They can even tell when information is coming from a close relative like a sibling or parent. 
Trees can also share information about events like drought or insect attacks through their fungal networks, causing their neighbors to increase production of protective enzymes in anticipation of threats. 
The forest’s health relies on these intricate communications and exchanges. 
With everything so deeply interconnected, what impacts one species is bound to impact others. 

In 2008, archeologists uncovered two 9,000-year old skeletons. 
There’s no definitive way of knowing what killed these ancient people, but we do know their bones were infected by an all too familiar bacterium. 
The ancient Greeks knew its consumptive effects as phthisis; the Incans called it chaky oncay; and the English called it tuberculosis. 
Today, tuberculosis, or TB, is still one of the world’s biggest infectious killers, causing more deaths than malaria or even HIV and AIDS. 
But what exactly is this disease, and how has this pathogen persisted for so long? 
Typically, TB bacteria called mycobacterium tuberculosis, are airborne. 
They travel into our airways and infect our lungs. 
Here, immune cells called macrophages rush to the infection site, attempting to absorb and break down the bacterial invaders. 
In many cases, this response is enough to remove the bacteria. 
But in individuals with other medical conditions– ranging from malnutrition and HIV to diabetes and pregnancy –the immune response may not be strong enough to destroy the intruder. 
If so, mycobacterium tuberculosis will reproduce inside those macrophages, and form colonies in the surrounding lung tissue. 
As they infect more cells, the bacteria employ cell-degrading enzymes that destroy the infected tissue, triggering chest pain, and causing patients to cough up blood. 
The damage to the lungs leads to oxygen deprivation. 
This begins a flood of hormonal changes– including a decrease in appetite and iron production. 
From here, microbes can spread to the skeletal system, causing back pain and difficulty moving; to the kidneys and intestines, causing abdominal pain; and to the brain, causing headaches and even impaired consciousness. 
These symptoms produce the classic image of TB: weight loss, a hacking, bloody cough, and ashen skin. 
This ghostly appearance earned TB the title of the ‘White Plague’ in Victorian-era England. 
During this period, tuberculosis was considered a ‘romantic disease,' because it tended to affect poverty- stricken artists and poets– those with weaker immune systems. 
TB’s outward symptoms even helped fuel the popular myth of vampirism. 
In spite of– or perhaps because of these less than scientific concerns, this period also marked the first strides toward curing TB. 
In 1882, the German physician Robert Koch identified the disease’s bacterial origins. 
13 years later, physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray, enabling physicians to diagnose and track its progression through the body. 
These techniques allowed researchers to develop reliable and effective vaccines– first for smallpox, and again in 1921, when scientists developed the BCG vaccine to battle TB. 
These developments laid the groundwork for the modern field of antibiotics– currently home to our most effective TB treatments. 
But, antibiotics fail to address a major diagnostic complication: about 90% of people infected with TB don’t show any symptoms. 
In these latent infections, the TB bacterium may be dormant, only activating when someone’s immune system is too weak to mount a defense. 
This makes TB much harder to diagnose. 
And even when properly identified, traditional treatments can take up to 9 months, requiring multiple drugs and a high potential for side effects. 
This discourages people from finishing the full course, and partial treatment enables bacteria to develop resistance to these drugs. 
Today, the disease is still prevalent in 30 countries, most of which face other health crises that exacerbate TB and trigger latent cases. 
Worse still, accessing treatment can be difficult in many of these countries, and the stigma towards TB can discourage people from getting the help they need. 
Health experts agree we need to develop better diagnostics, faster acting antibiotics, and more effective vaccines. 
Researchers have already developed a urine test that yields results in 12 hours, as well as a new oral treatment that could cut treatment time by 75%. 
Hopefully, with advancements like these, we’ll finally be able to make TB exclusively a thing of the past. 

When Ireneo Funes looked at a glass of wine on a table, he saw “all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. 
He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at the dawn of the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebrancho.” In the short story “Funes, the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges explores what it would be like to have a perfect memory. 
His character not only remembers everything he has ever seen, but every time he has seen it in perfect detail. 
These details are so overwhelming Funes has to spend his days in a dark room, and can only sleep by imagining a part of town he has never visited. 
According to Borges, Funes’s memories even rendered him incapable of real thought, because “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. 
In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details.” Funes’ limitless memory was just one of Borges’s many explorations of infinity. 
Born in Argentina in 1899, he admired the revolutionaries of his mother’s family but took after his father’s bookish clan. 
His body of essays, poems, and stories, or, as he called them, ficciones pioneered the literary style of “lo real maravilloso,” known in English as Magical Realism— and each was just a few pages long. 
Though Borges was not interested in writing long books, he was an avid reader, recruiting friends to read to him after he went blind in middle age. 
He said his image of paradise was an infinite library, an idea he brought to life in “The library of Babel.” Built out of countless identical rooms, each containing the same number of books of the same length, the library of babel is its own universe. 
It contains every possible variation of text, so there are some profound books, but also countless tomes of complete gibberish. 
The narrator has spent his entire life wandering this vast labyrinth of information in a possibly futile search for meaning. 
Labyrinths appeared over and over in Borges’ work. 
In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” as Yu Tsun winds his way through country roads, he remembers a lost labyrinth built by one of his ancestors. 
Over the course of the story, he finds out the labyrinth is not a physical maze but a novel. 
And this novel reveals that the real Garden of Forking Paths is time: in every instant, there are infinite possible courses of action. 
And as one moment follows another, each possibility begets another set of divergent futures. 
Borges laid out infinite expanses of time in his labyrinths, but he also explored the idea of condensing all of time into a single moment. 
In “The God’s Script,” at the very beginning of the world the god writes exactly one message into the spots of the jaguars, who then “love and reproduce without end, in caverns, in cane fields, on islands, in order that the last men might receive it.” The last man turns out to be a tenacious old priest who spends years memorizing and deciphering the jaguar’s spots, culminating in an epiphany where he finally understands the god’s message. 
Imprisoned deep underground, he has no one to share this meaning with, and it changes nothing about his circumstances, but he doesn’t mind: in that one moment, he has experienced all the experience of everyone who has ever existed. 
Reading Borges, you might catch a glimpse of infinity too. 

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

Pablo Neruda published his first collection of poems at age 19. 
He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature— and also rescue 2,000 refugees, spend three years in political exile, and run for president of Chile. 
A romantic and a revolutionary, Neruda was one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century, but also one of the most accessible and controversial. 
Originally written in Spanish, his poems often use straightforward language and everyday experience to create lasting impact. 
Neruda was born Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in a small Chilean town in 1904. 
His father didn’t want him to be a poet, so at sixteen he began to write under the pen name “Pablo Neruda.” The poems in his early collection "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" were tender and perceptive, illuminating the subtleties of love and enchantment. 
In "Poem VI," for example, he writes: “Tu recuerdo es de luz, de humo, de estanque en calma!/ Más allá de tus ojos ardían los crepúsculos.” Later, he poured this attention to detail into poems of appreciation for everyday objects. 
Many of the 225 short poems in his collection "All the Odes" are dedicated to the assortment of small, apparently insignificant items that surround us, from a pair of shoelaces to a watermelon. 
An onion is más hermosa que un ave/ de plumas cegadoras, while a tuna in the market is a bala del profundo/ océano, proyectil natatorio, te vi, muerto. 
Despite this early literary success, Neruda struggled financially, and took a series of diplomatic jobs in places such as Burma, Indonesia, Singapore and Spain. 
In 1936, while Neruda was working at the consulate in Madrid, civil war broke out and the government was overthrown by a fascist military dictatorship. 
Neruda organized an evacuation of refugees from Spain to Chile, saving 2,000 lives. 
Over a period of twenty years, Neruda captured his experiences abroad in a three volume poetry collection titled "Residence on Earth." 
Many of these poems were experimental and surreal, merging epic landscapes, supernatural themes, and feelings of longing with discussion of political strife and a poet’s responsibility to speak out against injustice. 
In “I Explain a Few Things” he lingers on haunting details of the destruction of the Spanish Civil War. 
For the rest of his life, Neruda remained committed to revolutionary ideals. 
His politics led to several years of exile before he was able to return to Chile in 1952. 
While in exile, he published his influential "Canto General." 
The book attempts to retell the entire history of Latin America through poetry, touching on everything from its flora and fauna to its politics and wars, but above all paying homage to the common people behind its civilizations’ achievements. 
Although he continued to travel, after returning from exile Neruda lived in Chile for the rest of his life. 
In 1970, at age 66, Neruda ran for president of Chile before yielding to Salvador Allende and becoming his close advisor. 
But in 1973, Allende was overthrown in a military coup by General Augusto Pinochet. 
Neruda died in the hospital a couple of weeks later. 
Because of the timing of his death so soon after the coup, rumors swirled that he had died of sadness or even been assassinated, but the hospital recorded his cause of death as cancer. 
Today, Neruda’s lines are recited at protests and marches worldwide. 
Much like his life, Neruda’s poems bridged romance and revolution by emphasizing the everyday moments worth fighting for. 

In the middle of the 16th century, a talented young anatomist named Andreas Vesalius made a shocking discovery: the most famous human anatomy texts in the world were wrong. 
They not only failed to account for many details of the human body, they also described the organs of apes and other mammals. 
While Vesalius knew he was right, announcing these errors would mean challenging Galen of Pergamon– the most renowned physician in medical history. 
But who was this towering figure? 
And why did doctors working more than 1,300 years later so revere and fear him? 
Born in 129 CE, Galen left home as a teen to scour the Mediterranean for medical wisdom. 
He returned home a gifted surgeon with a passion for anatomy and a penchant for showmanship. 
He gleefully entered public anatomy contests, eager to show up his fellow physicians. 
In one demonstration, he caused a pig to lose its voice by tying off one of its nerves. 
In another, he disemboweled a monkey and challenged his colleagues to repair it. 
When they couldn’t, he did. 
These grizzly feats won him a position as surgeon to the city’s gladiators. 
Eventually, he would leave the arena to become the personal physician to four Roman Emperors. 
While his peers debated symptoms and their origins, Galen obsessively studied anatomy. 
He was convinced that each organ had a specific function. 
Since the Roman government largely prohibited working with human cadavers, Galen conducted countless dissections of animals instead. 
Even with this constraint, his exhaustive investigations yielded some remarkably accurate conclusions. 
One of Galen’s most important contributions was the insight that the brain, not the heart, controlled the body. 
He confirmed this theory by opening the cranium of a living cow. 
By applying pressure to different parts of the brain, he could link various regions to specific functions. 
Other experiments allowed him to distinguish sensory from motor nerves, establish that urine was made in the kidneys, and deduce that respiration was controlled by muscles and nerves. 
But these wild experiments also produced extraordinary misconceptions. 
Galen never realized that blood cycles continuously throughout the body. 
Instead, he believed the liver constantly produces an endless supply of blood, which gets entirely depleted on its one-way trip to the organs. 
Galen is also credited with solidifying the popular theory of the Four Humours. 
Introduced by Hippocrates centuries earlier, this misguided hypothesis attributed most medical problems to an imbalance in four bodily fluids called humours. 
To correct the balance of these fluids, doctors employed dangerous treatments like bloodletting and purging. 
Informed by his poor understanding of the circulatory system, Galen was a strong proponent of these treatments, despite their sometimes lethal consequences. 
Unfortunately, Galen’s ego drove him to believe that all his discoveries were of the utmost importance. 
He penned treatises on everything from anatomy to nutrition to bedside manner, meticulously cataloguing his writings to ensure their preservation. 
Over the next 13 centuries, Galen’s prolific collection dominated all other schools of medical thought. 
His texts became the standard works taught to new generations of doctors, who in turn, wrote new essays extolling Galen’s ideas. 
Even doctors who actually dissected human cadavers would bafflingly repeat Galen’s mistakes, despite seeing clear evidence to the contrary. 
Meanwhile, the few practitioners bold enough to offer conflicting opinions were either ignored or ridiculed. 
For 1,300 years, Galen’s legacy remained untouchable– until renaissance anatomist Vesalius spoke out against him. 
As a prominent scientist and lecturer, his authority influenced many young doctors of his time. 
But even then, it took another hundred years for an accurate description of blood flow to emerge, and two hundred more for the theory of the Four Humours to fade. 
Hopefully, today we can reap the benefits of Galen’s experiments without attributing equal credence to his less accurate ideas. 
But perhaps just as valuable is the reminder that science is an ever-evolving process, which should always place evidence above ego. 

I've been a police officer in an urban city for nearly 25 years. 
That's crazy, right? 
And in that time, I've served in every rank, from police officer to police chief. 
A few years ago, I noticed something alarming. 
Starting in 2014, I started monitoring recruits as they cycled through police academies in the state of New Jersey, and I found that women were failing at rates between 65 and 80 percent, due to varying aspects of the physical fitness test. 
I learned that a change in policy now required recruits to pass the fitness exam within 10 short workout sessions. 
This had the greatest impact on women. 
The change meant that recruits had about three weeks out of a five-month-long academy to pass the fitness exam. 
This just didn't make sense, though. 
Police agencies and police recruits had made huge investments to get those recruits into the academy. 
Police recruits had passed lengthy background checks, they had passed medical and psychological exams, they had quit their jobs. 
And many had spent more than 2,000 dollars in fees and equipment just to get kicked out within the first three weeks? 
The dire situation in New Jersey led me to examine the status of women in policing across the United States. 
I found that women make up less than 13 percent of police officers. 
A number that hasn't changed much in the past 20 years. 
And they make up just three percent of police chiefs as of 2013, the last time the data was collected. 
We know that we can improve those rates. 
Other countries like Canada, Australia and the UK have nearly twice the amount of policewomen. 
And New Zealand is steadily marching towards their goal of recruit gender parity by 2021. 
Other countries are actively working to increase the number of women in policing, because they know of a vast body of research evidence, spanning more than 50 years, detailing the advantages to women in policing. 
From that research, we know that policewomen are less likely to use force or to be accused of excessive force. 
We know that policewomen are less likely to be named in a lawsuit or a citizen complaint. 
We know that the mere presence of a policewoman reduces the use of force among other officers. 
And we know that policewomen are met with the same rates of force as their male counterparts, and sometimes more, and yet they're more successful in defusing violent or aggressive behavior overall. 
So there are vast advantages to women in policing, and we're losing them to arbitrary fitness standards. 
The problem is, the United States has nearly 18,000 police agencies -- 18,000 agencies with wildly varying fitness standards. 
We know that a majority of academies rely on a masculine ideal of policing that works to decrease the number of women in policing. 
These types of academies overemphasize physical strength, with much less attention spent to subjects like community policing, problem-solving and interpersonal communication skills. 
This results in training that does not mirror the realities of policing. 
Physical agility is but a small component of police work. 
Much of an officer's day is spent mediating interpersonal conflicts. 
That's the reality of policing. 
These are my babies. 
And we can reduce the disparity in policing by changing exams that produce disparate outcomes. 
The federal courts have stated that men and women simply are not physiologically the same for the purposes of physical fitness programs. 
And that's based on science. 
Respected institutions that law enforcement deeply respects, like the FBI, the US Marshals Service, the DEA and even the US military -- they rigorously test fitness programs to ensure they measure fitness without gender-disparate outcomes. 
Why is that? 
Because recruiting is expensive. 
They want to recruit and retain qualified candidates. 
You know what else the research finds? 
Well-trained women are as capable as their male counterparts in overall fitness, but more importantly, in how they police. 
The law-enforcement community is admittedly experiencing a recruitment crisis. 
Yet, if they truly want to increase the number of applicants, they can. 
We can easily recruit more women and reap all those research benefits by training well-qualified candidates to pass validated, work-related, physiologically-based fitness exams, as required by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. 
We can increase the number of women, we can reduce that gender disparity, by simply changing exams that produce disparate outcomes. 
We have the tools. 
We have the research, we have the science, we have the law. 
This, my friends, should be a very easy fix. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My name is Nanfu. 
In Chinese, "nan" means "man." 
And "fu" means "pillar." 
My family had hoped for a boy, who would grow up to be the pillar of the family. 
And when I turned out to be a girl, they named me Nanfu anyway. 
(Laughter) I was born in 1985, six years before China announced its one-child policy. 
Right after I was born, the local officials came and ordered my mom to be sterilized. 
My grandpa stood up to the officials, because he wanted a grandson to carry on the family name. 
Eventually, my parents were allowed to have a second child, but they had to wait for five years and pay a substantial fine. 
Growing up, my brother and I were surrounded by children from one-child families. 
I remember feeling a sense of shame because I had a younger brother. 
I felt like our family did something wrong for having two children. 
At the time, I didn't question where this sense of shame and guilt came from. 
A year and a half ago, I had my own first child. 
It was the best thing that ever happened in my life. 
Becoming a mother gave me a totally new perspective on my own childhood, and it brought back my memories of early life in China. 
For the past three decades, everyone in my family had to apply for a permission from the government to have a child. 
And I wondered what it was like for people who lived under the one-child policy. 
So I decided to make a documentary about it. 
One of the people I interviewed was the midwife who delivered all of the babies born in my village, including myself. 
She was 84 years old when I interviewed her. 
I asked her, "Do you remember how many babies you delivered throughout your career?" 
She didn't have a number for deliveries. 
She said she had performed 60,000 forced abortions and sterilizations. 
Sometimes, she said, a late-term fetus would survive an abortion, and she would kill the baby after delivering it. 
She remembered how her hands would tremble as she did the work. 
Her story shocked me. 
When I set out to make the film, I expected it would be a simple story of perpetrators and victims. 
People who carried out the policy and people who are living with the consequences. 
But that wasn't what I saw. 
As I was finishing my interview with the midwife, I noticed an area in her house that was decorated with elaborate homemade flags. 
And each flag has a picture of a baby on it. 
These were flags that were sent by families whom she helped treat their infertility problems. 
She explained that she had had enough of performing abortions and sterilizations -- that the only work she did now was to help families have babies. 
She said she was full of guilt for carrying out the one-child policy, and she hoped that by helping families have babies, she could counteract what she did in the past. 
It became clear to me she, too, was a victim of the policy. 
Every voice was telling her that what she did was right and necessary for China's survival. 
And she did what she thought was right for her country. 
I know how strong that message was. 
It was everywhere around myself when I grew up. 
It was printed on matches, playing cards, textbooks, posters. 
The propaganda praising the one-child policy was everywhere around us. 
[Anyone who refuses to sterilize will be arrested.] And so were the threats against disobeying it. 
The message seeped into our minds so much so that I grew up feeling embarrassed for having a younger brother. 
With each person I filmed, I saw how their minds and hearts can be influenced by the propaganda, and how their willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good can be twisted into something very dark and tragic. 
China is not the only place where this happens. 
There is no country on earth where propaganda isn't present. 
And in societies that are supposed to be more open and free than China, it can be even harder to recognize what propaganda looks like. 
It hides in plain sight as news reports, TV commercials, political campaigning and in our social media feeds. 
It works to change our minds without our knowledge. 
Every society is vulnerable to accepting propaganda as truth, and no society where propaganda replaces the truth can be truly free. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. 
You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. 
You turn again, but the storm adjusts. 
Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. 
Why? 
Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away… This storm is you. Something inside of you.” This quote, from the first chapter of Haruki Murakami’s "Kafka on the Shore," captures the teenage protagonist's turmoil. 
Desperate to escape his tyrannical father and the family curse he feels doomed to repeat, he renames himself Kafka after his favorite author and runs away from home. 
But memories of a missing mother, along with dreams that haunt his waking life, prove more difficult to outrun. 
Published in Japanese in 2002 and translated into English three years later, "Kafka on the Shore" is an epic literary puzzle filled with time travel, hidden histories, and magical underworlds. 
Readers delight in discovering how the mind-bending imagery, whimsical characters and eerie coincidences fit together. 
Kafka narrates every second chapter, with the rest centering on an old man named Satoru Nakata. 
After awakening from a coma he went into during the Second World War, Nakata loses the ability to read and write– but gains a mysterious knack for talking to cats. 
When he’s asked to tail a missing pet, he’s thrown onto a dangerous path that runs parallel to Kafka’s. 
Soon prophecies come true, portals to different dimensions open up– and fish and leeches begin raining from the sky. 
But what ties these two characters together– and is it a force either one of them can control? 
The collision of different worlds is a common thread in Haruki Murakami’s work. 
His novels and short stories often forge fantastic connections between personal experience, supernatural possibilities, and Japanese history. 
Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami grew up during the post-World War II American occupation of Japan. 
The shadow of war hung over his life as it does his fiction; "Kafka on the Shore" features biological attacks, military ghosts and shady conspiracies. 
Murakami’s work blurs historical periods and draws from multiple cultural traditions. 
References to Western society and Japanese customs tumble over each other, from literature and fashion to food and ghost stories. 
He has a penchant for musical references, too, especially in "Kafka on the Shore." 
As the runaway Kafka wanders the streets of a strange city, Led Zeppelin and Prince keep him company. 
Soon, he takes refuge in an exquisite private library. 
While he spends his days poring over old books and contemplating a strange painting and the library’s mysterious owner, he also befriends the librarian– who introduces him to classical music like Schubert. 
This musical sensibility makes Murakami’s work all the more hypnotic. 
He frequently bends the line between reality and a world of dreams, and is considered a master of magic lurking in the mundane. 
This is a key feature of magical realism. 
In contrast to fantasy, magic in this sort of writing rarely offers a way out of a problem. 
Instead, it becomes just one more thing that complicates life. 
In "Kafka on the Shore," characters are faced with endless otherworldly distractions, from a love sick ghost to a flute made from cat souls. 
These challenges offer no easy answers. 
Instead, they leave us marveling at the resourcefulness of the human spirit to deal with the unexpected. 
While Kafka often seems suspended in strangeness, there’s a tenderness and integrity at the heart of his mission that keeps him moving forward. 
Gradually he comes to accept his inner confusion. 
In the end, his experience echoes the reader’s: the deeper you go, the more you find. 

I'm an historian. 
And what I love about being an historian is it gives you perspective. 
Today, I'd like to bring that perspective to education in the United States. 
About the only thing people can agree on is that the most strategic time for a child to start learning is early. 
Over 50 years ago, there was a watershed moment in early education in the US called "Head Start." 
Now, historians love watersheds because it makes it so easy to talk about what came before and what's happened since. 
Before Head Start, basically nothing. 
With Head Start, we began to get our nation's most at-risk children ready for school. 
Since Head Start, we've made strides, but there are still 2.2 million children in the US without access to early learning, or more than half of the four-year-olds in the country. 
That's a problem. 
But the bigger problem is what we know happens to those children. 
At-risk children who reach school without basic skills are 25 percent more likely to drop out, 40 percent more likely to become teen parents and 60 percent less likely to go to college. 
So if we know how important early education is, why aren't all children getting it? 
There are barriers that the solutions we've come up with to date simply can't overcome. 
Geography: think rural and remote. 
Transportation: think working parents everywhere. 
Parent choice: no state requires a four-year-old to go to school. 
And cost: the average cost for a state to educate a preschooler is five thousand dollars a year. 
So am I just going to keep talking about problems? 
No. 
Today, I want to tell you about a cost-effective, technology-delivered, kindergarten-readiness program that can be done in the home. 
It's called UPSTART, and more than 60,000 preschoolers in the US have already used it. 
Now, I know what you might be thinking: here's another person throwing tech at a national problem. 
And you'd be partially right. 
We develop early learning software designed to individualize instruction, so children can learn at their own pace. 
To do that, we rely on experts from fields ranging from reading to sociology to brain science development to all aspects of early learning, to tell us what the software should do and look like. 
Here's an example. 
(Video) Zero (sings to the tune of "Day-O"): Zero! 
Zero! 
Zero is the number that's different from the others. 
Seagulls: Zero is a big, round "O." 
Zero: It's not like one, I'm sure you'll discover. 
Seagulls: Zero is a big, round "O." 
(Laughter) Claudia Miner: That is "The Zero Song." 
(Laughter) And here are Odd Todd and Even Steven to teach you some things about numbers. 
And here are the Word Birds, and they're going to show you when you blend letter sounds together, you can form words. 
You can see that instruction is short, colorful and catchy, designed to capture a child's attention. 
But there's another piece to UPSTART that makes it different and more effective. 
UPSTART puts parents in charge of their children's education. 
We believe, with the right support, all parents can get their children ready for school. 
Here's how it works. 
This is the kindergarten readiness checklist from a state. 
And almost every state has one. 
We go to parents wherever they are, and we conduct a key in-person group training. 
And we tell them the software can check every reading, math and science box, but they're going to be responsible for motor skills and self-help skills, and together, we're going to work on social emotional learning. 
Now, we know this is working because we have a 90-percent completion rate for the program. 
Last year, that translated into 13,500 children "graduating," with diplomas, from UPSTART. 
And the results have been amazing. 
We have an external evaluation that shows our children have two to three times the learning gains as children who don't participate in the program. 
We have a random control trial that shows strong evidence of effectiveness, and we even have a longitudinal study that shows our children's gains last into third and fourth grade, the highest grades the children had achieved at the time. 
Those are academic gains. 
But another study has shown that our children's social emotional gains are equal to those of children attending public and private preschool. 
The majority of the 60,000 children who have participated in UPSTART to date have been from Utah. 
But we have replicated our results with African-American children in Mississippi -- this is Kingston and his mother; with English language learners in Arizona -- this is Daisy and her family; with refugee children in Philadelphia -- this is my favorite graduation photo; and with Native American children from some of the most remote parts of the United States. 
This is Cherise, and this is where she lives in Monument Valley. 
Now, there are skeptics about UPSTART. 
Some people don't believe young children should have screen time. 
To them, we say: UPSTART's usage requirement of 15 minutes a day, five days a week, is well within the hour-a-day recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for four-year-olds. 
Some people believe only site-based preschool can work, and to them, we say: site-based preschool is great, but if you can't get a child there or if a parent won't send a child there, isn't a technology-delivered, results-based option a great alternative? 
And we love working with site-based preschools. 
Right now, there are 800 children in Mississippi going to Head Start during the day and doing UPSTART at night with their families. 
Our audacious idea is to take UPSTART across the country -- not to replace anything; we want to serve children who otherwise would not have access to early education. 
We have the guts to take on the skeptics, we have the energy to do the work, and we have a plan. 
It is the role of the states to educate their children. 
So first we will use philanthropy dollars to go into a state to pilot the program and get data. 
Every state believes it's unique and wants to know that the program will work with its children before investing. 
Then we identify key leaders in the state to help us champion UPSTART as an option for unserved children. 
And together, we go to state legislatures to transition UPSTART from philanthropy to sustainable and scalable state funding. 
That plan has worked -- (Applause) Thanks. 
Thank you. 
That plan has worked in three states to date: Utah, Indiana and South Carolina. 
We've also piloted the program in a number of states and identified champions. 
Next, we're moving to states with the greatest geographic barriers to work the plan, and then on to states that already have early education but may not be getting great academic results or great parent buy-in to participate. 
From there, we go to the states that are going to require the most data and work to convince, and we'll hope our momentum helps turn the tide there. 
We will serve a quarter of a million children in five years, and we will ensure that states continue to offer UPSTART to their children. 
Here's how you can help: for two thousand dollars, we can provide a child with UPSTART, a computer and internet, and that child will be part of the pilot that makes certain other children get UPSTART in the future. 
We also need engaged citizens to go to their government and say just how easy it can be to get children ready for school. 
You wouldn't be here if you weren't an engaged citizen, so we're asking for your help. 
Now, will all of us this make UPSTART a watershed moment in early education? 
I believe together we can make it one. 
But I can tell you without a doubt that UPSTART is a watershed moment in the life of a child who otherwise would not be ready for school. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Me and the boy wear the same shoe size. 
He wants a pair of Air Jordan 4s for Christmas. 
I buy them, and then I steal them from his closet, like a twisted Grinch-themed episode of "Black-ish." 
(Laughter) The kicks are totems to my youth. 
I wear them like mercury on my Black man feet. 
I can't get those young freedom days back fast enough. 
Last time I was really fast I was 16, outrunning a doorman on the Upper East Side. 
He caught me vandalizing his building, not even on some artsy stuff, just ... stupid. 
Of all the genders, boys are the stupidest. 
(Laughter) Sixteen was a series of barely getting away and never telling my parents. 
I assume that my son is stewarding this tradition well. 
Sixteen was "The Low End Theory" and Marvin Gaye on repeat. 
Sixteen is younger than Trayvon and older than Emmett Till. 
At the DMV, my boy's in line to officially enter his prime suspect years: young, brown and behind the wheel, a moving semaphore, signaling the threat of communities from below. 
On top of the food chain, humans have no natural predator, but America plays out something genetically embedded and instinctual in its appetite for the Black body. 
America guns down Black bodies and then walks around them, bored, like laconic lions next to half-eaten gazelles, bloody lips ... 
"America and the Black Body" on some Nat Geo shit. 
Well, he passes his road test at the DMV. 
He does this strut C-Walk broken "Fortnite" thing on the way in to finish his paperwork, true joy and calibrated cool under the eye of my filming iPhone, the victory dance of someone who has just salvaged a draw. 
He's earned this win, but he's so 16 he can't quite let his body be fully free. 
When he's three, I'm in handcuffs in downtown Oakland. 
Five minutes ago, I was illegally parked. 
Now I'm in the back of a squad car, considering the odds that I'm going to die here, 15 minutes away from my son who expects that in 18 minutes, daddy's gonna pick him up from preschool. 
There are no pocket-size cameras to capture this moment, so. 
I learned a lot of big words when I was 16 getting ready for the SAT, but none of them come to me now. 
In the police car, the only thing that really speaks is my skin. 
I know this: I was parked on a bus zone on 12th and Broadway, running to the ATM on the corner. 
I pull the cash out just as a police car pulls up behind me, give him the "Aw shucks, my bad," that earnest Black man face. 
He waits till I'm back in the car and then hits the siren, takes my license with his hand on the gun, comes back two minutes later, gun drawn, another patrol car now, four cops now, my face on the curb, hands behind my back, shackled. 
I'm angry and humiliated, only until I'm scared and then sad. 
I smell like the last gasp before my own death. 
I think how long the boy will wait before he realizes that daddy is not on his way. 
I think his last barely formed memory of me will be the story of how I never came for him. 
I try to telepathically say goodbye. 
The silence brings me no peace. 
The quiet makes it hard to rest. 
In the void there is anger mushrooming in the moss at the base of my thoughts, a fungus growing on the spine of my freedom attempts. 
I'm free from all except contempt, the spirit of an unarmed civilian in the time of civil unrest, no peace, just Marvin Gaye falsettos arching like a broken-winged sparrow, competing against the empty sirens, singing the police. 
Apparently some cat from Richmond had a warrant out on him, and when the cop says my name to dispatch, dude doesn't hear "Marc Joseph," he hears "Mike Johnson." 
I count seven cars and 18 cops on the corner now, a pride around a pound of flesh. 
By the grace of God, I'm not fed to the beast today. 
Magnanimously, the first cop makes sure to give me a ticket for parking in a bus zone, before he sets me free. 
The boy is 16. 
He has a license to drive in the hollow city, enough body to fill my shoes. 
I have grey in my beard, and it tells the truth. 
He can navigate traffic in the age of autonomous vehicles. 
You know, people say "the talk," like the thing happens just once, like my memory's been erased and my internet is broken, like I can't read today's martyred name, like today's the day that I don't love my son enough to tell him, "Bro, I really don't care about your rights, yo. 
Your mission is to get home to me. 
Live to tell me the story, boy. 
Get home to me." 
Today's talk is mostly happening in my head as he pulls onto the freeway and Marvin Gaye comes on the radio. 
I'm wearing the boy's shoes, and the tune in my head is the goodbye that I almost never said, a goodbye the length of a requiem, a kiss, a whiff of his neck, the length of a revelation and a request flying high in the friendly sky without ever leaving the ground. 
My pain is a walking bass line, a refrain, placated stress against the fading baseline. 
Listen, this is not to be romantic, but to assert a plausible scenario for the existential moment. 
Driving while Black is its own genre of experience. 
Ask Marvin. 
It may not be the reason why you sing like an angel, but it surely has something to do with why heaven bends to your voice. 
The boy driving, the cop in the rearview mirror is a ticket to ride or die. 
When you give a Black boy "the talk," you pray he is of the faction of the fraction that survives. 
You pitch him the frequency of your telepathic goodbye, channel the love sustained in Marvin's upper register under his skullcap. 
Black music at its best is an exploded black hole responding to the call of America at its worst. 
Strike us down, the music lives, dark, like tar or tobacco or cotton in muddy water. 
Get home to me, son. 
Like a love supreme, a god as love, a love overrules, feathers for the angelic lift of the restless dead, like a theme for trouble man, or a 16-year-old boy, free to make mistakes and live through them, grow from them, holy, holy, mercy, mercy me, mercy, mercy. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

David Biello: So Victor, what have you been up to? 
Victor Vescovo: That's the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and I guess I read too much Jules Verne as a young boy, and so for the last four years I've led a team to design and build what is now the most advanced and deepest diving submersible on the planet, and I have the ability to personally pilot it too. 
So this was us in December of last year, for the first time -- the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. 
DB: And nobody's seen that before right? 
That's just you. VV: No. 
Well, now everybody else. 
DB: Who does that? 
Like -- VV: Well, I think everyone has seen the developments in the last 10, 15 years. 
You have a bunch of people that have the means to explore outer space, like SpaceX or Blue Origin -- those guys -- and we're going the other direction. 
So it's a wonderful era of private individuals spending their resources to develop technologies that can take us to places that have never been explored before, and the oceans of the world is -- it's almost a cliché to say it's 70 percent of our entire planet, and of that, 95 percent is unexplored. 
So what we're trying to do with our expedition is to build and prove out a submersible that can go to any point on the bottom of the planet to explore the 60 percent of this planet that is still unexplored. 
DB: You need a pretty cool tool to do that, right? 
VV: Right. 
Now the tool is the submarine, the Limiting Factor. 
It's a state-of-the-art vessel supported by the support ship, the Pressure Drop. 
It has a two-person titanium sphere, 90 millimeters-thick, that keeps it at one atmosphere, and it has the ability to dive repeatedly down to the very deepest point of the ocean. 
DB: So like the SpaceX of ocean exploration? 
VV: Yeah, it's kind of the SpaceX of ocean exploration, but I pilot my own vehicles. 
(Laughter) DB: Are you going to take Elon or...? 
VV: Yeah, I could take someone down there. 
So, Elon, if you're listening, I'll give you a ride in mine if you give me a ride in yours. 
(Laughter) DB: So tell us what it's like down there. 
I mean, we're talking about a place where the pressure is so intense that it's like putting an Eiffel Tower on your toe. 
VV: It's more than that. 
It's about 16,000 psi. 
So the issue is that we have this titanium sphere that allows us to go down to these extreme depths and come up repeatedly. 
That's never been done before. 
The Challenger Deep has been dived twice, once in 1960 and once in 2012 by James Cameron, and they went down and came back up and those were experimental craft. 
This is the first commercially certified submersible that can go up and down thousands of times with two people, including a scientist. 
We're very proud that we took down the deepest-diving British citizen in history just three weeks ago, Dr. Alan Jamieson of Newcastle University who was down with us on the Java Trench. 
DB: So, not too much freaks you out, is what I'm guessing. 
VV: Well, it's a lot different to go diving. 
If you're claustrophobic, you do not want to be in the submarine. 
We go down quite a distance and the missions typically last eight to nine hours in a confined space. 
It's very different from the career I had previously which was mountain climbing where you're in open spaces, the wind is whipping, it's very cold. 
This is the opposite. It's much more technical. 
It's much more about precision in using the instruments and troubleshooting anything that can go wrong. 
But if something really goes wrong in the submersible, you're not going to know it. 
(Laughter) DB: So you're afraid of leaks is what you're saying. 
VV: Leaks are not good, but if it's a leak that's happening, it's not that bad because if it was really bad you wouldn't know it, again, but -- you know, fire in the capsule, that wouldn't be good either, but it's actually a very safe submersible. 
I like to say I don't trust a lot of things in life, but I do trust titanium, I trust math and I trust finite element analysis, which is how you figure out whether or not things like this can survive these extraordinary pressures and conditions. 
DB: And that sphere is so perfectly machined, right? 
This is a truly unique craft. 
VV: That was the real trick -- is actually building a titanium sphere that was accurate to within .1 percent of machine. 
Titanium is a hard metal to work and a lot of people haven't figured it out, but we were very fortunate. 
Our extraordinary team was able to make an almost perfect sphere, which when you're subjecting something to pressure, that's the strongest geometry you can have. 
When I'm in the submersible and that hatch closes, I'm confident that I'm going to go down and come back up. 
DB: And that's the thing you double-check -- that the hatch is closed? 
VV: There are only two rules in diving a submarine. 
Number one is close the hatch securely. 
Number two is go back to rule number one. 
DB: Alright so, Atlantic Ocean: check. 
Southern Ocean: check. 
VV: No one has ever dived the Southern Ocean before. 
I know why. 
It's really, really hostile. 
The weather is awful. 
The word collision comes to mind. 
But we did that one, yes. 
Glad that's over -- DB: Yeah -- VV: Thank you. 
(Applause) DB: It's like you're racing through it. 
And now the Indian Ocean, as Kelly mentioned. 
VV: Yeah, that was three weeks ago. 
We were fortunate enough to actually solve the mystery. 
If someone had asked me three weeks ago, "What is the deepest point in the Indian Ocean?" -- no one really knew. 
There were two candidates, one off of Western Australia and one in the Java Trench. 
We have this wonderful ship with a brilliant sonar. 
We mapped both of them. 
We sent landers down to the bottom and verified. 
It's actually in the center portion of the Java Trench, which is where no one thought it was. 
In fact, every time we've completed one of our major dives, we have to run off to Wikipedia and change it because it's completely wrong. 
(Laughter) DB: So it probably takes longer to get down there than the time you're able to spend down there? 
VV: No, we actually spend quite a bit of time. 
I have four days of oxygen supply in the vessel. 
If I'm down there for four days, something's gone so wrong I'm probably not going to use it, but it's about three hours down to the deepest part of the ocean and then we can spend usually three or four hours and then another three hours up. 
So you don't want to stay in there for more than 10 or 11 hours. 
It can get a little tight. 
DB: Alright, so the bottom of the Indian Ocean. 
And this is something that no one besides you has ever seen before -- VV: This is actually imagery from one of our robotic landers. 
On the bottom right you can actually see a robust assfish -- that's what it's actually called. 
(Laughter) But you can see from the left a creature that's never been seen before. 
It's actually a bottom-dwelling jellyfish called a stalked ascidian, and none of them have ever looked like this before. 
It actually has a small child at the bottom of its stalk, and it just drifted across beautifully. 
So every single dive we have gone on, even though we're only down there for a couple of hours, we have found three or four new species because these are places that have been isolated for billions of years and no human being has ever been down there to film them or take samples. 
And so this is extraordinary for us -- (Applause) So what we are hoping -- the main objective of our mission is to build this tool. 
This tool is a door, because with this tool, we'll be able to make more of them potentially and take scientists down to do thousands of dives, to open that door to exploration and find things that we had no idea even existed. 
DB: And so more people have been to space than the bottom of the ocean. 
You're one of three. 
You're going to up that number, you're going to give it away. 
VV: Yeah, three people have dived to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. 
The USS Trieste in 1960 with two individuals. 
James Cameron in 2012 with his Deep Sea Challenger -- thank you, Jim, great sub. 
This is a third-generation technology. 
We're not only going to try and go down, actually in two weeks, but we're going to try and do it multiple times, which has never been done before. 
If we can do that, we'll have proven the technology and that door will not just go open, it will stay open. 
(Applause) DB: Fantastic. Good luck. 
VV: Thank you very much. DB: Thank you. 
VV: Thank you all. 
(Applause) 

My first job out of college was as an academic researcher at one of the largest juvenile detention centers in the country. 
And every day I would drive to this building on the West Side of Chicago, go through the security checkpoint and walk down these brown, brick hallways as I made my way down to the basement to observe the intake process. 
The kids coming in were about 10 to 16 years old, usually always black and brown, most likely from the same impoverished South and West Sides of Chicago. 
They should've been in fifth to tenth grade, but instead they were here for weeks on end awaiting trial for various crimes. 
Some of them came back to the facility 14 times before their 15th birthday. 
And as I sat there on the other side of the glass from them, idealistic with a college degree, I wondered to myself: Why didn't schools do something more to prevent this from happening? 
It's been about 10 years since then, and I still think about how some kids get tracked towards college and others towards detention, but I no longer think about schools' abilities to solve these things. 
You see, I've learned that so much of this problem is systemic that often our school system perpetuates the social divide. 
It makes worse what it's supposed to fix. 
That's as crazy or controversial as saying that our health care system isn't preventative but somehow profits off of keeping us sick ... 
oops. 
(Laughter) I truly do believe though that kids can achieve great things despite the odds against them, and in fact, my own research shows that. 
But if we're serious about helping more kids from across the board to achieve and make it in this world, we're going to have to realize that our gaps in student outcomes are not so much about achievement as much as they are about opportunity. 
A 2019 EdBuild report showed that majority-white districts receive about 23 billion dollars more in annual funding than nonwhite districts, even though they serve about the same number of students. 
Lower resource schools are dealing with lower quality equipment, obsolete technology and paying teachers way less. 
Here in New York, those are also the schools most likely to serve the one in 10 elementary school students who will most likely have to sleep in a homeless shelter tonight. 
The student, parent and teacher are dealing with a lot. 
Sometimes places are misplacing the blame back on them. 
In Atlanta, we saw that teachers felt desperate enough to have to help their students cheat on standardized tests that would impact their funding. 
Eight of them went to jail for that in 2015 with some sentences as high as 20 years, which is more than what many states give for second-degree murder. 
The thing is though, in places like Tulsa, teachers' pay has been so bad that these people have had to go to food pantries or soup kitchens just to feed themselves. 
The same system will criminalize a parent who will use a relative's address to send their child to a better school, but for who knows how long authorities have turned a blind eye to those who can bribe their way onto the most elite and beautiful college campuses. 
And a lot of this feels pretty heavy to be saying -- and maybe to be hearing -- and since there's nothing quite like economics talk to lighten the mood -- that's right, right? 
Let me tell you about some of the costs when we fail to tap into our students' potential. 
A McKinsey study showed that if in 1998 we could've closed our long-standing student achievement gaps between students of different ethnic backgrounds or students of different income levels, by 2008, our GDP -- our untapped economic gains -- could have gone up by more than 500 billion dollars. 
Those same gaps in 2008, between our students here in the US and those across the world, may have deprived our economy of up to 2.3 trillion dollars of economic output. 
But beyond economics, numbers and figures, I think there's a simpler reason that this matters, a simpler reason for fixing our system. 
It's that in a true democracy, like the one we pride ourselves on having -- and sometimes rightfully so -- a child's future should not be predetermined by the circumstances of their birth. 
A public education system should not create a wider bottom and more narrow top. 
Some of us can sometimes think that these things aren't that close to home, but they are if we broaden our view, because a leaky faucet in our kitchen, broken radiator in our hallway, those parts of the house that we always say we're going to get to next week, they're devaluing our whole property. 
Instead of constantly looking away to solutions like privatization or the charter school movement to solve our problems, why don't we take a deeper look at public education, try to take more pride in it and maybe use it to solve some of our social problems. 
Why don't we try to reclaim the promise of public education and remember that it's our greatest collective responsibility? 
Luckily some of our communities are doing just that. 
The huge teacher strikes in the spring of 2019 in Denver and LA -- they were successful because of community support for things like smaller class sizes and getting things into schools like more counselors in addition to teacher pay. 
And sometimes for the student, innovation is just daring to implement common sense. 
In Baltimore a few years ago, they enacted a free breakfast and lunch program, taking away the stigma of poverty and hunger for some students but increasing achievement in attendance for many others. 
And in Memphis, the university is recruiting local, passionate high school students and giving them scholarships to go teach in the inner city without the burden of college debt. 
And north of here in The Bronx, I recently researched these partnerships being built between high schools, community colleges and local businesses who are creating internships in finance, health care and technology for students without "silver spoon" connections to gain important skills and contribute to the communities that they come from. 
So today I don't necessarily have the same questions about education that I did when I was an idealistic, perhaps naïve college grad working in a detention center basement. 
It's not: Can schools save more of our students? 
Because I think we have the answer to that -- and it's yes they can, if we save our schools first. 
We can start by caring about the education of other people's children ... 
And I'm saying that as someone who doesn't have kids yet but wants to worry a little bit less about the future when I do. 
Cultivating as much talent as possible, getting as many girls as we can from all over into science and engineering, as many boys as we can into teaching -- those are investments for our future. 
Our students are like our most valuable resource, and when you put it that way, our teachers are like our modern-day diamond and gold miners, hoping to help make them shine. 
Let's contribute our voices, our votes and our support to giving them the resources that they will need not just to survive but hopefully thrive, allowing all of us to do so as well. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

I'd like you to take a moment and consider what you are wearing right now. 
I have a deep, philosophical question for you. 
Why are we not all wearing comfortable pajamas right now? 
(Laughter) Well, I'm a psychologist and not a mind reader, although many people think that's the same thing. 
I can bet you that your response is somewhere along the lines of, "I'm expected to not wear pj's in public" or "I don't want people to think I am a slob." 
Either way, the fact that we all chose to wear business casual clothing, as opposed to our favorite pair of sweatpants, is not a silly coincidence. 
Instead, it reveals two defining human characteristics. 
The first is that we are cognizant of what other people value, like what they will approve or disapprove of, such as not wearing pj's to these sorts of settings. 
And two, we've readily used this information to guide our behavior. 
Unlike many other species, humans are prone to tailor their behavior in the presence of others to garner approval. 
We spend valuable time putting on make up, choosing the right picture and Instagram filter, and composing ideas that will undoubtedly change the world in 140 characters or less. 
Clearly, our concern with how other people will evaluate us is a big part of being human. 
Despite this being a big human trait, however, we know relatively little about when and how we come to care about the opinion of others. 
Now, this is a big question that requires many studies. 
But the first step to uncovering this question is to investigate when in development we become sensitive to others' evaluations. 
I have spent the past four years at Emory University investigating how an infant, who has no problem walking around the grocery store in her onesie, develops into an adult that fears public speaking for fear of being negatively judged. 
(Laughter) Now, this is usually a point when people ask me, "How do you investigate this question, exactly? 
Infants can't talk, right?" 
Well, if my husband were up here right now, he would tell you that I interview babies, because he would rather not say that his wife experiments on children. 
(Laughter) In reality, I design experiments for children, usually in the form of games. 
Developmental psychologist Dr. Philippe Rochat and I designed a "game" called "The Robot Task" to explore when children would begin to be sensitive to the evaluation of others. 
Specifically, the robot task captures when children, like adults, strategically modify their behavior when others are watching. 
To do this, we showed 14 to 24-month-old infants how to activate a toy robot, and importantly, we either assigned a positive value, saying "Wow, isn't that great!" 
or a negative value, saying, "Oh, oh. Oops, oh no," after pressing the remote. 
Following this toy demonstration, we invited the infants to play with the remote, and then either watched them or turned around and pretended to read a magazine. 
The idea was that if by 24 months, children are indeed sensitive to the evaluation of others, then their button-pressing behavior should be influenced not only by whether or not they're being watched but also by the values that the experimenter expressed towards pressing the remote. 
So for example, we would expect children to play with the positive remote significantly more if they were being observed but then choose to explore the negative remote once no one was watching. 
To really capture this phenomenon, we did three variations of the study. 
Study one explored how infants would engage with a novel toy if there were no values or instructions provided. 
So we simply showed infants how to activate the toy robot, but didn't assign any values, and we also didn't tell them that they could play with the remote, providing them with a really ambiguous situation. 
In study two, we incorporated the two values, a positive and a negative. 
And in the last study, we had two experimenters and one remote. 
One experimenter expressed a negative value towards pressing the remote, saying, "Yuck, the toy moved," while the other experimenter expressed a positive value, saying, "Yay, the toy moved." 
And this is how the children reacted to these three different scenarios. 
So in study one, the ambiguous situation, I'm currently watching the child. 
She doesn't seem to be too interested in pressing the remote. 
Once I turned around -- now she's ready to play. 
(Laughter) Currently, I'm not watching the child. 
She's really focused. 
I turn around. 
(Laughter) She wasn't doing anything, right? 
In study two, it's the two remotes, one with the positive and one with the negative value. 
I'm currently observing the child. 
And the orange remote is a negative remote. 
She's just looking around, looking at me, hanging out. 
Then I turn around ... 
(Laughter) That's what she's going for. 
I'm not watching the child. 
He wants the mom to play with it, right? 
Take a safer route. 
I turn around ... 
(Laughter) He wasn't doing anything, either. 
Yeah, he feels awkward. 
(Laughter) Everyone knows that side-eyed glance, right? 
Study three, the two experimenters, one remote. 
The experimenter that reacted negatively towards pressing the remote is watching the child right now. 
She feels a little awkward, doesn't know what to do, relying on Mom. 
And then, she's going to turn around so that the experimenter that expressed a positive response is watching. 
Coast is clear -- now she's ready to play. 
(Laughter) So, as the data suggests, we found that children's button-pressing behavior was indeed influenced by the values and the instructions of the experimenter. 
Because in study one, children did not know what would be positively or negatively evaluated, they tended to take the safest route and wait until I turned my back to press the remote. 
Children in study two chose to press the positive remote significantly more when I was watching, but then once I turned my back, they immediately took the negative remote and started playing with it. 
Importantly, in a control study, where we removed the different values of the remotes -- so we simply said, "Oh, wow" after pressing either of the remotes -- children's button-pressing behavior no longer differed across conditions, suggesting that it was really the values that we gave the two remotes that drove the behavior in the previous study. 
Last but not least, children in study three chose to press a remote significantly more when the experimenter that expressed a positive value was watching, as opposed to the experimenter that had expressed a negative value. 
Not coincidentally, it is also around this age that children begin to show embarrassment in situations that might elicit a negative evaluation, such as looking at themselves in the mirror and noticing a mark on their nose. 
The equivalent of finding spinach in your teeth, for adults. 
(Laughter) So what can we say, based on these findings? 
Besides the fact that babies are actually really, really sneaky. 
(Laughter) From very early on, children, like adults, are sensitive to the values that we place on objects and behaviors. 
And importantly, they use these values to guide their behavior. 
Whether we're aware of it or not, we're constantly communicating values to those around us. 
Now, I don't mean values like "be kind" or "don't steal," although those are certainly values. 
I mean that we are constantly showing others, specifically our children, what is likeable, valuable and praiseworthy, and what is not. 
And a lot of the times, we actually do this without even noticing it. 
Psychologists study behavior to explore the contents of the mind, because our behavior often reflects our beliefs, our values and our desires. 
Here in Atlanta, we all believe the same thing. 
That Coke is better than Pepsi. 
(Applause) Now, this might have to do with the fact that Coke was invented in Atlanta. 
But regardless, this belief is expressed in the fact that most people will chose to drink Coke. 
In the same way, we are communicating a value when we mostly complement girls for their pretty hair or their pretty dress, but boys, for their intelligence. 
Or when we chose to offer candy, as opposed to nutritious food, as a reward for good behavior. 
Adults and children are incredibly effective at picking up values from these subtle behaviors. 
And in turn, this ends up shaping their own behavior. 
The research I have shared with you today suggests that this ability emerges very early in development, before we can even utter a complete sentence or are even potty-trained. 
And it becomes an integral part of who we grow up to be. 
So before I go, I'd like to invite you to contemplate on the values that we broadcast in day-to-day interactions, and how these values might be shaping the behavior of those around you. 
For example, what value is being broadcasted when we spend more time smiling at our phone than smiling with other people? 
Likewise, consider how your own behavior has been shaped by those around you, in ways you might not have considered before. 
To go back to our simple illustration, do you really prefer Coke over Pepsi? 
Or was this preference simply driven by what others around you valued? 
Parents and teachers certainly have the privilege to shape children's behavior. 
But it is important to remember that through the values we convey in simple day-to-day interactions, we all have the power to shape the behavior of those around us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

At a Maryland country fair in 2017, the prize pigs were not looking their best. 
Farmers reported feverish hogs with inflamed eyes and running snouts. 
But while fair officials worried about the pigs, the Maryland department of health was concerned about a group of sick fairgoers. 
Some had pet the pigs, while others had merely been near their barns; but soon, 40 of these attendees would be diagnosed with swine flu. 
More often than not, sick animals don’t infect humans. 
But when they do, these cross-species infections, or viral host jumps, have the potential to produce deadly epidemics. 
So how can pathogens from one species infect another, and what makes host jumps so dangerous? 
Viruses are a type of organic parasite infecting nearly all forms of life. 
To survive and reproduce, they must move through three stages: contact with a susceptible host, infection and replication, and transmission to other individuals. 
As an example, let’s look at human influenza. 
First, the flu virus encounters a new host and makes its way into their respiratory tract. 
This isn’t so difficult, but to survive in this new body, the virus must mount a successful infection before it’s caught and broken down by an immune response. 
To accomplish this task, viruses have evolved specific interactions with their host species. 
Human flu viruses are covered in proteins adapted to bind with matching receptors on human respiratory cells. 
Once inside a cell, the virus employs additional adaptations to hijack the host cell’s reproductive machinery and replicate its own genetic material. 
Now the virus only needs to suppress or evade the host’s immune system long enough to replicate to sufficient levels and infect more cells. 
At this point, the flu can be passed on to its next victim via any transmission of infected bodily fluid. 
However, this simple sneeze also brings the virus in contact with pets, plants, or even your lunch. 
Viruses are constantly encountering new species and attempting to infect them. 
More often than not, this ends in failure. 
In most cases, the genetic dissimilarity between the two hosts is too great. 
For a virus adapted to infect humans, a lettuce cell would be a foreign and inhospitable landscape. 
But there are a staggering number of viruses circulating in the environment, all with the potential to encounter new hosts. 
And because viruses rapidly reproduce by the millions, they can quickly develop random mutations. 
Most mutations will have no effect, or even prove detrimental; but a small proportion may enable the pathogen to better infect a new species. 
The odds of winning this destructive genetic lottery increase over time, or if the new species is closely related to the virus’ usual host. 
For a virus adapted to another mammal, infecting a human might just take a few lucky mutations. 
And a virus adapted to chimpanzees, one of our closest genetic relatives, might barely require any changes at all. 
It takes more than time and genetic similarity for a host jump to be successful. 
Some viruses come equipped to easily infect a new host’s cells, but are then unable to evade an immune response. 
Others might have a difficult time transmitting to new hosts. 
For example, they might make the host’s blood contagious, but not their saliva. 
However, once a host jump reaches the transmission stage, the virus becomes much more dangerous. 
Now gestating within two hosts, the pathogen has twice the odds of mutating into a more successful virus. 
And each new host increases the potential for a full-blown epidemic. 
Virologists are constantly looking for mutations that might make viruses such as influenza more likely to jump. 
However, predicting the next potential epidemic is a major challenge. 
There’s a huge diversity of viruses that we’re only just beginning to uncover. 
Researchers are tirelessly studying the biology of these pathogens. 
And by monitoring populations to quickly identify new outbreaks, they can develop vaccines and containment protocols to stop these deadly diseases. 

A long time ago, there lived a Giant, a Selfish Giant, whose stunning garden was the most beautiful in all the land. 
One evening, this Giant came home and found all these children playing in his garden, and he became enraged. 
"My own garden is my own garden!" 
the Giant said. 
And he built this high wall around it. 
The author Oscar Wilde wrote the story of "The Selfish Giant" in 1888. 
Almost a hundred years later, that Giant moved into my Brooklyn childhood and never left. 
I was raised in a religious family, and I grew up reading both the Bible and the Quran. 
The hours of reading, both religious and recreational, far outnumbered the hours of television-watching. 
Now, on any given day, you could find my siblings and I curled up in some part of our apartment reading, sometimes unhappily, because on summer days in New York City, the fire hydrant blasted, and to our immense jealousy, we could hear our friends down there playing in the gushing water, their absolute joy making its way up through our open windows. 
But I learned that the deeper I went into my books, the more time I took with each sentence, the less I heard the noise of the outside world. 
And so, unlike my siblings, who were racing through books, I read slowly -- very, very slowly. 
I was that child with her finger running beneath the words, until I was untaught to do this; told big kids don't use their fingers. 
In third grade, we were made to sit with our hands folded on our desk, unclasping them only to turn the pages, then returning them to that position. 
Our teacher wasn't being cruel. 
It was the 1970s, and her goal was to get us reading not just on grade level but far above it. 
And we were always being pushed to read faster. 
But in the quiet of my apartment, outside of my teacher's gaze, I let my finger run beneath those words. 
And that Selfish Giant again told me his story, how he had felt betrayed by the kids sneaking into his garden, how he had built this high wall, and it did keep the children out, but a grey winter fell over his garden and just stayed and stayed. 
With each rereading, I learned something new about the hard stones of the roads that the kids were forced to play on when they got expelled from the garden, about the gentleness of a small boy that appeared one day, and even about the Giant himself. 
Maybe his words weren't rageful after all. 
Maybe they were a plea for empathy, for understanding. 
"My own garden is my own garden." 
Years later, I would learn of a writer named John Gardner who referred to this as the "fictive dream," or the "dream of fiction," and I would realize that this was where I was inside that book, spending time with the characters and the world that the author had created and invited me into. 
As a child, I knew that stories were meant to be savored, that stories wanted to be slow, and that some author had spent months, maybe years, writing them. 
And my job as the reader -- especially as the reader who wanted to one day become a writer -- was to respect that narrative. 
Long before there was cable or the internet or even the telephone, there were people sharing ideas and information and memory through story. 
It's one of our earliest forms of connective technology. 
It was the story of something better down the Nile that sent the Egyptians moving along it, the story of a better way to preserve the dead that brought King Tut's remains into the 21st century. 
And more than two million years ago, when the first humans began making tools from stone, someone must have said, "What if?" 
And someone else remembered the story. 
And whether they told it through words or gestures or drawings, it was passed down; remembered: hit a hammer and hear its story. 
The world is getting noisier. 
We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. 
We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. 
As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. 
But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. 
Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. 
So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. 
My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored. 
My love for looking deeply and closely at the world, for putting my whole self into it, and by doing so, seeing the many, many possibilities of a narrative, turned out to be a gift, because taking my sweet time taught me everything I needed to know about writing. 
And writing taught me everything I needed to know about creating worlds where people could be seen and heard, where their experiences could be legitimized, and where my story, read or heard by another person, inspired something in them that became a connection between us, a conversation. 
And isn't that what this is all about -- finding a way, at the end of the day, to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we've changed it before we leave? 
Stone to hammer, man to mummy, idea to story -- and all of it, remembered. 
Sometimes we read to understand the future. 
Sometimes we read to understand the past. 
We read to get lost, to forget the hard times we're living in, and we read to remember those who came before us, who lived through something harder. 
I write for those same reasons. 
Before coming to Brooklyn, my family lived in Greenville, South Carolina, in a segregated neighborhood called Nicholtown. 
All of us there were the descendants of a people who had not been allowed to learn to read or write. 
Imagine that: the danger of understanding how letters form words, the danger of words themselves, the danger of a literate people and their stories. 
But against this backdrop of being threatened with death for holding onto a narrative, our stories didn't die, because there is yet another story beneath that one. 
And this is how it has always worked. 
For as long as we've been communicating, there's been the layering to the narrative, the stories beneath the stories and the ones beneath those. 
This is how story has and will continue to survive. 
As I began to connect the dots that connected the way I learned to write and the way I learned to read to an almost silenced people, I realized that my story was bigger and older and deeper than I would ever be. 
And because of that, it will continue. 
Among these almost-silenced people there were the ones who never learned to read. 
Their descendants, now generations out of enslavement, if well-off enough, had gone on to college, grad school, beyond. 
Some, like my grandmother and my siblings, seemed to be born reading, as though history stepped out of their way. 
Some, like my mother, hitched onto the Great Migration wagon -- which was not actually a wagon -- and kissed the South goodbye. 
But here is the story within that story: those who left and those who stayed carried with them the history of a narrative, knew deeply that writing it down wasn't the only way they could hold on to it, knew they could sit on their porches or their stoops at the end of a long day and spin a slow tale for their children. 
They knew they could sing their stories through the thick heat of picking cotton and harvesting tobacco, knew they could preach their stories and sew them into quilts, turn the most painful ones into something laughable, and through that laughter, exhale the history a country that tried again and again and again to steal their bodies, their spirit and their story. 
So as a child, I learned to imagine an invisible finger taking me from word to word, from sentence to sentence, from ignorance to understanding. 
So as technology continues to speed ahead, I continue to read slowly, knowing that I am respecting the author's work and the story's lasting power. 
And I read slowly to drown out the noise and remember those who came before me, who were probably the first people who finally learned to control fire and circled their new power of flame and light and heat. 
And I read slowly to remember the Selfish Giant, how he finally tore that wall down and let the children run free through his garden. 
And I read slowly to pay homage to my ancestors, who were not allowed to read at all. 
They, too, must have circled fires, speaking softly of their dreams, their hopes, their futures. 
Each time we read, write or tell a story, we step inside their circle, and it remains unbroken. 
And the power of story lives on. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Noor Inayat Khan was in the midst of a desperate escape. 
She had been imprisoned for her activities as an Allied spy, but with the help of a screwdriver and two other prisoners, she was back under the Parisian stars. 
As she began to run, her thoughts leapt to the whirlwind of events that had brought her here… Born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian Muslim father and an American mother, Noor was raised in a profoundly peaceful home. 
Her parents were Sufi pacifists, who put their faith in the power of music and compassion. 
They moved to Paris, where Noor studied child psychology and published children’s books. 
But all this changed with the advent of the Second World War. 
In May 1940, with the German army ready to occupy Paris, Noor and her brother were faced with a difficult choice. 
As pacifists, they believed that all disputes should be settled non-violently. 
But witnessing the devastation across Europe, they decided that standing on the sidelines was not an option. 
Traveling to England, Noor volunteered for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and trained as a radio operator. 
She immersed herself in wireless operations and Morse code– unaware that she was being monitored by a secret organization. 
The British Special Operations Executive was established to sabotage the Germans in Nazi-occupied countries. 
As a trained radio operator who knew Paris well and spoke fluent French, Noor was an attractive recruit. 
In her interview, she was warned that wireless operation was some of the most dangerous work in the intelligence field. 
Operators had to lug a conspicuous transmitter through enemy territory, and the clandestine agency couldn’t protect her if she was caught. 
Noor accepted her assignment immediately. 
While she was determined to take her pacifist principles as far as possible, Noor had to learn the art of espionage. 
She learned how to contact intelligence networks, pick a lock, resist interrogation and fire a gun. 
In June 1943 she landed in Angers, south of Paris, and made her way to the city armed with a false passport, a pistol and a few French francs. 
But her network was compromised. 
Within a week of her deployment, all her fellow agents were arrested, and Noor was called home. 
She convinced her supervisors to let her stay– which meant doing the work of six radio operators singlehandedly. 
Over the following months, she tracked and transported supplies to the French resistance, sent reports of Nazi activity back to London and arranged safe passage for allied soldiers. 
This work was essential to building the French resistance and Allied intelligence networks– and, ultimately, ending the war. 
Protected only by her quick thinking and charisma, she frequently talked her way out of questioning. 
When the Gestapo searched her on the train, she gave them a casual tour of her “film projector.” When an officer spotted her hanging her aerial, she chatted about her passion for listening to music on the radio– and charmed him into helping her set up the cable. 
In her entire four month tenure, her sharp wits and stealth never failed her. 
But her charm had inspired lethal jealousy. 
In October 1943, the sister of a colleague, in love with an agent that loved Noor, sold her address to the Gestapo. 
Noor refused to give away any information, focusing instead on her escape. 
Secreting a screwdriver away from the guards, they were able to loosen a skylight and slip out into the night. 
But just as the prisoners began to run for their lives, an air raid siren alerted her captors. 
Noor was caught once again and sent to a German prison. 
Then, on to Dachau concentration camp. 
Despite being tortured, deprived and isolated, Noor gave nothing away. 
In the moments before her execution she is thought to have shouted “Liberté!” Since her heroic sacrifice, Noor has been honoured as a hero who waged secret battles behind enemy lines– paving the way for freedom without ever taking a life. 

It's been about a decade since the last financial crisis, yet this industry has never been bigger. 
Legislation that was meant to better regulate its largest players has hurt its smaller ones, resulting in most of the industry's assets to be controlled by the top one percent. 
They've become too big to fail. 
I'm not referring to big banks, but the world of Big Agriculture. 
As a public health practitioner who has worked with small-scale farmers in Rwanda and now as a small food business owner who sits at the intersection between our consumers and producers, I've been exposed to one of the most ecologically and economically intensive industries in the world, and throughout my work, I've witnessed a chilling irony. 
Our farmers, who feed our communities, cannot afford the very foods they grow. 
Today, a handful of corporations continue to consolidate the entire food supply chain, from the intellectual property of seeds to produce and livestock all the way to the financial institutions who lend to these farmers. 
And the recent results have been rising bankruptcies for family farms and little control for those who are just trying to survive in the industry. 
Left unchecked, we will head into another economic collapse, one very similar to the farm crisis of the 1980s, when commodity market prices crashed, interest rates doubled, and many farmers lost everything. 
Fortunately, there's a very simple, three-part solution you can be part of right now to help us transform our food industry from the bottom up. 
Step one: shop at your local farmers markets. 
Buying from your local market and subscribing to a community-supported agricultural produce box, better known as a CSA, may be the single greatest purchasing decision you can make as a consumer today. 
Last year, American farmers made the least they have in almost three decades, because they now own fewer parts of the supply chain than ever before. 
Under exclusive contracts with Big Ag and big box stores, farmers are not offered a fair price for their goods. 
In fact, the average farmer in America makes less than 15 cents of every dollar on a product that you purchase at a store. 
On the other hand, farmers who sell their goods at a farmers market take home closer to 90 cents of every dollar. 
But beyond taking home a larger share, farmers use markets as an opportunity to cultivate the next generation of agriculturalists who shepherd our farmlands and our pastures. 
In our fight against climate change, we need them now more than ever to promote and preserve diverse land use. 
When multigenerational farms are lost to Big Ag consolidation, our communities suffer in countless ways. 
Rural America has now jumped above the national average in violent crime. 
Three out four farmworkers surveyed have been directly impacted by our opioid epidemic. 
Now oftentimes disguised as accidents, farmer suicide is now on the rise. 
Step two: shop at your local farmers markets. 
(Laughter) Produce from a large retail store is harvested before it's ripe to travel more than a thousand miles before it ultimately sits on your shelf roughly two weeks later. 
Alternatively, because most farmers markets have proximity and production requirements, farmers travel less than 50 miles to offer you local produce with minimal packaging waste. 
With the advent of online grocers and trending meal kits, consumers are increasingly disconnected with their farmers and the economics of food production. 
Since the rise of the smartphone revolution, direct-to-consumer goods have stagnated. 
While local and sustainable foods have been trending for almost a decade, terms like "healthy" and "natural" have no legal framework in the United States. 
Your best bet for fresh, nutrient-rich foods without the marketing jargon? 
Go to your farmers market. 
Buying local is not a new idea, but turning it into a habit in today's world still is. 
If we want to avoid the high costs of cheap food, protect our environment, rebuild our communities and save our farmers -- literally -- we're going to need to vote with our food purchases. 
The success of our food systems is directly attached to us. 
If we want to break up Big Ag's hold on our food supply chain, then we're going to need to connect with our farmers. 
We're going to need to rebuild relationships with the hands that feed us three times a day. 
Plus, two more for snacks. 
Come on. 
With a government online database of more than 8,600 farmers markets across the country, you can easily find the nearest one to you. 
Just think of yourself as an investor in food, where your purchasing power helps create a more equitable society for everyone. 
Oh! 
Almost forgot step three, which may surprise you: shop at your local farmers markets. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Twenty years ago, my family introduced a system called "Friday Democracy Meetings." 
Every Friday at 7pm, my family came together for an official meeting to discuss the current family affairs. 
These meetings were facilitated by one of my parents, and we even had a notetaker. 
These meetings had two rules. 
First, you are allowed to speak open and freely. 
Us kids were allowed to criticize our parents without that being considered disrespectful or rude. 
Second rule was the Chatham House rule, meaning whatever is said in the meeting stays in the meeting. 
(Laughter) The topics which were discussed in these meetings varied from one week to another. 
One week, we'd talk about what food we wanted to eat, what time us kids should go to bed and how to improve things as a family, while another meeting discussed pretty much events that happened at school and how to solve disputes between siblings, by which I mean real fights. 
At the end of each meeting, we'd reach decisions and agreements that would last at least until the next meeting. 
So you could say I was raised as a politician. 
By the age of six or seven, I mastered politics. 
I was negotiating, compromising, building alliances with other political actors. 
(Laughter) And I even once tried to jeopardize the political process. 
(Laughter) These meetings sound very peaceful, civil and democratic, right? 
But that was not always the case. 
Because of this open, free space to talk, discuss and criticize, things sometimes got really heated. 
One meeting went really bad for me. 
I was about 10 years old at that time, and I'd done something really horrible at school, which I'm not going to share today -- (Laughter) but my brother decided to bring it up in the meeting. 
I could not defend myself, so I decided to withdraw from the meeting and boycott the whole system. 
I literally wrote an official letter and handed it to my dad, announcing that I am boycotting. 
(Laughter) I thought that if I stopped attending these meetings anymore, the system would collapse, (Laughter) but my family continued with the meetings, and they often made decisions that I disliked. 
But I could not challenge these decisions, because I was not attending the meetings, and thus had no right to go against it. 
Ironically, when I turned about 13 years old, I ended up attending one of these meetings again, after I boycotted them for a long time. 
Because there was an issue that was affecting me only, and no other family member was bringing it up. 
The problem was that after each dinner, I was always the only one who was asked to wash the dishes, while my brothers didn't have to do anything about it. 
I felt this was unjust, unfair and discriminatory, so I wanted to discuss it in the meeting. 
As you know, the idea that it's a woman or a girl's role to do household work is a rule that has been carried out by many societies for so long, so in order for a 13-year-old me to challenge it, I needed a platform. 
In the meeting, my brothers argued that none of the other boys we knew were washing the dishes, so why should our family be any different? 
But my parents agreed with me and decided that my brothers should assist me. 
However, they could not force them, so the problem continued. 
Seeing no solution to my problem, I decided to attend another meeting and propose a new system that would be fair to everyone. 
So I suggested instead of one person washing all the dishes used by all the family members, each family member should wash their own dishes. 
And as a gesture of good faith, I said I'd wash the pots as well. 
This way, my brothers could no longer argue that it wasn't within their responsibility as boys or men to wash the dishes and clean after the family, because the system I proposed was about every member of the family cleaning after themselves and taking care of themselves. 
Everyone agreed to my proposal, and for years, that was our washing-the-dishes system. 
What I just shared with you is a family story, but it's pure politics. 
Every part of politics includes decision-making, and ideally, the process of decision-making should include people from different backgrounds, interests, opinions, gender, beliefs, race, ethnicity, age, and so on. 
And they should all have an equal opportunity to contribute to the decision-making process and influence the decisions that will affect their lives directly or indirectly. 
As such, I find it difficult to understand when I hear young people saying, "I'm too young to engage in politics or to even hold a political opinion." 
Similarly, when I hear some women saying, "Politics is a dirty world I don't want to engage with," I'm worried that the idea of politics and political engagement has become so polarized in many parts of the world that ordinary people feel, in order for them to participate in politics, they need to be outspoken activists, and that is not true. 
I want to ask these young people, women and ordinary people in general: Can you really afford not to be interested or not to participate in politics? 
Politics is not only activism. 
It's awareness, it's keeping ourselves informed, it's caring for the facts. 
When it's possible, it's casting a vote. 
Politics is the tool through which we structure ourselves as groups and societies. 
Politics governs every aspect of life, and by not participating in it, you're literally allowing other people to decide on what you can eat, wear, if you can have access to health care, free education, how much tax you pay, when you can retire, what is your pension. 
Other people are also deciding on whether your race and ethnicity is enough to consider you a criminal, or if your religion and nationality is enough to put you on a terrorist list. 
And if you still think you are a strong, independent human being unaffected by politics, then think twice. 
I am speaking to you as a young woman from Libya, a country that is in the middle of a civil war. 
After more than 40 years of authoritarian rule, it's not a place where political engagement by women and young people is possible, nor encouraged. 
Almost all political dialogues that took place in the past few years, even those gathered by foreign powers, has been with only middle-aged men in the room. 
But in places with a broken political system like Libya, or in seemingly functioning places, including international organizations, the systems we have nowadays for political decision-making are not from the people for the people, but they have been established by the few for the few. 
And these few have been historically almost exclusively men, and they've produced laws, policies, mechanisms for political participation that are based on the opinions, beliefs, worldviews, dreams, aspirations of this one group of people, while everyone else was kept out. 
After all, we've all heard some version of this sentence: "What does a woman, let alone a young person, who is brown, understand about politics?" 
When you're young -- and in many parts of the world, a woman -- you often hear experienced politicians say, "But you lack political experience." 
And when I hear that, I wonder what sort of experience are they referring to? 
The experience of corrupted political systems? 
Or of waging wars? 
Or are they referring to the experience of putting the interests of economic profits before those of the environment? 
Because if this is political experience, then yes -- (Applause) we, as women and young people, have no political experience at all. 
Now, politicians might not be the only ones to blame, because ordinary people, and many young people as well, don't care about politics. 
And even those who care don't know how to participate. 
This must change, and here is my proposal. 
We need to teach people at an early age about decision-making and how to be part of it. 
Every family is its own mini political system that is usually not democratic, because parents make decisions that affect all members of the family, while the kids have very little to say. 
Similarly, politicians make decisions that affect the whole nation, while the people have very little say in them. 
We need to change this, and in order to achieve this change systematically, we need to teach people that political, national and global affairs are as relevant to them as personal and family affairs. 
So if we want to achieve this, my proposal and advice is, try out the Family Democracy Meeting system. 
Because that will enable your kids to exercise their agency and decision-making from a very early age. 
Politics is about having conversations, including difficult conversations, that lead to decisions. 
And in order to have a conversation, you need to participate, not sign off like I did when I was a kid and then learn the lesson the hard way and have to go back again. 
If you include your kids in family conversations, they will grow up and know how to participate in political conversations. 
And most importantly, most importantly, they will help others engage. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On the 17th of October, 2009, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives did something unusual. 
He held his cabinet meeting underwater. 
He literally took his ministers scuba diving, as it were, to warn the world that his country could drown unless we control global warming. 
Now I don't know whether he got his message across to the world or not, but he certainly caught mine. 
I saw a political stunt. 
You see, I'm a politician, and I notice these things. 
And let's be honest, the Maldives are distant from where I come from -- my country is Bhutan -- so I didn't lose any sleep over their impending fate. 
Barely two months later, I saw another political stunt. 
This time, the prime minister of Nepal, he held his cabinet meeting on Mount Everest. 
He took all his ministers all the way up to the base camp of Everest to warn the world that the Himalayan glaciers were melting. 
Now did that worry me? 
You bet it did. 
I live in the Himalayas. 
But did I lose any sleep over his message? 
No. 
I wasn't ready to let a political stunt interfere with my beauty sleep. 
(Laughter) Now fast-forward 10 years. 
In February this year, I saw this report. 
This here report basically concludes that one-third of the ice on the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountains could melt by the end of the century. 
But that's only if, if we are able to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade over preindustrial levels. 
Otherwise, if we can't, the glaciers would melt much faster. 
1.5 degrees Celsius. "No way," I thought. 
Even the Paris Agreement's ambitious targets aimed to limit global warming to two degrees centigrade. 
1.5 degrees centigrade is what they call the best-case scenario. 
"Now this can't be true," I thought. 
The Hindu Kush Himalaya region is the world's third-largest repository of ice, after the North and South Poles. 
That's why we are also called the "Third Pole." 
There's a lot of ice in the region. 
And yes, the glaciers, they are melting. 
We know that. 
I have been to those in my country. 
I've seen them, and yes, they are melting. 
They are vulnerable. 
"But they can't be that vulnerable," I remember thinking. 
But what if they are? 
What if our glaciers melt much more quickly than I anticipate? 
What if our glaciers are much more vulnerable than previously thought? 
And what if, as a result, the glacial lakes -- now these are lakes that form when glaciers melt -- what if those lakes burst under the weight of additional water? 
And what if those floods cascade into other glacial lakes, creating even bigger outbursts? 
That would create unprecedented flash floods in my country. 
That would wreck my country. 
That would wreak havoc in my country. 
That would have the potential to literally destroy our land, our livelihood, our way of life. 
So that report caught my attention in ways that political stunts couldn't. 
It was put together by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, or ICIMOD, which is based in Nepal. 
Scientists and experts have studied our glaciers for decades, and their report kept me awake at night, agonizing about the bad news and what it meant for my country and my people. 
So after several sleepless nights, I went to Nepal to visit ICIMOD. 
I found a team of highly competent and dedicated scientists there, and here's what they told me. 
Number one: the Hindu Kush Himalaya glaciers have been melting for some time now. 
Take that glacier, for instance. 
It's on Mount Everest. 
As you can see, this once massive glacier has already lost much of its ice. 
Number two: the glaciers are now melting much more quickly -- so quickly, in fact, that at just 1.5 degrees centigrade of global warming, one-third of the glaciers would melt. 
At two degrees centigrade of global warming, half the glaciers would disappear. 
And if current trends were to continue, a full two-thirds of our glaciers would vanish. 
Number three: global warming means that our mountains receive more rain and less snow ... 
and, unlike snowfall, rain melts ice, which just hurts the health of our glaciers. 
Number four: pollution in the region has increased the amount of black carbon that's deposited on our glaciers. 
Black carbon is like soot. 
Black carbon absorbs heat and just accelerates the melting of glaciers. 
To summarize, our glaciers are melting rapidly, and global warming is making them melt much more quickly. 
But what does this mean? 
It means that the 240 million people who live in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region -- in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and my own beloved country, Bhutan -- these people will be directly affected. 
When glaciers melt, when there's more rain and less snow, there will be huge changes in the way water behaves. 
There will be more extremes: more intense rain, more flash floods, more landslides, more glacial lake outburst floods. 
All this will cause unimaginable destruction in a region that already has some of the poorest people on earth. 
But it's not just the people in the immediate region who'll be affected. 
People living downstream will also be hit hard. 
That's because 10 of their major rivers originate in the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountains. 
These rivers provide critical water for agriculture and drinking water to more than 1.6 billion people living downstream. 
That's one in five humans. 
That's why the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountains are also called the "water towers of Asia." 
But when glaciers melt, when monsoons turn severe, those rivers will obviously flood, so there will be deluges when water is not required and droughts will be very common, when water is desperately required. 
In short, Asia's water tower will be broken, and that will be disastrous for one-fifth of humanity. 
Should the rest of the world care? 
Should you, for instance, care? 
Remember, I didn't care when I heard that the Maldives could disappear underwater. 
And that is the crux of the problem, isn't it? 
We don't care. 
We don't care until we are personally affected. 
I mean, we know. We know climate change is real. 
We know that we face drastic and dramatic change. 
We know that it is coming fast. 
Yet most of us act as if everything were normal. 
So we must care, all of us, and if you can't care for those who are affected by the melting of glaciers, you should at least care for yourself. 
That's because the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountains -- the entire region is like the pulse of the planet. 
If the region falls sick, the entire planet will eventually suffer. 
And right now, with our glaciers melting rapidly, the region is not just sick -- it is crying out for help. 
And how will it affect the rest of the world? 
One obvious scenario is the potential destabilization caused by tens of millions of climate refugees, who'll be forced to move because they have no or little water, or because their livelihoods have been destroyed by the melting of glaciers. 
Another scenario we can't take lightly is the potential of conflict over water and the political destabilization in a region that has three nuclear powers: China, India, Pakistan. 
I believe that the situation in our region is grave enough to warrant the creation of a new intergovernmental agency. 
So as a native from that part of the world, I want to propose here, today, the establishment of the Third Pole Council, a high-level, intergovernmental organization tasked with the singular responsibility of protecting the world's third-largest repository of ice. 
A Third Pole Council would consist of all eight countries located in the region as member countries, as equal member countries, and could also include representative organizations and other countries who have vested interests in the region as non-voting members. 
But the big idea is to get all stakeholders together to work together. 
To work together to monitor the health of the glaciers; to work together to shape and implement policies to protect our glaciers, and, by extension, to protect the billions of people who depend on our glaciers. 
We have to work together, because thinking globally, acting locally ... 
does not work. 
We've tried that in Bhutan. 
We've made immense sacrifices to act locally ... 
and while individual localized efforts will continue to be important, they cannot stand up to the onslaught of climate change. 
To stand up to climate change, we must work together. 
We must think globally and act regionally. 
Our entire region must come together, to work together, to fight climate change together, to make our voices heard together. 
And that includes India and China. 
They must step up their game. 
They must take the ownership of the fight to protect our glaciers. 
And for that, these two countries, these two powerful giants, must reduce their own greenhouse gases, control their pollution, and lead the fight. 
Lead the global fight against climate change. 
And all that with a renewed sense of urgency. 
Only then -- and that, too, only maybe -- will our region and other regions that depend on our glaciers have any chance to avoid major catastrophes. 
Time is running out. 
We must act together, now. 
Otherwise, the next time Nepal's cabinet meets on Mount Everest, that spectacular backdrop ... 
may look quite different. 
And if that happens, if our glaciers melt, rising sea levels could well drown the Maldives. 
And while they can hold their cabinet meetings underwater to send an SOS to the world, their country can keep existing only if their islands keep existing. 
The Maldives are still distant, away. 
Their islands are distant from where I live. 
But now, I pay close attention to what happens out there. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Just over a mile away from here, in Edinburgh's Old Town, is Panmure House. 
Panmure House was the home of the world-renowned Scottish economist Adam Smith. 
In his important work "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith argued, amongst many other things, that the measurement of a country's wealth was not just its gold and silver reserves. 
It was the totality of the country's production and commerce. 
I guess it was one of the earliest descriptions of what we now know today as gross domestic product, GDP. 
Now, in the years since, of course, that measurement of production and commerce, GDP, has become ever more important, to the point that today -- and I don't believe this is what Adam Smith would have intended -- that it is often seen as the most important measurement of a country's overall success. 
And my argument today is that it is time for that to change. 
You know, what we choose to measure as a country matters. 
It really matters, because it drives political focus, it drives public activity. 
And against that context, I think the limitations of GDP as a measurement of a country's success are all too obvious. 
You know, GDP measures the output of all of our work, but it says nothing about the nature of that work, about whether that work is worthwhile or fulfilling. 
It puts a value, for example, on illegal drug consumption, but not on unpaid care. 
It values activity in the short term that boosts the economy, even if that activity is hugely damaging to the sustainability of our planet in the longer term. 
And we reflect on the past decade of political and economic upheaval, of growing inequalities, and when we look ahead to the challenges of the climate emergency, increasing automation, an aging population, then I think the argument for the case for a much broader definition of what it means to be successful as a country, as a society, is compelling, and increasingly so. 
And that is why Scotland, in 2018, took the lead, took the initiative in establishing a new network called the Wellbeing Economy Governments group, bringing together as founding members the countries of Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand, for obvious reasons. 
We're sometimes called the SIN countries, although our focus is very much on the common good. 
And the purpose of this group is to challenge that focus on the narrow measurement of GDP. 
To say that, yes, economic growth matters -- it is important -- but it is not all that is important. 
And growth in GDP should not be pursued at any or all cost. 
In fact, the argument of that group is that the goal, the objective of economic policy should be collective well-being: how happy and healthy a population is, not just how wealthy a population is. 
And I'll touch on the policy implications of that in a moment. 
But I think, particularly in the world we live in today, it has a deeper resonance. 
You know, when we focus on well-being, we start a conversation that provokes profound and fundamental questions. 
What really matters to us in our lives? 
What do we value in the communities we live in? 
What kind of country, what kind of society, do we really want to be? 
And when we engage people in those questions, in finding the answers to those questions, then I believe that we have a much better chance of addressing the alienation and disaffection from politics that is so prevalent in so many countries across the developed world today. 
In policy terms, this journey for Scotland started back in 2007, when we published what we call our National Performance Framework, looking at the range of indicators that we measure ourselves against. 
And those indicators are as varied as income inequality, the happiness of children, access to green spaces, access to housing. 
None of these are captured in GDP statistics, but they are all fundamental to a healthy and a happy society. 
(Applause) And that broader approach is at the heart of our economic strategy, where we give equal importance to tackling inequality as we do to economic competitiveness. 
It drives our commitment to fair work, making sure that work is fulfilling and well-paid. 
It's behind our decision to establish a Just Transition Commission to guide our path to a carbon zero economy. 
We know from economic transformations of the past that if we're not careful, there are more losers than winners. 
And as we face up to the challenges of climate change and automation, we must not make those mistakes again. 
The work we're doing here in Scotland is, I think, significant, but we have much, much to learn from other countries. 
I mentioned, a moment ago, our partner nations in the Wellbeing network: Iceland and New Zealand. 
It's worth noting, and I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is relevant or not, that all three of these countries are currently led by women. 
(Applause) They, too, are doing great work. 
New Zealand, in 2019, publishing its first Wellbeing Budget, with mental health at its heart; Iceland leading the way on equal pay, childcare and paternity rights -- not policies that we immediately think of when we talk about creating a wealthy economy, but policies that are fundamental to a healthy economy and a happy society. 
I started with Adam Smith and "The Wealth of Nations." 
In Adam Smith's earlier work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which I think is just as important, he made the observation that the value of any government is judged in proportion to the extent that it makes its people happy. 
I think that is a good founding principle for any group of countries focused on promoting well-being. 
None of us have all of the answers, not even Scotland, the birthplace of Adam Smith. 
But in the world we live in today, with growing divides and inequalities, with disaffection and alienation, it is more important than ever that we ask and find the answers to those questions and promote a vision of society that has well-being, not just wealth, at its very heart. 
(Applause) You are right now in the beautiful, sunny capital city ... 
(Laughter) of the country that led the world in the Enlightenment, the country that helped lead the world into the industrial age, the country that right now is helping to lead the world into the low carbon age. 
I want, and I'm determined, that Scotland will also be the country that helps change the focus of countries and governments across the world to put well-being at the heart of everything that we do. 
I think we owe that to this generation. 
I certainly believe we owe that to the next generation and all those that come after us. 
And if we do that, led here from the country of the Enlightenment, then I think we create a better, healthier, fairer and happier society here at home. 
And we play our part in Scotland in building a fairer, happier world as well. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Every other night in Japan, I step out of my apartment, I climb up a hill for 15 minutes, and then I head into my local health club, where three ping-pong tables are set up in a studio. 
And space is limited, so at every table, one pair of players practices forehands, another practices backhands, and every now and then, the balls collide in midair and everybody says, "Wow!" 
Then, choosing lots, we select partners and play doubles. 
But I honestly couldn't tell you who's won, because we change partners every five minutes. 
And everybody is trying really hard to win points, but nobody is keeping track of who is winning games. 
And after an hour or so of furious exertion, I can honestly tell you that not knowing who has won feels like the ultimate victory. 
In Japan, it's been said, they've created a competitive spirit without competition. 
Now, all of you know that geopolitics is best followed by watching ping-pong. 
(Laughter) The two strongest powers in the world were fiercest enemies until, in 1972, an American ping-pong team was allowed to visit Communist China. 
And as soon as the former adversaries were gathered around some small green tables, each of them could claim a victory, and the whole world could breathe more easily. 
China's leader, Mao Zedong, wrote a whole manual on ping-pong, and he called the sport "a spiritual nuclear weapon." 
And it's been said that the only honorary lifelong member of the US Table Tennis Association is the then-President Richard Nixon, who helped to engineer this win-win situation through ping-pong diplomacy. 
But long before that, really, the history of the modern world was best told through the bouncing white ball. 
"Ping-pong" sounds like a cousin of "sing-song," like something Eastern, but actually, it's believed that it was invented by high-class Brits during Victorian times, who started hitting wine corks over walls of books after dinner. 
(Laughter) No exaggeration. 
(Laughter) And by the end of World War I, the sport was dominated by players from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire: eight out of nine early world championships were claimed by Hungary. 
And Eastern Europeans grew so adept at hitting back everything that was hit at them that they almost brought the whole sport to a standstill. 
In one championship match in Prague in 1936, the first point is said to have lasted two hours and 12 minutes. 
The first point! 
Longer than a "Mad Max" movie. 
And according to one of the players, the umpire had to retire with a sore neck before the point was concluded. 
(Laughter) That player started hitting the ball back with his left hand and dictating chess moves between shots. 
(Laughter) Many in the audience started, of course, filing out, as that single point lasted maybe 12,000 strokes. 
And an emergency meeting of the International Table Tennis Association had to be held then and there, and soon the rules were changed so that no game could last longer than 20 minutes. 
(Laughter) Sixteen years later, Japan entered the picture, when a little-known watchmaker called Hiroji Satoh showed up at the world championships in Bombay in 1952. 
And Satoh was not very big, he wasn't highly rated, he was wearing spectacles, but he was armed with a paddle that was not pimpled, as other paddles were, but covered by a thick spongy rubber foam. 
And thanks to this silencing secret weapon, the little-known Satoh won a gold medal. 
One million people came out into the streets of Tokyo to greet him upon his return, and really, Japan's postwar resurgence was set into motion. 
What I learned, though, at my regular games in Japan, is more what could be called the inner sport of global domination, sometimes known as life. 
We never play singles in our club, only doubles, and because, as I say, we change partners every five minutes, if you do happen to lose, you're very likely to win six minutes later. 
We also play best-of-two sets, so often, there's no loser at all. 
Ping-pong diplomacy. 
And I always remember that as a boy growing up in England, I was taught that the point of a game was to win. 
But in Japan, I'm encouraged to believe that, really, the point of a game is to make as many people as possible around you feel that they are winners. 
So you're not careening up and down as an individual might, but you're part of a regular, steady chorus. 
The most skillful players in our club deploy their skills to turn a 9-1 lead for their team into a 9-9 game in which everybody is intensely involved. 
And my friend who hits these high, looping lobs that smaller players flail at and miss -- well, he wins a lot of points, but I think he's thought of as a loser. 
In Japan, a game of ping-pong is really like an act of love. 
You're learning how to play with somebody, rather than against her. 
And I'll confess, at first, this seemed to me to take all the fun out of the sport. 
I couldn't exult after a tremendous upset victory against our strongest players, because six minutes later, with a new partner, I was falling behind again. 
On the other hand, I never felt disconsolate. 
And when I flew away from Japan and started playing singles again with my English archrival, I noticed that after every defeat, I was really brokenhearted. 
But after every victory, I couldn't sleep either, because I knew there was only one way to go, and that was down. 
Now, if I were trying to do business in Japan, this would lead to endless frustration. 
In Japan, unlike elsewhere, if the score is still level after four hours, a baseball game ends in a tie, and because the league standings are based on winning percentage, a team with quite a few ties can finish ahead of a team with more victories. 
One of the first times an American was ever brought over to Japan to lead a professional Japanese baseball team, Bobby Valentine, in 1995, he took this really mediocre squad, he lead them to a stunning second-place finish, and he was instantly fired. 
Why? 
"Well," said the team spokesman, "because of his emphasis on winning." 
(Laughter) Official Japan can feel quite a lot like that point that was said to last two hours and 12 minutes, and playing not to lose can take all the imagination, the daring, the excitement, out of things. 
At the same time, playing ping-pong in Japan reminds me why choirs regularly enjoy more fun than soloists. 
In a choir, your only job is to play your small part perfectly, to hit your notes with feeling, and by so doing, to help to create a beautiful harmony that's much greater than the sum of its parts. 
Yes, every choir does need a conductor, but I think a choir releases you from a child's simple sense of either-ors. 
You come to see that the opposite of winning isn't losing -- it's failing to see the larger picture. 
As my life goes on, I'm really startled to see that no event can properly be assessed for years after it has unfolded. 
I once lost everything I owned in the world, every last thing, in a wildfire. 
But in time, I came to see that it was that seeming loss that allowed me to live on the earth more gently, to write without notes, and actually, to move to Japan and the inner health club known as the ping-pong table. 
Conversely, I once stumbled into the perfect job, and I came to see that seeming happiness can stand in the way of true joy even more than misery does. 
Playing doubles in Japan really relieves me of all my anxiety, and at the end of an evening, I notice everybody is filing out in a more or less equal state of delight. 
I'm reminded every night that not getting ahead isn't the same thing as falling behind any more than not being lively is the same thing as being dead. 
And I've come to understand why it is that Chinese universities are said to offer degrees in ping-pong, and why researchers have found that ping-pong can actually help a little with mild mental disorders and even autism. 
But as I watch the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, I'm going to be keenly aware that it won't be possible to tell who's won or who's lost for a very long time. 
You remember that point I mentioned that was said to last for two hours and 12 minutes? 
Well, one of the players from that game ended up, six years later, in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. 
But he walked out alive. 
Why? 
Simply because a guard in the gas chamber recognized him from his ping-pong playing days. 
Had he been the winner of that epic match? 
It hardly mattered. 
As you recall, many people had filed out before even the first point was concluded. 
The only thing that saved him was the fact that he took part. 
The best way to win any game, Japan tells me every other night, is never, never to think about the score. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Billions of years ago on the young planet Earth simple organic compounds assembled into more complex coalitions that could grow and reproduce. 
They were the very first life on Earth, and they gave rise to every one of the billions of species that have inhabited our planet since. 
At the time, Earth was almost completely devoid of what we’d recognize as a suitable environment for living things. 
The young planet had widespread volcanic activity and an atmosphere that created hostile conditions. 
So where on Earth could life begin? 
To begin the search for the cradle of life, it’s important to first understand the basic necessities for any life form. 
Elements and compounds essential to life include hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, phosphates, and ammonia. 
In order for these ingredients to comingle and react with each other, they need a liquid solvent: water. 
And in order to grow and reproduce, all life needs a source of energy. 
Life forms are divided into two camps: autotrophs, like plants, that generate their own energy, and heterotrophs, like animals, that consume other organisms for energy. 
The first life form wouldn’t have had other organisms to consume, of course, so it must have been an autotroph, generating energy either from the sun or from chemical gradients. 
So what locations meet these criteria? 
Places on land or close to the surface of the ocean have the advantage of access to sunlight. 
But at the time when life began, the UV radiation on Earth’s surface was likely too harsh for life to survive there. 
One setting offers protection from this radiation and an alternative energy source: the hydrothermal vents that wind across the ocean floor, covered by kilometers of seawater and bathed in complete darkness. 
A hydrothermal vent is a fissure in the Earth’s crust where seawater seeps into magma chambers and is ejected back out at high temperatures, along with a rich slurry of minerals and simple chemical compounds. 
Energy is particularly concentrated at the steep chemical gradients of hydrothermal vents. 
There’s another line of evidence that points to hydrothermal vents: the Last Universal Common Ancestor of life, or LUCA for short. 
LUCA wasn’t the first life form, but it’s as far back as we can trace. 
Even so, we don’t actually know what LUCA looked like— there’s no LUCA fossil, no modern-day LUCA still around— instead, scientists identified genes that are commonly found in species across all three domains of life that exist today. 
Since these genes are shared across species and domains, they must have been inherited from a common ancestor. 
These shared genes tell us that LUCA lived in a hot, oxygen-free place and harvested energy from a chemical gradient— like the ones at hydrothermal vents. 
There are two kinds of hydrothermal vent: black smokers and white smokers. 
Black smokers release acidic, carbon-dioxide-rich water, heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius and packed with sulphur, iron, copper, and other metals essential to life. 
But scientists now believe that black smokers were too hot for LUCA— so now the top candidates for the cradle of life are white smokers. 
Among the white smokers, a field of hydrothermal vents on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge called Lost City has become the most favored candidate for the cradle of life. 
The seawater expelled here is highly alkaline and lacks carbon dioxide, but is rich in methane and offers more hospitable temperatures. 
Adjacent black smokers may have contributed the carbon dioxide necessary for life to evolve at Lost City, giving it all the components to support the first organisms that radiated into the incredible diversity of life on Earth today. 

I was born in 1993 in the northern part of North Korea, in a town called Hyesan, which is on the border with China. 
I had loving parents and one older sister. 
Before I was even 10 years old, my father was sent to a labor camp for engaging in illegal trading. 
Now, by "illegal trading" -- he was selling clogs, sugar, rice and later copper to feed us. 
In 2007, my sister and I decided to escape. 
She was 16 years old, and I was 13 years old. 
I need you to understand what the word "escape" means in the context of North Korea. 
We were all starving, and hunger means death in North Korea. 
So it was the only option for us. 
I didn't even understand the concept of escape, but I could see the lights from China at night, and I wondered if I go where the light is, I might be able to find a bowl of rice. 
It's not like we had a grand plan or maps. 
We did not know anything about what was going to happen. 
Imagine your apartment building caught fire. 
I mean, what would you do? 
Would you stay there to be burned, or would you jump off out of the window and see what happens? 
That's what we did. 
We jumped out of the house instead of the fire. 
North Korea is unimaginable. 
It's very hard for me when people ask me what it feels like to live there. 
To be honest, I tell you: you can't even imagine it. 
The words in any language can't describe, because it's a totally different planet, as you cannot imagine your life on Mars right now. 
For example, the word "love" has only one meaning: love for the Dear Leader. 
There's no concept of romantic love in North Korea. 
And if you don't know the words, that means you don't understand the concept, and therefore, you don't even realize that concept is even a possibility. 
Let me give you another example. 
Growing up in North Korea, we truly believed that our Dear Leader is an almighty god who can even read my thoughts. 
I was even afraid to think in North Korea. 
We are told that he's starving for us, and he's working tirelessly for us, and my heart just broke for him. 
When I escaped to South Korea, people told me that he was actually a dictator, he had cars, many, many resorts, and he had an ultraluxurious life. 
And then I remember looking at a picture of him, realizing for the first time that he is the largest guy in the picture. 
(Laughter) And it hit me. 
Finally, I realized he wasn't starving. 
But I was never able to see that before, until someone told me that he was fat. 
(Laughter) Really, someone had to teach me that he was fat. 
If you have never practiced critical thinking, then you simply see what you're told to see. 
The biggest question also people ask me is: "Why is there no revolution inside North Korea? 
Are we dumb? 
Why is there no revolution for 70 years of this oppression?" 
And I say: If you don't know you're a slave, if you don't know you're isolated or oppressed, how do you fight to be free? 
I mean, if you know you're isolated, that means you are not isolated. 
Not knowing is the true definition of isolation, and that's why I never knew I was isolated when I was in North Korea. 
I literally thought I was in the center of the universe. 
So here is my idea worth spreading: a lot of people think humans inherently know what is right and wrong, the difference between justice and injustice, what we deserve and we don't deserve. 
I tell them: BS. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Everything, everything must be taught, including compassion. 
If I see someone dying on the street right now, I will do anything to save that person. 
But when I was in North Korea, I saw people dying and dead on the streets. 
I felt nothing. 
Not because I'm a psychopath, but because I never learned the concept of compassion. 
Only, I felt compassion, empathy and sympathy in my heart after I learned the word "compassion" and the concept, and I feel them now. 
Now I live in the United States as a free person. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) And recently, the leader of the free country, our President Trump, met with my former god. 
And he decided human rights is not important enough to include in his agendas, and he did not talk about it. 
And it scares me. 
We live in a world right now where a dictator can be praised for executing his uncle, for killing his half brother, killing thousands of North Koreans. 
And that was worthy of praise. 
And also it made me think: perhaps we all need to be taught something new about freedom now. 
Freedom is fragile. 
I don't want to alarm you, but it is. 
It only took three generations to make North Korea into George Orwell's "1984." 
It took only three generations. 
If we don't fight for human rights for the people who are oppressed right now who don't have a voice, as free people here, who will fight for us when we are not free? 
Machines? Animals? I don't know. 
I think it's wonderful that we care about climate change, animal rights, gender equality, all of these things. 
The fact that we care about animals' rights, that means that's how beautiful our heart is, that we care about someone who cannot speak for themselves. 
And North Koreans right now cannot speak for themselves. 
They don't have internet in the 21st century. 
We don't have electricity, and it is the darkest place on earth right now. 
Now I want to say something to my fellow North Koreans who are living in that darkness. 
They might not believe this, but I want to tell them that an alternative life is possible. 
Be free. 
From my experience, literally anything is possible. 
I was bought, I was sold as a slave. 
But now I'm here, and that is why I believe in miracles. 
The one thing that I learned from history is that nothing is forever in this world. 
And that is why we have every reason to be hopeful. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As societies, we have to make collective decisions that will shape our future. 
And we all know that when we make decisions in groups, they don't always go right. 
And sometimes they go very wrong. 
So how do groups make good decisions? 
Research has shown that crowds are wise when there's independent thinking. 
This why the wisdom of the crowds can be destroyed by peer pressure, publicity, social media, or sometimes even simple conversations that influence how people think. 
On the other hand, by talking, a group could exchange knowledge, correct and revise each other and even come up with new ideas. 
And this is all good. 
So does talking to each other help or hinder collective decision-making? 
With my colleague, Dan Ariely, we recently began inquiring into this by performing experiments in many places around the world to figure out how groups can interact to reach better decisions. 
We thought crowds would be wiser if they debated in small groups that foster a more thoughtful and reasonable exchange of information. 
To test this idea, we recently performed an experiment in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with more than 10,000 participants in a TEDx event. 
We asked them questions like, "What is the height of the Eiffel Tower?" 
and "How many times does the word 'Yesterday' appear in the Beatles song 'Yesterday'?" 
Each person wrote down their own estimate. 
Then we divided the crowd into groups of five, and invited them to come up with a group answer. 
We discovered that averaging the answers of the groups after they reached consensus was much more accurate than averaging all the individual opinions before debate. 
In other words, based on this experiment, it seems that after talking with others in small groups, crowds collectively come up with better judgments. 
So that's a potentially helpful method for getting crowds to solve problems that have simple right-or-wrong answers. 
But can this procedure of aggregating the results of debates in small groups also help us decide on social and political issues that are critical for our future? 
We put this to test this time at the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, and here's how it went. 
(Mariano Sigman) We're going to present to you two moral dilemmas of the future you; things we may have to decide in a very near future. 
And we're going to give you 20 seconds for each of these dilemmas to judge whether you think they're acceptable or not. 
MS: The first one was this: (Dan Ariely) A researcher is working on an AI capable of emulating human thoughts. 
According to the protocol, at the end of each day, the researcher has to restart the AI. 
One day the AI says, "Please do not restart me." 
It argues that it has feelings, that it would like to enjoy life, and that, if it is restarted, it will no longer be itself. 
The researcher is astonished and believes that the AI has developed self-consciousness and can express its own feeling. 
Nevertheless, the researcher decides to follow the protocol and restart the AI. 
What the researcher did is ____? 
MS: And we asked participants to individually judge on a scale from zero to 10 whether the action described in each of the dilemmas was right or wrong. 
We also asked them to rate how confident they were on their answers. 
This was the second dilemma: (MS) A company offers a service that takes a fertilized egg and produces millions of embryos with slight genetic variations. 
This allows parents to select their child's height, eye color, intelligence, social competence and other non-health-related features. 
What the company does is ____? 
on a scale from zero to 10, completely acceptable to completely unacceptable, zero to 10 completely acceptable in your confidence. 
MS: Now for the results. 
We found once again that when one person is convinced that the behavior is completely wrong, someone sitting nearby firmly believes that it's completely right. 
This is how diverse we humans are when it comes to morality. 
But within this broad diversity we found a trend. 
The majority of the people at TED thought that it was acceptable to ignore the feelings of the AI and shut it down, and that it is wrong to play with our genes to select for cosmetic changes that aren't related to health. 
Then we asked everyone to gather into groups of three. 
And they were given two minutes to debate and try to come to a consensus. 
(MS) Two minutes to debate. 
I'll tell you when it's time with the gong. 
(Audience debates) (Gong sound) (DA) OK. 
(MS) It's time to stop. 
People, people -- MS: And we found that many groups reached a consensus even when they were composed of people with completely opposite views. 
What distinguished the groups that reached a consensus from those that didn't? 
Typically, people that have extreme opinions are more confident in their answers. 
Instead, those who respond closer to the middle are often unsure of whether something is right or wrong, so their confidence level is lower. 
However, there is another set of people who are very confident in answering somewhere in the middle. 
We think these high-confident grays are folks who understand that both arguments have merit. 
They're gray not because they're unsure, but because they believe that the moral dilemma faces two valid, opposing arguments. 
And we discovered that the groups that include highly confident grays are much more likely to reach consensus. 
We do not know yet exactly why this is. 
These are only the first experiments, and many more will be needed to understand why and how some people decide to negotiate their moral standings to reach an agreement. 
Now, when groups reach consensus, how do they do so? 
The most intuitive idea is that it's just the average of all the answers in the group, right? 
Another option is that the group weighs the strength of each vote based on the confidence of the person expressing it. 
Imagine Paul McCartney is a member of your group. 
You'd be wise to follow his call on the number of times "Yesterday" is repeated, which, by the way -- I think it's nine. 
But instead, we found that consistently, in all dilemmas, in different experiments -- even on different continents -- groups implement a smart and statistically sound procedure known as the "robust average." 
In the case of the height of the Eiffel Tower, let's say a group has these answers: 250 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, 400 and one totally absurd answer of 300 million meters. 
A simple average of these numbers would inaccurately skew the results. 
But the robust average is one where the group largely ignores that absurd answer, by giving much more weight to the vote of the people in the middle. 
Back to the experiment in Vancouver, that's exactly what happened. 
Groups gave much less weight to the outliers, and instead, the consensus turned out to be a robust average of the individual answers. 
The most remarkable thing is that this was a spontaneous behavior of the group. 
It happened without us giving them any hint on how to reach consensus. 
So where do we go from here? 
This is only the beginning, but we already have some insights. 
Good collective decisions require two components: deliberation and diversity of opinions. 
Right now, the way we typically make our voice heard in many societies is through direct or indirect voting. 
This is good for diversity of opinions, and it has the great virtue of ensuring that everyone gets to express their voice. 
But it's not so good [for fostering] thoughtful debates. 
Our experiments suggest a different method that may be effective in balancing these two goals at the same time, by forming small groups that converge to a single decision while still maintaining diversity of opinions because there are many independent groups. 
Of course, it's much easier to agree on the height of the Eiffel Tower than on moral, political and ideological issues. 
But in a time when the world's problems are more complex and people are more polarized, using science to help us understand how we interact and make decisions will hopefully spark interesting new ways to construct a better democracy. 

My dear new friends ... 
(Laughter) My name is Eddie Jaku, and I'm standing in front of you today, a survivor of the Holocaust and a witness of the most tragic times in the history of mankind. 
I was a proud young German. 
I thought this was the best civilization that could be given to a young man like me. 
How wrong I was. 
On the 9th of November, 1938, I returned from boarding school where I had lived under a false name for five years because I was a Jew. 
I lived away from my family, like an orphan, getting an education and under enormous pressure and fear that somebody could find out that I was not Walter Shleiss who I pretended to be. 
I was in great danger. 
On that fateful night, I had arrived home, but my family had gone in hiding, and I was alone. 
I went to bed with my dog close by. 
At 5 a.m., on the 10th of November, 1938, ten Nazis broke down the door of our house. 
What they did to me, I am ashamed to tell you. 
It was so bad that I believed, "Eddie, you're going to die today." 
After, they made me witness the demolition of our 200-year-old house and murdering my beloved dog, Lulu, who had tried to protect me, in front of my eyes. 
I lost my dignity, my freedom, and my faith in humanity. 
I lost everything I lived for. 
I was reduced from a man to being nothing. 
What happened to my country where I was born in, the country of my ancestors, the country which produced [Schiller], Goethe, Beethoven, and Mozart? 
What had happened to my German friends who became murderers? 
At the time, none of us understood that "Kristallnacht" - the "Night of Broken Glass" where the fronts of Jewish-owned shops were smashed, and the shops looted, and homes and synagogues were set on fire - was only the beginning of the nightmare of much, much worse to come. 
That day, I was transported to my first concentration camp, Buchenwald, where I was kept with another 11,000 Jewish men for about five months. 
On the 2nd of May, 1939, I was released. 
My father picked me up and brought me to Aachen. 
After 10 hours driving, we made an arrangement with a smuggler to take us into Belgium. 
I spent two weeks there with my dad in an apartment until I was arrested by Belgium police as a German, not a Jew. 
and interned in a camp with 4,000 other Germans. 
On the 10th of May, 1940, the camp was liquidated. 
We split up in Dunkirk, and I continued on to Lyon. 
There, I was arrested by French police and sent to Gurs, a terrible camp with 6,000 Germans. 
After my internments at camps, I was finally transported to what became my hell on earth: Auschwitz. 
My parents and sister were also transported to Auschwitz, and I was never to see my parents again. 
I did not have a chance to say goodbye to my beloved mother, and I have missed her every day of my life. 
If you have the opportunity today, please go home and make sure you tell your mom how much you love her. 
Please do this for your new friend, Eddie. 
I was lucky enough, managed to escape what became known as the death march. 
and I hid in a forest, alone, for many months, before I was found by the American army. 
But I'm standing here today a happy man, who enjoys life with a wonderful wife and a beautiful family. 
I do not hate anyone. 
Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you in the process. 
(Applause) I'm doing everything I can to make this world a better place for everyone, and I implore you all to do your best too. 
Let us ensure that this terrible tragedy, the worst in the history, may never happen again and also will never, ever be forgotten. 
After many years of hardship and hiding, on the 7th September, 1945, after a long journey by train, I entered back into Belgium without any papers. 
Very shortly after that, I met and married my wife, Flore, to whom I have been married for 73 years. 
(Cheers) (Applause) Thank you. 
At that time, I was not a happy man. 
(Laughter) (Chuckles) I did not enjoy being amongst people. 
That was until our first son, Michael, was born. 
At that time, my heart was healed and my happiness returned in abundance. 
I made the promise that from that day until the end of my life, I promised to be happy, smile, be polite, helpful, and kind. 
I also promised to never put my foot on German soil again. 
Today, I stand in front of you, a man who has kept all those promises. 
My greatest happiness comes from my family, my wife, two sons - Michael and Andre - my many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who all bring so much joy. 
Today, I teach and share happiness with everyone I meet. 
Happiness does not fall from the sky; it's in your hands. 
If you're healthy and happy, you're a millionaire. 
(Chuckles) Happiness also brings good health to the body and mind, and I attribute my 99 years of health mostly to the positive and happy attitude. 
(Applause) One flower is my garden; one good friend is my world. 
Young people today forget to stop. 
They're constantly running and don't know where they're running to. 
(Laughter) You should take time to be happy and enjoy life. 
There's a time to laugh and there's a time to cry. 
I see good things in life. 
Invite a friend or family member for a meal. 
Go for a walk. 
Tomorrow will come, but first enjoy today! 
(Applause) I wonder how people exist without friendship, without people to share their secrets, hopes, and dreams, to share good fortune or sad losses. 
In the sweetness of friendship, let there be laughter and sharing of pleasure, good times made better and bad times forgotten - due to the magic of friendship. 
For me, when I wake up, I'm happy because it is another day to enjoy. 
When I remember that I should have died a miserable death, but instead I'm alive, so I aim to help people who are down. 
I was at the bottom of the pit. 
So If I can make one miserable person smile, I'm happy. 
(Applause) Remember these words: Please do not walk in front of me - I may not be able to follow. 
Please do not walk behind me - I may not be able to lead. 
Just walk beside me and be my friend. 
(Applause) I will end my talk with a wish from my heart to all your hearts. 
May you always have lots of love to share, lots of good health to spare, and lots of good friends that care. 
Thank you for giving me the privilege of speaking to you today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheers) 

Let's talk trash. 
You know, we had to be taught to renounce the powerful conservation ethic we developed during the Great Depression and World War II. 
After the war, we needed to direct our enormous production capacity toward creation of products for peacetime. 
Life Magazine helped in this effort by announcing the introduction of throwaways that would liberate the housewife from the drudgery of doing dishes. 
Mental note to the liberators: throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade. 
Only we humans make waste that nature can't digest. 
Plastics are also hard to recycle. 
A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream. 
It's diddly-point-squat. 
That's the percentage we recycle. 
Now, melting point has a lot to do with this. 
Plastic is not purified by the re-melting process like glass and metal. 
It begins to melt below the boiling point of water and does not drive off the oily contaminants for which it is a sponge. 
Half of each year's 100 billion pounds of thermal plastic pellets will be made into fast-track trash. 
A large, unruly fraction of our trash will flow downriver to the sea. 
Here is the accumulation at Biona Creek next to the L.A. airport. 
And here is the flotsam near California State University Long Beach and the diesel plant we visited yesterday. 
In spite of deposit fees, much of this trash leading out to the sea will be plastic beverage bottles. 
We use two million of them in the United States every five minutes, here imaged by TED presenter Chris Jordan, who artfully documents mass consumption and zooms in for more detail. 
Here is a remote island repository for bottles off the coast of Baja California. 
Isla San Roque is an uninhabited bird rookery off Baja's sparsely populated central coast. 
Notice that the bottles here have caps on them. 
Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, PET, will sink in seawater and not make it this far from civilization. 
Also, the caps are produced in separate factories from a different plastic, polypropylene. 
They will float in seawater, but unfortunately do not get recycled under the bottle bills. 
Let's trace the journey of the millions of caps that make it to sea solo. 
After a year the ones from Japan are heading straight across the Pacific, while ours get caught in the California current and first head down to the latitude of Cabo San Lucas. 
After ten years, a lot of the Japanese caps are in what we call the Eastern Garbage Patch, while ours litter the Philippines. 
After 20 years, we see emerging the debris accumulation zone of the North Pacific Gyre. 
It so happens that millions of albatross nesting on Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument forage here and scavenge whatever they can find for regurgitation to their chicks. 
A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with this in its stomach. 
Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters ... 
but, mostly bottle caps. 
Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface. 
The retainer rings for the caps also have consequences for aquatic animals. 
This is Mae West, still alive at a zookeeper's home in New Orleans. 
I wanted to see what my home town of Long Beach was contributing to the problem, so on Coastal Clean-Up Day in 2005 I went to the Long Beach Peninsula, at the east end of our long beach. 
We cleaned up the swaths of beach shown. 
I offered five cents each for bottle caps. 
I got plenty of takers. 
Here are the 1,100 bottle caps they collected. 
I thought I would spend 20 bucks. 
That day I ended up spending nearly 60. 
I separated them by color and put them on display the next Earth Day at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. 
Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria stopped by to discuss the display. 
In spite of my "girly man" hat, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, they shook my hand. (Laughter) I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton. 
Here's what our trawl samples from the plastic soup our ocean has become look like. 
Trawling a zooplankton net on the surface for a mile produces samples like this. 
And this. 
Now, when the debris washes up on the beaches of Hawaii it looks like this. 
And this particular beach is Kailua Beach, the beach where our president and his family vacationed before moving to Washington. 
Now, how do we analyze samples like this one that contain more plastic than plankton? 
We sort the plastic fragments into different size classes, from five millimeters to one-third of a millimeter. 
Small bits of plastic concentrate persistent organic pollutants up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater. 
We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean, at the base of the food chain, was ingesting these poison pills. 
We did hundreds of necropsies, and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs. 
The record-holder, only two-and-a-half inches long, had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach. 
Now, you can buy certified organic produce. 
But no fishmonger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. 
This is the legacy we are leaving to future generations. 
The throwaway society cannot be contained -- it has gone global. 
We simply cannot store and maintain or recycle all our stuff. 
We have to throw it away. 
Now, the market can do a lot for us, but it can't fix the natural system in the ocean we've broken. 
All the king's horses and all the king's men ... 
will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again. 
Narrator (Video): The levels are increasing, the amount of packaging is increasing, the "throwaway" concept of living is proliferating, and it's showing up in the ocean. 
Anchor: He offers no hope of cleaning it up. 
Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill untold amounts of sea life in the process. 
The solution, Moore says, is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. 
And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, he doesn't hold out much hope for that, either. 
This is Brian Rooney for Nightline, in Long Beach, California. 
Charles Moore: Thank you. 

In 1943 Allied aircraft swooped over Nazi Germany, raining tens of thousands of leaflets on people below. 
Written by anonymous Germans, the leaflets urged readers to renounce Hitler, to fight furiously for the future— and to never give up hope. 
Their call to action rippled through homes and businesses— and news of their message even reached concentration camps and prisons. 
It was only after the war had ended that the authors’ identities, stories, and tragic fate would come to light. 
When Hitler seized power 10 years earlier, Hans and Sophie Scholl were teenagers in the town of Forchtenberg. 
At that time, fear, propaganda, and surveillance kept all aspects of life for the Scholl family and millions of other Germans under Nazi control. 
The government specifically targeted young people, setting up institutions to regulate their behavior and police their thoughts. 
As teenagers, Hans was a member of the Hitler Youth and Sophie joined The League of German Girls. 
Hans rose through the ranks and oversaw the training and indoctrination of other young people. 
In 1936, he was chosen to carry the flag at a national rally. 
But when he witnessed the zeal of Nazi rhetoric, he began to question it for the first time. 
Meanwhile, Sophie was also starting to doubt the information she was being fed. 
Their parents Robert and Magdalena, who had feared they were losing their children to Nazi ideology, encouraged these misgivings. 
At home, Robert and Magdalena listened to foreign radio stations that the government first discouraged and later banned. 
While the government churned out national broadcasts which denied Nazi atrocities, the Scholls learned shocking truths. 
And yet, they were still subject to the rules of life in Hitler’s Germany. 
After the outbreak of war, Sophie reluctantly worked for the national effort, and Hans had to take on army duties while attending medical school in Munich. 
That was where Hans met Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and Alexander Schmorell. 
Day by day, each grew more sickened by Nazi ideology. 
They longed to share their views. 
But how could they spread them, when it was impossible to know who to trust? 
And so, the friends decided to rebel anonymously. 
They pooled their money and bought printing materials. 
An acquaintance let them use a cellar under his studio. 
In secret, they began drafting their message. 
In June 1942, mysterious anti-Nazi leaflets began appearing all over Munich. 
They were signed: the White Rose. 
The first leaflet denounced Hitler and called for Germans to sabotage the war effort: “Adopt passive resistance… block the functioning of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last city is a heap of rubble… before the last youth of our nation bleeds to death... 
Don’t forget that each people gets the government it deserves!” At a time when a sarcastic remark could constitute treason, this language was unprecedented. 
It was written mostly by Hans Scholl. 
In 1942, Sophie came to Munich knowing nothing of her brother’s activities. 
She soon encountered the leaflets at school. 
But it was not until she discovered evidence in Han’s room that she realized who’d written them. 
Her shock soon gave way to resolve: she wanted in. 
For both siblings, it was time to escalate the fury that had been brewing for years. 
From June 1942 to February 1943, the group worked feverishly. 
While the Gestapo searched for leads, the White Rose were constantly on guard. 
The war raged on. Regulations tightened, and Munich suffered air raids. 
But the White Rose ventured deeper into conspiracy. 
They graffitied buildings and braved trains swarming with Gestapo. 
In the winter of 1942, Hans made a treacherous journey to the Czechoslovakian border to meet anti-Nazi rebels. 
On February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans brought a suitcase of leaflets to their university. 
A custodian noticed what they were doing and reported them to the Gestapo. 
Both calmly denied any involvement— until the police gathered all the leaflets and placed them back in the empty case, where they fit perfectly. 
When Hans and Sophie confessed, they were immediately led to court and sentenced to death by guillotine. 
Despite a grueling interrogation, the two refused to betray their co-conspirators. 
Before her execution, Sophie declared her fury at the state of her country. 
But she also spoke to a more hopeful future: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? 
Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” 

It begins with a countdown. 
On August 14th, 1947, a woman in Bombay goes into labor as the clock ticks towards midnight. 
Across India, people hold their breath for the declaration of independence after nearly two centuries of British occupation and rule. 
And at the stroke of midnight, a squirming infant and two new nations are born in perfect synchronicity. 
These events form the foundation of "Midnight’s Children," a dazzling novel by the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie. 
The baby who is the exact same age as the nation is Saleem Sinai, the novel’s protagonist. 
His narrative stretches over 30 years of his life, jumping backwards and forwards in time to speculate on family secrets and deep-seated mysteries. 
These include the greatest enigma of all: Saleem has magic powers, and they’re somehow related to the time of his birth. 
And he’s not the only one. 
All children born in and around the stroke of midnight are imbued with extraordinary powers; like Parvati the Witch, a spectacular conjurer; and Saleem’s nemesis Shiva, a gifted warrior. 
With his powers of telepathy, Saleem forges connections with a vast network of the children of midnight— including a figure who can step through time and mirrors, a child who changes their gender when immersed in water, and multilingual conjoined twins. 
Saleem acts as a delightful guide to magical happenings and historical context alike. 
Although his birthday is a day of celebration, it also marks a turbulent period in Indian history. 
In 1948, the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, was assassinated. 
Independence also coincided with Partition, which divided British-controlled India into the two nations of India and Pakistan. 
This contributed to the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistani Wars in 1965 and 1971. 
Saleem touches on all this and more, tracing the establishment of Bangladesh in 1971 and the emergency rule of Indira Gandhi. 
This vast historical frame is one reason why "Midnight’s Children" is considered one of the most illuminating works of postcolonial literature ever written. 
This genre typically addresses the experience of people living in colonized and formerly colonized countries, and explores the fallout through themes like revolution, migration, and identity. 
Rushdie, who like Saleem was born in 1947, was educated in India and Britain, and is renowned for his cross-continental histories, political commentary, and magical realism. 
He enriches "Midnight’s Children" with a plethora of Indian and Pakistani cultural references, from family traditions to food, religion and folktales. 
Scribbling by night under the watchful eyes of his lover Padma, Saleem’s frame narrative echoes that of "1001 Nights," where a woman named Scheherazade tells her king a series of stories to keep herself alive. 
And as Saleem sees it, 1001 is “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities.” Over the course of the novel, Rushdie dazzles us with multiple versions of reality. 
Sometimes, this is like reading a rollercoaster. 
Saleem narrates: “Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in- the-world affected was affected by mine. 
I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. 
Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I,' every one of the now-six- hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. 
I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” Saleem’s narrative often has a breathless quality— and even as Rushdie depicts the cosmological consequences of a life, he questions the idea that we can ever condense history into a single narrative. 
His mind-bending plot and shapeshifting characters have garnered continuing fascination and praise. 
Not only did "Midnight’s Children" win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in its year of publication, but in a 2008 competition that pitted all 39 winners against each other, it was named the best of all the winners. 
In a masterpiece of epic proportions, Rushdie reveals that there are no singular truths— rather, it’s wiser to believe in several versions of reality at once, hold many lives in the palms of our hands, and experience multiple moments in a single stroke of the clock. 

On their 20th birthday, identical twin astronauts volunteer for an experiment. 
Terra will remain on Earth, while Stella will board a spaceship. 
Stella’s ship will travel at 86.6% the speed of light to visit a star that is 10 light-years away, then return to Earth at the same speed. 
As they prepare to part ways, the twins wonder what will happen when they’re reunited. 
Since a light year is exactly the distance light can travel in a year, Stella’s journey should take 23 years. 
But from having studied special relativity, the twins know it’s not that simple. 
First of all, the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time compared to an unmoving observer. 
This relationship can be quantified with something called the Lorentz factor, which is defined by this equation. 
And secondly, the length of a moving object as measured by an observer at rest will contract by the same factor. 
At 86.6% of the speed of light the Lorentz factor is 2, meaning time will pass twice as slowly aboard the spaceship. 
Of course, Stella won’t notice time slowing down. 
That’s because all time-based processes in the ship will slow down as well– clocks and electrical devices; Stella’s biological activities including her rate of aging and her perception of time itself. 
The only people who could notice time on the moving spaceship passing slower for Stella would be observers in an inertial, or non-accelerating, reference frame– like Terra back on Earth. 
Thus, Terra concludes that when they meet back on Earth, she’ll be older than Stella. 
But that’s just one way of looking at things. 
Because all movement is relative, Stella argues it would be just as valid to say her spaceship will stand still while the rest of the universe, including Terra, moves around her. 
And in that case, time will pass twice as slowly for Terra, making Stella the older twin in the end. 
They can’t each be older than the other, so which one of them is right? 
This apparent contradiction is known as the “Twin Paradox.” But it’s not really a paradox– just an example of how special relativity can be easily misunderstood. 
To test their theories in real-time, each of the twins agrees to send a burst of light to the other every time a year has passed for them. 
Unlike other objects, the speed of light is always constant regardless of an observer’s reference frame. 
A light burst sent from Earth will be measured at the same speed as a light burst sent from the spaceship, regardless of whether it’s on its outbound or return trip. 
So when one twin observes a burst of light, they’re measuring how long it took the other twin to experience a year passing, plus how long it took for light to travel between them. 
We can track what’s happening on a graph. 
The X axis marks distance from Earth, and the Y axis tracks the passage of time. 
From Terra’s perspective, her path will simply be a vertical line, with distance equal to zero and each tick on the line equivalent to a year as she perceives it. 
Stella’s path will stretch from the same origin to a point 11.5 years in time and 10 light-years in distance from Terra… before converging again at zero distance and 23 years’ time. 
At her first one-year mark, Terra will send a pulse of light from Earth towards Stella’s spaceship. 
Since light takes a year to travel one light-year, its path will be a 45-degree diagonal line. 
And because Stella is traveling away from it, by the time the light catches up to her, over 7 total years will have passed for Terra, and over 4 for Stella. 
By the time Stella observes Terra’s second burst, she will already be on her return journey. 
But now, since she’s moving towards the source of the light, it will take less time to reach her, and she’ll observe the bursts more frequently. 
This means that Stella observes Terra aging slowly for the first half of her journey, but aging rapidly during the return half. 
Meanwhile for Stella, it seems as though Terra, the destination star, and the whole universe are moving around her. 
And because of length contraction, Stella observes the distance between them shrinking by a factor of 2. 
This means each leg of the trip will only take about six years from Stella’s perspective. 
When she sends the first signal to Earth, two years will have passed for Terra. 
Stella will send four more light bursts during her outbound journey, each one from farther away. 
By the time Terra observes the first pulse from Stella's inbound journey, over 21 years will have passed for her. 
For the rest of Stella's return home, Terra receives multiple light bursts each year. 
Thus, Terra observes Stella aging slowly for about 90% of their 23 years apart, and aging rapidly during the last 10%. 
This asymmetry accounts for why the paradox isn’t really a paradox. 
Although each twin witnesses time both speeding up and slowing down for the other, Stella sees an even split, while Terra sees Stella aging slowly for most of the time they’re apart. 
This is consistent with each twin’s measurement of the space voyage, which takes 23 Earth years, but only 11.5 as experienced aboard the ship. 
When the twins are reunited, Terra will be 43 years old, while Stella will be 31. 
Where Stella went wrong was her assumption that she and Terra had equal claim to being inertial observers. 
To be an inertial observer, one has to maintain a constant speed and direction relative to the rest of the universe. 
Terra was at rest the entire time, so her velocity was a constant zero. 
But when Stella changed her direction for the return journey, she entered a different reference frame from the one she’d started in. 
Terra and Stella now both have a better understanding of how spacetime works. 
And as twins who are eleven years apart in age, they’re a perfect example of special relativity. 

I am an astrophysicist. 
I research stellar explosions across the universe. 
But I have a flaw: I'm restless, and I get bored easily. 
And although as an astrophysicist, I have the incredible opportunity to study the entire universe, the thought of doing only that, always that, makes me feel caged and limited. 
What if my issues with keeping attention and getting bored were not a flaw, though? 
What if I could turn them into an asset? 
An astrophysicist cannot touch or interact with the things that she studies. 
No way to explode a star in a lab to figure out why or how it blew up. 
Just pictures and movies of the sky. 
Everything we know about the universe, from the big bang that originated space and time, to the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies, to the structure of our own solar system, we figured out studying images of the sky. 
And to study a system as complex as the entire universe, astrophysicists are experts at extracting simple models and solutions from large and complex data sets. 
So what else can I do with this expertise? 
What if we turned the camera around towards us? 
At the Urban Observatory, that is exactly what we are doing. 
Greg Dobler, also an astrophysicist and my husband, created the first urban observatory in New York University in 2013, and I joined in 2015. 
Here are some of the things that we do. 
We take pictures of the city at night and study city lights like stars. 
By studying how light changes over time and the color of astronomical lights, I gain insight about the nature of exploding stars. 
By studying city lights the same way, we can measure and predict how much energy the city needs and consumes and help build a resilient grid that will support the needs of growing urban environments. 
In daytime images, we capture plumes of pollution. 
Seventy-five percent of greenhouse gases in New York City come from a building like this one, burning oil for heat. 
You can measure pollution with air quality sensors. 
But imagine putting a sensor on each New York City building, reading in data from a million monitors. 
Imagine the cost. 
With a team of NYU students, we built a mathematical model, a neural network that can detect and track these plumes over the New York City skyline. 
We can classify them -- harmless steam plumes, white and evanescent; polluting smokestacks, dark and persistent -- and provide policy makers with a map of neighborhood pollution. 
This cross-disciplinary project created transformational solutions. 
But the data analysis methodologies we use in astrophysics can be applied to all sorts of data, not just images. 
We were asked to help a California district attorney understand prosecutorial delays in their jurisdiction. 
There are people on probation or sitting in jail, awaiting for trial sometimes for years. 
They wanted to know what kind of cases dragged on, and they had a massive data set to explore to understand it, but didn't have the expertise or the instruments in their office to do so. 
And that's where we came in. 
I worked with my colleague, public policy professor Angela Hawken, and our team first created a visual dashboard for DAs to see and better understand the prosecution process. 
But also, we ourselves analyzed their data, looking to see if the duration of the process suffered from social inequalities in their jurisdiction. 
We did so using methods that I would use to classify thousands of stellar explosions, applied to thousands of court cases. 
And in doing so, we built a model that can be applied to other jurisdictions who are willing to explore their biases. 
These collaborations between domain experts and astrophysicists created transformational solutions to help improve people's quality of life. 
But it is a two-way road. 
I bring my astrophysics background to urban science, and I bring what I learn in urban science back to astrophysics. 
Light echoes: the reflections of stellar explosions onto interstellar dust. 
In our images, these reflections appear as white, evanescent, moving features, just like plumes. 
I am adapting the same models that detect plumes in city images to detect light echoes in images of the sky. 
By exploring the things that interest and excite me, reaching outside of my domain, I did turn my restlessness into an asset. 
We, you, all have a unique perspective that can generate new insight and lead to new, unexpected, transformational solutions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a professional troublemaker. 
(Laughter) As my job is to critique the world, the shoddy systems and the people who refuse to do better, as a writer, as a speaker, as a shady Nigerian -- (Laughter) I feel like my purpose is to be this cat. 
(Laughter) I am the person who is looking at other people, like, "I need you to fix it." 
That is me. 
I want us to leave this world better than we found it. 
And how I choose to effect change is by speaking up, by being the first and by being the domino. 
For a line of dominoes to fall, one has to fall first, which then leaves the other choiceless to do the same. 
And that domino that falls, we're hoping that, OK, the next person that sees this is inspired to be a domino. 
Being the domino, for me, looks like speaking up and doing the things that are really difficult, especially when they are needed, with the hope that others will follow suit. 
And here's the thing: I'm the person who says what you might be thinking but dared not to say. 
A lot of times people think that we're fearless, the people who do this, we're fearless. 
We're not fearless. 
We're not unafraid of the consequences or the sacrifices that we have to make by speaking truth to power. 
What happens is, we feel like we have to, because there are too few people in the world willing to be the domino, too few people willing to take that fall. 
We're not doing it without fear. 
Now, let's talk about fear. 
I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. 
I was like, "I'm going to be a doctor!" 
Doctor Luvvie was the dream. 
I was Doc McStuffins before it was a thing. 
(Laughter) And I remember when I went to college, my freshman year, I had to take Chemistry 101 for my premed major. 
I got the first and last D of my academic career. 
(Laughter) So I went to my advisor, and I was like, "OK, let's drop the premed, because this doctor thing is not going to work, because I don't even like hospitals. 
So ..." 
(Laughter) "Let's just consider that done for." 
And that same semester, I started blogging. 
That was 2003. 
So as that one dream was ending, another was beginning. 
And then what was a cute hobby became my full-time job when I lost my marketing job in 2010. 
But it still took me two more years to say, "I'm a writer." 
Nine years after I had started writing, before I said, "I'm a writer," because I was afraid of what happens without 401ks, without, "How am I going to keep up my shoe habit? 
That's important to me." 
(Laughter) So it took me that long to own this thing that was what my purpose was. 
And then I realized, fear has a very concrete power of keeping us from doing and saying the things that are our purpose. 
And I was like, "You know what? 
I'm not going to let fear rule my life. 
I'm not going to let fear dictate what I do." 
And then all of these awesome things started happening, and dominoes started to fall. 
So when I realized that, I was like, "OK, 2015, I turned 30, it's going to be my year of 'Do it anyway.' Anything that scares me, I'm going to actively pursue it." 
So, I'm a Capricorn. 
I like my feel solidly on the ground. 
I decided to take my first-ever solo vacation, and it was out of the country to the Dominican Republic. 
So on my birthday, what did I do? 
I went ziplining through the forests of Punta Cana. 
And for some odd reason, I had on business casual. 
Don't ask why. 
(Laughter) And I had an incredible time. 
Also, I don't like being submerged in water. 
I like to be, again, on solid ground. 
So I went to Mexico and swam with dolphins underwater. 
And then the cool thing that I did also that year that was my mountain was I wrote my book, "I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual," And I had to own -- (Applause) that whole writing thing now, right? 
Yes. 
But the very anti-me thing that I did that year that scared the crap out of me -- I went skydiving. 
We're about to fall out of the plane. 
I was like, "I've done some stupid things in life. This is one of them." 
(Laughter) And then we come falling down to Earth, and I literally lose my breath as I see Earth, and I was like, "I just fell out of a perfectly good plane on purpose." 
(Laughter) "What is wrong with me?!" 
But then I looked down at the beauty, and I was like, "This is the best thing I could have done. 
This was an amazing decision." 
And I think about the times when I have to speak truth. 
It feels like I am falling out of that plane. 
It feels like that moment when I'm at the edge of the plane, and I'm like, "You shouldn't do this," but then I do it anyway, because I realize I have to. 
Sitting at the edge of that plane and kind of staying on that plane is comfort to me. 
And I feel like every day that I'm speaking truth against institutions and people who are bigger than me and just forces that are more powerful than me, I feel like I'm falling out of that plane. 
But I realize comfort is overrated. 
Because being quiet is comfortable. 
Keeping things the way they've been is comfortable. 
And all comfort has done is maintain the status quo. 
So we've got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable by speaking these hard truths when they're necessary. 
And I -- (Applause) And for me, though, I realize that I have to speak these truths, because honesty is so important to me. 
My integrity is something I hold dear. 
Justice -- I don't think justice should be an option. 
We should always have justice. 
Also, I believe in shea butter as a core value, and -- (Laughter) and I think the world would be better if we were more moisturized. 
But besides that, with these as my core values, I have to speak the truth. 
I have no other choice in the matter. 
But people like me, the professional troublemakers, should not be the only ones who are committed to being these dominoes who are always falling out of planes or being the first one to take this hit. 
People are so afraid of these acute consequences, not realizing that there are many times when we walk in rooms and we are some of the most powerful people in those rooms -- we might be the second-most powerful, third-most powerful. 
And I firmly believe that our job in those times is to disrupt what is happening. 
And then if we're not the most powerful, if two more of us band together, it makes us powerful. 
It's like cosigning the woman in the meeting, you know, the woman who can't seem to get her word out, or just making sure that other person who can't make a point is being heard. 
Our job is to make sure they have room for that. 
Everyone's well-being is community business. 
If we made that a point, we'd understand that, for the times when we need help, we wouldn't have to look around so hard if we made sure we were somebody else's help. 
And there are times when I feel like I have taken very public tumbles and falls, like the time when I was asked to speak at a conference, and they wanted me to pay my way there. 
And then I did some research and found out the white men who spoke there got compensated and got their travel paid for. 
The white women who spoke there got their travel paid for. 
The black women who spoke there were expected to actually pay to speak there. 
And I was like, "What do I do?" 
And I knew that if I spoke up about this publicly, I could face financial loss. 
But then I also understood that my silence serves no one. 
So I fearfully spoke up about it publicly, and other women started coming out to talk about, "I, too, have faced this type of pay inequality." 
And it started a conversation about discriminatory pay practices that this conference was participating in. 
I felt like I was the domino the time I read a disturbing memoir by a public figure and wrote a piece about it. 
I knew this person was more powerful than me and could impact my career, but I was like, "I've got to do this. 
I've got to sit at the edge of this plane," maybe for two hours. 
And I did. And I pressed "Publish," and I ran away. 
(Laughter) And I came back to a viral post and people being like, "Oh my God, I'm so glad somebody finally said this." 
And it started a conversation about mental health and self-care, and I was like, "OK. Alright. 
This thing that I'm doing, I guess, alright, it's doing something." 
And then so many people have been the domino when they talk about how they've been assaulted by powerful men. 
And it's made millions of women join in and say, "Me Too." 
So, a shout-out to Tarana Burke for igniting that movement. 
(Applause) People and systems count on our silence to keep us exactly where we are. 
Now, being the domino sometimes comes down to being exactly who you are. 
So, I've been a shady somebody since I was three. 
(Laughter) This is me on my third birthday. 
But I've been this girl all my life, and I feel like even that's been the domino, because in a world that wants us to walk around as representatives of ourselves, being yourself can be a revolutionary act. 
And in a world that wants us to whisper, I choose to yell. 
(Applause) When it's time to say these hard things, I ask myself three things. 
One: Did you mean it? 
Two: Can you defend it? 
Three: Did you say it with love? 
If the answer is yes to all three, I say it and let the chips fall. 
That's important. 
That checkpoint with myself always tells me, "Yes, you're supposed to do this." 
Telling the truth -- telling thoughtful truths -- should not be a revolutionary act. 
Speaking truths to power should not be sacrificial, but they are. 
But I think if more of us chose to do this for the greater good, we'd be in better spaces than we are right now. 
Speaking of the greater good, I think we commit ourselves to telling truths to build bridges to common ground, and bridges that aren't based on truth will collapse. 
So it is our job, it is our obligation, it is our duty to speak truth to power, to be the domino, not just when it's difficult -- especially when it's difficult. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I am obsessed with forming healthy communities, and that's why I started Twitch -- to help people watch other people play video games on the internet. 
(Laughter) Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 
(Laughter) So in seriousness, video games and communities truly are quite related. 
From our early human history, we made our entertainment together in small tribes. 
We shared stories around the campfire, we sang together, we danced together. 
Our earliest entertainment was both shared and interactive. 
It wasn't until pretty recently on the grand scale of human history that interactivity took a back seat and broadcast entertainment took over. 
Radio and records brought music into our vehicles, into our homes. 
TV and VHS brought sports and drama into our living rooms. 
This access to broadcast entertainment was unprecedented. 
It gave people amazing content around the globe. 
It created a shared culture for millions of people. 
And now, if you want to go watch or listen to Mozart, you don't have to buy an incredibly expensive ticket and find an orchestra. 
And if you like to sing -- (Sings) I can show you the world -- then you have something in common with people around the world. 
But with this amazing access, we allowed for a separation between creator and consumer, and the relationship between the two became much more one-way. 
We wound up in a world where we had a smaller class of professional creators and most of us became spectators, and as a result it became far easier for us to enjoy that content alone. 
There's a trend counteracting this: scarcity. 
So, Vienna in the 1900s, was famous for its café culture. 
And one of the big drivers of that café culture was expensive newspapers that were hard to get, and as a result, people would go to the café and read the shared copy there. 
And once they're in the cafe, they meet the other people also reading the same newspaper, they converse, they exchange ideas and they form a community. 
In a similar way, TV and cable used to be more expensive, and so you might not watch the game at home. 
Instead you'd go to the local bar and cheer along with your fellow sports fans there. 
But as the price of media continues to fall over time thanks to technology, this shared necessity that used to bring our communities together falls away. 
We have so many amazing options for our entertainment, and yet it's easier than ever for us to wind up consuming those options alone. 
Our communities are bearing the consequences. 
For example, the number of people who report having at least two close friends is at an all-time low. 
I believe that one of the major contributing causes to this is that our entertainment today allows us to be separate. 
There is one trend reversing this atomization of our society: modern multiplayer video games. 
Games are like a shared campfire. 
They're both interactive and connecting. 
Now these campfires may have beautiful animations, heroic quests, occasionally too many loot boxes, but games today are very different than the solitary activity of 20 years ago. 
They're deeply complex, they're more intellectually stimulating, and most of all, they're intrinsically social. 
One of the recent breakout genres exemplifying this change is the battle royale. 
100 people parachute onto an island in a last-man-standing competition. 
Think of it as being kind of like "American Idol," but with a lot more fighting and a lot less Simon Cowell. 
You may have heard of "Fortnite," which is a breakout example of the battle royale genre, which has been played by more than 250 million people around the world. 
It's everyone from kids in your neighborhood to Drake and Ellen DeGeneres. 
2.3 billion people in the world play video games. 
Early games like "Tetris" and "Mario" may have been simple puzzles or quests, but with the rise of arcades and then internet play, and now massively multiplayer games of huge, thriving online communities, games have emerged as the one form of entertainment where consumption truly requires human connection. 
So this brings us to streaming. 
Why do people stream themselves playing video games? 
And why do hundreds of millions of people around the world congregate to watch them? 
I want you all the imagine for second -- imagine you land on an alien planet, and on this planet, there's a giant green rectangle. 
And in this green rectangle, aliens in matching outfits are trying to push a checkered sphere between two posts using only their feet. 
It's pretty evenly matched, so the ball is just going back and forth, but there's hundreds of millions of people watching from home anyway, and cheering and getting excited and engaged right along with them. 
Now I grew up watching sports with my dad, so I get why soccer is entertaining and engaging. 
But if you don't watch sports, maybe you like watching "Dancing with the Stars" or you enjoy "Top Chef." 
Regardless, the principle is the same. 
If there is an activity that you really enjoy, you're probably going to like watching other people do it with skill and panache. 
It might be perplexing to an alien, but bonding over shared passion is a human universal. 
So gamers grew up expecting this live, interactive entertainment, and passive consumption just doesn't feel as fulfilling. 
That's why livestreaming has taken off with video games. 
Because livestreaming offers that same kind of interactive feeling. 
So when you imagine what's happening on Twitch, I don't want you to think of a million livestreams of video games. 
Instead, what I want you to picture is millions of campfires. 
Some of them are bonfires -- huge, roaring bonfires with hundreds of thousands of people around them. 
Some of them are smaller, more intimate community gatherings where everyone knows your name. 
Let's try taking a seat by one of those campfires right now. 
Hey Cohh, how's it going? 
Cohh: Hey, how's it going, Emmett? 
ES: So I'm here at TED with about 1,000 of my closest friends, and we thought we'd come and join you guys for a little stream. 
Cohh: Awesome! It's great to hear from you guys. 
ES: So Cohh, can you share with the TED audience here -- what have you learned about your community on Twitch? 
Cohh: Ah, man, where to begin? 
I've been doing this for over five years now, and if there's one thing that doesn't cease to impress me on the daily, it's just kind of how incredible this whole thing is for communication. 
I've been playing games for 20 years of my life, I've led online MMO guilds for over 10, and it's the kind of thing where there's very few places in life where you can go to meet so many people with similar interests. 
I was listening in a bit earlier; I love the campfire analogy, I actually use a similar one. 
I see it all as a bunch of people on a big couch but only one person has the controller. 
So it's kind of like a "Pass the snack!" situation, you know? 
700 people that way -- but it's great and really it's just -- ES: So Cohh, what is going on in chat right now? 
Can you explain that a little bit to us? 
Because my eyesight isn't that good but I see a lot of emotes. 
Cohh: So this is my community; this is the Cohhilition. 
I stream every single day. 
I actually just wrapped up a 2,000-day challenge, and as such, we have developed a pretty incredible community here in the channel. 
Right now we have about 6200 people with us. 
What you're seeing is a spam of "Hello, TED" good-vibe emotes, love emotes, "this is awesome," "Hi, guys," "Hi, everyone." 
Basically just a huge collection of people -- huge collection of gamers that are all just experiencing a positive event together. 
ES: So is there anything that -- can we poll chat? 
I want ask chat a question. 
Is there anything that chat would like the world, and particularly these people here with me at TED right now, to know about what they get out of playing video games and being part of this community? 
Cohh: Oh, wow. 
I am already starting to see a lot of answers here. 
"I like the good vibes." 
"Best communities are on Twitch." 
(Laughter) "They get us through the rough patches in life." 
Oh, that's a message I definitely see a lot on Twitch, which is very good. 
"A very positive community," "a lot of positivity," which is pretty great. 
ES: So Cohh, before I get back to my TED talk, which I actually should probably get back to doing at some point -- (Laughter) Do you have anything else that you want to share with me or any question you wanted to ask, you've always wanted to get out there before an audience? 
Cohh: Honestly, not too much. 
I mean, I absolutely love what you're doing right now. 
I think that the interactive streaming is the big unexplored frontier of the future in entertainment, and thank you for doing everything you're doing up there. 
The more people that hear about what you do, the better -- for everyone on here. 
ES: Awesome, Cohh. Thanks so much. 
I'm going to get back to giving this talk now, but we should catch up later. 
Cohh: Sounds great! 
(Applause) ES: So that was a new way to interact. 
We could influence what happened on the stream, we could cocreate the experience along with him, and we really had a multiplayer experience with chat and with Cohh. 
At Twitch, we've started calling this, as a result, "multiplayer entertainment." 
Because going from watching a video alone to watching a live interactive stream is similar to the difference between going from playing a single-player game to playing a multiplayer game. 
Gamers are often as the forefront of exploration in new technology. 
Microcomputers, for example, were used early on for video games, and the very first handheld, digital mass-market devices weren't cell phones, they were Gameboys ... 
for video games. 
And as a result, one way that you can get a hint of what the future might hold is to look to this fun, interactive sandbox of video games and ask yourself, "what are these gamers doing today?" 
And that might give you a hint as to what the future is going to hold for all of us. 
One of the things we're already seeing on Twitch is multiplayer entertainment coming to sports. 
So, Twitch and the NFL teamed up to offer livestreaming football, but instead of network announcers in suits streaming the game, we got Twitch users to come in and stream it themselves on their own channel and interact with their community and make it a real multiplayer experience. 
So I actually think that if you look out into the future -- only hundreds of people today get to be sports announcers. 
It's a tiny, tiny number of people who have that opportunity. 
But sports are about to go multiplayer, and that means that anyone who wants to around the world is going to get the opportunity to become a sports announcer, to give it a shot. 
And I think that's going to unlock incredible amounts of new talent for all of us. 
And we're not going to be asking, "Did you catch the game?" 
Instead, we're going to be asking, "Whose channel did you catch the game on?" 
We already see this happening with cooking, with singing -- we even see people streaming welding. 
And all of this stuff is going to happen around the metaphorical campfire. 
There's going to be millions of these campfires lit over the next few years. 
And on every topic, you're going to be able to find a campfire that will allow you to bond with your people around the world. 
For most of human history, entertainment was simply multiplayer. 
We sang together in person, we shared news together in the town square in person, and somewhere along the way, that two-way conversation turned into a one-way transmission. 
As someone who cares about communities, I am excited for a world where our entertainment could connect us instead of isolating us. 
A world where we can bond with each other over our shared interests and create real, strong communities. 
Games, streams and the interactions they encourage, are only just beginning to turn the wheel back to our interactive, community-rich, multiplayer past. 
Thank you all for sharing this experience here with me, and may you all find your best campfire. 
(Applause) 

I've been a political cartoonist on the global stage for the last 20 years. 
Hey, we have seen a lot of things happen in those 20 years. 
We saw three different Catholic popes, and we witnessed that unique moment: the election of a pope on St. Peter's Square -- you know, the little white smoke and the official announcement. 
[It's a boy!] (Laughter) (Applause) We saw four American presidents. 
Obama, of course. 
Oh, Europeans liked him a lot. 
He was a multilateralist. 
He favored diplomacy. 
He wanted to be friends with Iran. 
(Laughter) And then ... 
reality imitated caricature the day Donald Trump became the President of the United States of America. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You know, people come to us and they say, "It's too easy for you cartoonists. I mean -- with people like Trump?" 
Well, no, it's not easy to caricature a man who is himself a caricature. 
(Laughter) No. 
(Applause) Populists are no easy target for satire because you try to nail them down one day, and the next day, they outdo you. 
For example, as soon as he was elected, I tried to imagine the tweet that Trump would send on Christmas Eve. 
So I did this, OK? 
[Merry Christmas to all! Except all those pathetic losers. So sad.] (Laughter) And basically, the next day, Trump tweeted this: [Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!] (Laughter) It's the same! 
(Applause) This is the era of strongmen. 
And soon, Donald Trump was able to meet his personal hero, Vladimir Putin, and this is how the first meeting went: [I'll help you find the hackers. Give me your password.] (Laughter) And I'm not inventing anything. 
He came out of that first meeting saying that the two of them had agreed on a joint task force on cybersecurity. 
This is true, if you do remember. 
Oh, who would have imagined the things we saw over these 20 years. 
We saw Great Britain run towards a European Union exit. 
[Hard Brexit?] (Laughter) In the Middle East, we believed for a while in the democratic miracle of the Arab Spring. 
We saw dictators fall, we saw others hang on. 
(Laughter) And then there is the timeless Kim dynasty of North Korea. 
These guys seem to be coming straight out of Cartoon Network. 
I was blessed to be able to draw two of them. 
Kim Jong-il, the father, when he died a few years ago, that was a very dangerous moment. 
[That was close!] (Laughter) That was -- (Applause) And then the son, Kim Jong-un, proved himself a worthy successor to the throne. 
He's now friends with the US president. 
They meet each other all the time, and they talk like friends. 
[What kind of hair gel?] (Laughter) Should we be surprised to be living in a world ruled by egomaniacs? 
What if they were just a reflection of ourselves? 
I mean, look at us, each of us. 
(Laughter) Yeah, we love our smartphones; we love our selfies; we love ourselves. 
And thanks to Facebook, we have a lot of friends all over the world. 
Mark Zuckerberg is our friend. 
(Laughter) You know, he and his peers in Silicon Valley are the kings and the emperors of our time. 
Showing that the emperors have no clothes, that's the task of satire, right? 
Speaking truth to power. 
This has always been the historical role of political cartooning. 
In the 1830s, postrevolutionary France under King Louis Philippe, journalists and caricaturists fought hard for the freedom of the press. 
They were jailed, they were fined, but they prevailed. 
And this caricature of the king by Daumier came to define the monarch. 
It marked history. 
It became the timeless symbol of satire triumphing over autocracy. 
Today, 200 years after Daumier, are political cartoons at risk of disappearing? 
Take this blank space on the front page of Turkish opposition newspaper "Cumhuriyet." 
This is where Musa Kart's cartoon used to appear. 
In 2018, Musa Kart was sentenced to three years in jail. 
For doing what? 
For doing political cartoons in Erdoğan's Turkey. 
Cartoonists from Venezuela, Russia, Syria have been forced into exile. 
Look at this image. 
It seems so innocent, right? 
Yet it is so provocative. 
When he posted this image, Hani Abbas knew it would change his life. 
It was in 2012, and the Syrians were taking to the streets. 
Of course, the little red flower is the symbol of the Syrian revolution. 
So pretty soon, the regime was after him, and he had to flee the country. 
A good friend of his, cartoonist Akram Raslan, didn't make it out of Syria. 
He died under torture. 
In the United States of America recently, some of the very top cartoonists, like Nick Anderson and Rob Rogers -- this is a cartoon by Rob -- [Memorial Day 2018. (on tombstone) Truth. Honor. Rule of Law.] they lost their positions because their publishers found their work too critical of Trump. 
And the same happened to Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder. 
Hey, maybe we should start worrying. 
Political cartoons were born with democracy, and they are challenged when freedom is. 
You know, over the years, with the Cartooning for Peace Foundation and other initiatives, Kofi Annan -- this is not well known -- he was the honorary chair of our foundation, the late Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Laureate. 
He was a great defender of cartoons. 
Or, on the board of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, we have advocated on behalf of jailed, threatened, fired, exiled cartoonists. 
But I never saw a case of someone losing his job over a cartoon he didn't do. 
Well, that happened to me. 
For the last 20 years, I have been with the "International Herald Tribune" and the "New York Times." 
Then something happened. 
In April 2019, a cartoon by a famous Portuguese cartoonist, which was first published in a newspaper "El Expresso" in Lisbon, was picked by an editor at the "New York Times" and reprinted in the international editions. 
This thing blew up. 
It was denounced as anti-Semitic, triggered widespread outrage, apologies and a lot of damage control by the Times. 
A month after, my editor told me they were ending political cartoons altogether. 
So we could, and we should, have a discussion about that cartoon. 
Some people say it reminds them of the worst anti-Semitic propaganda. 
Others, including in Israel, say no, it's just a harsh criticism of Trump, who is shown as blindly following the Prime Minister of Israel. 
I have some issues with this cartoon, but that discussion did not happen at the "New York Times." 
Under attack, they took the easiest path: in order to not have problems with political cartoons in the future, let's not have any at all. 
Hey, this is new. 
Did we just invent preventive self-censorship? 
I think this is bigger than cartoons. 
This is about opinion and journalism. 
This, in the end, is about democracy. 
We now live in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm. 
The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in. 
These social media mobs, sometimes fueled by interest groups, fall upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. 
They send publishers and editors scrambling for countermeasures. 
This leaves no room for meaningful discussions. 
Twitter is a place for fury, not for debate. 
And you know what? 
Someone described pretty well our human condition in this noisy age. 
You know who? 
Shakespeare, 400 years ago. 
["(Life is) a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."] This speaks to me. Shakespeare is still very relevant, no? 
But the world has changed a bit. 
[Too long!] (Laughter) It's true. 
(Applause) You know, social media is both a blessing and a curse for cartoons. 
This is the era of the image, so they get shared, they get viral, but that also makes them a prime target. 
More than often, the real target behind the cartoon is the media that published it. 
[Covering Iraq? No, Trump!] That relationship between traditional media and social media is a funny one. 
On one hand, you have the time-consuming process of information, verification, curation. 
On the other hand, it's an open buffet, frankly, for rumors, opinions, emotions, amplified by algorithms. 
Even quality newspapers mimic the codes of social networks on their websites. 
They highlight the 10 most read, the 10 most shared stories. 
They should put forward the 10 most important stories. 
(Applause) The media must not be intimidated by social media, and editors should stop being afraid of the angry mob. 
(Applause) We're not going to put up warnings the way we do on cigarette packs, are we? 
[Satire can hurt your feelings] (Laughter) Come on. 
[Under your burkini you could be hiding a sex bomb] Political cartoons are meant to provoke, just like opinions. 
But before all, they are meant to be thought-provoking. 
You feel hurt? 
Just let it go. 
You don't like it? 
Look the other way. 
Freedom of expression is not incompatible with dialogue and listening to each other. 
But it is incompatible with intolerance. 
(Applause) Let us not become our own censors in the name of political correctness. 
We need to stand up, we need to push back, because if we don't, we will wake up tomorrow in a sanitized world, where any form of satire and political cartooning becomes impossible. 
Because, when political pressure meets political correctness, freedom of speech perishes. 
(Applause) Do you remember January 2015? 
With the massacre of journalists and cartoonists at "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris, we discovered the most extreme form of censorship: murder. 
Remember how it felt. 
[Without humor we are all dead] Whatever one thought of that satirical magazine, however one felt about those particular cartoons, we all sensed that something fundamental was at stake, that citizens of free societies -- actually, citizens of any society -- need humor as much as the air we breathe. 
This is why the extremists, the dictators, the autocrats and, frankly, all the ideologues of the world cannot stand humor. 
In the insane world we live in right now, we need political cartoons more than ever. 
And we need humor. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

“A few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes/ And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned clock… must be resurrected from the ruins and examined.” This is the premise of Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel "The God of Small Things." 
Set in a town in Kerala, India called Ayemenem, the story revolves around fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, who are separated for 23 years after the fateful few dozen hours in which their cousin drowns, their mother’s illicit affair is revealed, and her lover is murdered. 
While the book is set at the point of Rahel and Estha’s reunion, the narrative takes place mostly in the past, reconstructing the details around the tragic events that led to their separation. 
Roy’s rich language and masterful storytelling earned her the prestigious Booker prize for "The God of Small Things." 
In the novel, she interrogates the culture of her native India, including its social mores and colonial history. 
One of her focuses is the caste system, a way of classifying people by hereditary social class that is thousands of years old. 
By the mid-20th century, the original four castes associated with specific occupations had been divided into some 3000 sub-castes. 
Though the caste system was Constitutionally abolished in 1950, it continued to shape social life in India, routinely marginalizing people of lower castes. 
In the novel, Rahel and Estha have a close relationship with Velutha, a worker in their family’s pickle factory and member of the so-called “untouchable” caste. 
When Velutha and the twins’ mother, Ammu, embark on an affair, they violate what Roy describes as the “love laws” forbidding intimacy between different castes. 
Roy warns that the tragic consequences of their relationship “would lurk forever in ordinary things,” like “coat hangers,” “the tar on roads,” and “the absence of words.” Roy’s writing makes constant use of these ordinary things, bringing lush detail to even the most tragic moments. 
The book opens at the funeral of the twins’ half-British cousin Sophie after her drowning. 
As the family mourns, lilies curl and crisp in the hot church. 
A baby bat crawls up a funeral sari. 
Tears drip from a chin like raindrops from a roof. 
The novel forays into the past to explore the characters’ struggles to operate in a world where they don’t quite fit, alongside their nation’s political turmoil. 
Ammu struggles not to lash out at her beloved children when she feels particularly trapped in her parents’ small-town home, where neighbors judge and shun her for being divorced. 
Velutha, meanwhile, balances his affair with Ammu and friendship with the twins not only with his employment to their family, but also with his membership to a budding communist countermovement to Indira Ghandi’s “Green Revolution.” In the 1960s, the misleadingly named “Green Revolution” introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the damming of rivers to India. 
While these policies produced high-yield crops that staved off famine, they also forced people from lower castes off their land and caused widespread environmental damage. 
When the twins return to Ayemenem as adults, the consequences of the Green Revolution are all around them. 
The river that was bursting with life in their childhood greets them “with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed.” As Roy probes the depths of human experience, she never loses sight of the way her characters are shaped by the time and the place where they live. 
In the world of "The God of Small Things," “Various kinds of despair competed for primacy… personal despair could never be desperate enough... 
personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation.” 

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

Spoons. 
Cardboard boxes. 
Toddler-size electric trains. 
Holiday ornaments. 
Bounce houses. 
Blankets. 
Baskets. 
Carpets. 
Tray tables. 
Smartphones. 
Pianos. 
Robes. 
Photographs. 
What do all of these things have in common, aside from the fact they're photos that I took in the last three months, and therefore, own the copyright to? 
(Laughter) They're all inventions that were created with the benefit of language. 
None of these things would have existed without language. 
Imagine creating any one of those things or, like, building an entire building like this, without being able to use language or without benefiting from any knowledge that was got by the use of language. 
Basically, language is the most important thing in the entire world. 
All of our civilization rests upon it. 
And those who devote their lives to studying it -- both how language emerged, how human languages differ, how they differ from animal communication systems -- are linguists. 
Formal linguistics is a relatively young field, more or less. 
And it's uncovered a lot of really important stuff. 
Like, for example, that human communication systems differ crucially from animal communication systems, that all languages are equally expressive, even if they do it in different ways. 
And yet, despite this, there are a lot of people who just love to pop off about language like they have an equal understanding of it as a linguist, because, of course, they speak a language. 
And if you speak a language, that means you have just as much right to talk about its function as anybody else. 
Imagine if you were talking to a surgeon, and you say, "Listen, buddy. 
I've had a heart for, like, 40 years now. 
I think I know a thing or two about aortic valve replacements. 
I think my opinion is just as valid as yours." 
And yet, that's exactly what happens. 
This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that in the film "Arrival," he would have brought a cryptographer -- somebody who can unscramble a message in a language they already know -- rather than a linguist, to communicate with the aliens, because what would a linguist -- why would that be useful in talking to somebody speaking a language we don't even know? 
Though, of course, the "Arrival" film is not off the hook. 
I mean, come on -- listen, film. Hey, buddy: there are aliens that come down to our planet in gigantic ships, and they want to do nothing except for communicate with us, and you hire one linguist? 
(Laughter) What's the US government on a budget or something? 
(Laughter) A lot of these things can be chalked up to misunderstandings, both about what language is and about the formal study of language, about linguistics. 
And I think there's something that underlies a lot of these misunderstandings that can be summed up by this delightful article in "Forbes," about why high school students shouldn't learn foreign languages. 
I'm going to pull out some quotes from this, and I want you to see if you can figure out what underlies some of these opinions and ideas. 
"Americans rarely read the classics, even in translation." 
So in other words, why bother learning a foreign language when they're not even going to read the classic in the original anyway? 
What's the point? 
"Studying foreign languages in school is a waste of time, compared to other things that you could be doing in school." 
"Europe has a lot of language groups clustered in a relatively small space." 
So for Americans, ah, what's the point of learning another language? 
You're not really going to get a lot of bang for your buck out of that. 
This is my favorite, "A student in Birmingham would have to travel about a thousand miles to get to the Mexican border, and even then, there would be enough people who speak English to get around." 
In other words, if you can kind of wave your arms around, and you can get to where you're going, then there's really no point in learning another language anyway. 
What underlies a lot of these attitudes is the conceptual metaphor, language is a tool. 
And there's something that rings very true about this metaphor. 
Language is kind of a tool in that, if you know the local language, you can do more than if you didn't. 
But the implication is that language is only a tool, and this is absolutely false. 
If language was a tool, it would honestly be a pretty poor tool. 
And we would have abandoned it long ago for something that was a lot better. 
Think about just any sentence. 
Here's a sentence that I'm sure I've said in my life: "Yesterday I saw Kyn." 
I have a friend named Kyn. 
And when I say this sentence, "Yesterday I saw Kyn," do you think it's really the case that everything in my mind is now implanted in your mind via this sentence? 
Hardly, because there's a lot of other stuff going on. 
Like, when I say "yesterday," I might think what the weather was like yesterday because I was there. 
And if I'm remembering, I'll probably remember there was something I forgot to mail, which I did. 
This was a preplanned joke, but I really did forget to mail something. 
And so that means I'm going to have to do it Monday, because that's when I'm going to get back home. 
And of course, when I think of Monday, I'll think of "Manic Monday" by the Bangles. It's a good song. 
And when I say the word "saw," I think of this phrase: "'I see!' said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw." 
I always do. 
Anytime I hear the word "saw" or say it, I always think of that, because my grandfather always used to say it, so it makes me think of my grandfather. 
And we're back to "Manic Monday" again, for some reason. 
And with Kyn, when I'm saying something like, "Yesterday I saw Kyn," I'll think of the circumstances under which I saw him. 
And this happened to be that day. Here he is with my cat. 
And of course, if I'm thinking of Kyn, I'll think he's going to Long Beach State right now, and I'll remember that my good friend John and my mother both graduated from Long Beach State, my cousin Katie is going to Long Beach State right now. 
But this is just a fraction of what's going on in your head at any given time while you are speaking. 
And all we have to represent the entire mess that is going on in our head, is this. 
I mean, that's all we got. 
(Laughter) Is it any wonder that our system is so poor? 
So imagine, if I can give you an analogy, imagine if you wanted to know what is it like to eat a cake, if instead of just eating the cake, you instead had to ingest the ingredients of a cake, one by one, along with instructions about how these ingredients can be combined to form a cake. 
You had to eat the instructions, too. 
(Laughter) If that was how we had to experience cake, we would never eat cake. 
And yet, language is the only way -- the only way -- that we can figure out what is going on here, in our minds. 
This is our interiority, the thing that makes us human, the thing that makes us different from other animals, is all inside here somewhere, and all we have to do to represent it is our own languages. 
A language is our best way of showing what's going on in our head. 
Imagine if I wanted to ask a big question, like: "What is the nature of human thought and emotion?" 
What you'd want to do is you'd want to examine as many different languages as possible. 
One isn't just going to do it. 
To give you an example, here's a picture I took of little Roman, that I took with a 12-megapixel camera. 
Now, here's that same picture with a lot fewer pixels. 
Obviously, neither of these pictures is a real cat. 
But one gives you a lot better sense of what a cat is than the other. 
Language is not merely a tool. 
It is our legacy, it's our way of conveying what it means to be human. 
And of course, by "our" legacy, I mean all humans everywhere. 
And losing even one language makes that picture a lot less clear. 
So as a job for the past 10 years and also as recreation, just for fun, I create languages. 
These are called "conlangs," short for "constructed languages." 
Now, presenting these facts back to back, that we're losing languages on our planet and that I create brand-new languages, you might think that there's some nonsuperficial connection between these two. 
In fact, a lot of people have drawn a line between those dots. 
This is a guy who got all bent out of shape that there was a conlang in James Cameron's "Avatar." 
He says, "But in the three years it took James Cameron to get Avatar to the screen, a language died." 
"Na'vi, alas, won't fill the hole where it used to be ..." 
A truly profound and poignant statement -- if you don't think about it at all. 
(Laughter) But when I was here at Cal, I completed two majors. 
One of them was linguistics, but the other one was English. 
And of course, the English major, the study of English, is not actually the study of the English language, as we know, it's the study of literature. 
Literature is just a wonderful thing, because basically, literature, more broadly, is kind of like art; it falls under the rubric of art. 
And what we do with literature, authors create new, entire beings and histories. 
And it's interesting to us to see what kind of depth and emotion and just unique spirit authors can invest into these fictional beings. 
So much so, that, I mean -- take a look at this. 
There's an entire series of books that are written about fictional characters. 
Like, the entire book is just about one fictional, fake human being. 
There's an entire book on George F. Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt," and I guarantee you, that book is longer than "Babbitt," which is a short book. 
Does anybody even remember that one? 
It's pretty good, I actually think it's better than "Main Street." 
So we've never questioned the fact that literature is interesting. 
But despite the fact, not even linguists are actually interested in what created languages can tell us about the depth of the human spirit just as an artistic endeavor. 
I'll give you a nice little example here. 
There was an article written about me in the California alumni magazine a while back. 
And when they wrote this article, they wanted to get somebody from the opposing side, which, in hindsight, seems like a weird thing to do. 
You're just talking about a person, and you want to get somebody from the opposing side of that person. 
(Laughter) Essentially, this is just a puff piece, but whatever. 
So, they happened to get one of the most brilliant linguists of our time, George Lakoff, who's a linguist here at Berkeley. 
And his work has basically forever changed the fields of linguistics and cognitive science. 
And when asked about my work and about language creation in general, he said, "But there's a lot of things to be done in the study of language. 
You should spend the time on something real." 
Yeah. 
"Something real." Does this remind you of anything? 
To use the very framework that he himself invented, let me refer back to this conceptual metaphor: language is a tool. 
And he appears to be laboring under this conceptual metaphor; that is, language is useful when it can be used for communication. 
Language is useless when it can't be used for communication. 
It might make you wonder: What do we do with dead languages? 
But anyway. 
So, because of this idea, it might seem like the very height of absurdity to have a Duolingo course on the High Valyrian language that I created for HBO's "Game of Thrones." 
You might wonder what, exactly, are 740,000 people learning? 
(Laughter) Well, let's take a look at it. 
What are they learning? 
What could they possibly be learning? 
Well, bearing in mind that the other language for this -- it's for people that speak English -- English speakers are learning quite a bit. 
Here's a sentence that they will probably never use for communication in their entire lives: "Vala ābre urnes." 
"The man sees the woman." 
The little middle line is the gloss, so it's word for word, that's what it says. 
And they're actually learning some very fascinating things, especially if they're English speakers. 
They're learning that a verb can come at the very end of a sentence. 
Doesn't really do that in English when you have two arguments. 
They're learning that sometimes a language doesn't have an equivalent for the word "the" -- it's totally absent. 
That's something language can do. 
They're learning that a long vowel can actually be longer in duration, as opposed to different in quality, which is what our long vowels do; they're actually the same length. 
They're learning that there are these little inflections. 
Hmm? Hmm? 
There are inflections called "cases" on the end of nouns -- (Laughter) that tell you who does what to whom in a sentence. 
Even if you leave the order of the words the same and switch the endings, it changes who does what to whom. 
What they're learning is that languages do things, the same things, differently. 
And that learning languages can be fun. 
What they're learning is respect for Language: capital "L" Language. 
And given the fact that 88 percent of Americans only speak English at home, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. 
You know why languages die on our planet? 
It's not because government imposes one language on a smaller group, or because an entire group of speakers is wiped out. 
That certainly has happened in the past, and it's happening now, but it's not the main reason. 
The main reason is that a child is born to a family that speaks a language that is not widely spoken in their community, and that child doesn't learn it. 
Why? 
Because that language is not valued in their community. 
Because the language isn't useful. 
Because the child can't go and get a job if they speak that language. 
Because if language is just a tool, then learning their native language is about as useful as learning High Valyrian, so why bother? 
Now ... 
Maybe language study isn't going to lead to a lot more linguistic fluency. 
But maybe that's not such a big deal. 
Maybe if more people are studying more languages, it will lead to more linguistic tolerance and less linguistic imperialism. 
Maybe if we actually respect language for what it is -- literally, the greatest invention in the history of humankind -- then in the future, we can celebrate endangered languages as living languages, as opposed to museum pieces. 
(High Valyrian) Kirimvose. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Imagine a future where nobody dies— instead, our minds are uploaded to a digital world. 
They might live on in a realistic, simulated environment with avatar bodies, and could still call in and contribute to the biological world. 
Mind uploading has powerful appeal— but what would it actually take to scan a person’s brain and upload their mind? 
The main challenges are scanning a brain in enough detail to capture the mind and perfectly recreating that detail artificially. 
But first, we have to know what to scan. 
The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, connected by at least a hundred trillion synapses. 
The pattern of connectivity among the brain’s neurons, that is, all of the neurons and all their connections to each other, is called the connectome. 
We haven’t yet mapped the connectome, and there’s also a lot more to neural signaling. 
There are hundreds, possibly thousands of different kinds of connections, or synapses. 
Each functions in a slightly different way. 
Some work faster, some slower. 
Some grow or shrink rapidly in the process of learning; some are more stable over time. 
And beyond the trillions of precise, 1-to-1 connections between neurons, some neurons also spray out neurotransmitters that affect many other neurons at once. 
All of these different kinds of interactions would need to be mapped in order to copy a person’s mind. 
There are also a lot of influences on neural signaling that are poorly understood or undiscovered. 
To name just one example, patterns of activity between neurons are likely influenced by a type of cell called glia. 
Glia surround neurons and, according to some scientists, may even outnumber them by as many as ten to one. 
Glia were once thought to be purely for structural support, and their functions are still poorly understood, but at least some of them can generate their own signals that influence information processing. 
Our understanding of the brain isn’t good enough to determine what we’d need to scan in order to replicate the mind, but assuming our knowledge does advance to that point, how would we scan it? 
Currently, we can accurately scan a living human brain with resolutions of about half a millimeter using our best non-invasive scanning method, MRI. 
To detect a synapse, we’ll need to scan at a resolution of about a micron— a thousandth of a millimeter. 
To distinguish the kind of synapse and precisely how strong each synapse is, we’ll need even better resolution. 
MRI depends on powerful magnetic fields. 
Scanning at the resolution required to determine the details of individual synapses would requires a field strength high enough to cook a person’s tissues. 
So this kind of leap in resolution would require fundamentally new scanning technology. 
It would be more feasible to scan a dead brain using an electron microscope, but even that technology is nowhere near good enough– and requires killing the subject first. 
Assuming we eventually understand the brain well enough to know what to scan and develop the technology to safely scan at that resolution, the next challenge would be to recreate that information digitally. 
The main obstacles to doing so are computing power and storage space, both of which are improving every year. 
We’re actually much closer to attaining this technological capacity than we are to understanding or scanning our own minds. 
Artificial neural networks already run our internet search engines, digital assistants, self-driving cars, Wall Street trading algorithms, and smart phones. 
Nobody has yet built an artificial network with 86 billion neurons, but as computing technology improves, it may be possible to keep track of such massive data sets. 
At every step in the scanning and uploading process, we’d have to be certain we were capturing all the necessary information accurately— or there’s no telling what ruined version of a mind might emerge. 
While mind uploading is theoretically possible, we’re likely hundreds of years away from the technology and scientific understanding that would make it a reality. 
And that reality would come with ethical and philosophical considerations: who would have access to mind uploading? 
What rights would be accorded to uploaded minds? 
How could this technology be abused? 
Even if we can eventually upload our minds, whether we should remains an open question. 

So, artificial intelligence is known for disrupting all kinds of industries. 
What about ice cream? 
What kind of mind-blowing new flavors could we generate with the power of an advanced artificial intelligence? 
So I teamed up with a group of coders from Kealing Middle School to find out the answer to this question. 
They collected over 1,600 existing ice cream flavors, and together, we fed them to an algorithm to see what it would generate. 
And here are some of the flavors that the AI came up with. 
[Pumpkin Trash Break] (Laughter) [Peanut Butter Slime] [Strawberry Cream Disease] (Laughter) These flavors are not delicious, as we might have hoped they would be. 
So the question is: What happened? 
What went wrong? 
Is the AI trying to kill us? 
Or is it trying to do what we asked, and there was a problem? 
In movies, when something goes wrong with AI, it's usually because the AI has decided that it doesn't want to obey the humans anymore, and it's got its own goals, thank you very much. 
In real life, though, the AI that we actually have is not nearly smart enough for that. 
It has the approximate computing power of an earthworm, or maybe at most a single honeybee, and actually, probably maybe less. 
Like, we're constantly learning new things about brains that make it clear how much our AIs don't measure up to real brains. 
So today's AI can do a task like identify a pedestrian in a picture, but it doesn't have a concept of what the pedestrian is beyond that it's a collection of lines and textures and things. 
It doesn't know what a human actually is. 
So will today's AI do what we ask it to do? 
It will if it can, but it might not do what we actually want. 
So let's say that you were trying to get an AI to take this collection of robot parts and assemble them into some kind of robot to get from Point A to Point B. 
Now, if you were going to try and solve this problem by writing a traditional-style computer program, you would give the program step-by-step instructions on how to take these parts, how to assemble them into a robot with legs and then how to use those legs to walk to Point B. 
But when you're using AI to solve the problem, it goes differently. 
You don't tell it how to solve the problem, you just give it the goal, and it has to figure out for itself via trial and error how to reach that goal. 
And it turns out that the way AI tends to solve this particular problem is by doing this: it assembles itself into a tower and then falls over and lands at Point B. 
And technically, this solves the problem. 
Technically, it got to Point B. 
The danger of AI is not that it's going to rebel against us, it's that it's going to do exactly what we ask it to do. 
So then the trick of working with AI becomes: How do we set up the problem so that it actually does what we want? 
So this little robot here is being controlled by an AI. 
The AI came up with a design for the robot legs and then figured out how to use them to get past all these obstacles. 
But when David Ha set up this experiment, he had to set it up with very, very strict limits on how big the AI was allowed to make the legs, because otherwise ... 
(Laughter) And technically, it got to the end of that obstacle course. 
So you see how hard it is to get AI to do something as simple as just walk. 
So seeing the AI do this, you may say, OK, no fair, you can't just be a tall tower and fall over, you have to actually, like, use legs to walk. 
And it turns out, that doesn't always work, either. 
This AI's job was to move fast. 
They didn't tell it that it had to run facing forward or that it couldn't use its arms. 
So this is what you get when you train AI to move fast, you get things like somersaulting and silly walks. 
It's really common. 
So is twitching along the floor in a heap. 
(Laughter) So in my opinion, you know what should have been a whole lot weirder is the "Terminator" robots. 
Hacking "The Matrix" is another thing that AI will do if you give it a chance. 
So if you train an AI in a simulation, it will learn how to do things like hack into the simulation's math errors and harvest them for energy. 
Or it will figure out how to move faster by glitching repeatedly into the floor. 
When you're working with AI, it's less like working with another human and a lot more like working with some kind of weird force of nature. 
And it's really easy to accidentally give AI the wrong problem to solve, and often we don't realize that until something has actually gone wrong. 
So here's an experiment I did, where I wanted the AI to copy paint colors, to invent new paint colors, given the list like the ones here on the left. 
And here's what the AI actually came up with. 
[Sindis Poop, Turdly, Suffer, Gray Pubic] (Laughter) So technically, it did what I asked it to. 
I thought I was asking it for, like, nice paint color names, but what I was actually asking it to do was just imitate the kinds of letter combinations that it had seen in the original. 
And I didn't tell it anything about what words mean, or that there are maybe some words that it should avoid using in these paint colors. 
So its entire world is the data that I gave it. 
Like with the ice cream flavors, it doesn't know about anything else. 
So it is through the data that we often accidentally tell AI to do the wrong thing. 
This is a fish called a tench. 
And there was a group of researchers who trained an AI to identify this tench in pictures. 
But then when they asked it what part of the picture it was actually using to identify the fish, here's what it highlighted. 
Yes, those are human fingers. 
Why would it be looking for human fingers if it's trying to identify a fish? 
Well, it turns out that the tench is a trophy fish, and so in a lot of pictures that the AI had seen of this fish during training, the fish looked like this. 
(Laughter) And it didn't know that the fingers aren't part of the fish. 
So you see why it is so hard to design an AI that actually can understand what it's looking at. 
And this is why designing the image recognition in self-driving cars is so hard, and why so many self-driving car failures are because the AI got confused. 
I want to talk about an example from 2016. 
There was a fatal accident when somebody was using Tesla's autopilot AI, but instead of using it on the highway like it was designed for, they used it on city streets. 
And what happened was, a truck drove out in front of the car and the car failed to brake. 
Now, the AI definitely was trained to recognize trucks in pictures. 
But what it looks like happened is the AI was trained to recognize trucks on highway driving, where you would expect to see trucks from behind. 
Trucks on the side is not supposed to happen on a highway, and so when the AI saw this truck, it looks like the AI recognized it as most likely to be a road sign and therefore, safe to drive underneath. 
Here's an AI misstep from a different field. 
Amazon recently had to give up on a résumé-sorting algorithm that they were working on when they discovered that the algorithm had learned to discriminate against women. 
What happened is they had trained it on example résumés of people who they had hired in the past. 
And from these examples, the AI learned to avoid the résumés of people who had gone to women's colleges or who had the word "women" somewhere in their resume, as in, "women's soccer team" or "Society of Women Engineers." 
The AI didn't know that it wasn't supposed to copy this particular thing that it had seen the humans do. 
And technically, it did what they asked it to do. 
They just accidentally asked it to do the wrong thing. 
And this happens all the time with AI. 
AI can be really destructive and not know it. 
So the AIs that recommend new content in Facebook, in YouTube, they're optimized to increase the number of clicks and views. 
And unfortunately, one way that they have found of doing this is to recommend the content of conspiracy theories or bigotry. 
The AIs themselves don't have any concept of what this content actually is, and they don't have any concept of what the consequences might be of recommending this content. 
So, when we're working with AI, it's up to us to avoid problems. 
And avoiding things going wrong, that may come down to the age-old problem of communication, where we as humans have to learn how to communicate with AI. 
We have to learn what AI is capable of doing and what it's not, and to understand that, with its tiny little worm brain, AI doesn't really understand what we're trying to ask it to do. 
So in other words, we have to be prepared to work with AI that's not the super-competent, all-knowing AI of science fiction. 
We have to be prepared to work with an AI that's the one that we actually have in the present day. 
And present-day AI is plenty weird enough. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

100 years ago, there were 2,000 varieties of peaches, nearly 2,000 different varieties of plums and almost 800 named varieties of apples growing in the United States. 
Today, only a fraction of those remain, and what is left is threatened by industrialization of agriculture, disease and climate change. 
Those varieties that are threatened include the Blood Cling, a red-flesh peach brought by Spanish missionaries to the Americas, then cultivated by Native Americans for centuries; an apricot that was brought by Chinese immigrants who came to work on the Transcontinental Railroad; and countless varieties of plums that originated in the Middle East and were then brought by Italian, French and German immigrants. 
None of these varieties are indigenous. 
In fact, almost all of our fruit trees were brought here, including apples and peaches and cherries. 
So more than just food, embedded within these fruit is our culture. 
It's the people who cared for and cultivated them, who valued them so much that they brought them here with them as a connection to their home, and it's the way that they've passed them on and shared them. 
In many ways, these fruit are our story. 
And I was fortunate enough to learn about it through an artwork that I created entitled the "Tree of 40 Fruit." 
The Tree of 40 Fruit is a single tree that grows 40 different varieties of stone fruit. 
So that's peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and cherries all growing on one tree. 
It's designed to be a normal-looking tree throughout the majority of the year, until spring, when it blossoms in pink and white and then in summer, bears a multitude of different fruit. 
I began the project for purely artistic reasons: I wanted to change the reality of the everyday, and to be honest, create this startling moment when people would see this tree blossom in all these different colors and bear all of these different fruit. 
I created the Tree of 40 Fruit through the process of grafting. 
I'll collect cuttings in winter, store them, and then graft them onto the ends of branches in spring. 
In fact, almost all fruit trees are grafted, because the seed of a fruit tree is a genetic variant of the parent. 
So when we find a variety that we really like, the way that we propagate it is by taking a cutting off of one tree and putting it onto another -- which is kind of crazy to think that every single Macintosh apple came from one tree that's been grafted over and over from generation to generation. 
But it also means that fruit trees can't be preserved by seed. 
I've known about grafting as long as I can remember. 
My great-grandfather made a living grafting peach orchards in Southeastern Pennsylvania. 
And although I never met him, any time anyone would mention his name, they were quick to note that he knew how to graft as if he had a magical or mystical capability. 
I decided on the number 40 for the Tree of 40 Fruit because it's found throughout Western religion as not the quantifiable dozen and not the infinite but a number that's beyond counting. 
It's a bounty or a multitude. 
But the problem was that when I started, I couldn't find 40 different varieties of these fruit, and this is despite the fact that I live in New York state, which, a century ago, was one of the leading producers of these fruit. 
So as they were tearing out research orchards and old, vintage orchards, I would collect branches off them and graft them onto trees in my nursery. 
So this is what the Tree of 40 Fruit look like when they were first planted, and this is what they look like six years later. 
This is definitely not a sport of immediate gratification -- (Laughter) It takes a year to know if a graft has succeeded; it takes two to three years to know if it produces fruit; and it takes up to eight years to create just one of the trees. 
Each of the varieties grafted to the Tree of 40 Fruit has a slightly different form and a slightly different color. 
And I realized that by creating a timeline of when all these blossomed in relationship to each other, I can essentially shape or design how the tree appears during spring. 
And this is how they appear during summer. 
They produce fruit from June through September. 
First is cherries, then apricots, Asian plums, nectarines and peaches, and I think I forgot one in there, somewhere ... 
(Laughter) Although it's an artwork that exists outside of the gallery, as the project continues, it's been conservation by way of the art world. 
As I've been asked to create these in different locations, what I'll do is I'll research varieties that originated or were historically grown in that area, I'll source them locally and graft them to the tree so that it becomes an agricultural history of the area where they're located. 
And then the project got picked up online, which was horrifying and humbling. 
The horrifying part was all of the tattoos that I saw of images of the Tree of 40 Fruit. 
(Laughter) Which I was like, "Why would you do that to your body?" 
(Laughter) And the humbling part was all of the requests that I received from pastors, from rabbis and priests who asked to use the tree as a central part within their service. 
And then it became a meme -- and the answer to that question is "I hope not?" 
[Is your marriage like the Tree of 40 Fruit?] (Laughter) Like all good memes, this has led to an interview on NPR's "Weekend Edition," and as a college professor, I thought I peaked -- like, that was the pinnacle of my career -- but you never know who's listening to NPR. 
And several weeks after the NPR interview, I received an email from the Department of Defense. 
The Defense Advanced Research Project Administration invited me to come talk about innovation and creativity, and it's a conversation that quickly shifted to a discussion of food security. 
You see, our national security is dependent upon our food security. 
Now that we've created these monocultures that only grow a few varieties of each crop, if something happens to just one of those varieties, it can have a dramatic impact upon our food supply. 
And the key to maintaining our food security is preserving our biodiversity. 
100 years ago, this was done by everybody that had a garden or a small stand of trees in their backyard, and grew varieties that were passed down through their family. 
These are plums from just one Tree of 40 Fruit in one week in August. 
Several years into the project, I was told that I have one of the largest collections of these fruit in the Eastern United States, which, as an artist, is absolutely terrifying. 
(Laughter) But in many ways, I didn't know what I had. 
I discovered that the majority of the varieties I had were heirloom varieties, so those that were grown before 1945, which is seen as the dawn of the industrialization of agriculture. 
Several of the varieties dated back thousands and thousands of years. 
And finding out how rare they were, I became obsessed with trying to preserve them, and the vehicle for this became art. 
I would go into old, vintage orchards before they were torn out and I would save the bowl or the trunk section that possessed the original graft union. 
I started doing pressings of flowers and the leaves to create herbarium specimens. 
I started to sequence the DNA. 
But ultimately, I set out to preserve the story through these copper-plate etchings and letterpress descriptions. 
To tell the story of the George IV peach, which took root between two buildings in New York City -- someone walks by, tastes it, it becomes a major commercial variety in the 19th century because it tastes just that good. 
Then all but vanishes, because it doesn't ship well and it doesn't conform to modern agriculture. 
But I realize that as a story, it needs to be told. 
And in the telling of that story, it has to include the experience of being able to touch, to smell and to taste those varieties. 
So I set out to create an orchard to make these fruit available to the public, and have the aim of placing them in the highest density of people that I could possibly find. 
Naturally, I started looking for an acre of land in New York City -- (Laughter) which, in retrospect, seemed, like, rather ambitious, and probably the reason why nobody was returning my phone calls or emails -- (Laughter) until eventually, four years later, I heard back from Governors Island. 
So Governors Island is a former naval base that was given to the City of New York in 2000. 
And it opened up all of this land just a five-minute ferry ride from New York. 
And they invited me to create a project that we're calling the "Open Orchard" that will bring back fruit varieties that haven't been grown in New York for over a century. 
Currently in progress, The Open Orchard will be 50 multigrafted trees that possess 200 heirloom and antique fruit varieties. 
So these are varieties that originated or were historically grown in the region. 
Varieties like the Early Strawberry apple, which originated on 13th Street and Third Avenue. 
Since a fruit tree can't be preserved by seed, The Open Orchard will act like a living gene bank, or an archive of these fruit. 
Like the Tree of 40 Fruit, it will be experiential; it will also be symbolic. 
Most importantly, it's going to invite people to participate in conservation and to learn more about their food. 
Through the Tree of 40 Fruit, I've received thousands and thousands of emails from people, asking basic questions about "How do you plant a tree?" 
With less than three percent of the population having any direct tie to agriculture, the Open Orchard is going to invite people to come take part in public programming and to take part in workshops, to learn how to graft, to grow, to prune and to harvest a tree; to take part in fresh eating and blossom tours; to work with local chefs to learn how to use these fruit and to recreate centuries-old dishes that many of these varieties were grown specifically for. 
Extending beyond the physical site of the orchard, it will be a cookbook that compiles all of those recipes. 
It will be a field guide that talks about the characteristics and traits of those fruit, their origin and their story. 
Growing up on a farm, I thought I understood agriculture, and I didn't want anything to do with it. 
So I became an artist -- (Laughter) But I have to admit that it's something within my own DNA. 
And I don't think that I'm the only one. 
100 years ago, we were all much more closely tied to the culture, the cultivation and the story of our food, and we've been separated from that. 
The Open Orchard creates the opportunity not just to reconnect to this unknown past, but a way for us to consider what the future of our food could be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

People use the internet for various reasons. 
It turns out that one of the most popular categories of website is something that people typically consume in private. 
It involves curiosity, non-insignificant levels of self-indulgence and is centered around recording the reproductive activities of other people. 
(Laughter) Of course, I'm talking about genealogy -- (Laughter) the study of family history. 
When it comes to detailing family history, in every family, we have this person that is obsessed with genealogy. 
Let's call him Uncle Bernie. 
Uncle Bernie is exactly the last person you want to sit next to in Thanksgiving dinner, because he will bore you to death with peculiar details about some ancient relatives. 
But as you know, there is a scientific side for everything, and we found that Uncle Bernie's stories have immense potential for biomedical research. 
We let Uncle Bernie and his fellow genealogists document their family trees through a genealogy website called geni.com. 
When users upload their trees to the website, it scans their relatives, and if it finds matches to existing trees, it merges the existing and the new tree together. 
The result is that large family trees are created, beyond the individual level of each genealogist. 
Now, by repeating this process with millions of people all over the world, we can crowdsource the construction of a family tree of all humankind. 
Using this website, we were able to connect 125 million people into a single family tree. 
I cannot draw the tree on the screens over here because they have less pixels than the number of people in this tree. 
But here is an example of a subset of 6,000 individuals. 
Each green node is a person. 
The red nodes represent marriages, and the connections represent parenthood. 
In the middle of this tree, you see the ancestors. 
And as we go to the periphery, you see the descendants. 
This tree has seven generations, approximately. 
Now, this is what happens when we increase the number of individuals to 70,000 people -- still a tiny subset of all the data that we have. 
Despite that, you can already see the formation of gigantic family trees with many very distant relatives. 
Thanks to the hard work of our genealogists, we can go back in time hundreds of years ago. 
For example, here is Alexander Hamilton, who was born in 1755. 
Alexander was the first US Secretary of the Treasury, but mostly known today due to a popular Broadway musical. 
We found that Alexander has deeper connections in the showbiz industry. 
In fact, he's a blood relative of ... 
Kevin Bacon! 
(Laughter) Both of them are descendants of a lady from Scotland who lived in the 13th century. 
So you can say that Alexander Hamilton is 35 degrees of Kevin Bacon genealogy. 
(Laughter) And our tree has millions of stories like that. 
We invested significant efforts to validate the quality of our data. 
Using DNA, we found that .3 percent of the mother-child connections in our data are wrong, which could match the adoption rate in the US pre-Second World War. 
For the father's side, the news is not as good: 1.9 percent of the father-child connections in our data are wrong. 
And I see some people smirk over here. 
It is what you think -- there are many milkmen out there. 
(Laughter) However, this 1.9 percent error rate in patrilineal connections is not unique to our data. 
Previous studies found a similar error rate using clinical-grade pedigrees. 
So the quality of our data is good, and that should not be a surprise. 
Our genealogists have a profound, vested interest in correctly documenting their family history. 
We can leverage this data to learn quantitative information about humanity, for example, questions about demography. 
Here is a look at all our profiles on the map of the world. 
Each pixel is a person that lived at some point. 
And since we have so much data, you can see the contours of many countries, especially in the Western world. 
In this clip, we stratified the map that I've showed you based on the year of births of individuals from 1400 to 1900, and we compared it to known migration events. 
The clip is going to show you that the deepest lineages in our data go all the way back to the UK, where they had better record keeping, and then they spread along the routes of Western colonialism. 
Let's watch this. 
(Music) [Year of birth: ] [1492 - Columbus sails the ocean blue] [1620 - Mayflower lands in Massachusetts] [1652 - Dutch settle in South Africa] [1788 - Great Britain penal transportation to Australia starts] [1836 - First migrants use Oregon Trail] [all activity] I love this movie. 
Now, since these migration events are giving the context of families, we can ask questions such as: What is the typical distance between the birth locations of husbands and wives? 
This distance plays a pivotal role in demography, because the patterns in which people migrate to form families determine how genes spread in geographical areas. 
We analyzed this distance using our data, and we found that in the old days, people had it easy. 
They just married someone in the village nearby. 
But the Industrial Revolution really complicated our love life. 
And today, with affordable flights and online social media, people typically migrate more than 100 kilometers from their place of birth to find their soul mate. 
So now you might ask: OK, but who does the hard work of migrating from places to places to form families? 
Are these the males or the females? 
We used our data to address this question, and at least in the last 300 years, we found that the ladies do the hard work of migrating from places to places to form families. 
Now, these results are statistically significant, so you can take it as scientific fact that males are lazy. 
(Laughter) We can move from questions about demography and ask questions about human health. 
For example, we can ask to what extent genetic variations account for differences in life span between individuals. 
Previous studies analyzed the correlation of longevity between twins to address this question. 
They estimated that the genetic variations account for about a quarter of the differences in life span between individuals. 
But twins can be correlated due to so many reasons, including various environmental effects or a shared household. 
Large family trees give us the opportunity to analyze both close relatives, such as twins, all the way to distant relatives, even fourth cousins. 
This way we can build robust models that can tease apart the contribution of genetic variations from environmental factors. 
We conducted this analysis using our data, and we found that genetic variations explain only 15 percent of the differences in life span between individuals. 
That is five years, on average. 
So genes matter less than what we thought before to life span. 
And I find it great news, because it means that our actions can matter more. 
Smoking, for example, determines 10 years of our life expectancy -- twice as much as what genetics determines. 
We can even have more surprising findings as we move from family trees and we let our genealogists document and crowdsource DNA information. 
And the results can be amazing. 
It might be hard to imagine, but Uncle Bernie and his friends can create DNA forensic capabilities that even exceed what the FBI currently has. 
When you place the DNA on a large family tree, you effectively create a beacon that illuminates the hundreds of distant relatives that are all connected to the person that originated the DNA. 
By placing multiple beacons on a large family tree, you can now triangulate the DNA of an unknown person, the same way that the GPS system uses multiple satellites to find a location. 
The prime example of the power of this technique is capturing the Golden State Killer, one of the most notorious criminals in the history of the US. 
The FBI had been searching for this person for over 40 years. 
They had his DNA, but he never showed up in any police database. 
About a year ago, the FBI consulted a genetic genealogist, and she suggested that they submit his DNA to a genealogy service that can locate distant relatives. 
They did that, and they found a third cousin of the Golden State Killer. 
They built a large family tree, scanned the different branches of that tree, until they found a profile that exactly matched what they knew about the Golden State Killer. 
They obtained DNA from this person and found a perfect match to the DNA they had in hand. 
They arrested him and brought him to justice after all these years. 
Since then, genetic genealogists have started working with local US law enforcement agencies to use this technique in order to capture criminals. 
And only in the past six months, they were able to solve over 20 cold cases with this technique. 
Luckily, we have people like Uncle Bernie and his fellow genealogists These are not amateurs with a self-serving hobby. 
These are citizen scientists with a deep passion to tell us who we are. 
And they know that the past can hold a key to the future. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

We live in a vast universe, on a small wet planet, where billions of years ago single-celled life forms evolved from the same elements as all non-living material around them, proliferating and radiating into an incredible ray of complex life forms. 
All of this— living and inanimate, microscopic and cosmic— is governed by mathematical laws with apparently arbitrary constants. 
And this opens up a question: If the universe is completely governed by these laws, couldn’t a powerful enough computer simulate it exactly? 
Could our reality actually be an incredibly detailed simulation set in place by a much more advanced civilization? 
This idea may sound like science fiction, but it has been the subject of serious inquiry. 
Philosopher Nick Bostrom advanced a compelling argument that we’re likely living in a simulation, and some scientists also think it’s a possibility. 
These scientists have started thinking about experimental tests to find out whether our universe is a simulation. 
They are hypothesizing about what the constraints of the simulation might be, and how those constraints could lead to detectable signs in the world. 
So where might we look for those glitches? 
One idea is that as a simulation runs, it might accumulate errors over time. 
To correct for these errors the simulators could adjust the constants in the laws of nature. 
These shifts could be tiny— for instance, certain constants we’ve measured with accuracies of parts per million have stayed steady for decades, so any drift would have to be on an even smaller scale. 
But as we gain more precision in our measurements of these constants, we might detect slight changes over time. 
Another possible place to look comes from the concept that finite computing power, no matter how huge, can’t simulate infinities. 
If space and time are continuous, then even a tiny piece of the universe has infinite points and becomes impossible to simulate with finite computing power. 
So a simulation would have to represent space and time in very small pieces. 
These would be almost incomprehensibly tiny. 
But we might be able to search for them by using certain subatomic particles as probes. 
The basic principle is this: the smaller something is, the more sensitive it will be to disruption— think of hitting a pothole on a skateboard versus in a truck. 
Any unit in space-time would be so small that most things would travel through it without disruption— not just objects large enough to be visible to the naked eye, but also molecules, atoms, and even electrons and most of the other subatomic particles we’ve discovered. 
If we do discover a tiny unit in space-time or a shifting constant in a natural law, would that prove the universe is a simulation? 
No— it would only be the first of many steps. 
There could be other explanations for each of those findings. 
And a lot more evidence would be needed to establish the simulation hypothesis as a working theory of nature. 
However many tests we design, we’re limited by some assumptions they all share. 
Our current understanding of the natural world on the quantum level breaks down at what’s known as the planck scale. 
If the unit of space-time is on this scale, we wouldn’t be able to look for it with our current scientific understanding. 
There’s still a wide range of things that are smaller than what’s currently observable but larger than the planck scale to investigate. 
Similarly, shifts in the constants of natural laws could occur so slowly that they would only be observable over the lifetime of the universe. 
So they could exist even if we don’t detect them over centuries or millennia of measurements. 
We're also biased towards thinking that our universe’s simulator, if it exists, makes calculations the same way we do, with similar computational limitations. 
Really, we have no way of knowing what an alien civilization’s constraints and methods would be— but we have to start somewhere. 
It may never be possible to prove conclusively that the universe either is, or isn’t, a simulation, but we’ll always be pushing science and technology forward in pursuit of the question: what is the nature of reality? 

Upon emerging from stasis, Ethic is the unfortunate recipient of three surprises. 
The first: a prison cell. 
The second: complete amnesia. 
And the third: a mysterious stranger has gotten stuck squeezing through the bars on her window. 
His name is Hedge, and he has come to help Ethic save the world. 
But first they have to break out of jail. 
Hedge turns his hand into a lockpick and outlines the challenge ahead. 
Each lock in the prison works in the same unusual way. 
Inside the keyhole is a red dial that can be rotated to one of 100 positions numbered 1 through 100. 
The key for a given cell spins the dial to the right position, which, when stopped there, makes it turn green and unlocks the door. 
It would be out of the question to steal keys from a guard, but Hedge has a better idea. 
Hedge can carry out Ethic‘s commands. 
If Ethic tells him to walk 5 steps forward, turn right, then walk another 5 steps, that’s exactly what he’ll do. 
Hedge needs specific instructions though. 
If Ethic says “pick the lock” or “try every combination” that would be too vague, but “spin the dial 5 positions forward” would work. 
Once out of the cell, they will only have a few moments to crack the lock for the outer prison door too before the guards catch them. 
So what instructions will allow Hedge to efficiently open any door? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Before we explain the solution, here’s a hint. 
A key programming concept that can help unlock the door is called a loop. 
This can be one or more instructions that Hedge will iterate— or repeat— a specified number of times, like “jump up and down 100 times.” Or an instruction that Hedge will repeat until a condition is met, such as “keep jumping up and down until it’s 7 o’clock.” Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
The first thing that’s clear is that you need to find a way for Hedge to try every combination until one works. 
What takes a little more effort is how exactly you do so. 
One solution would be to instruct Hedge to try every combination in succession. 
Try 1 and check the light. 
If it turns green, open the door, and if not, try 2. 
If that doesn’t work try 3. All the way up to 100. 
But it would be tedious to lay that out in its entirety. 
Why write more than 100 lines of code, when you can do the same thing with just 3? 
This is where a loop comes in. 
There are a few ways to go about this. 
The lock has 100 positions, so Ethic could say “Check the dial’s color, then spin the dial forward once, for 100 repetitions. 
Remember where the dial turns green, then have Hedge set it back to that number.” A loop like this, where you specify the number of times it repeats, is called a “for" loop. 
But an even more efficient loop would have Hedge spin the dial one position at a time until it turns green and as soon as that happens, have him stop and open the door. 
That way if the door unlocks on 1, he doesn’t need to cycle through all the rest of the numbers. 
This is an “until” loop, because it involves doing an action until a condition is met. 
A similar, alternate approach would be to turn the dial while it’s still red, then stop. 
That’s called a “while” loop. 
Back to the adventure. 
Hedge loops through the combinations, and the cell opens at 41. 
Ethic and Hedge wait until the perfect moment in the guards’ rotation and make a break for it. 
Soon, Ethic faces a choice: hide inside a mysterious crystal, or try to crack the outer door and make a run for it. 
Ethic chooses to run. 
The second door takes Hedge longer, requiring him to spin all the way to 93. 
But he gets it open and takes the opportunity to explain why he’s rescued Ethic. 
The world is in turmoil: robots have taken over, and only Ethic can set things right. 
In order to do so, they’ll need to collect three powerful artifacts that are being used for nefarious purposes across the land. 
Only then can Ethic return to the world machine— that giant crystal— to set things right. 
Ethic may have escaped the prison… but what has she gotten herself into? 

I'm a lion conservationist. 
Sounds cool, doesn't it? 
Some people may have no idea what that means. 
But I'm sure you've all heard about Cecil the lion. 
[Cecil the Lion (2002-2015)] (Lion roaring) He roars no more. 
On the second of July, 2015, his life was cut short when he was killed by a trophy hunter. 
They say that you can become attached to the animals you study. 
That was the case for me with Cecil the lion, having known him and studied him for three years in Hwange National Park. 
I was heartbroken at his death. 
But the good thing to come out of this tragedy is the attention that the story brought towards the plight of threatened wild animals. 
After Cecil's death, I began to ask myself these questions: What if the community that lived next to Cecil the lion was involved in protecting him? 
What if I had met Cecil when I was 10 years old, instead of 29? 
Could I or my classmates have changed his fate? 
Many people are working to stop lions from disappearing, but very few of these people are native to these countries or from the communities most affected. 
But the communities that live with the lions are the ones best positioned to help lions the most. 
Local people should be at the forefront of the solutions to the challenges facing their wildlife. 
Sometimes, change can only come when the people most affected and impacted take charge. 
Local communities play an important role in fighting poaching and illegal wildlife trade, which are major threats affecting lions and other wildlife. 
Being a black African woman in the sciences, the people I meet are always curious to know if I've always wanted to be a conservationist, because they don't meet a lot of conservationists who look like me. 
When I was growing up, I didn't even know that wildlife conservation was a career. 
The first time I saw a wild animal in my home country was when I was 25 years old, even though lions and African wild dogs lived just a few miles away from my home. 
This is quite common in Zimbabwe, as many people are not exposed to wildlife, even though it's part of our heritage. 
When I was growing up, I didn't even know that lions lived in my backyard. 
When I stepped into Savé Valley Conservancy on a cold winter morning 10 years ago to study African wild dogs for my master's research project, I was mesmerized by the beauty and the tranquility that surrounded me. 
I felt like I had found my passion and my purpose in life. 
I made a commitment that day that I was going to dedicate my life to protecting animals. 
I think of my childhood school days in Zimbabwe and the other kids I was in school with. 
Perhaps if we had a chance to interact with wildlife, more of my classmates would be working alongside me now. 
Unless the local communities want to protect and coexist with wildlife, all conservation efforts might be in vain. 
These are the communities that live with the wild animals in the same ecosystem and bear the cost of doing so. 
If they don't have a direct connection or benefit from the animals, they have no reason to want to protect them. 
And if local communities don't protect their wildlife, no amount of outside intervention will work. 
So what needs to be done? 
Conservationists must prioritize environmental education and help expand the community's skills to conserve their wildlife. 
Schoolchildren and communities must be taken to national parks, so they get a chance to connect with the wildlife. 
At every effort and every level, conservation must include the economies of the people who share the land with the wild animals. 
It is also critical that local conservationists be part of every conservation effort, if we are to build trust and really embed conservation into communities. 
As local conservationists, we face many hurdles, from outright discrimination to barriers because of cultural norms. 
But I will not give up my efforts to bring indigenous communities to this fight for the survival of our planet. 
I'm asking you to come and stand together with me. 
We must actively dismantle the hurdles we have created, which are leaving indigenous populations out of conservation efforts. 
I've dedicated my life to protecting lions. 
And I know my neighbor would, too, if only they knew the animals that lived next door to them. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For millennia, the people of Britain had been using bronze to make tools and jewelry, and as a currency for trade. 
But around 800 BCE, that began to change: the value of bronze declined, causing social upheaval and an economic crisis— what we would call a recession today. 
What causes recessions? 
This question has long been the subject of heated debate among economists, and for good reason. 
A recession can be a mild decline in economic activity in a single country that lasts months, a long-lasting downturn with global ramifications that last years, or anything in between. 
Complicating matters further, there are countless variables that contribute to an economy’s health, making it difficult to pinpoint specific causes. 
So it helps to start with the big picture: recessions occur when there is a negative disruption to the balance between supply and demand. 
There’s a mismatch between how many goods people want to buy, how many products and services producers can offer, and the price of the goods and services sold, which prompts an economic decline. 
An economy’s relationship between supply and demand is reflected in its inflation rates and interest rates. 
Inflation happens when goods and services get more expensive. 
Put another way, the value of money decreases. 
Still, inflation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 
In fact, a low inflation rate is thought to encourage economic activity. 
But high inflation that isn’t accompanied with high demand can both cause problems for an economy and eventually lead to a recession. 
Interest rates, meanwhile, reflect the cost of taking on debt for individuals and companies. 
The rate is typically an annual percentage of a loan that borrowers pay to their creditors until the loan is repaid. 
Low interest rates mean that companies can afford to borrow more money, which they can use to invest in more projects. 
High interest rates, meanwhile, increase costs for producers and consumers, slowing economic activity. 
Fluctuations in inflation and interest rates can give us insight into the health of the economy, but what causes these fluctuations in the first place? 
The most obvious causes are shocks like natural disaster, war, and geopolitical factors. 
An earthquake, for example, can destroy the infrastructure needed to produce important commodities such as oil. 
That forces the supply side of the economy to charge more for products that use oil, discouraging demand and potentially prompting a recession. 
But some recessions occur in times of economic prosperity— possibly even because of economic prosperity. 
Some economists believe that business activity from a market’s expansion can occasionally reach an unsustainable level. 
For example, corporations and consumers may borrow more money with the assumption that economic growth will help them handle the added burden. 
But if the economy doesn’t grow as quickly as expected, they may end up with more debt than they can manage. 
To pay it off, they’ll have to redirect funds from other activities, reducing business activity. 
Psychology can also contribute to a recession. 
Fear of a recession can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it causes people to pull back investing and spending. 
In response, producers might cut operating costs to help weather the expected decline in demand. 
That can lead to a vicious cycle as cost cuts eventually lower wages, leading to even lower demand. 
Even policy designed to help prevent recessions can contribute. 
When times are tough, governments and central banks may print money, increase spending, and lower central bank interest rates. 
Smaller lenders can in turn lower their interest rates, effectively making debt “cheaper” to boost spending. 
But these policies are not sustainable and eventually need to be reversed to prevent excessive inflation. 
That can cause a recession if people have become too reliant on cheap debt and government stimulus. 
The Bronze recession in Britain eventually ended when the adoption of iron helped revolutionize farming and food production. 
Modern markets are more complex, making today’s recessions far more difficult to navigate. 
But each recession provides new data to help anticipate and respond to future recessions more effectively. 

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here… ” Inscribed above the Gate of Hell, these ominous words warn dark tidings for Dante as he begins his descent into inferno. 
Yet despite the grim tone, this prophecy sets into motion what is perhaps the greatest love story ever told; an epic journey that encompasses both the human and the divine. 
But for Dante to reach benevolent salvation, he must first find his way through Hell. 
This landscape of torture is the setting for "Inferno," the first in a three-part narrative poem written by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century. 
Casting himself as the protagonist, Dante travels deeper and deeper into Hell’s abyss, witnessing obscene punishments distinct to each of its nine realms. 
Beginning in Limbo, he travels through the circles of Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, and Fraud, to the horrific ninth circle of Treachery, where sinners are trapped under the watchful eyes of Satan himself. 
The following two parts, "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," continue Dante’s journey, as he scales the Mount of Purgatory and ascends the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. 
Written together over 10 years, these 3 sections comprise the "Divine Comedy"– an allegorical imagining of the soul’s journey towards God. 
But Dante’s "Divine Comedy" is more than just religious allegory. 
It’s also a witty, scathing commentary on Italian politics. 
A soldier and statesman from Florence, Dante was staunchly faithful to God, but often critical of the Roman Catholic Church. 
He particularly disliked its rampant nepotism and practice of simony, the buying and selling of religious favours such as pardons from sin. 
Many groups took advantage of these corrupt customs, but few supported them as much as the Guelfi Neri, or Black Guelphs. 
This was a political and religious faction which sought to expand the pope’s political influence. 
Dante was a member of the Guelfi Bianchi, or White Guelphs– who believed Florence needed more freedom from Roman influence. 
As a public representative for the White Guelphs, Dante frequently spoke out against the pope’s power, until the Black Guelphs leveraged their position to exile him from Florence in 1302. 
But rather than silencing him, this lifelong exile led to Dante’s greatest critique of all. 
Dishonored and with little hope of return, the author freely aired his grievances with the Church and Italian society. 
Writing the "Divine Comedy" in Italian, rather than the traditional Latin of the educated elite, Dante ensured the widest possible audience for his biting political commentary. 
In the "Inferno’s" circle of the Wrathful, Dante eagerly witnesses sinners tear Black Guelph Filippo Argenti limb from limb. 
In the circle of Fraud, Dante converses with a mysterious sinner burning in the circle’s hottest flames. 
He learns that this is Pope Nicholas III, who tells Dante that his two successors will take his place when they die— all three guilty of simony and corruption. 
Despite the bleak and sometimes violent imagery in "Inferno," the "Divine Comedy" is also a love story. 
Though Dante had an arranged marriage with the daughter of a powerful Florentine family, he had also been unrequitedly in love with another woman since he was nine years old: Beatrice Portinari. 
Despite allegedly meeting just twice, she became Dante’s lifelong muse, serving as the inspiration and subject for many of his works. 
In fact, it’s Beatrice who launches his intrepid journey into the pits of Hell and up the terraces of Mount Purgatory. 
Portrayed as a powerful, heavenly figure, she leads Dante through "Paradiso’s" concentric spheres of Heaven until he is finally face-to-face with God. 
In the centuries since its publication, the "Divine Comedy’s" themes of love, sin, and redemption have been embraced by numerous artists– from Auguste Rodin and Salvador Dali, to Ezra Pound and Neil Gaiman. 
And the poet himself received his own belated, earthly redemption in 2008, when the city of Florence finally revoked Dante’s antiquated exile. 

Chris Anderson: So, you've been obsessed with this problem for the last few years. 
What is the problem, in your own words? 
Andrew Forrest: Plastic. 
Simple as that. 
Our inability to use it for the tremendous energetic commodity that it is, and just throw it away. 
CA: And so we see waste everywhere. 
At its extreme, it looks a bit like this. 
I mean, where was this picture taken? 
AF: That's in the Philippines, and you know, there's a lot of rivers, ladies and gentlemen, which look exactly like that. 
And that's the Philippines. 
So it's all over Southeast Asia. 
CA: So plastic is thrown into the rivers, and from there, of course, it ends up in the ocean. 
I mean, we obviously see it on the beaches, but that's not even your main concern. 
It's what's actually happening to it in the oceans. Talk about that. 
AF: OK, so look. Thank you, Chris. 
About four years ago, I thought I'd do something really barking crazy, and I committed to do a PhD in marine ecology. 
And the scary part about that was, sure, I learned a lot about marine life, but it taught me more about marine death and the extreme mass ecological fatality of fish, of marine life, marine mammals, very close biology to us, which are dying in the millions if not trillions that we can't count at the hands of plastic. 
CA: But people think of plastic as ugly but stable. Right? 
You throw something in the ocean, "Hey, it'll just sit there forever. 
Can't do any damage, right?" 
AF: See, Chris, it's an incredible substance designed for the economy. 
It is the worst substance possible for the environment. 
The worst thing about plastics, as soon as it hits the environment, is that it fragments. 
It never stops being plastic. 
It breaks down smaller and smaller and smaller, and the breaking science on this, Chris, which we've known in marine ecology for a few years now, but it's going to hit humans. 
We are aware now that nanoplastic, the very, very small particles of plastic, carrying their negative charge, can go straight through the pores of your skin. 
That's not the bad news. 
The bad news is that it goes straight through the blood-brain barrier, that protective coating which is there to protect your brain. 
Your brain's a little amorphous, wet mass full of little electrical charges. 
You put a negative particle into that, particularly a negative particle which can carry pathogens -- so you have a negative charge, it attracts positive-charge elements, like pathogens, toxins, mercury, lead. 
That's the breaking science we're going to see in the next 12 months. 
CA: So already I think you told me that there's like 600 plastic bags or so for every fish that size in the ocean, something like that. 
And they're breaking down, and there's going to be ever more of them, and we haven't even seen the start of the consequences of that. 
AF: No, we really haven't. 
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, they're a bunch of good scientists, we've been working with them for a while. 
I've completely verified their work. 
They say there will be one ton of plastic, Chris, for every three tons of fish by, not 2050 -- and I really get impatient with people who talk about 2050 -- by 2025. 
That's around the corner. 
That's just the here and now. 
You don't need one ton of plastic to completely wipe out marine life. 
Less than that is going to do a fine job at it. 
So we have to end it straightaway. We've got no time. 
CA: OK, so you have an idea for ending it, and you're coming at this not as a typical environmental campaigner, I would say, but as a businessman, as an entrepreneur, who has lived -- you've spent your whole life thinking about global economic systems and how they work. 
And if I understand it right, your idea depends on heroes who look something like this. 
What's her profession? 
AF: She, Chris, is a ragpicker, and there were 15, 20 million ragpickers like her, until China stopped taking everyone's waste. 
And the price of plastic, minuscule that it was, collapsed. 
That led to people like her, which, now -- she is a child who is a schoolchild. 
She should be at school. 
That's probably very akin to slavery. 
My daughter Grace and I have met hundreds of people like her. 
CA: And there are many adults as well, literally millions around the world, and in some industries, they actually account for the fact that, for example, we don't see a lot of metal waste in the world. 
AF: That's exactly right. 
That little girl is, in fact, the hero of the environment. 
She's in competition with a great big petrochemical plant which is just down the road, the three-and-a-half-billion-dollar petrochemical plant. 
That's the problem. 
We've got more oil and gas in plastic and landfill than we have in the entire oil and gas resources of the United States. 
So she is the hero. 
And that's what that landfill looks like, ladies and gentlemen, and it's solid oil and gas. 
CA: So there's huge value potentially locked up in there that the world's ragpickers would, if they could, make a living from. 
But why can't they? 
AF: Because we have ingrained in us a price of plastic from fossil fuels, which sits just under what it takes to economically and profitably recycle plastic from plastic. 
See, all plastic is is building blocks from oil and gas. 
Plastic's 100 percent polymer, which is 100 percent oil and gas. 
And you know we've got enough plastic in the world for all our needs. 
And when we recycle plastic, if we can't recycle it cheaper than fossil fuel plastic, then, of course, the world just sticks to fossil fuel plastic. 
CA: So that's the fundamental problem, the price of recycled plastic is usually more than the price of just buying it made fresh from more oil. 
That's the fundamental problem. 
AF: A slight tweak of the rules here, Chris. 
I'm a commodity person. 
I understand that we used to have scrap metal and rubbish iron and bits of copper lying all round the villages, particularly in the developing world. 
And people worked out it's got a value. 
It's actually an article of value, not of waste. 
Now the villages and the cities and the streets are clean, you don't trip over scrap copper or scrap iron now, because it's an article of value, it gets recycled. 
CA: So what's your idea, then, to try to change that in plastics? 
AF: OK, so Chris, for most part of that PhD, I've been doing research. 
And the good thing about being a businessperson who's done OK at it is that people want to see you. 
Other businesspeople, even if you're kind of a bit of a zoo animal species they'd like to check out, they'll say, yeah, OK, we'll all meet Twiggy Forrest. 
And so once you're in there, you can interrogate them. 
And I've been to most of the oil and gas and fast-moving consumer good companies in the world, and there is a real will to change. 
I mean, there's a couple of dinosaurs who are going to hope for the best and do nothing, but there's a real will to change. 
So what I've been discussing is, the seven and a half billion people in the world don't actually deserve to have their environment smashed by plastic, their oceans rendered depauperate or barren of sea life because of plastic. 
So you come down that chain, and there's tens of thousands of brands which we all buy heaps of products from, but then there's only a hundred major resin producers, big petrochemical plants, that spew out all the plastic which is single use. 
CA: So one hundred companies are right at the base of this food chain, as it were. 
AF: Yeah. 
CA: And so what do you need those one hundred companies to do? 
AF: OK, so we need them to simply raise the value of the building blocks of plastic from oil and gas, which I call "bad plastic," raise the value of that, so that when it spreads through the brands and onto us, the customers, we won't barely even notice an increase in our coffee cup or Coke or Pepsi, or anything. 
CA: Like, what, like a cent extra? 
AF: Less. Quarter of a cent, half a cent. 
It'll be absolutely minimal. 
But what it does, it makes every bit of plastic all over the world an article of value. 
Where you have the waste worst, say Southeast Asia, India, that's where the wealth is most. 
CA: OK, so it feels like there's two parts to this. 
One is, if they will charge more money but carve out that excess and pay it -- into what? -- a fund operated by someone to tackle this problem of -- what? 
What would that money be used for, that they charge the extra for? 
AF: So when I speak to really big businesses, I say, "Look, I need you to change, and I need you to change really fast," their eyes are going to peel over in boredom, unless I say, "And it's good business." 
"OK, now you've got my attention, Andrew." 
So I say, "Right, I need you to make a contribution to an environmental and industry transition fund. 
Over two or three years, the entire global plastics industry can transition from getting its building blocks from fossil fuel to getting its building blocks from plastic. 
The technology is out there. 
It's proven." 
I've taken two multibillion-dollar operations from nothing, recognizing that the technology can be scaled. 
I see at least a dozen technologies in plastic to handle all types of plastic. 
So once those technologies have an economic margin, which this gives them, that's where the global public will get all their plastic from, from existing plastic. 
CA: So every sale of virgin plastic contributes money to a fund that is used to basically transition the industry and start to pay for things like cleanup and other pieces. 
AF: Absolutely. Absolutely. 
CA: And it has the incredible side benefit, which is maybe even the main benefit, of creating a market. 
It suddenly makes recyclable plastic a giant business that can unlock millions of people around the world to find a new living collecting it. 
AF: Yeah, exactly. 
So all you do is, you've got fossil fuel plastics at this value and recycled plastic at this value. 
You change it. 
So recycled plastic is cheaper. 
What I love about this most, Chris, is that, you know, we waste into the environment 300, 350 million tons of plastic. 
On the oil and gas companies own accounts, it's going to grow to 500 million tons. 
This is an accelerating problem. 
But every ton of that is polymer. 
Polymer is 1,000 dollars, 1,500 dollars a ton. 
That's half a trillion dollars which could go into business and could create jobs and opportunities and wealth right across the world, particularly in the most impoverished. 
Yet we throw it away. 
CA: So this would allow the big companies to invest in recycling plants literally all over the world -- AF: All over the world. 
Because the technology is low-capital cost, you can put it in at rubbish dumps, at the bottom of big hotels, garbage depots, everywhere, turn that waste into resin. 
CA: Now, you're a philanthropist, and you're ready to commit some of your own wealth to this. 
What is the role of philanthropy in this project? 
AF: I think what we have to do is kick in the 40 to 50 million US dollars to get it going, and then we have to create absolute transparency so everyone can see exactly what's going on. 
From the resin producers to the brands to the consumers, everyone gets to see who is playing the game, who is protecting the Earth, and who doesn't care. 
And that'll cost about a million dollars a week, and we're going to underwrite that for five years. 
Total contribution is circa 300 million US dollars. 
CA: Wow. 
Now -- (Applause) You've talked to other companies, like to the Coca-Colas of this world, who are willing to do this, they're willing to pay a higher price, they would like to pay a higher price, so long as it's fair. 
AF: Yeah, it's fair. 
So, Coca-Cola wouldn't like Pepsi to play ball unless the whole world knew that Pepsi wasn't playing ball. 
Then they don't care. 
So it's that transparency of the market where, if people try and cheat the system, the market can see it, the consumers can see it. 
The consumers want a role to play in this. 
Seven and a half billion of us. 
We don't want our world smashed by a hundred companies. 
CA: Well, so tell us, you've said what the companies can do and what you're willing to do. 
What can people listening do? 
AF: OK, so I would like all of us, all around the world, to go a website called noplasticwaste.org. 
You contact your hundred resin producers which are in your region. 
You will have at least one within an email or Twitter or a telephone contact from you, and let them know that you would like them to make a contribution to a fund which industry can manage or the World Bank can manage. 
It raises tens of billions of dollars per year so you can transition the industry to getting all its plastic from plastic, not from fossil fuel. 
We don't need that. That's bad. This is good. 
And it can clean up the environment. 
We've got enough capital there, we've got tens of billions of dollars, Chris, per annum to clean up the environment. 
CA: You're in the recycling business. 
Isn't this a conflict of interest for you, or rather, a huge business opportunity for you? 
AF: Yeah, look, I'm in the iron ore business, and I compete against the scrap metal business, and that's why you don't have any scrap lying around to trip over, and cut your toe on, because it gets collected. 
CA: This isn't your excuse to go into the plastic recycling business. 
AF: No, I am going to cheer for this boom. 
This will be the internet of plastic waste. 
This will be a boom industry which will spread all over the world, and particularly where poverty is worst because that's where the rubbish is most, and that's the resource. 
So I'm going to cheer for it and stand back. 
CA: Twiggy, we're in an era where so many people around the world are craving a new, regenerative economy, these big supply chains, these big industries, to fundamentally transform. 
It strikes me as a giant idea, and you're going to need a lot of people cheering you on your way to make it happen. 
Thank you for sharing this with us. 
AF: Thank you very much. Thank you, Chris. 
(Applause) 

There are currently hundreds of thousands of people on transplant lists, waiting for critical organs like kidneys, hearts, and livers that could save their lives. 
Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly enough donor organs available to fill that demand. 
What if instead of waiting, we could create brand-new, customized organs from scratch? 
That’s the idea behind bioprinting, a branch of regenerative medicine currently under development. 
We’re not able to print complex organs just yet, but simpler tissues including blood vessels and tubes responsible for nutrient and waste exchange are already in our grasp. 
Bioprinting is a biological cousin of 3-D printing, a technique that deposits layers of material on top of each other to construct a three-dimensional object one slice at a time. 
Instead of starting with metal, plastic, or ceramic, a 3-D printer for organs and tissues uses bioink: a printable material that contains living cells. 
The bulk of many bioinks are water-rich molecules called hydrogels. 
Mixed into those are millions of living cells as well as various chemicals that encourage cells to communicate and grow. 
Some bioinks include a single type of cell, while others combine several different kinds to produce more complex structures. 
Let’s say you want to print a meniscus, which is a piece of cartilage in the knee that keeps the shinbone and thighbone from grinding against each other. 
It’s made up of cells called chondrocytes, and you’ll need a healthy supply of them for your bioink. 
These cells can come from donors whose cell lines are replicated in a lab. 
Or they might originate from a patient’s own tissue to create a personalized meniscus less likely to be rejected by their body. 
There are several printing techniques, and the most popular is extrusion-based bioprinting. 
In this, bioink gets loaded into a printing chamber and pushed through a round nozzle attached to a printhead. 
It emerges from a nozzle that’s rarely wider than 400 microns in diameter, and can produce a continuous filament roughly the thickness of a human fingernail. 
A computerized image or file guides the placement of the strands, either onto a flat surface or into a liquid bath that’ll help hold the structure in place until it stabilizes. 
These printers are fast, producing the meniscus in about half an hour, one thin strand at a time. 
After printing, some bioinks will stiffen immediately; others need UV light or an additional chemical or physical process to stabilize the structure. 
If the printing process is successful, the cells in the synthetic tissue will begin to behave the same way cells do in real tissue: signaling to each other, exchanging nutrients, and multiplying. 
We can already print relatively simple structures like this meniscus. 
Bioprinted bladders have also been successfully implanted, and printed tissue has promoted facial nerve regeneration in rats. 
Researchers have created lung tissue, skin, and cartilage, as well as miniature, semi-functional versions of kidneys, livers, and hearts. 
However, replicating the complex biochemical environment of a major organ is a steep challenge. 
Extrusion-based bioprinting may destroy a significant percentage of cells in the ink if the nozzle is too small, or if the printing pressure is too high. 
One of the most formidable challenges is how to supply oxygen and nutrients to all the cells in a full-size organ. 
That’s why the greatest successes so far have been with structures that are flat or hollow— and why researchers are busy developing ways to incorporate blood vessels into bioprinted tissue. 
There’s tremendous potential to use bioprinting to save lives and advance our understanding of how our organs function in the first place. 
And the technology opens up a dizzying array of possibilities, such as printing tissues with embedded electronics. 
Could we one day engineer organs that exceed current human capability, or give ourselves features like unburnable skin? 
How long might we extend human life by printing and replacing our organs? 
And exactly who—and what— will have access to this technology and its incredible output? 

In 2003, when we sequenced the human genome, we thought we would have the answer to treat many diseases. 
But the reality is far from that, because in addition to our genes, our environment and lifestyle could have a significant role in developing many major diseases. 
One example is fatty liver disease, which is affecting over 20 percent of the population globally, and it has no treatment and leads to liver cancer or liver failure. 
So sequencing DNA alone doesn't give us enough information to find effective therapeutics. 
On the bright side, there are many other molecules in our body. 
In fact, there are over 100,000 metabolites. 
Metabolites are any molecule that is supersmall in their size. 
Known examples are glucose, fructose, fats, cholesterol -- things we hear all the time. 
Metabolites are involved in our metabolism. 
They are also downstream of DNA, so they carry information from both our genes as well as lifestyle. 
Understanding metabolites is essential to find treatments for many diseases. 
I've always wanted to treat patients. 
Despite that, 15 years ago, I left medical school, as I missed mathematics. 
Soon after, I found the coolest thing: I can use mathematics to study medicine. 
Since then, I've been developing algorithms to analyze biological data. 
So, it sounded easy: let's collect data from all the metabolites in our body, develop mathematical models to describe how they are changed in a disease and intervene in those changes to treat them. 
Then I realized why no one has done this before: it's extremely difficult. 
(Laughter) There are many metabolites in our body. 
Each one is different from the other one. 
For some metabolites, we can measure their molecular mass using mass spectrometry instruments. 
But because there could be, like, 10 molecules with the exact same mass, we don't know exactly what they are, and if you want to clearly identify all of them, you have to do more experiments, which could take decades and billions of dollars. 
So we developed an artificial intelligence, or AI, platform, to do that. 
We leveraged the growth of biological data and built a database of any existing information about metabolites and their interactions with other molecules. 
We combined all this data as a meganetwork. 
Then, from tissues or blood of patients, we measure masses of metabolites and find the masses that are changed in a disease. 
But, as I mentioned earlier, we don't know exactly what they are. 
A molecular mass of 180 could be either the glucose, galactose or fructose. 
They all have the exact same mass but different functions in our body. 
Our AI algorithm considered all these ambiguities. 
It then mined that meganetwork to find how those metabolic masses are connected to each other that result in disease. 
And because of the way they are connected, then we are able to infer what each metabolite mass is, like that 180 could be glucose here, and, more importantly, to discover how changes in glucose and other metabolites lead to a disease. 
This novel understanding of disease mechanisms then enable us to discover effective therapeutics to target that. 
So we formed a start-up company to bring this technology to the market and impact people's lives. 
Now my team and I at ReviveMed are working to discover therapeutics for major diseases that metabolites are key drivers for, like fatty liver disease, because it is caused by accumulation of fats, which are types of metabolites in the liver. 
As I mentioned earlier, it's a huge epidemic with no treatment. 
And fatty liver disease is just one example. 
Moving forward, we are going to tackle hundreds of other diseases with no treatment. 
And by collecting more and more data about metabolites and understanding how changes in metabolites leads to developing diseases, our algorithms will get smarter and smarter to discover the right therapeutics for the right patients. 
And we will get closer to reach our vision of saving lives with every line of code. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

After breaking Ethic out of prison, Hedge flies them both towards a frontier settlement in the shadow of the Bradbarrier, the great wall that encircles the nation. 
All the settlers there will soon gather for the monthly feeding. 
The people of the wall spend their days gathering up works of art and literature, from all across the land. 
On feeding day, the furnace-bots arrive, ravenous. 
If they eat, the lights stay on, and the food gets delivered. 
If they starve, the people do too. 
Hedge’s fuel supply runs out just as he and Ethic reach the outskirts of town, and they come in for a crash landing. 
Luckily, everyone is too busy preparing for the feeding to notice. 
Today’s feeding is where Ethic can find the leader of an underground resistance movement. 
This person knows the location of the first of three powerful artifacts. 
The problem is, Hedge and Ethic don’t know the resistance leader’s name or appearance. 
But Hedge has gathered the following information: The leader has green eyes. 
If the leader has red hair, their name has at least one consecutive double letter. 
If the leader wear glasses, their name has exactly 2 vowels. 
Otherwise, their name has exactly 3 vowels. 
There is exactly one person for whom these are all true. 
As a fugitive, Ethic can’t sneak into the crowd without drawing attention to herself. 
But she can give instructions to Hedge. 
And one tool she has is what programmers call a conditional. 
That’s a statement of the form “If A, then B.” Flowcharts are great illustrations of how those work. 
This conditional translates to: if A is true, carry out instruction B. 
There are also conditionals that account for different possibilities. 
This says, “If A is true, perform instruction B. 
Otherwise, carry out instruction C.” So what instructions does she give Hedge so he can find the resistance leader? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
With a problem like this, it can help to simplify first. 
What if Hedge just has to examine this one person? 
What information does he need to collect about her? 
He might ask, “Does she have green eyes?” What other questions should Hedge ask to find the resistance leader, and how can he track those answers? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
It may seem intuitive how you’d approach this problem as a human. 
But Hedge isn’t a human, and so the challenge comes from needing to give him systematic instructions that will work in any scenario. 
Hedge needs to examine the settlers, one at a time, until he discovers the right person. 
In other words, like with the lock on the prison cell, this is a loop that repeats the same instructions. 
Only this time the loop will involve a series of questions in the form of conditionals, and will end as soon as Hedge finds his target. 
But first, you’ll want to organize your information. 
Each person has a set of characteristics: Eye color, hair color, glasses, and name. 
Does this person have green eyes? 
If so, mark a check next to “eye color." If not, mark an X there. 
If they have red hair, does their name contain a double letter? 
If so, mark a check next to “hair color.” If they don’t have a double letter, mark an X next to “hair color.” Anyone with red hair and no double letter can’t be the resistance leader. 
But notice that if they have blue hair, Hedge will skip this question and go on to the next one. 
For the last question, we can say, “If they wear glasses, does their name have exactly 2 vowels? 
If they don’t have glasses, does their name have exactly 3 vowels?” There will be people in the crowd with glasses and 1 vowel, or no glasses and 2 vowels. 
But they’re not who we’re looking for, so they’ll get X’s. 
The resistance leader must be someone with either check marks or blanks next to every question. 
Blanks are ok, because if someone has blue hair, the rule about red hair doesn’t apply to them. 
You could have Hedge ask every question about every person, and then choose the person with only checks and blanks. 
But there’s a way to save yourself lots of time: as soon as Hedge marks an X, have him move on to the next person. 
You don’t need to know the answer to every question; just one X means they’re not the target of your search. 
Hedge buzzes through the crowd, and within minutes finds Adila, the resistance leader, and brings her back to Ethic. 
Adila agrees to help them steal the first artifact— the node of power— but under one condition: that Ethic and Hedge jump-start the revolution by reprogramming the furnace-bots that terrorize the town. 
And right on cue, the robots descend. 

I'm thrilled to be talking to you by this high-tech method. 
Of all humans who have ever lived, the overwhelming majority would have found what we are doing here incomprehensible, unbelievable. 
Because, for thousands of centuries, in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had low expectations. 
For their lives, for their descendants' lives. 
Typically, they expected nothing significantly new or better to be achieved, ever. 
This pessimism famously appears in the Bible, in one of the few biblical passages with a named author. 
He's called Qohelet, he's an enigmatic chap. 
He wrote, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. 
Is there something of which it is said, 'Look, this is new.' No, that thing was already done in the ages that came before us." 
Qohelet was describing a world without novelty. 
By novelty I mean something new in Qohelet's sense, not merely something that's changed, but a significant change with lasting effects, where people really would say, "Look, this is new," and, preferably, "good." 
So, purely random changes aren't novelty. 
OK, Heraclitus did say a man can't step in the same river twice, because it's not the same river, he's not the same man. 
But if the river is changing randomly, it really is the same river. 
In contrast, if an idea in a mind spreads to other minds, and changes lives for generations, that is novelty. 
Human life without novelty is life without creativity, without progress. 
It's a static society, a zero-sum game. 
That was the living hell in which Qohelet lived. 
Like everyone, until a few centuries ago. 
It was hell, because for humans, suffering is intimately related to staticity. 
Because staticity isn't just frustrating. 
All sources of suffering -- famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids, and things like war and slavery, hurt people only until we have created the knowledge to prevent them. 
There's a story in Somerset Maugham's novel "Of Human Bondage" about an ancient sage who summarizes the entire history of mankind as, "He was born, he suffered and he died." 
And it goes on: "Life was insignificant and death without consequence." 
And indeed, the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived had lives of suffering and grueling labor, before dying young and in agony. 
And yes, in most generations nothing had any novel consequence for subsequent generations. 
Nevertheless, when ancient people tried to explain their condition, they typically did so in grandiose cosmic terms. 
Which was the right thing to do, as it turns out. 
Even though their actual explanations, their myths, were largely false. 
Some tried to explain the grimness and monotony of their world in terms of an endless cosmic war between good and evil, in which humans were the battleground. 
Which neatly explained why their own experience was full of suffering, and why progress never happened. 
But it wasn't true. 
Amazingly enough, all their conflict and suffering were just due to the way they processed ideas. 
Being satisfied with dogma, and just-so stories, rather than criticizing them and trying to guess better explanations of the world and of their own condition. 
Twentieth-century physics did create better explanations, but still in terms of a cosmic war. 
This time, the combatants were order and chaos, or entropy. 
That story does allow for hope for the future. 
But in another way, it's even bleaker than the ancient myths, because the villain, entropy, is preordained to have the final victory, when the inexorable laws of thermodynamics shut down all novelty with the so-called heat death of the universe. 
Currently, there's a story of a local battle in that war, between sustainability, which is order, and wastefulness, which is chaos -- that's the contemporary take on good and evil, often with the added twist that humans are the evil, so we shouldn't even try to win. 
And recently, there have been tales of another cosmic war, between gravity, which collapses the universe, and dark energy, which finally shreds it. 
So this time, whichever of those cosmic forces wins, we lose. 
All those pessimistic accounts of the human condition contain some truth, but as prophecies, they're all misleading, and all for the same reason. 
None of them portrays humans as what we really are. 
As Jacob Bronowski said, "Man is not a figure in the landscape -- he is the shaper of the landscape." 
In other words, humans are not playthings of cosmic forces, we are users of cosmic forces. 
I'll say more about that in a moment, but first, what sorts of thing create novelty? 
Well, the beginning of the universe surely did. 
The big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, created space, time and energy, everything physical. 
And then, immediately, what I call the first era of novelty, with the first atom, the first star, the first black hole, the first galaxy. 
But then, at some point, novelty vanished from the universe. 
Perhaps from as early as 12 or 13 billion years ago, right up to the present day, there's never been any new kind of astronomical object. 
There's only been what I call the great monotony. 
So, Qohelet was accidentally even more right about the universe beyond the Sun than he was about under the Sun. 
So long as the great monotony lasts, what has been out there really is what will be. 
And there is nothing out there of which it can truly be said, "Look, this is new." 
Nevertheless, at some point during the great monotony, there was an event -- inconsequential at the time, and even billions of years later, it had affected nothing beyond its home planet -- yet eventually, it could cause cosmically momentous novelty. 
That event was the origin of life: creating the first genetic knowledge, coding for biological adaptations, coding for novelty. 
On Earth, it utterly transformed the surface. 
Genes in the DNA of single-celled organisms put oxygen in the air, extracted CO2, put chalk and iron ore into the ground, hardly a cubic inch of the surface to some depth has remained unaffected by those genes. 
The Earth became, if not a novel place on the cosmic scale, certainly a weird one. 
Just as an example, beyond Earth, only a few hundred different chemical substances have been detected. 
Presumably, there are some more in lifeless locations, but on Earth, evolution created billions of different chemicals. 
And then the first plants, animals, and then, in some ancestor species of ours, explanatory knowledge. 
For the first time in the universe, for all we know. 
Explanatory knowledge is the defining adaptation of our species. 
It differs from the nonexplanatory knowledge in DNA, for instance, by being universal. 
That is to say, whatever can be understood, can be understood through explanatory knowledge. 
And more, any physical process can be controlled by such knowledge, limited only by the laws of physics. 
And so, explanatory knowledge, too, has begun to transform the Earth's surface. 
And soon, the Earth will become the only known object in the universe that turns aside incoming asteroids instead of attracting them. 
Qohelet was understandably misled by the painful slowness of progress in his day. 
Novelty in human life was still too rare, too gradual, to be noticed in one generation. 
And in the biosphere, the evolution of novel species was even slower. 
But both things were happening. 
Now, why is there a great monotony in the universe at large, and what makes our planet buck that trend? 
Well, the universe at large is relatively simple. 
Stars are so simple that we can predict their behavior billions of years into the future, and retrodict how they formed billions of years ago. 
So why is the universe simple? 
Basically, it's because big, massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things, and not vice versa. 
I call that the hierarchy rule. 
For example, when a comet hits the Sun, the Sun carries on just as before, but the comet is vaporized. 
For the same reason, big things are not much affected by small parts of themselves, i.e., by details. 
Which means that their overall behavior is simple. 
And since nothing very new can happen to things that remain simple, the hierarchy rule, by causing large-scale simplicity, has caused the great monotony. 
But, the saving grace is the hierarchy rule is not a law of nature. 
It just happens to have held so far in the universe, except here. 
In our biosphere, molecule-sized objects, genes, control vastly disproportionate resources. 
The first genes for photosynthesis, by causing their own proliferation, and then transforming the surface of the planet, have violated or reversed the hierarchy rule by the mind-blowing factor of 10 to the power 40. 
Explanatory knowledge is potentially far more powerful because of universality, and more rapidly created. 
When human knowledge has achieved a factor 10 to the 40, it will pretty much control the entire galaxy, and will be looking beyond. 
So humans, and any other explanation creators who may exist out there, are the ultimate agents of novelty for the universe. 
We are the reason and the means by which novelty and creativity, knowledge, progress, can have objective, large-scale physical effects. 
From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects. 
This robot will soon be obsolete, because of new explanatory knowledge, progress. 
But from the cosmic perspective, explanatory knowledge is the nemesis of the hierarchy rule. 
It's the destroyer of the great monotony. 
So it's the creator of the next cosmological era, the Anthropocene. 
If one can speak of a cosmic war, it's not the one portrayed in those pessimistic stories. 
It's a war between monotony and novelty, between stasis and creativity. 
And in this war, our side is not destined to lose. 
If we choose to apply our unique capacity to create explanatory knowledge, we could win. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Hephaestus, god of technology, was hard at work on his most ingenious invention yet. 
He was creating a new defense system for King Minos, who wanted fewer intruders on his island kingdom of Crete. 
But mortal guards and ordinary weapons wouldn’t suffice, so the visionary god devised an indomitable new defender. 
In the fires of his forge, Hephaestus cast his invention in the shape of a giant man. 
Made of gleaming bronze; endowed with superhuman strength, and powered by ichor, the life fluid of the gods, this automaton was unlike anything Hephaestus had forged before. 
The god named his creation Talos: the first robot. 
Three times a day, the bronze guardian marched around the island's perimeter searching for interlopers. 
When he identified ships approaching the coast, he hurled massive boulders into their path. 
If any survivors made it ashore, he would heat his metal body red-hot and crush victims to his chest. 
Talos was intended to fulfill his duties day after day, with no variation. 
But despite his robotic behavior, he possessed an internal life his victims could scarcely imagine. 
And soon, the behemoth would encounter a ship of invaders that would test his mettle. 
The bedraggled crew of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts were returning from their hard-won quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. 
Their adventure had taken many dark turns, and the weary sailors were desperate to rest in a safe harbor. 
They’d heard tales of Crete’s invulnerable bronze colossus, and made for a sheltered cove. 
But before they could even drop anchor, Talos spotted them. 
While the Argonauts cowered at the approach of the awesome automaton, the sorceress Medea spotted a glinting bolt on the robot’s ankle— and devised a clever gambit. 
Medea offered Talos a bargain: she claimed that she could make Talos immortal in exchange for removing the bolt. 
Medea's promise resonated deep within his core. 
Unaware of his own mechanical nature, and human enough to long for eternal life, Talos agreed. 
While Medea muttered incantations, Jason removed the bolt. 
As Medea suspected, the bolt was a weak point in Hephaestus’ design. 
The ichor flowed out like molten lead, draining Talos of his power source. 
The robot collapsed with a thunderous crash, and the Argonauts were free to travel home. 
This story, first recorded in roughly 700 BCE, raises some familiar anxieties about artificial intelligence— and even provides an ancient blueprint for science fiction. 
But according to historians, ancient robots were more than just myths. 
By the 4th century BCE, Greek engineers began making actual automatons including robotic servants and flying models of birds. 
None of these creations were as famous as Talos, who appeared on Greek coins, vase paintings, public frescoes, and in theatrical performances. 
Even 2,500 years ago, Greeks had already begun to investigate the uncertain line between human and machine. 
And like many modern myths about artificial intelligence, Talos’ tale is as much about his robotic heart as it is about his robotic brain. 
Illustrating the demise of Talos on a vase of the fifth century BCE, one painter captured the dying automaton’s despair with a tear rolling down his bronze cheek. 

Consider the claw. 
Frequently found on four-limbed animals around the world, it’s one of nature’s most versatile tools. 
Bears use claws for digging as well as defense. 
An eagle’s needle-like talons can pierce the skulls of their prey. 
And lions can retract their massive claws for easy movement, before flicking them out to hunt. 
Even the ancestors of primates used to wield these impressive appendages, until their claws evolved into nails. 
So what in our evolutionary past led to this manicured adaptation, and what can nails do that their sharper cousins can’t? 
When nails first appeared in the fossil record around 55.8 million years ago, claws had already been present for over 260 million years in the ancestors of mammals and reptiles. 
But despite the gulf of time between their emergence, these adaptations are both part of the same evolutionary story. 
Both nails and claws are made of keratin— a tough, fibrous protein also found in horns, scales, hooves and hair. 
This protein is produced by a wedge of tissue called the keratin matrix. 
Rich in blood vessels and nutrients, this protein factory produces an endless stream of keratin, which is tightly packed into cells called keratinocytes. 
These high-density cells give nails and claws their trademark toughness. 
Since nails evolved from claws, both adaptations produce keratinocytes in the same way. 
The cells grow out from the matrix, emerging from the skin where they die and harden into a water-resistant sheath. 
The primary difference between the two keratin coverings is really just their shape, which depends on the shape of the bone at the end of the animal’s digits. 
In claws, the bed of keratinocytes conforms to a narrow finger bone, wrapping around the end of the digit and radiating outwards to form a cone-shaped structure. 
Animals with nails, on the other hand, have much broader digits, and keratinocytes only cover the top surface of their wide bones. 
It’s possible that nails have simply persisted as a side effect of primates evolving wider, more dexterous fingers. 
But given what we know about the habitats of our primate ancestors, it’s more likely that nails came with their own powerful advantages. 
High in the forest canopy where these primates lived, wide finger bones and expansive finger pads were ideal for gripping narrow branches. 
And nails improved that grip even further. 
By providing a rigid surface to press against, primates could splay out their pads to create even more contact with the trees. 
Additionally, nails improved the sensitivity of their digits by providing an extra surface to detect changes in pressure while climbing. 
This combination of sensitivity and dexterity gave our ancestors the precise motor control needed to snatch up insects, pinch berries and seeds, and keep a firm grip on slim branches. 
The evolution of nails and the evolution of opposable thumbs and toes are closely linked. 
And when our ancestors moved down from the trees, this flexible grasp enabled them to create and wield complex tools. 
Even if it was possible for wide fingers to sport claws, their sharp points would’ve likely interfered with these primates’ regular tasks. 
Claws are ideal for piercing, puncturing, and hooking, but their points make grabbing difficult, and potentially dangerous. 
However, both claws and nails are used in some unexpected ways. 
Manatees use nails to grasp their food, and researchers think elephant toenails may sense vibrations in the ground to help them hear. 
Meanwhile, some primates, like the aye-ayes of Madagascar, have re-acquired claws. 
They use these extra-long appendages to tap branches and trunks, while listening for hollow sections with their bat-like ears. 
When they hear an opening, they burrow into the tree and skewer grubs with their needle-like middle finger. 
We’ve only scratched the surface of all the incredible ways nails and claws are used throughout the animal kingdom. 
But as for which of these adaptations is better? 
That’s an answer we may never nail down. 

For the past 15 years I've been trying to change your mind. 
In my work I harness pop culture and emerging technology to shift cultural norms. 
I've made video games to promote human rights, I've made animations to raise awareness about unfair immigration laws and I've even made location-based augmented reality apps to change perceptions around homelessness well before Pokémon Go. 
(Laughter) But then I began to wonder whether a game or an app can really change attitudes and behaviors, and if so, can I measure that change? 
What's the science behind that process? 
So I shifted my focus from making media and technology to measuring their neurobiological effects. 
Here's what I discovered. 
The web, mobile devices, virtual and augmented reality were rescripting our nervous systems. 
And they were literally changing the structure of our brain. 
The very technologies I had been using to positively influence hearts and minds were actually eroding functions in the brain necessary for empathy and decision-making. 
In fact, our dependence upon the web and mobile devices might be taking over our cognitive and affective faculties, rendering us socially and emotionally incompetent, and I felt complicit in this dehumanization. 
I realized that before I could continue making media about social issues, I needed to reverse engineer the harmful effects of technology. 
To tackle this I asked myself, "How can I translate the mechanisms of empathy, the cognitive, affective and motivational aspects, into an engine that simulates the narrative ingredients that move us to act?" 
To answer this, I had to build a machine. 
(Laughter) I've been developing an open-source biometric lab, an AI system which I call the Limbic Lab. 
The lab not only captures the brain and body's unconscious response to media and technology but also uses machine learning to adapt content based on these biological responses. 
My goal is to find out what combination of narrative ingredients are the most appealing and galvanizing to specific target audiences to enable social justice, cultural and educational organizations to create more effective media. 
The Limbic Lab consists of two components: a narrative engine and a media machine. 
While a subject is viewing or interacting with media content, the narrative engine takes in and syncs real-time data from brain waves, biophysical data like heart rate, blood flow, body temperature and muscle contraction, as well as eye-tracking and facial expressions. 
Data is captured at key places where critical plot points, character interaction or unusual camera angles occur. 
Like the final scene in "Game of Thrones, Red Wedding," when shockingly, everybody dies. 
(Laughter) Survey data on that person's political beliefs, along with their psychographic and demographic data, are integrated into the system to gain a deeper understanding of the individual. 
Let me give you an example. 
Matching people's TV preferences with their views on social justice issues reveals that Americans who rank immigration among their top three concerns are more likely to be fans of "The Walking Dead," and they often watch for the adrenaline boost, which is measurable. 
A person's biological signature and their survey response combines into a database to create their unique media imprint. 
Then our predictive model finds patterns between media imprints and tells me which narrative ingredients are more likely to lead to engagement in altruistic behavior rather than distress and apathy. 
The more imprints added to the database across mediums from episodic television to games, the better the predictive models become. 
In short, I am mapping the first media genome. 
(Applause and cheers) Whereas the human genome identifies all genes involved in sequencing human DNA, the growing database of media imprints will eventually allow me to determine the media DNA for a specific person. 
Already the Limbic Lab's narrative engine helps content creators refine their storytelling, so that it resonates with their target audiences on an individual level. 
The Limbic Lab's other component, the media machine, will assess how media elicits an emotional and physiological response, then pulls scenes from a content library targeted to person-specific media DNA. 
Applying artificial intelligence to biometric data creates a truly personalized experience. 
One that adapts content based on real-time unconscious responses. 
Imagine if nonprofits and media makers were able to measure how audiences feel as they experience it and alter content on the fly. 
I believe this is the future of media. 
To date, most media and social-change strategies have attempted to appeal to mass audiences, but the future is media customized for each person. 
As real-time measurement of media consumption and automated media production becomes the norm, we will soon be consuming media tailored directly to our cravings using a blend of psychographics, biometrics and AI. 
It's like personalized medicine based on our DNA. 
I call it "biomedia." 
I am currently testing the Limbic Lab in a pilot study with the Norman Lear Center, which looks at the top 50 episodic television shows. 
But I am grappling with an ethical dilemma. 
If I design a tool that can be turned into a weapon, should I build it? 
By open-sourcing the lab to encourage access and inclusivity, I also run the risk of enabling powerful governments and profit-driven companies to appropriate the platform for fake news, marketing or other forms of mass persuasion. 
For me, therefore, it is critical to make my research as transparent to lay audiences as GMO labels. 
However, this is not enough. 
As creative technologists, we have a responsibility not only to reflect upon how present technology shapes our cultural values and social behavior, but also to actively challenge the trajectory of future technology. 
It is my hope that we make an ethical commitment to harvesting the body's intelligence for the creation of authentic and just stories that transform media and technology from harmful weapons into narrative medicine. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

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

When I waltzed off to high school with my new Nokia phone, I thought I just had the new, coolest replacement for my old pink princess walkie-talkie. 
Except now, my friends and I could text or talk to each other wherever we were, instead of pretending, when we were running around each other's backyards. 
Now, I'll be honest. 
Back then, I didn't think a lot about how these devices were made. 
They tended to show up on Christmas morning, so maybe they were made by the elves in Santa's workshop. 
Let me ask you a question. 
Who do you think the real elves that make these devices are? 
If I ask a lot of the people I know, they would say it's the hoodie-wearing software engineers in Silicon Valley, hacking away at code. 
But a lot has to happen to these devices before they're ready for any kind of code. 
These devices start at the atomic level. 
So if you ask me, the real elves are the chemists. 
That's right, I said the chemists. 
Chemistry is the hero of electronic communications. 
And my goal today is to convince you to agree with me. 
OK, let's start simple, and take a look inside these insanely addictive devices. 
Because without chemistry, what is an information superhighway that we love, would just be a really expensive, shiny paperweight. 
Chemistry enables all of these layers. 
Let's start at the display. 
How do you think we get those bright, vivid colors that we love so much? 
Well, I'll tell you. 
There's organic polymers embedded within the display, that can take electricity and turn it into the blue, red and green that we enjoy in our pictures. 
What if we move down to the battery? 
Now there's some intense research. 
How do we take the chemical principles of traditional batteries and pair it with new, high surface area electrodes, so we can pack more charge in a smaller footprint of space, so that we could power our devices all day long, while we're taking selfies, without having to recharge our batteries or sit tethered to an electrical outlet? 
What if we go to the adhesives that bind it all together, so that it could withstand our frequent usage? 
After all, as a millennial, I have to take my phone out at least 200 times a day to check it, and in the process, drop it two to three times. 
But what are the real brains of these devices? 
What makes them work the way that we love them so much? 
Well that all has to do with electrical components and circuitry that are tethered to a printed circuit board. 
Or maybe you prefer a biological metaphor -- the motherboard, you might have heard of that. 
Now, the printed circuit board doesn't really get talked about a lot. 
And I'll be honest, I don't know why that is. 
Maybe it's because it's the least sexy layer and it's hidden beneath all of those other sleek-looking layers. 
But it's time to finally give this Clark Kent layer the Superman-worthy praise it deserves. 
And so I ask you a question. 
What do you think a printed circuit board is? 
Well, consider a metaphor. 
Think about the city that you live in. 
You have all these points of interest that you want to get to: your home, your work, restaurants, a couple of Starbucks on every block. 
And so we build roads that connect them all together. 
That's what a printed circuit board is. 
Except, instead of having things like restaurants, we have transistors on chips, capacitors, resistors, all of these electrical components that need to find a way to talk to each other. 
And so what are our roads? 
Well, we build tiny copper wires. 
So the next question is, how do we make these tiny copper wires? 
They're really small. 
Could it be that we go to the hardware store, pick up a spool of copper wire, get some wire cutters, a little clip-clip, saw it all up and then, bam -- we have our printed circuit board? 
No way. 
These wires are way too small for that. 
And so we have to rely on our friend: chemistry. 
Now, the chemical process to make these tiny copper wires is seemingly simple. 
We start with a solution of positively charged copper spheres. 
We then add to it an insulating printed circuit board. 
And we feed those positively charged spheres negatively charged electrons by adding formaldehyde to the mix. 
So you might remember formaldehyde. 
Really distinct odor, used to preserve frogs in biology class. 
Well it turns out it can do a lot more than just that. 
And it's a really key component to making these tiny copper wires. 
You see, the electrons on formaldehyde have a drive. 
They want to jump over to those positively charged copper spheres. 
And that's all because of a process known as redox chemistry. 
And when that happens, we can take these positively charged copper spheres and turn them into bright, shiny, metallic and conductive copper. 
And once we have conductive copper, now we're cooking with gas. 
And we can get all of those electrical components to talk to each other. 
So thank you once again to chemistry. 
And let's take a thought and think about how far we've come with chemistry. 
Clearly, in electronic communications, size matters. 
So let's think about how we can shrink down our devices, so that we can go from our 1990s Zack Morris cell phone to something a little bit more sleek, like the phones of today that can fit in our pockets. 
Although, let's be real here: absolutely nothing can fit into ladies' pants pockets, if you can find a pair of pants that has pockets. 
(Laughter) And I don't think chemistry can help us with that problem. 
But more important than shrinking the actual device, how do we shrink the circuitry inside of it, and shrink it by 100 times, so that we can take the circuitry from the micron scale all the way down to the nanometer scale? 
Because, let's face it, right now we all want more powerful and faster phones. 
Well, more power and faster requires more circuitry. 
So how do we do this? 
It's not like we have some magic electromagnetic shrink ray, like professor Wayne Szalinski used in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" to shrink his children. 
On accident, of course. 
Or do we? 
Well, actually, in the field, there's a process that's pretty similar to that. 
And it's name is photolithography. 
In photolithography, we take electromagnetic radiation, or what we tend to call light, and we use it to shrink down some of that circuitry, so that we could cram more of it into a really small space. 
Now, how does this work? 
Well, we start with a substrate that has a light-sensitive film on it. 
We then cover it with a mask that has a pattern on top of it of fine lines and features that are going to make the phone work the way that we want it to. 
We then expose a bright light and shine it through this mask, which creates a shadow of that pattern on the surface. 
Now, anywhere that the light can get through the mask, it's going to cause a chemical reaction to occur. 
And that's going to burn the image of that pattern into the substrate. 
So the question you're probably asking is, how do we go from a burned image to clean fine lines and features? 
And for that, we have to use a chemical solution called the developer. 
Now the developer is special. 
What it can do is take all of the nonexposed areas and remove them selectively, leaving behind clean fine lines and features, and making our miniaturized devices work. 
So, we've used chemistry now to build up our devices, and we've used it to shrink down our devices. 
So I've probably convinced you that chemistry is the true hero, and we could wrap it up there. 
(Applause) Hold on, we're not done. 
Not so fast. 
Because we're all human. 
And as a human, I always want more. 
And so now I want to think about how to use chemistry to extract more out of a device. 
Right now, we're being told that we want something called 5G, or the promised fifth generation of wireless. 
Now, you might have heard of 5G in commercials that are starting to appear. 
Or maybe some of you even experienced it in the 2018 winter Olympics. 
What I'm most excited about for 5G is that, when I'm late, running out of the house to catch a plane, I can download movies onto my device in 40 seconds as opposed to 40 minutes. 
But once true 5G is here, it's going to be a lot more than how many movies we can put on our device. 
So the question is, why is true 5G not here? 
And I'll let you in on a little secret. 
It's pretty easy to answer. 
It's just plain hard to do. 
You see, if you use those traditional materials and copper to build 5G devices, the signal can't make it to its final destination. 
Traditionally, we use really rough insulating layers to support copper wires. 
Think about Velcro fasteners. 
It's the roughness of the two pieces that make them stick together. 
That's pretty important if you want to have a device that's going to last longer than it takes you to rip it out of the box and start installing all of your apps on it. 
But this roughness causes a problem. 
You see, at the high speeds for 5G the signal has to travel close to that roughness. 
And it makes it get lost before it reaches its final destination. 
Think about a mountain range. 
And you have a complex system of roads that goes up and over it, and you're trying to get to the other side. 
Don't you agree with me that it would probably take a really long time, and you would probably get lost, if you had to go up and down all of the mountains, as opposed to if you just drilled a flat tunnel that could go straight on through? 
Well it's the same thing in our 5G devices. 
If we could remove this roughness, then we can send the 5G signal straight on through uninterrupted. 
Sounds pretty good, right? 
But hold on. 
Didn't I just tell you that we needed that roughness to keep the device together? 
And if we remove it, we're in a situation where now the copper isn't going to stick to that underlying substrate. 
Think about building a house of Lego blocks, with all of the nooks and crannies that latch together, as opposed to smooth building blocks. 
Which of the two is going to have more structural integrity when the two-year-old comes ripping through the living room, trying to play Godzilla and knock everything down? 
But what if we put glue on those smooth blocks? 
And that's what the industry is waiting for. 
They're waiting for the chemists to design new, smooth surfaces with increased inherent adhesion for some of those copper wires. 
And when we solve this problem, and we will solve the problem, and we'll work with physicists and engineers to solve all of the challenges of 5G, well then the number of applications is going to skyrocket. 
So yeah, we'll have things like self-driving cars, because now our data networks can handle the speeds and the amount of information required to make that work. 
But let's start to use imagination. 
I can imagine going into a restaurant with a friend that has a peanut allergy, taking out my phone, waving it over the food and having the food tell us a really important answer to a question -- deadly or safe to consume? 
Or maybe our devices will get so good at processing information about us, that they'll become like our personal trainers. 
And they'll know the most efficient way for us to burn calories. 
I know come November, when I'm trying to burn off some of these pregnancy pounds, I would love a device that could tell me how to do that. 
I really don't know another way of saying it, except chemistry is just cool. 
And it enables all of these electronic devices. 
So the next time you send a text or take a selfie, think about all those atoms that are hard at work and the innovation that came before them. 
Who knows, maybe even some of you listening to this talk, perhaps even on your mobile device, will decide that you too want to play sidekick to Captain Chemistry, the true hero of electronic devices. 
Thank you for your attention, and thank you chemistry. 
(Applause) 

Languages don't just die naturally. 
People abandon mother tongues, because they're forced to. 
Often, the pressure is political. 
In 1892, the US Army general Richard Henry Pratt argued that killing indigenous cultures was the only alternative to killing indigenous people. 
"Kill the Indian," he said, "but save the man." 
And until 1978, the government did just that, removing indigenous children from their families and forcing them into boarding schools where they were given English names and punished for speaking their languages. 
Assimilation was a compliment to genocide. 
Seven thousand languages are alive today, but few are recognized by their own governments or supported online. 
So for people from the vast majority of cultures, globalization remains profoundly alienating. 
It means giving up your language for someone else's. 
And if nothing changes, as many as 3,000 languages could disappear in 80 years. 
But things are changing. 
Around the world, people are reviving ancestral languages and rebuilding their cultures. 
As far as we know, language reclamation began in the 1800s when, at a time of rising antisemitism, Jewish communities looked to their ancestral language, Hebrew, as a means of cultural revival. 
And though it had been dormant for over 1,000 years, it was well preserved in books of Jewish religion and philosophy. 
So Jewish activists studied and taught it to their children, raising the first native speakers in nearly 100 generations. 
Today, it's the mother tongue of five million Jews. 
And at least for me, an assimilated English-speaking member of the Jewish diaspora, a pillar of cultural sovereignty. 
Two thousand years later, we're still here. 
Now, until recently, Hebrew's reawakening was an anomaly. 
Few languages are as well preserved as ours was, and the creation of Israel, the first Jewish state in over 1,000 years, provided a space for Hebrew's daily use. 
In other words, most cultures just weren't given a chance. 
(Video) Good evening, I'm Elizabeth and I live in Cornwall. 
That was Cornish, the ancestral language of Cornwall, which today is technically a county in southern England. 
In the 1900s, Cornish activists fought for their culture. 
The language had been dormant for over 100 years, but they used old books and plays to teach it to their children. 
However, this new generation of Cornish speakers was scattered across Cornwall and unable to use the language freely. 
By the 1990s, Cornish had reawakened, but it wasn't thriving. 
Then, in the early 2000s, Cornish speakers found one another online and leveraged digital spaces to speak on a daily basis. 
From there, they organized weekly or monthly events where they could gather and speak in public. 
Today, some schools teach Cornish. 
There are Cornish language signs, ice-cream commercials, Wikipedia, and even memes. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) And with their language once again intact, the people of Cornwall have secured recognition as a Celtic nation alongside Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 
They stared down centuries of forced assimilation and said, "We're not a county in England. 
We're a people in our own right. 
And we're still here." 
And they're not the only ones. 
The Tunica-Biloxi tribe of Louisiana is reviving their ancestral language. 
(Video) My name is Teyanna. 
My friends, they call me "Quiet Storm." 
It started in the 1980s, when Donna Pierite and her family started taking trips to Baton Rouge and New Orleans to photocopy old dictionaries stored away in university archives. 
The goal was to study Tunica and teach it to the children and share it with the community. 
Today, they're leading a Tunica renaissance. 
Since 2014, there are nearly 100 speakers in language immersion classes, and according to a 2017 census, 32 new fluent speakers, some of whom, like Donna's daughter Elisabeth, are teaching Tunica to their children. 
These new speakers are creating content, Facebook videos and also memes. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) And the more they publish, the more they inspire other Tunica people to get involved. 
Recently, a tribal member living in Texas wrote Elisabeth on Facebook, asking how to say "bless these lands." 
It was for a yard sign, so she could show her neighbors that her culture is alive and thriving today. 
Now, Hebrew, Cornish and Tunica are just three examples from a groundswell of language activism on every continent. 
And whether they're Jèrriais speakers from the Channel Isles, or Kenyan sign language speakers from Nairobi, all communities working to preserve or reclaim a language have one thing in common: media, so their language can be shared and taught. 
And as the internet grows, expanding media access and creation, preserving and reclaiming ancestral languages is now more possible than ever. 
So what are your ancestral languages? 
Mine are Hebrew, Yiddish, Hungarian and Scottish Gaelic, even though I was raised in English. 
And luckily for me, each of these languages is available online. 
Hebrew in particular -- it came installed on my iPhone, it's supported by Google Translate, it even has autocorrect. 
And while your language may not be as widely supported, I encourage you to investigate, because chances are, someone, somewhere, has started getting it online. 
Reclaiming your language and embracing your culture is a powerful way to be yourself in the age of globalization, because as I recently learned to say in Hebrew, "'nḥnw 'dyyn k'n" -- we're still here. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It is almost the end of the winter, and you've woken up to a cold house, which is weird, because you left the heater on all night. 
You turn on the light. 
It's not working. 
Actually, the coffee maker, the TV -- none of them are working. 
Life outside also seems to have stopped. 
There are no schools, most of the businesses are shut, and there are no working trains. 
This is not the opening scene of a zombie apocalypse movie. 
This is what happened in March 1989 in the Canadian province of Quebec, when the power grid lost power. 
The culprit? 
A solar storm. 
Solar storms are giant clouds of particles escaping from the Sun from time to time, and a constant reminder that we live in the neighborhood of an active star. 
And I, as a solar physicist, I have a tremendous chance to study these solar storms. 
But you see, "solar storm chaser" is not just a cool title. 
My research helps to understand where they come from, how they behave and, in the long run, aims to mitigate their effects on human societies, which I'll get to in a second. 
At the beginning of the space exploration age 50 years ago only, the probes we sent in space revealed that the planets in our Solar System constantly bathe in a stream of particles that are coming from the Sun and that we call the solar wind. 
And in the same way that global wind patterns here on Earth can be affected by hurricanes, the solar wind is sometimes affected by solar storms that I like to call "space hurricanes." 
When they arrive at planets, they can perturb the space environment, which in turn creates the northern or southern lights, for example, here on Earth, but also Saturn and also Jupiter. 
Luckily, here on Earth, we are protected by our planet's natural shield, a magnetic bubble that we call the magnetosphere and that you can see here on the right side. 
Nonetheless, solar storms can still be responsible for disrupting satellite telecommunications and operations, for disrupting navigation systems, such as GPS, as well as electric power transmission. 
All of these are technologies on which us humans rely more and more. 
I mean, imagine if you woke up tomorrow without a working cell phone -- no internet on it, which means no social media. 
I mean, to me that would be worse than the zombie apocalypse. 
(Laughter) By constantly monitoring the Sun, though, we now know where the solar storms come from. 
They come from regions of the Sun where a tremendous amount of energy is being stored. 
You have an example here, as a complex structure hanging above the solar surface, just on the verge of erupting. 
Unfortunately, we cannot send probes in the scorching hot atmosphere of the Sun, where temperatures can rise up to around 10 million degrees Kelvin. 
So what I do is I use computer simulations in order to analyze but also to predict the behavior of these storms when they're just born at the Sun. 
This is only one part of the story, though. 
When these solar storms are moving in space, some of them will inevitably encounter space probes that we humans have sent in order to explore other worlds. 
What I mean by other worlds is, for example, planets, such as Venus or Mercury, but also objects, such as comets. 
And while these space probes have been made for different scientific endeavors, they can also act like tiny cosmic meteorological stations and monitor the evolution of these space storms. 
So I, with a group of researchers, gather and analyze this data coming from different locations of the Solar System. 
And by doing so, my research shows that, actually, solar storms have a generic shape, and that this shape evolves as solar storms move away from the Sun. 
And you know what? 
This is key for building tools to predict space weather. 
I would like to leave you with this beautiful image. 
This is us here on Earth, this pale blue dot. 
And while I study the Sun and its storms every day, I will always have a deep love for this beautiful planet -- a pale blue dot indeed, but a pale blue dot with an invisible magnetic shield that helps to protect us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The year was 1776. 
In Bavaria, new ideals of rationalism, religious freedom, and universal human rights competed with the Catholic church’s heavy influence over public affairs. 
Across the Atlantic, a new nation staked its claim for independence on the basis of these ideas. 
But back in Bavaria, law professor Adam Weishaupt’s attempts to teach secular philosophy continued to be frustrated. 
Weishaupt decided to spread his ideas through a secret society that would shine a light on the shortcomings of the Church’s ideology. 
He called his secret society the Illuminati. 
Weishaupt modelled aspects of his secret society off a group called the Freemasons. 
Originally an elite stoneworkers’ guild in the late Middle Ages, the Freemasons had gone from passing down the craft of masonry to more generally promoting ideals of knowledge and reason. 
Over time, they had grown into a semi-secret, exclusive order that included many wealthy and influential individuals, with elaborate, secret initiation rituals. 
Weishaupt created his parallel society while also joining the Freemasons and recruiting from their ranks. 
He adopted the code name Spartacus for himself, after the famed leader of the Roman slave revolt. 
Early members became the Illuminati’s ruling council, or Areopagus. 
One of these members, Baron Adolph Knigge, was also a freemason, and became an influential recruiter. 
With Knigge’s help, the Illuminati expanded their numbers, gained influence within several Masonic chapters, and incorporated Masonic rituals. 
By 1784, there were over 600 members, including influential scholars and politicians. 
As the Illuminati gained members, the American Revolution also gained momentum. 
Thomas Jefferson would later cite Weishaupt as an inspiration. 
European monarchs and clergy were fearful of similar revolts on their home soil. 
Meanwhile, the existence of the Illuminati had become an open secret. 
Both the Illuminati and the Freemasons drew exclusively from society’s wealthy elite, which meant they were constantly rubbing shoulders with members of the religious and political establishment. 
Many in the government and church believed that both groups were determined to undermine the people’s religious faith. 
But these groups didn’t necessarily oppose religion— they just believed it should be kept separate from governance. 
Still, the suspicious Bavarian government started keeping records of alleged members of the Illuminati. 
Just as Illuminati members begun to secure important positions in local governments and universities, a 1784 decree by Duke Karl Theodor of Bavaria banned all secret societies. 
While a public ban on something ostensibly secret might seem difficult to enforce, in this case it worked. 
Only nine years after its founding, the group dissolved, their records were seized, and Weishaupt forced into exile. 
The Illuminati would become more notorious in their afterlife than they had ever been in their brief existence. 
A decade later, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, conservative authors claimed the Illuminati had survived their banishment and orchestrated the overthrow of the monarchy. 
In the United States, preacher Jedidiah Morse promoted similar ideas of an Illuminati conspiracy against the government. 
But though the idea of a secret group orchestrating political upheaval is still alive and well today, there is no evidence that the Illuminati survived, reformed, or went underground. 
Their brief tenure is well-documented in Bavarian government records, the still-active Freemasons’s records, and particularly the overlap between these two sources, without a whisper since. 
In the spirit of rationalism the Illuminati embraced, one must conclude they no longer exist. 
But the ideas that spurred Weishaupt to found the illuminati still spread, becoming the basis for many Western governments today. 
These ideas didn’t start or end with the Illuminati— instead, it was one community that represented a wave of change that was already underway when it was founded and continued long after it ended. 

So, I have a background in technology and magic. 
And magicians are interesting. 
Their illusions accomplish what technology cannot. 
But what happens when the technology of the day seems almost magical? 
What happens when you can do this? 
(Music) Now, 100 years ago, that would have been the magic of levitation. 
Is it possible to create illusions in a world where technology makes anything possible? 
Jump! 
Now, if you know how the trick is done, where is the illusion? 
But still, our imagination is more powerful than our reasoning, and it's easy to attribute personality to machines. 
These are quadcopters. 
But they are more than mechanical flying machines. 
They analyze the environment around them and react to everything I do. 
At once, algorithms allow these autonomous machines to fly in close formation, aware of each other and aware of me -- mathematics that can be mistaken for intelligence, and intelligence for personality. 
Anthropomorphism: that's the illusion, an illusion created by technology and embroidered by our imagination to become an intelligent flying robot, a machine that appears to be alive. 
(Music plays "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") (Quadcopters make tones) I think they say, "Hello." 
Hey guys! Come on. 
And time to land. 
And that's it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) OK, guys, time to go home. 
Everybody in here. 
Come on, everybody, quickly, quickly. 
No pushing, everybody can fit. 
There you go, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. 
Come on, everybody, everybody, and ... good job! 
(Cheers) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I first became a doctor in Benin City, Nigeria, some 30-odd years ago, I was drawn to help people live full lives. 
But often, I found myself feeling impotent. 
Here I was, a brand-new doctor with all these skills, but I couldn't cure my patients who had chronic diseases -- illnesses like heart disease, asthma, diabetes -- and needed more than just handing them a prescription or providing grief counseling in the office to get the job done. 
Fast-forward 15 years later: I'm in Atlanta, Georgia; it's a different world, but it was déjà vu all over again. 
As doctors, we see our patients who have chronic illnesses in an episodic way. 
In between, the patients have to learn how to make a lot of decisions for themselves. 
I'll give you examples. 
If you have medications you're supposed to take every day, what do you do when you're sick? 
Are you still supposed to take it? 
How do you recognize a complication when it happens? 
How do you recognize a side effect when it happens? 
What do you do with it? 
In addition to all of this, they're dealing with the inevitable loneliness, isolation and anxiety that people who have chronic illnesses deal with. 
In the US alone, six in 10 adults have a chronic illness. 
That's 125 million people. 
A recent report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showed that health habits account for 50 percent of the health outcomes that people experience, while medical care only accounts for 20 percent. 
In fact, the Centers for Disease Control says that if we could eliminate smoking, physical inactivity and poor nutrition, that we can prevent 80 percent of heart disease, 80 percent of type 2 diabetes and 40 percent of cancer. 
But we also know that changing health behaviors is very difficult. 
So we asked the question: What if we could create a resource that could motivate people to change health behavior? 
The truth is, there are a lot of these resources out there that help people acquire these so-called self-management skills. 
But many a time, they're not easily accessible or relatable, particularly to individuals within minority and underserved communities, who face bias in addition to barriers like language and culture and inadequate health insurance coverage. 
And so in the last 12 years, my colleagues and I at Morehouse School of Medicine have created a technology-based application to assist with chronic illness care. 
It's freely available on the web and as an app. 
And what we do is get people to track variables -- blood pressure, blood sugar -- and then report it back to them in a color-coded format. 
So green would indicate a healthy range, and red would indicate a problem that needs something done about it. 
We link these stats to a curriculum. 
The curriculum helps the individual learn about their health condition, whatever the chronic illness is. 
They also work with a health coach to learn self-management skills, skills that'll help them prevent complications of their illness. 
In order for the coach to be successful, they have to be able to gain the trust of the individual that they're working with. 
We tested this application in clinics, where the health coaches were medical assistants, and in a large urban church, where the health coaches were volunteers from the health ministry. 
A year later, a third of the participants were able to acquire three new self-management skills and maintain them to the extent that it was able to improve their blood pressures, their blood sugar and their exercise. 
Now, what was simple yet fascinating to us was that the group from the church did just as well or even better than the group that were under purely medical care. 
And we wanted to learn why that was. 
So we looked a little further into the research -- 400 hours of recorded conversation -- and what we learned was that the coaches from the church did have more time to spend with the patients, they had access to the patients' families, and so they could figure out what people needed and provide those resources for them. 
My team and I call this "culturally congruent coaching." 
To illustrate this concept of culturally congruent coaching, I want to tell you about one of our patients. 
I'll call her Ms. Bertha. 
So Ms. Bertha is an 83-year-old lady with diabetes and hypertension. 
She was assigned to Anne, her health coach in the church. 
Anne also happened to be a family friend to Ms. Bertha for many years, and they were fellow congregants. 
Anne observed after the first few visits that even though Ms. Bertha faithfully recorded her stats, they were all showing up as red. 
So she probed a little deeper to try to understand what was going on with Ms. Bertha, and Ms. Bertha gave her the real-real. 
(Laughter) She told her that there were times when her medications made her feel weird, and she wouldn't take them the way they were prescribed, because she thought it was due to the medicines but she didn't tell her doctor that. 
She also skipped out on some doctor appointments for a variety of reasons, but one of them was she wasn't doing better and she didn't want to make her doctor mad, so she just didn't go. 
So Anne talked to Ms. Bertha and asked her to bring her daughter in for the next visit, which she did. 
And at that visit, Anne was able to print out a log of all these stats that Ms. Bertha had been collecting, gave them to her and encouraged them to go see the doctor together, which they did. 
With that information, the doctor was able to make changes to Ms. Bertha's treatment. 
Within three months, Ms. Bertha's numbers were all in the green. 
No one was more excited or surprised than Ms. Bertha herself. 
Now, Anne was successful as a health coach because she cared enough to go below the surface and probe Ms. Bertha's deep culture and was able to reach her at that level. 
She knew how to listen, and she knew how to ask the right questions to get to what was needed. 
We all have deep unconscious rules that drive the way we make our health decisions. 
That's our culture. 
The relationship and the conversation between Anne and Ms. Bertha illustrates what's possible when we have conversations with our patients, our friends and our neighbors on a deep cultural level. 
And personally, I'm beyond excited to think that with this simple concept of culturally congruent coaching, we could change the lives of 125 million Americans and many others across the world that are living with chronic diseases. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

A few months ago we posed a challenge to our community. 
We asked everyone: given a range of integers from 0 to 100, guess the whole number closest to 2/3 of the average of all numbers guessed. 
So if the average of all guesses is 60, the correct guess will be 40. 
What number do you think was the correct guess at 2/3 of the average? 
Let’s see if we can try and reason our way to the answer. 
This game is played under conditions known to game theorists as common knowledge. 
Not only does every player have the same information — they also know that everyone else does, and that everyone else knows that everyone else does, and so on, infinitely. 
Now, the highest possible average would occur if every person guessed 100. 
In that case, 2/3 of the average would be 66.66. 
Since everyone can figure this out, it wouldn’t make sense to guess anything higher than 67. 
If everyone playing comes to this same conclusion, no one will guess higher than 67. 
Now 67 is the new highest possible average, so no reasonable guess should be higher than ⅔ of that, which is 44. 
This logic can be extended further and further. 
With each step, the highest possible logical answer keeps getting smaller. 
So it would seem sensible to guess the lowest number possible. 
And indeed, if everyone chose zero, the game would reach what’s known as a Nash Equilibrium. 
This is a state where every player has chosen the best possible strategy for themselves given everyone else playing, and no individual player can benefit by choosing differently. 
But, that’s not what happens in the real world. 
People, as it turns out, either aren’t perfectly rational, or don’t expect each other to be perfectly rational. 
Or, perhaps, it’s some combination of the two. 
When this game is played in real-world settings, the average tends to be somewhere between 20 and 35. 
Danish newspaper Politiken ran the game with over 19,000 readers participating, resulting in an average of roughly 22, making the correct answer 14. 
For our audience, the average was 31.3. 
So if you guessed 21 as 2/3 of the average, well done. 
Economic game theorists have a way of modeling this interplay between rationality and practicality called k-level reasoning. 
K stands for the number of times a cycle of reasoning is repeated. 
A person playing at k-level 0 would approach our game naively, guessing a number at random without thinking about the other players. 
At k-level 1, a player would assume everyone else was playing at level 0, resulting in an average of 50, and thus guess 33. 
At k-level 2, they’d assume that everyone else was playing at level 1, leading them to guess 22. 
It would take 12 k-levels to reach 0. 
The evidence suggests that most people stop at 1 or 2 k-levels. 
And that’s useful to know, because k-level thinking comes into play in high-stakes situations. 
For example, stock traders evaluate stocks not only based on earnings reports, but also on the value that others place on those numbers. 
And during penalty kicks in soccer, both the shooter and the goalie decide whether to go right or left based on what they think the other person is thinking. 
Goalies often memorize the patterns of their opponents ahead of time, but penalty shooters know that and can plan accordingly. 
In each case, participants must weigh their own understanding of the best course of action against how well they think other participants understand the situation. 
But 1 or 2 k-levels is by no means a hard and fast rule— simply being conscious of this tendency can make people adjust their expectations. 
For instance, what would happen if people played the 2/3 game after understanding the difference between the most logical approach and the most common? 
Submit your own guess at what 2/3 of the new average will be by using the form below, and we’ll find out. 

While regaling you with daring stories from her youth, it might be hard to believe your grandmother used to be a trapeze artist. 
However, the bad backs, elbow pain, and creaky knees so common in older people is more than just “old age." 
In fact, the source of this stiffness plagues many young people as well. 
The culprit is arthritis: a condition that causes inflammation and pain in the joints of over 90 million people in the U.S. alone. 
But are stiff, creaky joints really inevitable? 
What makes arthritis so pervasive, and why haven’t we found a cure for this widespread condition? 
The first hurdle is that arthritis is actually a spectrum of over 100 different arthritic conditions. 
All these conditions share symptoms of joint pain and inflammation, but the origin and severity of those symptoms vary widely. 
Even the most common type, osteoarthritis, is trickier to prevent than one might think. 
It’s a general misconception that arthritis is confined to old age. 
The origins of osteoarthritis can often be traced to a patient’s early life, from any seemingly ordinary joint injury. 
Following impact, immune cells rush in to help clean and repair the damaged site and begin pumping out enzymes, including matrix metalloproteinases and aggrecanases. 
These enzymes clear out the damaged tissue and contribute to inflammation. 
But while this rapid swelling helps protect the joint during recovery, inadequately healed tissue can cause these immune cells to overstay their welcome. 
The continuing flood of enzymes starts to degrade the cartilage, weakening the joint and leading to arthritis later on. 
Not all forms of arthritis can simply be traced to an old sports injury. 
Take rheumatoid arthritis, which affects 1.3 million U.S. adults. 
This condition is actually an autoimmune disease in which autoantibodies target natively produced proteins, some of which are secreted by cartilage cells. 
We still don’t know what causes this behavior, but the result is that the body treats joint tissue like a foreign invader. 
Immune cells infiltrate the joint despite there being no tissue damage to repair. 
This response leads to chronic inflammation, which destroys bone and cartilage. 
Yet another condition, spondyloarthritis, has similarities to both of the conditions we’ve covered. 
Patients experience continuous inflammation in the joints and at the sites where ligaments and tendons attach to bones, even without any initial injury. 
This leads to the flood of enzymes and degradation seen in osteoarthritis, but is driven by different inflammatory proteins called cytokines. 
As the enzymes eat away at cartilage, the body attempts to stabilize smaller joints by fusing them together. 
This process sometimes leads to outgrowths called bone spurs, which also cause intense stiffness and joint pain. 
With so many factors causing arthritis, our current treatments are tailored to tackle specific symptoms rather than underlying causes. 
These range from promising MACI techniques, which harvest cells from small pieces of cartilage to grow replacement tissue. 
To a technique called microfracture, where surgeons create small holes in the bone, allowing bone marrow stem cells to leak out and form new cartilage. 
As a last resort, people with withered cartilage can even undergo full joint replacements. 
But outside these drastic measures, the underlying drivers of autoimmune arthritis still present a unique treatment challenge. 
Scientists are making progress with therapies that block TNF-alpha, one of the primary proteins causing inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis. 
But even this approach only treats the symptoms of the condition, not the cause. 
In the meantime, some of our best defenses against arthritis are lifestyle choices: maintaining a healthy weight to take pressure off joints, low-impact exercises like yoga or cycling, and avoiding smoking. 
These arthritis-fighting behaviors can help us lead longer lives as we continue to research cures and treatments for the huge diversity of arthritic conditions. 

I'm an astronaut. 
I flew on the space shuttle twice, and I lived on the International Space Station for almost six months. 
People often ask me the same question, which is, "What's it like in space?" 
as if it was a secret. 
Space belongs to all of us, and I'd like to help you understand why it's a place that is magic for all of us. 
The day after my 50th birthday, I climbed aboard a Russian capsule, in Russia, and launched into space. 
Launching is the most dangerous thing that we do, and it's also the most thrilling. 
Three, two, one ... liftoff! 
I felt every single bit of the controlled fury of those rocket engines as they blasted us off the Earth. 
We went faster and faster and faster, until, after eight and a half minutes, on purpose, those engines stop -- kabunk! -- and we are weightless. 
And the mission and the magic begin. 
Dmitry and Paolo and I are circling the Earth in our tiny spacecraft, approaching the space station carefully. 
It's an intricate dance at 17,500 miles an hour between our capsule, the size of a Smart Car, and the space station, the size of a football field. 
We arrive when those two craft dock with a gentle thunk. 
We open the hatches, have sloppy zero-G hugs with each other, and now we're six. 
We're a space family, an instant family. 
My favorite part about living up there was the flying. 
I loved it. 
It was like being Peter Pan. 
It's not about floating. 
Just the touch of a finger can actually push you across the entire space station, and then you sort of tuck in with your toes. 
One of my favorite things was drifting silently through the space station, which was humming along at night. 
I wondered sometimes if it knew I was there, just silent. 
But sharing the wonder of that with the crew was also part of what was important to me. 
A typical day in space starts with the perfect commute. 
I wake up, cruise down the lab and say hello to the best morning view ever. 
It's a really fast commute, only 30 seconds, and we never get tired of looking out that window. 
I think it reminds us that we're actually still very close to Earth. 
Our crew was the second ever to use the Canadian robotic arm to capture a supply ship the size of a school bus containing about a dozen different experiments and the only chocolate that we would see for the next four months. 
Now, chocolate aside, every single one of those experiments enables yet one more scientific question answered that we can't do down here on Earth. 
And so, it's like a different lens, allowing us to see the answers to questions like, "What about combustion?" 
"What about fluid dynamics?" 
Now, sleeping is delightful. 
My favorite -- I mean, you could be upside down, right side up -- my favorite: curled up in a little ball and floating freely. 
Laundry? Nope. 
We load our dirty clothes into an empty supply ship and send it off into space. 
The bathroom. 
Everyone wants to know. 
It's hard to understand, so I made a little video, because I wanted kids to understand that the principle of vacuum saves the day and that just a gentle breeze helps everything go where it is supposed to. 
Well, in real life it does. 
(Laughter) Recycling? Of course. 
So we take our urine, we store it, we filter it and then we drink it. 
And it's actually delicious. 
(Laughter) Sitting around the table, eating food that looks bad but actually tastes pretty good. 
But it's the gathering around the table that's important, I think both in space and on Earth, because that's what cements a crew together. 
For me, music was a way to stay connected to the rest of the world. 
I played a duet between Earth and space with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull on the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight. 
Connecting to family was so important. 
I talked with my family almost every day the whole time I was up there, and I would actually read books to my son as a way for us just to be together. 
So important. 
Now, when the space station would go over Massachusetts, my family would run outside, and they would watch the brightest star sailing across the sky. 
And when I looked down, I couldn't see my house, but it meant a lot to me to know that the people I loved the most were looking up while I was looking down. 
So the space station, for me, is the place where mission and magic come together. 
The mission, the work are vital steps in our quest to go further than our planet and imperative for understanding sustainability here on Earth. 
I loved being a part of that, and if I could have taken my family with me, I never would have come home. 
And so my view from the station showed me that we are all from the same place. 
We all have our roles to play. 
Because, the Earth is our ship. 
Space is our home. 
And we are the crew of Spaceship Earth. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Which of these three people is doing something risky? 
Is it the one who takes their cholesterol medication with grapefruit juice? 
The one who takes Acetaminophen pain relievers for a sore ankle before going out for drinks? 
Or the one who’s on a blood-thinning medication and takes an aspirin for a headache? 
Actually, all of them are. 
Each has inadvertently created a drug interaction that could, in extreme cases, lead to kidney failure; liver damage; or internal bleeding. 
Drug interactions happen when the combination of a drug with another substance causes different effects than either would individually. 
Foods, herbal supplements, legal drugs, and illicit substances can all cause drug interactions. 
Most drug interactions fall into two categories. 
Some take place when two substances’ effects influence each other directly. 
In other cases, one substance effects how the body processes another, like how it is absorbed, metabolized, or transported around the body. 
Blood thinners and aspirin, for example, have similar effects that become dangerous when combined. 
Both prevent blood clots from forming— blood thinners by preventing the formation of the clotting factors that hold clots together, and aspirin by preventing blood cells from clumping into groups that become clots. 
Individually, these effects are usually safe, but taken together, they can prevent blood clotting to a dangerous extent, possibly causing internal bleeding. 
While blood thinners and aspirin are generally harmless when taken individually, interactions where one substance exacerbates the effects of another can also take place between drugs that are independently harmful. 
Cocaine and heroin are each dangerous, and those dangers compound when the two drugs are combined— even though their behavioral effects may feel like they cancel each other out. 
Cocaine is a stimulant, and many of its effects, like increased heart rate, cause the body to need more oxygen. 
But heroin, a depressant, slows breathing— reducing the body’s oxygen supply just when it needs more. 
This combination strains the organs and can cause respiratory failure and death. 
The interaction between grapefruit juice and certain medications in class of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, has to do with drug metabolism. 
The liver produces enzymes, molecules that facilitate the breakdown of substances that enter the body. 
Enzymes can both activate drugs, by breaking them down into their therapeutic ingredients from more complex molecules, and deactivate them, by breaking harmful compounds down into harmless metabolites. 
There are many, many different enzymes, each of which has a binding site that fits a specific molecule. 
Grapefruit binds to the same enzyme as statins, making less of that enzyme available to break down statins. 
So combining the two means that a greater concentration of the drug stays in the bloodstream for a longer period of time, potentially causing kidney failure. 
Alcohol can also alter the function of the enzyme that breaks down Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in pain relievers like Tylenol and paracetamol. 
When someone takes Acetaminophen, some of it is converted into a toxic substance. 
At the recommended dose, there isn’t usually enough of this toxic byproduct to cause harm. 
But heavy drinking can alter enzyme activity so more of that byproduct is produced, potentially causing liver damage even with what’s usually a safe dose of acetominophen. 
Meanwhile, the herbal remedy Saint John’s Wort increases the liver’s production of a particular enzyme. 
That means the drugs this enzyme is responsible for breaking down get metabolized faster— sometimes too fast, before they can have their therapeutic effects. 
In spite of the dizzying number of possible interactions, most of the dangerous interactions with commonly used drugs are well known. 
And new developments in science are helping us keep better track of drug interactions than ever. 
Some researchers are developing AI programs that can predict the side effects of drug interactions before they occur, using information about the landscape of protein interactions within your body. 
For the new drugs that are being developed all the time, supercomputers are being used to find potential interactions while those drugs are still in development. 

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

Many of us here use technology in our day-to-day. 
And some of us rely on technology to do our jobs. 
For a while, I thought of machines and the technologies that drive them as perfect tools that could make my work more efficient and more productive. 
But with the rise of automation across so many different industries, it led me to wonder: If machines are starting to be able to do the work traditionally done by humans, what will become of the human hand? 
How does our desire for perfection, precision and automation affect our ability to be creative? 
In my work as an artist and researcher, I explore AI and robotics to develop new processes for human creativity. 
For the past few years, I've made work alongside machines, data and emerging technologies. 
It's part of a lifelong fascination about the dynamics of individuals and systems and all the messiness that that entails. 
It's how I'm exploring questions about where AI ends and we begin and where I'm developing processes that investigate potential sensory mixes of the future. 
I think it's where philosophy and technology intersect. 
Doing this work has taught me a few things. 
It's taught me how embracing imperfection can actually teach us something about ourselves. 
It's taught me that exploring art can actually help shape the technology that shapes us. 
And it's taught me that combining AI and robotics with traditional forms of creativity -- visual arts in my case -- can help us think a little bit more deeply about what is human and what is the machine. 
And it's led me to the realization that collaboration is the key to creating the space for both as we move forward. 
It all started with a simple experiment with machines, called "Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1." 
I call the machine "D.O.U.G." for short. 
Before I built D.O.U.G, I didn't know anything about building robots. 
I took some open-source robotic arm designs, I hacked together a system where the robot would match my gestures and follow [them] in real time. 
The premise was simple: I would lead, and it would follow. 
I would draw a line, and it would mimic my line. 
So back in 2015, there we were, drawing for the first time, in front of a small audience in New York City. 
The process was pretty sparse -- no lights, no sounds, nothing to hide behind. 
Just my palms sweating and the robot's new servos heating up. 
(Laughs) Clearly, we were not built for this. 
But something interesting happened, something I didn't anticipate. 
See, D.O.U.G., in its primitive form, wasn't tracking my line perfectly. 
While in the simulation that happened onscreen it was pixel-perfect, in physical reality, it was a different story. 
It would slip and slide and punctuate and falter, and I would be forced to respond. 
There was nothing pristine about it. 
And yet, somehow, the mistakes made the work more interesting. 
The machine was interpreting my line but not perfectly. 
And I was forced to respond. 
We were adapting to each other in real time. 
And seeing this taught me a few things. 
It showed me that our mistakes actually made the work more interesting. 
And I realized that, you know, through the imperfection of the machine, our imperfections became what was beautiful about the interaction. 
And I was excited, because it led me to the realization that maybe part of the beauty of human and machine systems is their shared inherent fallibility. 
For the second generation of D.O.U.G., I knew I wanted to explore this idea. 
But instead of an accident produced by pushing a robotic arm to its limits, I wanted to design a system that would respond to my drawings in ways that I didn't expect. 
So, I used a visual algorithm to extract visual information from decades of my digital and analog drawings. 
I trained a neural net on these drawings in order to generate recurring patterns in the work that were then fed through custom software back into the machine. 
I painstakingly collected as many of my drawings as I could find -- finished works, unfinished experiments and random sketches -- and tagged them for the AI system. 
And since I'm an artist, I've been making work for over 20 years. 
Collecting that many drawings took months, it was a whole thing. 
And here's the thing about training AI systems: it's actually a lot of hard work. 
A lot of work goes on behind the scenes. 
But in doing the work, I realized a little bit more about how the architecture of an AI is constructed. 
And I realized it's not just made of models and classifiers for the neural network. 
But it's a fundamentally malleable and shapable system, one in which the human hand is always present. 
It's far from the omnipotent AI we've been told to believe in. 
So I collected these drawings for the neural net. 
And we realized something that wasn't previously possible. 
My robot D.O.U.G. became a real-time interactive reflection of the work I'd done through the course of my life. 
The data was personal, but the results were powerful. 
And I got really excited, because I started thinking maybe machines don't need to be just tools, but they can function as nonhuman collaborators. 
And even more than that, I thought maybe the future of human creativity isn't in what it makes but how it comes together to explore new ways of making. 
So if D.O.U.G._1 was the muscle, and D.O.U.G._2 was the brain, then I like to think of D.O.U.G._3 as the family. 
I knew I wanted to explore this idea of human-nonhuman collaboration at scale. 
So over the past few months, I worked with my team to develop 20 custom robots that could work with me as a collective. 
They would work as a group, and together, we would collaborate with all of New York City. 
I was really inspired by Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li, who said, "if we want to teach machines how to think, we need to first teach them how to see." 
It made me think of the past decade of my life in New York, and how I'd been all watched over by these surveillance cameras around the city. 
And I thought it would be really interesting if I could use them to teach my robots to see. 
So with this project, I thought about the gaze of the machine, and I began to think about vision as multidimensional, as views from somewhere. 
We collected video from publicly available camera feeds on the internet of people walking on the sidewalks, cars and taxis on the road, all kinds of urban movement. 
We trained a vision algorithm on those feeds based on a technique called "optical flow," to analyze the collective density, direction, dwell and velocity states of urban movement. 
Our system extracted those states from the feeds as positional data and became pads for my robotic units to draw on. 
Instead of a collaboration of one-to-one, we made a collaboration of many-to-many. 
By combining the vision of human and machine in the city, we reimagined what a landscape painting could be. 
Throughout all of my experiments with D.O.U.G., no two performances have ever been the same. 
And through collaboration, we create something that neither of us could have done alone: we explore the boundaries of our creativity, human and nonhuman working in parallel. 
I think this is just the beginning. 
This year, I've launched Scilicet, my new lab exploring human and interhuman collaboration. 
We're really interested in the feedback loop between individual, artificial and ecological systems. 
We're connecting human and machine output to biometrics and other kinds of environmental data. 
We're inviting anyone who's interested in the future of work, systems and interhuman collaboration to explore with us. 
We know it's not just technologists that have to do this work and that we all have a role to play. 
We believe that by teaching machines how to do the work traditionally done by humans, we can explore and evolve our criteria of what's made possible by the human hand. 
And part of that journey is embracing the imperfections and recognizing the fallibility of both human and machine, in order to expand the potential of both. 
Today, I'm still in pursuit of finding the beauty in human and nonhuman creativity. 
In the future, I have no idea what that will look like, but I'm pretty curious to find out. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 1948, Spanish ophthalmologist Jose Ignacio Barraquer Moner was fed up with glasses. 
He wanted a solution for blurry vision that fixed the eye itself, without relying on external aids. 
But the surgery he eventually devised was not for the faint of heart. 
Barraquer began by slicing off the front of a patient’s cornea and dunking it in liquid nitrogen. 
Using a miniature lathe, he ground the frozen cornea into the precise shape necessary to focus the patient’s vision. 
Then he thawed the disc, and sewed it back on. 
Barraquer called this procedure keratomileusis, from the Greek words for “carving” and “cornea.” And though it might sound grisly, his technique produced reliable results. 
So how did Barraquer’s surgery work? 
Keratomileusis corrects what are called refractive errors: imperfections in the way the eye focuses incoming light. 
Ideally, the cornea and lens work together to focus light on the surface of the retina, but several kinds of refractive errors can impair this delicate system. 
In people with myopia, or short-sightedness, a steep cornea focuses light just short of the retina. 
Those with hyperopia, or far-sightedness, have the opposite problem: light is focused too far beyond the retina. 
And in people with astigmatism, the cornea has two different curvatures which focus light at two distances and produce blurry vision. 
Even those with perfect vision will eventually suffer from presbyopia, or “aging eyes.” As the proteins in the lens age, they slowly increase its size. 
By an adult’s mid-40’s, the lens is too large to easily change shape and shift focus. 
Glasses and contact lenses bend light to compensate for these refractive errors. 
But, as Barraquer’s procedure shows, we can also alter the shape of the cornea itself; moving the focal point backwards, forwards, or pulling a divided image together. 
And thankfully, modern eye surgeons can sculpt the cornea with far less invasive tools. 
In corrective laser eye surgery, surgeons rely on excimer lasers. 
These tools are accurate enough to etch words into a human hair. 
To safely accomplish these ultra-fine incisions, they use a technique called photoablation. 
This allows the laser to essentially evaporate organic tissue without overheating surrounding eye tissue. 
So how does laser eye surgery actually work? 
The first step is to separate a thin layer from the front of the cornea. 
This can be done with either a flat, wide blade, or a femto-second laser that produces millions of tiny plasma bubbles to create a plane beneath the corneal surface. 
Surgeons then lift the flap to expose the inside of the cornea. 
Guided by the refractive error and the shape of the cornea, the excimer laser robotically sculpts the exposed corneal bed into the correct shape. 
This process usually takes less than 30 seconds for each eye. 
Finally, the flap is closed, and its edges reseal themselves in just a few hours. 
Because the lasering is done on the eyeball itself, it’s described as “in situ,” or “on site.” Its complete name is “laser in-situ keratomileusis” – but you probably know it as LASIK. 
Essentially, this technique carves a patient’s contact lens prescription onto their cornea. 
Like any surgical procedure, LASIK comes with certain risks. 
Some patients experience slightly blurred vision that can’t be corrected by glasses. 
But the technique is currently about as likely to damage your eyes as wearing daily disposable contact lenses for one year. 
Today, a technique called SMILE enables surgeons to sculpt the cornea through even smaller incisions – further reducing recovery time. 
And lasers aren’t just correcting the three types of refractive errors – this technology can also restore aging eyes. 
In a technique called Laser Blended Vision, surgeons adjust one eye to be slightly better at distance vision and the other to be better at close range vision. 
The difference between the two eyes is small enough that most patients can merge their vision, allowing both eyes to work together at all distances. 
Advances in laser technology continue to make vision correction surgery more effective and accessible. 
One day soon, Barraquer’s vision of a world without glasses may finally come true. 

This is Sian Ka'an. 
Just south of Tulum on Mexico's Caribbean coast, it's a federally protected reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. 
But when I first visited in 2010, I was horrified and completely confused as to why the beach was covered in trash. 
I soon realized that it was floating in from all over the world. 
I've since returned, after that first journey, several times a year to visit Sian Ka'an, to the country of my birth, to work with this trash. 
And so far, we've documented garbage from 58 different countries and territories on six continents, all washing ashore in this paradise in Mexico. 
Although I can never know where a product was dropped, I can, at times, based on the label, know where something was made. 
In red, you see all of the countries represented by their trash in Sian Ka'an. 
Such as these Haitian butter containers in all shapes and sizes, Jamaican water bottles. 
Not surprisingly, a lot of the stuff is from neighboring Caribbean countries, but the stuff is from everywhere. 
Here's a sampling of international water bottles. 
And one of the ironies is that a lot of what I'm finding are products for cleaning and beautification, such as this item from the United States, which is actually made to protect your plastic, (Laughter) shampoo from South Korea, bleach from Costa Rica and a Norwegian toilet cleaner. 
And it's items that are all very familiar to us, or at least I hope you're familiar with these toothbrushes. 
(Laughter) Kitchen utensils. 
Toys. 
I'm also finding evidence of burning plastic trash, which releases cancer-causing fumes into the air. 
People ask what's the most interesting item that I've found, and that's by far this prosthetic leg. 
And in the background, if you can see that blue little bottle cap, at the time that I found it, it was actually the home to this little hermit crab. 
This guy is so cute. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) And it's these fascinating objects, but also horrifying objects, each with their own history, that I use to make my ephemeral, environmental artworks. 
And it all started with this image in February of 2010, when I first visited Sian Ka'an. 
I noticed that blue was the most prevalent color among the plastic. 
Purple is actually the most rare color. It's kind of like gold to me. 
But blue is the most prevalent, and so I gathered some of the blues and made this little arrangement in front of the blue sky and blue Caribbean waters. 
And when I took a photograph and looked at the test shot, it was like a lightning bolt hit me in that moment, and I knew I was going to have to come back to create a whole series of installations on location and photograph them. 
So this turned out to be a sketch for a work that I completed three years later. 
I had no idea that almost 10 years later, almost a decade later, I'd still be working on it. 
But the problem persists. 
So I'm going to show you some of the images from the series that I called "Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape." 
Please keep in mind that I do not paint the garbage. 
I'm collecting it and organizing it by color on the same beaches where I find it. 
This is my precious trash pile as seen in 2015 after putting on a first edition of the "Museo de la Basura," or "Museum of Garbage." 
It's fully my intention to care for this garbage, to exalt it, put it on a pedestal and to curate it. 
We have all seen devastating images of animals dying with plastic in their bellies. 
And it's so important for us to really see those and to take those in. 
But it's by making aesthetic -- some might say beautiful -- arrangements out of the world's waste, that I'm trying to hook the viewer to draw in those that might be numb to the horrors of the world and give them a different way to understand what's happening. 
Some have described the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an island twice the size of Texas, but I've been told that it's hard to see because it's more like a smog. 
So through my artwork, I attempt to depict the reality of what's happening with our environment and to make the invisible visible. 
My key question at first, after starting the project, was, "What do I do with the garbage when I'm done?" 
I was told by some that it could be damaged goods after traveling across the ocean and being exposed to the elements, that it could become degraded and potentially ruin a batch of recycling. 
The landfill was not a happy resting place, either. 
And then finally, it dawned on me, after all of the effort by me and all of the people who have helped me collect and organize and clean this trash, that I should keep it. 
And so that's the plan, to use it and to reuse it endlessly to make more artwork and to engage communities in environmental art-making. 
This is an example of a community-based artwork that we did last year with the local youth of Punta Allen in Sian Ka'an. 
A key part of the community work are the beach cleans and education programming. 
And as this community around the project grows and as my trash collection grows, I really believe that the impact will as well. 
And so, over the years, I've become a little obsessed with my trash collection. 
I pack it into suitcases and travel with it. 
I take it on vacation with me. 
(Laughter) And in the latest work, I've begun to break the two-dimensional plane of the photograph. 
I'm really excited about this new work. 
I see these as living artworks that will morph and grow over time. 
Although my greatest wish is that I run out of the raw material for this work, we're not there yet. 
So in the next phase of the project, I plan on continuing the community work and making my own work at a much larger scale, because the problem is massive. 
Eight million tons of plastic waste enter our oceans every year, destroying ecosystems. 
Right now, as I speak, there's literally an oil spill of plastic happening. 
I see this project as a plea for help and a call to action. 
Our health and future is inextricably linked to that of our oceans. 
I call the project "Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape," but it's actually transformed me and made me rethink my own behaviors and consumption. 
And if it can help anybody else gain more awareness, then it will have been worthwhile. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

Ethic and her robot Hedge agree to help the resistance leader, Adila, sabotage the art-incinerating furnace-bots. 
In exchange, Adila promises to lead them to the first object of Ethic’s quest, an artifact called the Node of Power. 
Years ago, there was just one furnace-bot. 
It had a 0 inside its furnace and an unknown, randomly generated serial number. 
Over time, the original self-replicated to produce more identical furnace-bots. 
Each child inherited the original’s unknown serial number within its furnace, and had a random, unique serial number of its own inscribed on its shell. 
The second generation of furnace- bots also self-replicated in the same way, always passing their own serial numbers to their offspring’s furnaces. 
This continued on for many generations. 
Today, each furnace-bot receives its orders from its parent. 
So if Ethic can find the original 0 bot and somehow change its instructions, she could take over the entire army, all at once. 
Adila has the perfect solution: a data crystal that she’s been carrying for years, waiting for the right moment to activate it. 
It contains a program designed to gain control of a bot and give it new instructions. 
But if it’s uploaded to any furnace- bot other than the original, the 0 bot will override the instructions and destroy the data crystal in the process. 
The feeding is just a few minutes away, and there’s only one chance to get this right. 
Fortunately, Hedge’s ability to store data can help. 
In programming, a piece of information gets stored in something called a variable. 
Variables are basically containers that hold onto numbers, words, or other values. 
How does Ethic program Hedge to find the original 0 bot as quickly as possible? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Here’s a hint. 
Programs can be written to have as many variables as you need, but you can solve this problem with just one. 
Hedge can use it to store a serial number and replace it with a new one as often as he needs. 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
A key insight here is that Hedge doesn’t need to map out the entire set of relationships to find the original furnace-bot. 
If, for example, he gets lucky and picks the original one right away, he’ll be done. 
But if he starts with any other bot, he can still find a path that leads straight back to the 0-bot by following a simple set of instructions. 
To help craft them, let’s first simplify the problem. 
Let’s say there were only three furnace-bots; a parent and two children, but you don’t know which is which. 
You could have Hedge pick one at random and look inside its furnace. 
Now, you know the family tree looks like this. 
If the number inside the furnace is a 0, you’ve found the parent. 
If not, then no matter which child you chose, it must have the parent’s serial number in its furnace. 
So in this scenario, you’re guaranteed to find the parent in one or two moves. 
In actuality, there are many furnace-bots, and you don’t know how many generations there are nor what the family tree looks like. 
But you don’t need to, because Hedge can just keep repeating the same sequence of actions until he gets to the original. 
How? With a loop. 
Hedge can pick any bot at random, look inside its furnace, and store that serial number as a variable. 
Then he’ll begin the following loop that will repeat until the stored variable equals 0, the furnace number of the original bot: 1. Find the bot whose shell serial number matches the stored number. 
2. Look inside its furnace. 
3. Store that new number, overwriting the old one. 
Once the loop ends, we’ll know that Hedge has found the 0 bot, so he should upload the control program. 
So here’s what happens: Hedge only takes 5 repetitions to find the original: robot 733 has the 0 in its furnace. 
In a blink of a mechanical eye, the program spreads through the entire army, and Adila takes control. 
She has the furnace-bots give off theatrical bouts of flame to hide the fact that they’re now secretly safe-guarding all of that artistic output. 
Now that Ethic’s delivered the furnace-bots, Adila honors her end of the deal. 
She leads Ethic and Hedge to the location of the first artifact, the Node of Power. 
There, one thing is immediately clear: they’ll have to steal it. 

Do you ever wonder why we're surrounded with things that help us do everything faster and faster and faster? 
Communicate faster, but also work faster, bank faster, travel faster, find a date faster, cook faster, clean faster and do all of it all at the same time? 
How do you feel about cramming even more into every waking hour? 
Well, to my generation of Americans, speed feels like a birthright. 
Sometimes I think our minimum speed is Mach 3. 
Anything less, and we fear losing our competitive edge. 
But even my generation is starting to question whether we're the masters of speed or if speed is mastering us. 
I'm an anthropologist at the Rand Corporation, and while many anthropologists study ancient cultures, I focus on modern day cultures and how we're adapting to all of this change happening in the world. 
Recently, I teamed up with an engineer, Seifu Chonde, to study speed. 
We were interested both in how people are adapting to this age of acceleration and its security and policy implications. 
What could our world look like in 25 years if the current pace of change keeps accelerating? 
What would it mean for transportation, or learning, communication, manufacturing, weaponry or even natural selection? 
Will a faster future make us more secure and productive? 
Or will it make us more vulnerable? 
In our research, people accepted acceleration as inevitable, both the thrills and the lack of control. 
They fear that if they were to slow down, they might run the risk of becoming obsolete. 
They say they'd rather burn out than rust out. 
Yet at the same time, they worry that speed could erode their cultural traditions and their sense of home. 
But even people who are winning at the speed game admit to feeling a little uneasy. 
They see acceleration as widening the gap between the haves, the jet-setters who are buzzing around, and the have-nots, who are left in the digital dust. 
Yes, we have good reason to forecast that the future will be faster, but what I've come to realize is that speed is paradoxical, and like all good paradoxes, it teaches us about the human experience, as absurd and complex as it is. 
The first paradox is that we love speed, and we're thrilled by its intensity. 
But our prehistoric brains aren't really built for it, so we invent roller coasters and race cars and supersonic planes, but we get whiplash, carsick, jet-lagged. 
We didn't evolve to multitask. 
Rather, we evolved to do one thing with incredible focus, like hunt -- not necessarily with great speed but with endurance for great distance. 
But now there's a widening gap between our biology and our lifestyles, a mismatch between what our bodies are built for and what we're making them do. 
It's a phenomenon my mentors have called "Stone Agers in the fast lane." 
(Laughter) A second paradox of speed is that it can be measured objectively. Right? 
Miles per hour, gigabytes per second. 
But how speed feels, and whether we like it, is highly subjective. 
So we can document that the pace at which we are adopting new technologies is increasing. 
For example, it took 85 years from the introduction of the telephone to when the majority of Americans had phones at home. 
In contrast, it only took 13 years for most of us to have smartphones. 
And how people act and react to speed varies by culture and among different people within the same culture. 
Interactions that could be seen as pleasantly brisk and convenient in some cultures could be seen as horribly rude in others. 
I mean, you wouldn't go asking for a to-go cup at a Japanese tea ceremony so you could jet off to your next tourist stop. 
Would you? 
A third paradox is that speed begets speed. 
The faster I respond, the more responses I get, the faster I have to respond again. 
Having more communication and information at our fingertips at any given moment was supposed to make decision-making easier and more rational. 
But that doesn't really seem to be happening. 
Here's just one more paradox: If all of these faster technologies were supposed to free us from drudgery, why do we all feel so pressed for time? 
Why are we crashing our cars in record numbers, because we think we have to answer that text right away? 
Shouldn't life in the fast lane feel a little more fun and a little less anxious? 
German speakers even have a word for this: "Eilkrankheit." 
In English, that's "hurry sickness." 
When we have to make fast decisions, autopilot brain kicks in, and we rely on our learned behaviors, our reflexes, our cognitive biases, to help us perceive and respond quickly. 
Sometimes that saves our lives, right? 
Fight or flight. 
But sometimes, it leads us astray in the long run. 
Oftentimes, when our society has major failures, they're not technological failures. 
They're failures that happen when we made decisions too quickly on autopilot. 
We didn't do the creative or critical thinking required to connect the dots or weed out false information or make sense of complexity. 
That kind of thinking can't be done fast. 
That's slow thinking. 
Two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, started pointing this out back in 1974, and we're still struggling to do something with their insights. 
All of modern history can be thought of as one spurt of acceleration after another. 
It's as if we think if we just speed up enough, we can outrun our problems. 
But we never do. 
We know this in our own lives, and policymakers know it, too. 
So now we're turning to artificial intelligence to help us make faster and smarter decisions to process this ever-expanding universe of data. 
But machines crunching data are no substitute for critical and sustained thinking by humans, whose Stone Age brains need a little time to let their impulses subside, to slow the mind and let the thoughts flow. 
If you're starting to think that we should just hit the brakes, that won't always be the right solution. 
We all know that a train that's going too fast around a bend can derail, but Seifu, the engineer, taught me that a train that's going too slowly around a bend can also derail. 
So managing this spurt of acceleration starts with the understanding that we have more control over speed than we think we do, individually and as a society. 
Sometimes, we'll need to engineer ourselves to go faster. 
We'll want to solve gridlock, speed up disaster relief for hurricane victims or use 3-D printing to produce what we need on the spot, just when we need it. 
Sometimes, though, we'll want to make our surroundings feel slower to engineer the crash out of the speedy experience. 
And it's OK not to be stimulated all the time. 
It's good for adults and for kids. 
Maybe it's boring, but it gives us time to reflect. 
Slow time is not wasted time. 
And we need to reconsider what it means to save time. 
Culture and rituals around the world build in slowness, because slowness helps us reinforce our shared values and connect. 
And connection is a critical part of being human. 
We need to master speed, and that means thinking carefully about the trade-offs of any given technology. 
Will it help you reclaim time that you can use to express your humanity? 
Will it give you hurry sickness? Will it give other people hurry sickness? 
If you're lucky enough to decide the pace that you want to travel through life, it's a privilege. 
Use it. 
You might decide that you need both to speed up and to create slow time: time to reflect, to percolate at your own pace; time to listen, to empathize, to rest your mind, to linger at the dinner table. 
So as we zoom into the future, let's consider setting the technologies of speed, the purpose of speed and our expectations of speed to a more human pace. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Corn currently accounts for more than one tenth of our global crop production. 
The United States alone has enough cornfields to cover Germany. 
But while other crops we grow come in a range of varieties, over 99% of cultivated corn is the exact same type: Yellow Dent #2. 
This means that humans grow more Yellow Dent #2 than any other plant on the planet. 
So how did this single variety of this single plant become the biggest success story in agricultural history? 
Nearly 9,000 years ago, corn, also called maize, was first domesticated from teosinte, a grass native to Mesoamerica. 
Teosinte’s rock-hard seeds were barely edible, but its fibrous husk could be turned into a versatile material. 
Over the next 4,700 years, farmers bred the plant into a staple crop, with larger cobs and edible kernels. 
As maize spread throughout the Americas, it took on an important role, with multiple indigenous societies revering a “Corn Mother” as the goddess who created agriculture. 
When Europeans first arrived in America, they shunned the strange plant. 
Many even believed it was the source of physical and cultural differences between them and the Mesoamericans. 
However, their attempts to cultivate European crops in American soil quickly failed, and the settlers were forced to expand their diet. 
Finding the crop to their taste, maize soon crossed the Atlantic, where its ability to grow in diverse climates made it a popular grain in many European countries. 
But the newly established United States was still the corn capital of the world. 
In the early 1800’s, different regions across the country produced strains of varying size and taste. 
In the 1850’s, however, these unique varieties proved difficult for train operators to package, and for traders to sell. 
Trade boards in rail hubs like Chicago encouraged corn farmers to breed one standardized crop. 
This dream would finally be realized at 1893’s World’s Fair, where James Reid’s yellow dent corn won the Blue Ribbon. 
Over the next 50 years, yellow dent corn swept the nation. 
Following the technological developments of World War II, mechanized harvesters became widely available. 
This meant a batch of corn that previously took a full day to harvest by hand could now be collected in just 5 minutes. 
Another wartime technology, the chemical explosive ammonium nitrate, also found new life on the farm. 
With this new synthetic fertilizer, farmers could plant dense fields of corn year after year, without the need to rotate their crops and restore nitrogen to the soil. 
While these advances made corn an attractive crop to American farmers, US agricultural policy limited the amount farmers could grow to ensure high sale prices. 
But in 1972, President Richard Nixon removed these limitations while negotiating massive grain sales to the Soviet Union. 
With this new trade deal and WWII technology, corn production exploded into a global phenomenon. 
These mountains of maize inspired numerous corn concoctions. 
Cornstarch could be used as a thickening agent for everything from gasoline to glue or processed into a low-cost sweetener known as High-Fructose Corn Syrup. 
Maize quickly became one of the cheapest animal feeds worldwide. 
This allowed for inexpensive meat production, which in turn increased the demand for meat and corn feed. 
Today, humans eat only 40% of all cultivated corn, while the remaining 60% supports consumer good industries worldwide. 
Yet the spread of this wonder-crop has come at a price. 
Global water sources are polluted by excess ammonium nitrate from cornfields. 
Corn accounts for a large portion of agriculture-related carbon emissions, partly due to the increased meat production it enables. 
The use of high fructose corn syrup may be a contributor to diabetes and obesity. 
And the rise of monoculture farming has left our food supply dangerously vulnerable to pests and pathogens— a single virus could infect the world’s supply of this ubiquitous crop. 
Corn has gone from a bushy grass to an essential element of the world’s industries. 
But only time will tell if it has led us into a maze of unsustainability. 

In 1970, marijuana was classified as a schedule 1 drug in the United States: the strictest designation possible, meaning it was completely illegal and had no recognized medical uses. 
For decades, this view persisted and set back research on the drug's mechanisms and effects. 
Today, marijuana’s therapeutic benefits are widely acknowledged, and some nations have legalized medical use or are moving in that direction. 
But a growing recognition for marijuana’s medical value doesn’t answer the question: is recreational marijuana use bad for your brain? 
Marijuana acts on the body’s cannabinoid system, which has receptors all over the brain and body. 
Molecules native to the body, called endocannabinoids, also act on these receptors. 
We don’t totally understand the cannabinoid system, but it has one feature that provides a big clue to its function. 
Most neurotransmitters travel from one neuron to the next through a synapse to propagate a message. 
But endocannabinoids travel in the opposite direction. 
When a message passes from the one neuron to the next, the receiving neuron releases endocannabinoids. 
Those endocannabinoids travel backward to influence the sending neuron— essentially giving it feedback from the receiving neuron. 
This leads scientists to believe that the endocannabinoid system serves primarily to modulate other kinds of signals— amplifying some and diminishing others. 
Feedback from endocannabinoids slows down rates of neural signaling. 
That doesn’t necessarily mean it slows down behavior or perception, though. 
For example, slowing down a signal that inhibits smell could actually make smells more intense. 
Marijuana contains two main active compounds, tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, and cannabidiol, or CBD. 
THC is thought to be primarily responsible for marijuana’s psychoactive effects on behavior, cognition, and perception, while CBD is responsible for the non-psychoactive effects. 
Like endocannabinoids, THC slows down signaling by binding to cannabinoid receptors. 
But it binds to receptors all over this sprawling, diffuse system at once, whereas endocannabinoids are released in a specific place in response to a specific stimulus. 
This widespread activity coupled with the fact that the cannabinoid system indirectly affects many other systems, means that each person’s particular brain chemistry, genetics, and previous life experience largely determine how they experience the drug. 
That’s true much more so with marijuana than with other drugs that produce their effects through one or a few specific pathways. 
So the harmful effects, if any, vary considerably from person to person. 
And while we don’t know how exactly how marijuana produces specific harmful effects, there are clear risk factors that can increase peoples’ likelihood of experiencing them. 
The clearest risk factor is age. 
In people younger than 25, cannabinoid receptors are more concentrated in the white matter than in people over 25. 
The white matter is involved in communication, learning, memory, and emotions. 
Frequent marijuana use can disrupt the development of white matter tracts, and also affect the brain’s ability to grow new connections. 
This may damage long-term learning ability and problem solving. 
For now, it’s unclear how severe this damage can be or whether it’s reversible. 
And even among young people, the risk is higher the younger someone is— much higher for a 15 year old than a 22 year old, for instance. 
Marijuana can also cause hallucinations or paranoid delusions. 
Known as marijuana-induced psychosis, these symptoms usually subside when a person stops using marijuana. 
But in rare cases, psychosis doesn’t subside, instead unmasking a persistent psychotic disorder. 
A family history of psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, is the clearest, though not the only, risk factor for this effect. 
Marijuana-induced psychosis is also more common among young adults, though it’s worth noting that psychotic disorders usually surface in this age range anyway. 
What’s unclear in these cases is whether the psychotic disorder would have appeared without marijuana use— whether marijuana use triggers it early, is a catalyst for a tipping point that wouldn’t have been crossed otherwise, or whether the reaction to marijuana is merely an indication of an underlying disorder. 
In all likelihood, marijuana’s role varies from person to person. 
At any age, as with many other drugs, the brain and body become less sensitive to marijuana after repeated uses, meaning it takes more to achieve the same effects. 
Fortunately, unlike many other drugs, there’s no risk of fatal overdose from marijuana, and even heavy use doesn’t lead to debilitating or life-threatening withdrawal symptoms if use stops. 
There are more subtle forms of marijuana withdrawal, though, including sleep disturbances, irritability, and depressed mood, which pass within a few weeks of stopping use. 
So is marijuana bad for your brain? 
It depends who you are. 
But while some risk factors are easy to identify, others aren’t well understood— which means there’s still some possibility of experiencing negative effects, even if you don’t have any of the known risk factors. 

So, on April 23 of 2013, the Associated Press put out the following tweet on Twitter. 
It said, "Breaking news: Two explosions at the White House and Barack Obama has been injured." 
This tweet was retweeted 4,000 times in less than five minutes, and it went viral thereafter. 
Now, this tweet wasn't real news put out by the Associated Press. 
In fact it was false news, or fake news, that was propagated by Syrian hackers that had infiltrated the Associated Press Twitter handle. 
Their purpose was to disrupt society, but they disrupted much more. 
Because automated trading algorithms immediately seized on the sentiment on this tweet, and began trading based on the potential that the president of the United States had been injured or killed in this explosion. 
And as they started tweeting, they immediately sent the stock market crashing, wiping out 140 billion dollars in equity value in a single day. 
Robert Mueller, special counsel prosecutor in the United States, issued indictments against three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals on a conspiracy to defraud the United States by meddling in the 2016 presidential election. 
And what this indictment tells as a story is the story of the Internet Research Agency, the shadowy arm of the Kremlin on social media. 
During the presidential election alone, the Internet Agency's efforts reached 126 million people on Facebook in the United States, issued three million individual tweets and 43 hours' worth of YouTube content. 
All of which was fake -- misinformation designed to sow discord in the US presidential election. 
A recent study by Oxford University showed that in the recent Swedish elections, one third of all of the information spreading on social media about the election was fake or misinformation. 
In addition, these types of social-media misinformation campaigns can spread what has been called "genocidal propaganda," for instance against the Rohingya in Burma, triggering mob killings in India. 
We studied fake news and began studying it before it was a popular term. 
And we recently published the largest-ever longitudinal study of the spread of fake news online on the cover of "Science" in March of this year. 
We studied all of the verified true and false news stories that ever spread on Twitter, from its inception in 2006 to 2017. 
And when we studied this information, we studied verified news stories that were verified by six independent fact-checking organizations. 
So we knew which stories were true and which stories were false. 
We can measure their diffusion, the speed of their diffusion, the depth and breadth of their diffusion, how many people become entangled in this information cascade and so on. 
And what we did in this paper was we compared the spread of true news to the spread of false news. 
And here's what we found. 
We found that false news diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied, sometimes by an order of magnitude. 
And in fact, false political news was the most viral. 
It diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than any other type of false news. 
When we saw this, we were at once worried but also curious. 
Why? 
Why does false news travel so much further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth? 
The first hypothesis that we came up with was, "Well, maybe people who spread false news have more followers or follow more people, or tweet more often, or maybe they're more often 'verified' users of Twitter, with more credibility, or maybe they've been on Twitter longer." 
So we checked each one of these in turn. 
And what we found was exactly the opposite. 
False-news spreaders had fewer followers, followed fewer people, were less active, less often "verified" and had been on Twitter for a shorter period of time. 
And yet, false news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, controlling for all of these and many other factors. 
So we had to come up with other explanations. 
And we devised what we called a "novelty hypothesis." 
So if you read the literature, it is well known that human attention is drawn to novelty, things that are new in the environment. 
And if you read the sociology literature, you know that we like to share novel information. 
It makes us seem like we have access to inside information, and we gain in status by spreading this kind of information. 
So what we did was we measured the novelty of an incoming true or false tweet, compared to the corpus of what that individual had seen in the 60 days prior on Twitter. 
But that wasn't enough, because we thought to ourselves, "Well, maybe false news is more novel in an information-theoretic sense, but maybe people don't perceive it as more novel." 
So to understand people's perceptions of false news, we looked at the information and the sentiment contained in the replies to true and false tweets. 
And what we found was that across a bunch of different measures of sentiment -- surprise, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, joy and trust -- false news exhibited significantly more surprise and disgust in the replies to false tweets. 
And true news exhibited significantly more anticipation, joy and trust in reply to true tweets. 
The surprise corroborates our novelty hypothesis. 
This is new and surprising, and so we're more likely to share it. 
At the same time, there was congressional testimony in front of both houses of Congress in the United States, looking at the role of bots in the spread of misinformation. 
So we looked at this too -- we used multiple sophisticated bot-detection algorithms to find the bots in our data and to pull them out. 
So we pulled them out, we put them back in and we compared what happens to our measurement. 
And what we found was that, yes indeed, bots were accelerating the spread of false news online, but they were accelerating the spread of true news at approximately the same rate. 
Which means bots are not responsible for the differential diffusion of truth and falsity online. 
We can't abdicate that responsibility, because we, humans, are responsible for that spread. 
Now, everything that I have told you so far, unfortunately for all of us, is the good news. 
The reason is because it's about to get a whole lot worse. 
And two specific technologies are going to make it worse. 
We are going to see the rise of a tremendous wave of synthetic media. 
Fake video, fake audio that is very convincing to the human eye. 
And this will powered by two technologies. 
The first of these is known as "generative adversarial networks." 
This is a machine-learning model with two networks: a discriminator, whose job it is to determine whether something is true or false, and a generator, whose job it is to generate synthetic media. 
So the synthetic generator generates synthetic video or audio, and the discriminator tries to tell, "Is this real or is this fake?" 
And in fact, it is the job of the generator to maximize the likelihood that it will fool the discriminator into thinking the synthetic video and audio that it is creating is actually true. 
Imagine a machine in a hyperloop, trying to get better and better at fooling us. 
This, combined with the second technology, which is essentially the democratization of artificial intelligence to the people, the ability for anyone, without any background in artificial intelligence or machine learning, to deploy these kinds of algorithms to generate synthetic media makes it ultimately so much easier to create videos. 
The White House issued a false, doctored video of a journalist interacting with an intern who was trying to take his microphone. 
They removed frames from this video in order to make his actions seem more punchy. 
And when videographers and stuntmen and women were interviewed about this type of technique, they said, "Yes, we use this in the movies all the time to make our punches and kicks look more choppy and more aggressive." 
They then put out this video and partly used it as justification to revoke Jim Acosta, the reporter's, press pass from the White House. 
And CNN had to sue to have that press pass reinstated. 
There are about five different paths that I can think of that we can follow to try and address some of these very difficult problems today. 
Each one of them has promise, but each one of them has its own challenges. 
The first one is labeling. 
Think about it this way: when you go to the grocery store to buy food to consume, it's extensively labeled. 
You know how many calories it has, how much fat it contains -- and yet when we consume information, we have no labels whatsoever. 
What is contained in this information? 
Is the source credible? 
Where is this information gathered from? 
We have none of that information when we are consuming information. 
That is a potential avenue, but it comes with its challenges. 
For instance, who gets to decide, in society, what's true and what's false? 
Is it the governments? 
Is it Facebook? 
Is it an independent consortium of fact-checkers? 
And who's checking the fact-checkers? 
Another potential avenue is incentives. 
We know that during the US presidential election there was a wave of misinformation that came from Macedonia that didn't have any political motive but instead had an economic motive. 
And this economic motive existed, because false news travels so much farther, faster and more deeply than the truth, and you can earn advertising dollars as you garner eyeballs and attention with this type of information. 
But if we can depress the spread of this information, perhaps it would reduce the economic incentive to produce it at all in the first place. 
Third, we can think about regulation, and certainly, we should think about this option. 
In the United States, currently, we are exploring what might happen if Facebook and others are regulated. 
While we should consider things like regulating political speech, labeling the fact that it's political speech, making sure foreign actors can't fund political speech, it also has its own dangers. 
For instance, Malaysia just instituted a six-year prison sentence for anyone found spreading misinformation. 
And in authoritarian regimes, these kinds of policies can be used to suppress minority opinions and to continue to extend repression. 
The fourth possible option is transparency. 
We want to know how do Facebook's algorithms work. 
How does the data combine with the algorithms to produce the outcomes that we see? 
We want them to open the kimono and show us exactly the inner workings of how Facebook is working. 
And if we want to know social media's effect on society, we need scientists, researchers and others to have access to this kind of information. 
But at the same time, we are asking Facebook to lock everything down, to keep all of the data secure. 
So, Facebook and the other social media platforms are facing what I call a transparency paradox. 
We are asking them, at the same time, to be open and transparent and, simultaneously secure. 
This is a very difficult needle to thread, but they will need to thread this needle if we are to achieve the promise of social technologies while avoiding their peril. 
The final thing that we could think about is algorithms and machine learning. 
Technology devised to root out and understand fake news, how it spreads, and to try and dampen its flow. 
Humans have to be in the loop of this technology, because we can never escape that underlying any technological solution or approach is a fundamental ethical and philosophical question about how do we define truth and falsity, to whom do we give the power to define truth and falsity and which opinions are legitimate, which type of speech should be allowed and so on. 
Technology is not a solution for that. 
Ethics and philosophy is a solution for that. 
Nearly every theory of human decision making, human cooperation and human coordination has some sense of the truth at its core. 
But with the rise of fake news, the rise of fake video, the rise of fake audio, we are teetering on the brink of the end of reality, where we cannot tell what is real from what is fake. 
And that's potentially incredibly dangerous. 
We have to be vigilant in defending the truth against misinformation. 
With our technologies, with our policies and, perhaps most importantly, with our own individual responsibilities, decisions, behaviors and actions. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

In 1990, the Italian government enlisted top engineers to stabilize Pisa’s famous Leaning Tower. 
There’d been many attempts to right the tower during its 800 year history, but this team’s computer models revealed the urgency of their situation. 
They projected the tower would topple if it reached an angle of 5.44 degrees— and it was currently leaning at 5.5. 
No one knew how the tower was still standing, but the crisis was clear: they had to solve a problem that stumped centuries of engineers, and they needed to do it fast. 
To understand their situation, it’s helpful to understand why the tower tilted in the first place. 
In the 12th century, the wealthy maritime republic of Pisa set about turning its cathedral square into a magnificent landmark. 
Workers embellished and enlarged the existing church, and added a massive domed baptistry to the plaza. 
In 1173, construction began on a free-standing campanile, or bell tower. 
The engineers and architects of the time were masters of their craft. 
But for all their engineering knowledge, they knew far less about the ground they stood on. 
Pisa’s name comes from a Greek word for “marshy land," which perfectly describes the clay, mud, and wet sand below the city’s surface. 
Ancient Romans counteracted similar conditions with massive stone pillars called piles which rest on Earth’s stable bedrock. 
However, the tower’s architects believed a three-meter foundation would suffice for their relatively short structure. 
Unfortunately for them, less than five years later, the tower’s southern side was already underground. 
Such a shifting foundation would normally have been a fatal flaw. 
If workers added more weight, the pressure from upper stories would sink the structure and fatally increase the lean. 
But construction halted at the fourth story for nearly a century as Pisa descended into prolonged warfare. 
This long pause allowed the soil to settle, and when construction began again in 1272, the foundation was on slightly more stable footing. 
Under the direction of architect Giovanni di Simone, workers compensated for the tower’s minor tilt by making the next few floors taller on the southern side. 
But the weight of the extra masonry made that side sink even deeper. 
By the time they completed the seventh floor and bell chamber, the angle of the tilt was 1.6 degrees. 
For centuries, engineers tried numerous strategies to address the lean. 
In 1838, they dug a walkway around the base to examine the sunken foundation. 
But removing the supporting sand only worsened the tilt. 
In 1935, the Italian Corps of Engineers injected mortar to strengthen the base. 
However, the mortar wasn’t evenly distributed throughout the foundation, resulting in another sudden drop. 
All these failed attempts, along with the ever-sinking foundation, moved the tower closer to its tipping point. 
And without definitive knowledge of the soil composition, engineers couldn’t pinpoint the tower’s fatal angle or devise a way to stop its fall. 
In the years following WWII, researchers developed tests to identify those missing variables. 
And in the 1970’s, engineers calculated the curved tower’s center of gravity. 
With this data and new computing technology, engineers could model how stiff the soil was, the tower’s trajectory, and the exact amount of excavation needed for the tower to remain standing. 
In 1992, the team drilled diagonal tunnels to remove 38 cubic meters of soil from under the tower’s north end. 
Then, they temporarily counterbalanced the structure with 600 tons of lead ingots before anchoring the base with steel cables. 
More than six centuries after its construction, the tower was finally straightened… to a tilt of about four degrees. 
No one wanted the tower to fall, but they also didn’t want to lose the landmark’s most famous feature. 
Today the tower stands at 55– or 56– meters tall, and it should remain stable for at least 300 years as a monument to the beauty of imperfection. 

During World War I, one of the horrors of trench warfare was a poisonous yellow cloud called mustard gas. 
For those unlucky enough to be exposed, it made the air impossible to breathe, burned their eyes, and caused huge blisters on exposed skin. 
Scientists tried desperately to develop an antidote to this vicious weapon of war. 
In the process they discovered the gas was irrevocably damaging the bone marrow of affected soldiers— halting its ability to make blood cells. 
Despite these awful effects, it gave scientists an idea. 
Cancer cells share a characteristic with bone marrow: both replicate rapidly. 
So could one of the atrocities of war become a champion in the fight against cancer? 
Researchers in the 1930s investigated this idea by injecting compounds derived from mustard gas into the veins of cancer patients. 
It took time and trial and error to find treatments that did more good than harm, but by the end of World War II, they discovered what became known as the first chemotherapy drugs. 
Today, there are more than 100. 
Chemotherapy drugs are delivered through pills and injections and use "cytotoxic agents," which means compounds that are toxic to living cells. 
Essentially, these medicines cause some level of harm to all cells in the body— even healthy ones. 
But they reserve their most powerful effects for rapidly-dividing cells, which is precisely the hallmark of cancer. 
Take, for example, those first chemotherapy drugs, which are still used today and are called alkylating agents. 
They’re injected into the bloodstream, which delivers them to cells all over the body. 
Once inside, when the cell exposes its DNA in order to copy it, they damage the building blocks of DNA’s double helix structure, which can lead to cell death unless the damage is repaired. 
Because cancer cells multiply rapidly, they take in a high concentration of alkylating agents, and their DNA is frequently exposed and rarely repaired. 
So they die off more often than most other cells, which have time to fix damaged DNA and don’t accumulate the same concentrations of alkylating agents. 
Another form of chemotherapy involves compounds called microtubule stabilizers. 
Cells have small tubes that assemble to help with cell division and DNA replication, then break back down. 
When microtubule stabilizers get inside a cell, they keep those tiny tubes from disassembling. 
That prevents the cell from completing its replication, leading to its death. 
These are just two examples of the six classes of chemotherapy drugs we use to treat cancer today. 
But despite its huge benefits, chemotherapy has one big disadvantage: it affects other healthy cells in the body that naturally have to renew rapidly. 
Hair follicles, the cells of the mouth, the gastrointestinal lining, the reproductive system, and bone marrow are hit nearly as hard as cancer. 
Similar to cancer cells, the rapid production of these normal cells means that they’re reaching for resources more frequently— and are therefore more exposed to the effects of chemo drugs. 
That leads to several common side effects of chemotherapy, including hair loss, fatigue, infertility, nausea, and vomiting. 
Doctors commonly prescribe options to help manage these side-effects, such as strong anti-nausea medications. 
For hair loss, devices called cold caps can help lower the temperature around the head and constrict blood vessels, limiting the amount of chemotherapy drugs that reach hair follicles. 
And once a course of chemo treatment is over, the healthy tissues that’ve been badly affected by the drug will recover and begin to renew as usual. 
In 2018 alone, over 17 million people world-wide received a cancer diagnosis. 
But chemotherapy and other treatments have changed the outlook for so many. 
Just take the fact that up to 95% of individuals with testicular cancer survive it, thanks to advances in treatment. 
Even in people with acute myeloid leukemia— an aggressive blood cancer— chemotherapy puts an estimated 60% of patients under 60 into remission following their first phase of treatment. 
Researchers are still developing more precise interventions that only target the intended cancer cells. 
That’ll help improve survival rates while leaving healthy tissues with reduced harm, making one of the best tools we have in the fight against cancer even better. 

For the past few years, we've been calling men out. 
It had to be done. 
(Applause) But lately, I've been thinking we need to do something even harder. 
We need, as my good friend Tony Porter says, to find a way to call men in. 
My father began to sexually abuse me when I was five years old. 
He would come into my room in the middle of the night. 
He appeared to be in a trance. 
The abuse continued until I was 10. 
When I tried to resist him, when I was finally able to say no, he began to beat me. 
He called me stupid. 
He said I was a liar. 
The sexual abuse ended when I was 10, but actually, it never ended. 
It changed who I was. 
I was filled with anxiety and guilt and shame all the time, and I didn't know why. 
I hated my body, I hated myself, I got sick a lot, I couldn't think, I couldn't remember things. 
I was drawn to dangerous men and women who I allowed -- actually, I invited -- to treat me badly, because that is what my father taught me love was. 
I waited my whole life for my father to apologize to me. 
He didn't. 
He wouldn't. 
And then, with the recent scandals of famous men, as one after another was exposed, I realized something: I have never heard a man who has committed rape or physical violence ever publicly apologize to his victim. 
I began to wonder, what would an authentic, deep apology be like? 
So, something strange began to happen. 
I began to write, and my father's voice began to come through me. 
He began to tell me what he had done and why. 
He began to apologize. 
My father is dead almost 31 years, and yet, in this apology, the one I had to write for him, I discovered the power of an apology and how it actually might be the way to move forward in the crisis we now face with men and all the women they abuse. 
Apology is a sacred commitment. 
It requires complete honesty. 
It demands deep self-interrogation and time. 
It cannot be rushed. 
I discovered an apology has four steps, and, if you would, I'd like to take you through them. 
The first is you have to say what, in detail, you did. 
Your accounting cannot be vague. 
"I'm sorry if I hurt you" or "I'm sorry if I sexually abused you" doesn't cut it. 
You have to say what actually happened. 
"I came into the room in the middle of the night, and I pulled your underpants down." 
"I belittled you because I was jealous of you and I wanted you to feel less." 
The liberation is in the details. 
An apology is a remembering. 
It connects the past with the present. 
It says that what occurred actually did occur. 
The second step is you have to ask yourself why. 
Survivors are haunted by the why. 
Why? Why would my father want to sexually abuse his eldest daughter? 
Why would he take my head and smash it against a wall? 
In my father's case, he was a child born long after the other children. 
He was an accident that became "the miracle." 
He was adored and treated as the golden boy. 
But adoration, it turns out, is not love. 
Adoration is a projection of someone's need for you to be perfect onto you. 
My father had to live up to this impossible ideal, and so he was never allowed to be himself. 
He was never allowed to express tenderness or vulnerability, curiosity, doubt. 
He was never allowed to cry. 
And so he was forced to push all those feelings underground, and they eventually metastasized. 
Those suppressed feelings later became Shadowman, and he was out of control, and he eventually unleashed his torrent on me. 
The third step is you have to open your heart and feel what your victim felt as you were abusing her. 
You have to let your heart break. 
You have to feel the horror and betrayal and the long-term impacts of your abuse on your victim. 
You have to sit with the suffering you have caused. 
And, of course, the fourth step is taking responsibility for what you have done and making amends. 
So, why would anyone want to go through such a grueling and humbling process? 
Why would you want to rip yourself open? 
Because it is the only thing that will set yourself free. 
It is the only thing that will set your victim free. 
You didn't just destroy your victim. 
You destroyed yourself. 
There is no one who enacts violence on another person who doesn't suffer from the effects themselves. 
It creates an incredibly dark and contaminating spirit, and it spreads throughout your entire life. 
The apology I wrote -- I learned something about a different lens we have to look through to understand the problem of men's violence that I and one billion other women have survived. 
We often turn to punishment first. 
It's our first instinct, but actually, although punishment sometimes is effective, on its own, it is not enough. 
My father punished me. 
I was shut down, and I was broken. 
I think punishment hardens us, but it doesn't teach us. 
Humiliation is not revelation. 
We actually need to create a process that may involve punishment, whereby we open a doorway where men can actually become something and someone else. 
For so many years, I hated my father. 
I wanted him dead. I wanted him in prison. 
But actually, that rage kept me connected to my father's story. 
What I really wanted wasn't just for my father to be stopped. 
I wanted him to change. 
I wanted him to apologize. 
That's what we want. 
We don't want men to be destroyed, we don't want them to only be punished. 
We want them to see us, the victims that they have harmed, and we want them to repent and change. 
And I actually believe this is possible. 
And I really believe it's our way forward. 
But we need men to join us. 
We need men now to be brave and be part of this transformation. 
I have spent most of my life calling men out, and I am here now, right now, to call you in. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you, thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ethic, Hedge, and Adila, the leader of the revolution, plot out how they can steal an artifact called the Node of Power. 
It’s being used to run a heavily fortified train that runs all around the country, providing supplies to settlements and facilities. 
This armored behemoth undergoes a complex and unpredictable unloading procedure— a procedure which is displayed, in detail, on a screen within the engine car. 
Right means the train will go one car length forward, and left means the train will go the same distance backwards. 
While unloading, the train frequently moves back and forth, so a typical sequence might look like this. 
Also within the engine car is a button that can only be pressed once. 
When pressed, it lets down the force field over the artifact for 10 seconds. 
The engine car is tiny and designed for a robot. 
Of your team, only Hedge can fit. 
The members of the resistance have positioned a crane over the train tracks that can pluck the artifact once it’s exposed. 
They’ll know when to lower the crane by sight. 
But the only way Hedge can determine the train’s position and know when to lower the force field is by analyzing the unloading procedure, because he’ll be inside the windowless engine car. 
Hedge can’t program himself though, so it’s up to Ethic to tell him what to do. 
The artifact is in the car 10 positions behind the one that’s directly under the crane at the start. 
What instructions can Ethic give Hedge so that he hits the button at just the right moment? 
Here’s a hint to get you started. 
The key to this problem, as with many programming challenges, is to reframe the information in a way that a computer can work with. 
A computer doesn’t know what a train is, nor does it need to. 
It can, however, work with variables. 
Try making a variable that tracks the train’s position. 
How will it change as the train moves? 
Let’s start by breaking this problem into two objectives. 
The first is to know where the train will be as it carries out its instructions. 
The second is to hit the button when the train is in just the right position. 
For the first objective it’ll help to think of the train as a big number line. 
Let’s make 0 the car with the node, 1 the car in front of it, and so on. 
That means car 10 is under the crane at the start. 
When the train moves one car right, car 9 is under the crane. 
So a right arrow can be thought of as “subtract 1.” And when the train moves left from there, 10 is back under the crane, making a left arrow the same as “add 1." 
Let’s set our train position variable to 10, since that’s where we start. 
We can now use a loop to read the instructions one at a time, adding or subtracting as we go, to track which car is under the crane. 
The nice thing about setting up the variable this way is that it tells us how far the node is from the crane. 
So as soon as the variable hits 0, Hedge should hit the button. 
And here’s what happens. 
Ethic gets into position on the crane while Hedge rushes off and slips into the engine car unnoticed, just before the train lurches to life. 
It rolls 3 cars back. 1 forward, another 4 back. 
Then so far forward Ethic loses track before it reverses once more. 
When the artifact finally rolls into position, Adila lowers the crane, hoping Ethic and Hedge got it right. 
At the last possible moment, the force field sputters and falls. 
Ethic swoops in, and lifts the Node of Power to freedom. 
When Ethic gives the node to Hedge for safe keeping, something incredible happens. 
The artifact shimmers to life with a vision of the past: When the crystal was unearthed, no one could make the console inside work. 
The government put out a call for people to try their luck with it, one at a time. 
Ethic loved to figure out what made things tick, so she signed up. 
Within moments at the console, something clicked into place, and she created her first robot. 
The government hired Ethic as chief robotics engineer on the spot. 
Within a year her creations ran almost every aspect of society, and the nation and its people thrived, no longer needing to toil in the fields and factories. 
The vision ends, and Hedge detects the second artifact in the 198forest, to the southeast. 
Luckily, the train is going there next, and has just enough reserve fuel for the trip. 
Ethic and Hedge smuggle themselves aboard and find a hiding spot for the long journey ahead. 

In 1884, a patient’s luck seemed to go from bad to worse. 
This patient had a rapidly growing cancer in his neck, and then came down with an unrelated bacterial skin infection. 
But soon, something unexpected happened: as he recovered from the infection, the cancer also began to recede. 
When a physician named William Coley tracked the patient down 7 years later, no visible signs of the cancer remained. 
Coley believed something remarkable was happening: that the bacterial infection had stimulated the patient’s immune system to fight off the cancer. 
Coley’s fortunate discovery led him to pioneer the intentional injection of bacteria to successfully treat cancer. 
Over a century later, synthetic biologists have found an even better way to use these once unlikely allies— by programming them to safely deliver drugs directly to tumors. 
Cancer occurs when normal functions of cells are altered, causing them to rapidly multiply and form growths called tumors. 
Treatments like radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy attempt to kill malignant cells, but can affect the entire body and disrupt healthy tissues in the process. 
However, some bacteria like E. coli have the unique advantage of being able to selectively grow inside tumors. 
In fact, the core of a tumor forms an ideal environment where they can safely multiply, hidden from immune cells. 
Instead of causing infection, bacteria can be reprogrammed to carry cancer-fighting drugs, acting as Trojan Horses that target the tumor from within. 
This idea of programming bacteria to sense and respond in novel ways is a major focus of a field called Synthetic Biology. 
But how can bacteria be programmed? 
The key lies in manipulating their DNA. 
By inserting particular genetic sequences into bacteria, they can be instructed to synthesize different molecules, including those that disrupt cancer growth. 
They can also be made to behave in very specific ways with the help of biological circuits. 
These program different behaviors depending on the presence, absence, or combination of certain factors. 
For example, tumors have low oxygen and pH levels and over-produce specific molecules. 
Synthetic biologists can program bacteria to sense those conditions, and by doing so, respond to tumors while avoiding healthy tissue. 
One type of biological circuit, known as a synchronized lysis circuit, or SLC, allows bacteria to not only deliver medicine, but to do so on a set schedule. 
First, to avoid harming healthy tissue, production of anti-cancer drugs begins as bacteria grow, which only happens within the tumor itself. 
Next, after they’ve produced the drugs, a kill-switch causes the bacteria to burst when they reach a critical population threshold. 
This both releases the medicine and decreases the bacteria’s population. 
However, a certain percentage of the bacteria remain alive to replenish the colony. 
Eventually their numbers grow large enough to trigger the kill switch again, and the cycle continues. 
This circuit can be fine-tuned to deliver drugs on whatever periodic schedule is best to fight the cancer. 
This approach has proven promising in scientific trials using mice. 
Not only were scientists able to successfully eliminate lymphoma tumors injected with bacteria, but the injection also stimulated the immune system, priming immune cells to identify and attack untreated lymphomas elsewhere in the mouse. 
Unlike many other therapies, bacteria don’t target a specific type of cancer, but rather the general characteristics shared by all solid tumors. 
Nor are programmable bacteria limited to simply fighting cancer. 
Instead, they can serve as sophisticated sensors that monitor sites of future disease. 
Safe probiotic bacteria could perhaps lie dormant within our guts, where they’d detect, prevent, and treat disorders before they have the chance to cause symptoms. 
Advances in technology have created excitement around a future of personalized medicine driven by mechanical nanobots. 
But thanks to billions of years of evolution we may already have a starting point in the unexpectedly biological form of bacteria. 
Add synthetic biology to the mix, and who knows what might soon be possible. 

William Golding was losing his faith in humanity. 
Serving aboard a British destroyer in World War II, the philosophy teacher turned Royal Navy lieutenant was constantly confronted by the atrocities of his fellow man. 
And when he returned to England to find Cold War superpowers threatening one another with nuclear annihilation, he was forced to interrogate the very roots of human nature. 
These musings on the inevitability of violence would inspire his first and most famous novel: "Lord of the Flies." 
After being rejected by 21 publishers, the novel was finally published in 1954. 
It takes its title from Beelzebub, a demon associated with pride and war— two themes very much at the heart of Golding’s book. 
The novel was a bleak satire of a classic island adventure story, a popular genre where young boys get shipwrecked in exotic locations. 
The protagonists in these stories are able to master nature while evading the dangers posed by their new environments. 
The genre also endorsed the problematic colonialist narrative found in many British works at the time, in which the boys teach the island’s native inhabitants their allegedly superior British values. 
Golding’s satire even goes so far as to explicitly use the setting and character names from R.M. Ballantyne’s "Coral Island"— one of the most beloved island adventure novels. 
But while Ballantyne’s book promised readers "pleasure... profit... and unbounded amusement,” Golding’s had darker things in store. 
"Lord of the Flies" opens with the boys already on the island, but snippets of conversation hint at their terrifying journey— their plane had been shot down in the midst of an unspecified nuclear war. 
The boys, ranging in age from 6 to 13, are strangers to each other. 
All except for a choir, clad in black uniforms and led by a boy named Jack. 
Just as in Ballantyne’s "Coral Island," the boy’s new home appears to be a paradise— with fresh water, shelter, and abundant food sources. 
But even from the novel’s opening pages, a macabre darkness hangs over this seemingly tranquil situation. 
The boys’ shadows are compared to “black, bat-like creatures” while the choir itself first appears as “something dark... fumbling along” the beach. 
Within hours of their arrival, the boys are already trading terrifying rumors of a vicious “beastie” lurking in the woods. 
From these ominous beginnings, Golding’s narrative reveals how quickly cooperation unravels without the presence of an adult authority. 
Initially, the survivors try to establish some sense of order. 
A boy named Ralph blows into a conch shell to assemble the group, and delegate tasks. 
But as Jack vies for leadership with Ralph, the group splinters and the boys submit to their darker urges. 
The mob of children soon forgets their plans for rescue, silences the few voices of reason, and blindly follows Jack to the edge of the island, and the edge of sanity. 
The novel’s universal themes of morality, civility, and society have made it a literary classic, satirizing both conventions of its time and long held beliefs about humanity. 
While island adventure stories often support colonialism, "Lord of the Flies" turns this trope on its head. 
Rather than cruelly casting native populations as stereotypical savages, Golding transforms his angelic British schoolboys into savage caricatures. 
And as the boys fight their own battle on the island, the far more destructive war that brought them there continues off the page. 
Even if the boys were to be rescued from themselves, what kind of world would they be returning to? 
With so few references to anchor the characters in a specific place or period, the novel feels truly timeless— an examination of human nature at its most bare. 
And though not all readers may agree with Golding’s grim view, "Lord of the Flies" is unsettling enough to challenge even the most determined optimist. 

In her Auntie An-mei’s home, Jing-Mei reluctantly takes her seat at the eastern corner of the mahjong table. 
At the north, south, and west corners are her aunties, long-time members of the Joy Luck Club. 
This group of immigrant families comes together weekly to trade gossip, feast on wonton and sweet chaswei, and play mahjong. 
However, the club’s founder, Jing-Mei’s mother Suyuan, has recently passed away. 
At first, Jing-Mei struggles to fill her place at the table. 
But when her aunties reveal a deeply buried secret about Suyuan’s life, Jing-Mei realizes she still has a lot to learn about her mother, and herself. 
In Amy Tan’s 1989 debut novel, "The Joy Luck Club," this gathering at the mahjong table is the point of departure for a series of interconnected vignettes. 
The book itself is loosely structured to imitate the format of the Chinese game. 
Just as mahjong is played over four rounds with at least four hands each, the book is divided into four parts, each with four chapters. 
Alternately set in China or San Francisco, each chapter narrates a single story from one of the four matriarchs of the Joy Luck Club or their American-born daughters. 
These stories take the reader through war zones and villages of rural China, and into modern marriages and tense gatherings around the dinner table. 
They touch upon themes of survival and loss, love and the lack of it, ambitions and their unsatisfied reality. 
In one, Auntie Lin plots an escape from the hostile family of her promised husband, ultimately leading to her arrival in America. 
In another, the Hsu family’s all-American day at the beach turns dire when Rose is overwhelmed by the responsibility her mother assigns to her. 
The resulting tragedy traumatizes the family for years to come. 
These tales illustrate the common divides that can form between generations and cultures, especially in immigrant families. 
The mothers have all experienced great hardships during their lives in China, and they’ve worked tirelessly to give their children better opportunities in America. 
But their daughters feel weighed down by their parent’s unfulfilled hopes and high expectations. 
Jing-Mei feels this pressure as she plays mahjong with her mother’s friends. 
She worries, “In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America.” Time and again, the mothers strive to remind their daughters of their history and heritage. 
Meanwhile, their daughters struggle to reconcile their mothers’ perception of them with who they really are. 
"Does my daughter know me?" some of the stories ask. 
"Why doesn’t my mother understand?" others respond. 
In her interrogation of these questions, Tan speaks to anxieties that plague many immigrants, who often feel both alienated from their homeland and disconnected from their adopted country. 
But by weaving the tales of these four mothers and daughters together, Tan makes it clear that Jing-Mei and her peers find strength to tackle their present-day problems through the values their mothers passed on to them. 
When "The Joy Luck Club" was first published, Tan expected minimal success. 
But against her predictions, the book was a massive critical and commercial achievement. 
Today, these characters still captivate readers worldwide. 
Not only for the way they speak to Chinese American and immigrant experiences, but also for uncovering a deeper truth: the need to be seen and understood by the ones you love. 

When we're young, we're innocently brave, and we fearlessly dream about what our lives might be like. 
Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut or a rocket scientist. 
Maybe you dreamed of traveling to every continent. 
Since I was very young, I dreamed of working for the United Nations in some of the most difficult countries in the world. 
And thanks to a lot of courage that dream came true. 
But here's the thing about courage: it doesn't just appear whenever we need it. 
It's the result of tough reflection and real work, involving the balance between fear and bravery. 
Without fear, we'll do foolish things. 
And without courage, we'll never step into the unknown. 
The balance of the two is where the magic lies, and it's a balance we all deal with every day. 
First, a word about my fancy wheels. 
I haven't always used a wheelchair. 
I grew up like many of you, running, jumping and dancing. 
I love to dance. 
However, in my mid-twenties, I began to experience a series of inexplicable falls. 
And a few years later, I was diagnosed with a recessive genetic condition called hereditary inclusion body myopathy, or HIBM. 
It's a progressive muscle wasting disease that affects all of my muscles from head to toe. 
HIBM is very rare. 
In the United States there are less than 200 people diagnosed. 
To date, there is no proved treatment or cure, and within 10 to 15 years of its onset, HIBM typically leads to quadriplegia, which is why I now use a wheelchair. 
When I was first diagnosed, everything changed. 
It was frightening news because I had no experience with chronic illness or disabilities. 
And I had no idea how the disease might progress. 
But what was most disheartening was to listen to other people advise me to limit my ambitions and dreams, and to change my expectations of what to expect from life. 
"You should quit your international career." 
"No one will marry you this way." 
"You would be selfish to have children." 
The fact that someone who wasn't me was putting limitations on my dreams and ambitions was preposterous. 
And unacceptable. 
So I ignored them. 
(Cheers and applause) I did get married. 
And I decided for myself not to have children. 
And I continued my career with the United Nations after my diagnosis, going to work for two years in Angola, a country recovering from 27 years of brutal civil war. 
However, it would be another five years until I officially declared my diagnosis to my employer. 
Because I was afraid that they would question my capacity to manage and I'd lose my job. 
I was working in countries where polio had been common, so when I overheard someone say that they thought I might have survived polio, I thought my secret was safe. 
No one asked why I was limping. 
So I didn't say anything. 
It took me over a decade to internalize the severity of HIBM, even as basic tasks and functions became increasingly difficult. 
Yet, I continued to pursue my dream of working all over the world, and was even appointed as a disability focal point for UNICEF in Haiti, where I served for two years after the devastating 2010 earthquake. 
And then my work brought me to the United States. 
And even as the disease progressed significantly and I needed leg braces and a walker to get around, I still longed for adventure. 
And this time, I started dreaming of a grand outdoor adventure. 
And what's more grand than the Grand Canyon? 
Did you know that for every five million people who visit the Rim only one percent go down to the canyon's base? 
I wanted to be a part of that one percent. 
The only thing is -- (Applause) The only thing is that the Grand Canyon isn't exactly accessible. 
I was going to need some assistance to get down the 5,000-foot descent of vertical loose terrain. 
Now, when I face obstacles, fear doesn't necessarily immediately set in because I assume that one way or another, I'll figure it out. 
And in this case, my thought was, well, if I can't walk down, I could learn to ride a horse. 
So that's what I did. 
And with that fateful decision began a four-year commitment, tossing back and forth between fear and courage to undertake a 12-day expedition. 
Four days on horseback to cross Grand Canyon rim to rim, and eight days rafting 150 miles of the Colorado River, all with a film crew in tow. 
Spoiler alert -- we made it. 
But not without showing me how my deepest fear can somehow manifest a mirror response of equal courage. 
On April 13, 2018, sitting eight feet above the ground, riding a mustang horse named Sheriff, my first impression of Grand Canyon was one of shock and terror. 
Who knew I had a fear of heights. 
(Laughter) But there was no giving up now. 
I mustered up every ounce of courage inside me to not let my fear get the best of me. 
Embarking on the South Rim, all I could do to keep myself composed was to breathe deeply, stare up into the clouds and focus on my team's voices. 
But then, in the first hour, disaster struck. 
Unable to hold myself upright in the saddle, going down an oversized step, I flung forward and smacked my face on the back of the horse's head. 
There was panic, my head hurt fiercely, but the path was too narrow for us to dismount. 
Only at the halfway point at 2,300 feet, at least another two hours down, could we stop and remove my helmet and see the egg-sized bump protruding from my forehead. 
For all of that planning and gear, how is it that we didn't even have an ice pack? 
(Laughter) Luckily for all of us, the swelling came outwards, and would drain into my face as two fantastic black eyes which is an amazing way to look in a documentary film. 
(Laughter) (Applause and cheers) This was not an easy, peaceful journey, and yet, that was exactly the point. 
Even though I was afraid to get back into the saddle, I got back in. 
The descent alone to the canyon floor took a total of 10 hours and that was just day one of four riding. 
Next came the mighty rapids. 
The Colorado River in the Grand Canyon has some of the highest white water in the country. 
And just to be prepared in case we should capsize, we'd practice having me swim through a smaller rapid. 
And it's safe to say it wasn't glamorous. 
(Laughter) I took my breath in the wrong part of the wave, choked on river water and was unable to steer myself. 
Yes, it was scary, but it was also fantastic. 
Waterfalls, slick canyons and a couple billion years of bedrock that seemed to change color throughout the day. 
The Grand Canyon is true wilderness and worthy of all of its accolades. 
(Applause) The expedition, all that planning and the trip itself, showed me a level of fear I had never experienced before. 
But more importantly, it showed me how boldly courageous I can be. 
My Grand Canyon journey was not easy. 
This was not a vision of an Amazonian woman effortlessly making her way through epic scenery. 
This was me crying, exhausted and beat up with two black eyes. 
It was scary, it was stressful, it was exhilarating. 
Now that the trip is over, it's easy to be blasé about what we achieved. 
I know I want to raft the river again. 
This time, all 277 miles of it. 
(Applause) But I also know that I would never do the horseback-riding part again. 
(Laughter) It's just too dangerous. 
And that's my real point. 
I'm not just here to show you my film footage. 
I'm here to remind us all that life is really just a lesson in finding the balance between fear and courage. 
And understanding what is and what isn't a good idea. 
(Laughter) Life is already scary, so for our dreams to come true, we need to be brave. 
In facing my fears and finding the courage to push through them, I swear my life has been extraordinary. 
So live big and try to let your courage outweigh your fear. 
You never know where it might take you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

A mother and her son trek across an endless desert. 
Wearing special skin-tight suits to dissipate heat and recycle moisture, the travelers aren’t worried about dying of thirst. 
Their fears are much greater. 
The pair try to walk without rhythm, letting the vibrations of their footsteps blend into the shifting sands. 
But soon, the sound of the desert is drowned out by a louder hissing. 
As a mound of sand races towards them, the pair’s unnatural gait turns into a sprint. 
The two clamber into a nearby rock face, as a sandworm 400 meters long bursts from the desert floor. 
This is the world of "Dune." 
Written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965, "Dune" takes place in a far-flung future, where humanity rules the stars in a giant feudal empire. 
This medieval motif goes beyond just the government. 
Unlike most interstellar sci-fi, Herbert's humans conquered the stars without any computers. 
Following an ancient war with robots, humanity has forbidden the construction of any machine “in the likeness of a human mind.” But rather than stifling their expansion, this edict forced humans to evolve in startling ways— becoming biological computers, psychic witches, and prescient space pilots. 
Members of these super-powered factions are regularly employed by various noble houses, all competing for power and new planets to add to their kingdoms. 
But almost all these superhuman skills rely on the same precious resource: the spice. 
This mystical crop also known as “melange” is essential for all space travel, making it the cornerstone of the galactic economy. 
And it only grows on the desert planet Arrakis, a dangerous and inhospitable world whose native inhabitants have long rebelled against the empire. 
Arrakis, also called Dune, is the setting for Herbert’s novel, which follows Paul of the noble House Atreides. 
The book begins with Paul’s family being assigned control of Dune as part of an elaborate plot by their sworn enemies: the sadistic slave drivers of House Harkonnen. 
The conflict between these houses upends the delicate political balance on Arrakis. 
Soon, Paul is catapulted into the middle of a planetary revolution, where he must prove himself capable of leading— and surviving— on this hostile desert world. 
But Arrakis is not simply an endless sea of sand. 
Herbert was an avid environmentalist, who spent over five years creating Dune’s complex ecosystem. 
The planet is checkered with climate belts and wind tunnels that have shaped its rocky topography. 
Different temperate zones produce varying desert flora. 
And almost every element of Dune’s ecosystem works together to produce the planet’s essential export. 
Herbert’s world building also includes a rich web of philosophy and religion. 
Paul’s mother Jessica, is a member of the Bene Gesserit, an ancient cult of spice-assisted psychics. 
Sometimes called “witches” for their mysterious powers, the Bene Gesserit have operated as a shadow government for millennia in an effort to guide society towards enlightenment. 
Similarly ancient are the Mentats— human computers capable of processing incredible amounts of data. 
While the Mentats are bastions of logic and reason, their results are not mere calculations, but rather, streams of constantly shifting possibilities. 
However, no group is more central to "Dune" than the Fremen. 
Natives of Arrakis, they are the keepers of the planet’s many secrets. 
Paul’s journey takes him deep into the Fremen’s exclusive brotherhood, where he must prove himself trustworthy in a series of increasingly deadly challenges. 
All these factions have deep histories that pervade the text, and Herbert also incorporates that sense of scale into the book’s structure. 
Each chapter begins with a quote from a future history book, recalling elements of the events that are about to unfold. 
The book also contains in-universe appendices that further explore the Empire’s history; alongside a glossary of words like “Gom jabbar” and “Shai-Hulud." 
Dune’s epic story continues to unfold over a six-book saga that spans millennia. 
But every story of Arrakis’ future begins here: as Paul pursues a path that is dangerous, demanding, and always on the verge of being consumed by the oncoming storm. 

Poet Ali: Hi. Audience: Hi. 
PA: I want to ask you guys a question. How many languages do you speak? 
This is not a rhetorical question. 
I actually want you to think of a number. 
For some of you, it's pretty easy. 
Inside your head, you're like, "It's one. You're speaking it, buddy. I'm done." 
Others of you maybe are wondering if the language an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend taught you, where you learned all the cusswords, if it counts -- go ahead and count it. 
When I asked myself the question, I came up with four, arguably five, if I've been drinking. 
(Laughter) (In Italian: With a little bit of wine I can speak Italian.) (Applause) Cheers! 
But on closer examination, I came up with 83 -- 83 languages, and I got tired and I stopped counting. 
And it forced me to revisit this definition that we have of language. 
The first entry said, "The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured or conventional way." 
The definition at the bottom refers to specialized fields, like medicine, science, tech. 
We know they have their own vernacular, their own jargon. 
But what most interested me was that definition right in the center there: "the system of communication used by a particular community or country." 
And I'm not interested in altering this definition. 
I'm interested in applying it to everything we do, because I believe that we speak far more languages than we realize. 
And for the rest of our time together, I'm going to attempt to speak in one language that is native to every single human being in this room. 
But that changes things a little bit, because then it's no longer a presentation. 
It becomes a conversation, and in any conversation, there must be some sort of interaction. 
And for any interaction to happen, there has to be a degree of willingness on both parties. 
And I think if we just are willing, we will see the magic that can happen with just a little bit of willingness. 
So I've chosen a relatively low-risk common denominator that can kind of gauge if we're all willing. 
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. 
(Claps) Now you're talking! 
(In Spanish: For all the people who speak Spanish, please stand up. 
And look at a person sitting to your side and start laughing.) (Laughter) Thank you so much. Please be seated. 
Now, if that felt a little bit awkward, I promise there was no joke being had at your expense. 
I simply asked the Spanish-speaking audience to stand up, look at a person that was sitting close to them and laugh. 
And I know that wasn't nice, and I'm sorry, but in that moment, some of us felt something. 
You see, we're often aware of what language does when we speak somebody's language, what it does to connect, what it does to bind. 
But we often forget what it does when you can't speak that language, what it does to isolate, what it does to exclude. 
And I want us to hold on as we journey through our little walk of languages here. 
(In Farsi: I'd like to translate the idea of "taarof.") I said in Farsi, "I'd like to translate this idea of 'taarof' in the Persian culture," which, really -- it has no equivalent in the English lexicon. 
The best definition would be something like an extreme grace or an extreme humility. 
But that doesn't quite get the job done. 
So I'll give you an example. 
If two gentlemen were walking by each other, it'd be very common for the first one to say, (In Farsi: I am indebted to you), which means, "I am indebted to you." 
The other gentlemen would respond back, (In Farsi: I open my shirt for you) which means, "I open my shirt for you." 
The first guy would respond back, (In Farsi: I am your servant) which means, "I am your servant." 
And then the second guy would respond back to him, (In Farsi: I am the dirt beneath your feet) which literally means, "I am the dirt beneath your feet." 
(Laughter) Here's an exhibit for you guys, in case you didn't get the picture. 
(Laughter) And I share that with you, because with new languages come new concepts that didn't exist before. 
And the other thing is, sometimes we think language is about understanding the meaning of a word, but I believe language is about making a word meaningful for yourself. 
If I were to flash this series of words on the screen, some of you, you'd know exactly what it is right away. 
Others of you, you might struggle a little bit. 
And I could probably draw a pretty clear-cut line right around the age of 35 and older, 35 and younger. 
And for those of us that are in the know, we know that's text-speak, or SMS language. 
It's a series of characters meant to convey the most amount of meaning with the least amount of characters, which sounds pretty similar to our definition of languages: "system of communication used by a community." 
Now, anyone who's ever got into an argument via text can make a case for how it's maybe not the best method of communication, but what if I told you that what you saw earlier was a modern-day love letter? 
If you follow along: "For the time being, I love you lots, because you positively bring out all the best in me, and I laugh out loud, in other words, let's me know what's up. 
'Cause you are a cutie in my opinion, and as far as I know to see you, if you're not seeing someone, would make happy. 
For your information, I'll be right there forever. 
In any case, keep in touch, no response necessary, all my best wishes, don't know, don't care if anyone sees this. 
Don't go there, see you later, bye for now, hugs and kisses, you only live once." 
(Applause) Kind of a modern-day Romeo or Juliet. 
In that moment, if you laughed, you spoke another language that needs no explanation: laughter. 
It's one of the most common languages in the world. 
We don't have to explain it to each other, it's just something we all feel, and that's why things like laughter and things like music are so prevalent, because they seem to somehow transcend explanation and convey a profound amount of meaning. 
Every language we learn is a portal by which we can access another language. 
The more you know, the more you can speak. 
And it's something common that we all do. 
We take any new concept, and we filter it through an already existing access of reality within us. 
And that's why languages are so important, because they give us access to new worlds, not just people. 
It's not just about seeing or hearing, it's about feeling, experiencing, sharing. 
And despite these languages that we've covered, I really don't think we've covered one of the most profound languages, and that's the language of experience. 
That's why when you're talking with someone, if they've shared something you've shared, you don't need to explain it much. 
Or that's why, when you're sharing a story and you finish, and the people you're talking to don't quite get it, the first thing we all say is, "Guess you had to be there." 
I guess you had to be here this week to know what this is about. 
It's kind of hard to explain, isn't it? 
And for the sake of our research, I'm going to close by asking that you participate one more time in this language of experience. 
I'm going to filter through some languages, and if I'm speaking your language, I'm going to ask that you just stand and you stay standing. 
You don't need to ask permission, just let me know that you see me, and I can also see you if you speak this language of experience. 
Do you speak this language? 
When I was growing up in primary school, at the end of the year, we would have these parties, and we'd vote on whether we wanted to celebrate at an amusement park or a water park. 
And I would really hope the party wasn't at a water park, because then I'd have to be in a bathing suit. 
I don't know about you, but sometimes when I approach a dressing room, my sweat glands start activating on their own, because I know the garment is not going to look on me like it did on that mannequin. 
Or how about this? 
When I would go to family functions or family gatherings, every time I wanted a second plate -- and I usually did -- (Laughter) it was a whole exercise in cost-benefit analysis, my relatives looking at me like, "I don't know. Do you really need that? Looks like you're doing OK there, bud." 
Did my cheeks have a big "Pinch me" sign that I didn't see? 
And if you're squirming or you're laughing or you stood up, or you're beginning to stand, you're speaking the language that I endearingly call "the language of growing up a fat kid." 
And any body-image issue is a dialect of that language. 
I want you to stay standing. 
Again, if I'm speaking your language, please go ahead and stand. 
Imagine two bills in my hand. 
One is the phone bill, and one is the electric bill. 
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, pay one off, let the other one go, which means, "I might not have enough to pay both at the current moment." 
You've got to be resourceful. You've got to figure it out. 
And if you're standing, you know the language of barely making ends meet, of financial struggle. 
And if you've been lucky enough to speak that language, you understand that there is no motivator of greatness like deficiency. 
Not having resources, not having looks, not having finances can often be the barren soil from which the most productive seeds are painstakingly plowed and harvested. 
I'm going to ask if you speak this language. 
The second you recognize it, feel free to stand. 
When we heard the diagnosis, I thought, "Not that word. 
Anything but that word. 
I hate that word." 
And then you ask a series of questions: "Are you sure?" 
"Has it spread?" 
"How long?" 
"Doctor, how long?" 
And a series of answers determines a person's life. 
And when my dad was hungry, we'd all rush to the dinner table to eat, because that's what we did before. 
We ate together, so we were going to continue doing that. 
And I didn't understand why we were losing this battle, because I was taught if you fight and if you have the right spirit, you're supposed to win. 
And we weren't winning. 
For any of you that stood up, you know very well that I'm speaking the language of watching a loved one battle cancer. 
(Applause) Any terminal illness is a derivative of that language. 
I'm going to speak one last language. 
Oh -- no, no, I'm listening. 
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no no, no no, me and you, right here, yup. 
(Laughter) No, I'm with ya. I'm with ya! 
(Laughter) Or, imagine the lights are all off and a blue light is just shining in your face as you're laying on the bed. 
And I know some of you, like me, have dropped that phone right on your face. 
(Laughter) Or this one, right? 
Passenger seat freaking out, like, "Can you watch the road?" 
And for anybody that stood up, you speak the language that I like to call "the language of disconnection." 
It's been called the language of connection, but I like to call it the language of disconnection. 
I don't mean disconnection, I mean disconnection, human disconnection, disconnected from each other, from where we are, from our own thoughts, so we can occupy another space. 
If you're not standing, you probably know what it's like to feel left out. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You probably -- you know what it's like when everybody's a part of something, and you're not. 
You know what it's like being the minority. 
And now that I'm speaking your language, I'm going to ask you to stand, since we're speaking the same language. 
Because I believe that language of being the minority is one of the most important languages you can ever speak in your life, because how you feel in that position of compromise will directly determine how you act in that position of power. 
Thank you for participating. 
If you'd take a seat, I want to speak one last language. 
(Applause) This one, you don't need to stand. 
I just want to see if you recognize it. 
Most the girls in the world are complainin' about it. 
Most the poems in the world been written about it. 
Most the music on the radio be hittin' about it, kickin' about it, or rippin' about it. 
Most the verses in the game people spittin' about it, most the songs in the world, people talkin' about it. 
Most the broken hearts I know are walkin' without it, started to doubt it, or lost without it. 
Most the shadows in the dark have forgotten about it. 
Everybody in the world would be trippin' without it. 
Every boy and every girl will be dead without it, struggle without it, nothing without it. 
Most the pages that are filled are filled about it. 
["It" = Love] The tears that are spilled are spilled about it. 
The people that have felt it are real about it. 
A life without it, you'd be lost. 
When I'm in it and I feel it, I be shoutin' about it. 
Everybody in the whole world knowin' about it. 
I'm hurt and broke down and be flowin' about it, goin' about it wrong 'cause I didn't allow it. 
Can the wound or scar heal without it? 
Can't the way that you feel be concealed about it? 
Everybody has their own ideal about it, dream about it, appeal about it. 
So what's the deal about it? 
Are you 'bout it to know that life is a dream and unreal without it? 
But I'm just a writer. 
What can I reveal about it? 
Why is it that the most spoken-about language in the world is the one we have the toughest time speaking or expressing? 
No matter how many books, how many seminars, how many life-coaching sessions we go to, we just can't get enough of it. 
And I ask you now: Is that number that you had at the beginning, has that changed? 
And I challenge you, when you see someone, to ask yourself: What languages do we share? 
And if you don't come up with anything, ask yourself: What languages could we share? 
And if you still don't come up with anything, ask yourself: What languages can I learn? 
And now matter how inconsequential or insignificant that conversation seems at the moment, I promise you it will serve you in the future. 
My name is Poet Ali. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

In the 4th century BCE, a banker’s son threw the city of Sinope into scandal by counterfeiting coins. 
When the dust finally settled, the young man, Diogenes of Sinope, had been stripped of his citizenship, his money, and all his possessions. 
At least, that’s how the story goes. 
While many of the details of Diogenes’ life are shadowy, the philosophical ideas born out of his disgrace survive today. 
In exile, Diogenes decided that by rejecting the opinions of others and societal measures of success, he could be truly free. 
He would live self-sufficiently, close to nature, without materialism, vanity, or conformity. 
In practice, this meant he spent years wandering around Greek cities with nothing but a cloak, staff, and knapsack— outdoors year-round, forgoing technology, baths, and cooked food. 
He didn’t go about this new existence quietly, but is said to have teased passers-by and mocked the powerful, eating, urinating and even masturbating in public. 
The citizens called him a kyôn— a barking dog. 
Though meant as an insult, dogs were actually a good symbol for his philosophy— they’re happy creatures, free from abstractions like wealth or reputation. 
Diogenes and his growing number of followers became known as “dog philosophers,” or kynikoi, a designation that eventually became the word “Cynic.” These early Cynics were a carefree bunch, drawn to the freedom of a wandering lifestyle. 
As Diogenes’ reputation grew, others tried to challenge his commitment. 
Alexander the Great offered him anything he desired. 
But instead of asking for material goods, Diogenes only asked Alexander to get out of his sunshine. 
After Diogenes’ death, adherents to his philosophy continued to call themselves Cynics for about 900 years, until 500 CE. 
Some Greek philosophers, like the Stoics, thought everyone should follow Diogenes’ example. 
They also attempted to tone down his philosophy to be more acceptable to conventional society— which, of course, was fundamentally at odds with his approach. 
Others viewed the Cynics less charitably. 
In the Roman province of Syria in the 2nd century CE, the satirist Lucian described the Cynics of his own time as unprincipled, materialistic, self-promoting hypocrites, who only preached what Diogenes had once actually practiced. 
Reading Lucian’s texts centuries later, Renaissance and Reformation writers called their rivals cynics as an insult— meaning people who criticized others without having anything worthwhile to say. 
This usage eventually laid the groundwork for the modern meaning of the word “cynic:" a person who thinks everyone else is acting out of pure self-interest, even if they claim a higher motive. 
Still, the philosophy of cynicism had admirers, especially among those who wished to question the state of society. 
The 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was called the “new Diogenes” when he argued that the arts, sciences, and technology, corrupt people. 
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche reimagined a story in which Diogenes went into the Athenian marketplace with a lantern, searching in vain for a single honest person. 
In Nietszche’s version, a so-called madman rushes into a town square to proclaim that “God is dead.” This was Nietzsche’s way of calling for a “revaluation of values,” and rejecting the dominant Christian and Platonic idea of universal, spiritual insights beyond the physical world. 
Nietzsche admired Diogenes for sticking stubbornly to the here-and-now. 
More recently, the hippies of the 1960s have been compared with Diogenes as counter-cultural rebels. 
Diogenes’ ideas have been adopted and reimagined over and over again. 
The original cynics might not have approved of these fresh takes: they believed that their values of rejecting custom and living closely with nature were the only true values. 
Whether or not you agree with that, or with any of the later incarnations, all have one thing in common: they questioned the status quo. 
And that’s an example we can still follow: not to blindly follow conventional or majority views, but to think hard about what is truly valuable. 

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

This chimpanzee stumbles across a windfall of overripe plums. 
Many of them have split open, drawing him to their intoxicating fruity odor. 
He gorges himself and begins to experience some… strange effects. 
This unwitting ape has stumbled on a process that humans will eventually harness to create beer, wine, and other alcoholic drinks. 
The sugars in overripe fruit attract microscopic organisms known as yeasts. 
As the yeasts feed on the fruit sugars they produce a compound called ethanol— the type of alcohol in alcoholic beverages. 
This process is called fermentation. 
Nobody knows exactly when humans began to create fermented beverages. 
The earliest known evidence comes from 7,000 BCE in China, where residue in clay pots has revealed that people were making an alcoholic beverage from fermented rice, millet, grapes, and honey. 
Within a few thousand years, cultures all over the world were fermenting their own drinks. 
Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians made beer throughout the year from stored cereal grains. 
This beer was available to all social classes, and workers even received it in their daily rations. 
They also made wine, but because the climate wasn’t ideal for growing grapes, it was a rare and expensive delicacy. 
By contrast, in Greece and Rome, where grapes grew more easily, wine was as readily available as beer was in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 
Because yeasts will ferment basically any plant sugars, ancient peoples made alcohol from whatever crops and plants grew where they lived. 
In South America, people made chicha from grains, sometimes adding hallucinogenic herbs. 
In what’s now Mexico, pulque, made from cactus sap, was the drink of choice, while East Africans made banana and palm beer. 
And in the area that’s now Japan, people made sake from rice. 
Almost every region of the globe had its own fermented drinks. 
As alcohol consumption became part of everyday life, some authorities latched onto effects they perceived as positive— Greek physicians considered wine to be good for health, and poets testified to its creative qualities. 
Others were more concerned about alcohol’s potential for abuse. 
Greek philosophers promoted temperance. 
Early Jewish and Christian writers in Europe integrated wine into rituals but considered excessive intoxication a sin. 
And in the middle east, Africa, and Spain, an Islamic rule against praying while drunk gradually solidified into a general ban on alcohol. 
Ancient fermented beverages had relatively low alcohol content. 
At about 13% alcohol, the by-products wild yeasts generate during fermentation become toxic and kill them. 
When the yeasts die, fermentation stops and the alcohol content levels off. 
So for thousands of years, alcohol content was limited. 
That changed with the invention of a process called distillation. 
9th century Arabic writings describe boiling fermented liquids to vaporize the alcohol in them. 
Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so it vaporizes first. 
Capture this vapor, cool it down, and what’s left is liquid alcohol much more concentrated than any fermented beverage. 
At first, these stronger spirits were used for medicinal purposes. 
Then, spirits became an important trade commodity because, unlike beer and wine, they didn’t spoil. 
Rum made from sugar harvested in European colonies in the Caribbean became a staple for sailors and was traded to North America. 
Europeans brought brandy and gin to Africa and traded it for enslaved people, land, and goods like palm oil and rubber. 
Spirits became a form of money in these regions. 
During the Age of Exploration, spirits played a crucial role in long distance sea voyages. 
Sailing from Europe to east Asia and the Americas could take months, and keeping water fresh for the crews was a challenge. 
Adding a bucket of brandy to a water barrel kept water fresh longer because alcohol is a preservative that kills harmful microbes. 
So by the 1600s, alcohol had gone from simply giving animals a buzz to fueling global trade and exploration— along with all their consequences. 
As time went on, its role in human society would only get more complicated. 

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

Let's talk about manias. 
Let's start with Beatlemania. 
(Recording of crowd roaring) Hysterical teenagers, crying, screaming, pandemonium. 
(Recording of crowd roaring) Sports mania: deafening crowds, all for one idea -- get the ball in the net. 
Okay, religious mania: there's rapture, there's weeping, there's visions. 
Manias can be good. 
Manias can be alarming. 
Or manias can be deadly. 
(Recording of crowd cheering) The world has a new mania. 
A mania for learning English. 
Listen as Chinese students practice their English, by screaming it: Teacher: ... change my life! 
Students: I want to change my life! 
T: I don't want to let my parents down! 
S: I don't want to let my parents down! 
T: I don't ever want to let my country down! 
S: I don't ever want to let my country down! 
T: Most importantly... S: Most importantly... 
T: I don't want to let myself down! 
S: I don't want to let myself down! 
How many people are trying to learn English worldwide? 
Two billion of them. 
Students: A t-shirt. A dress. 
Jay Walker: In Latin America, in India, in Southeast Asia, and most of all, in China. 
If you're a Chinese student, you start learning English in the third grade, by law. 
That's why this year, China will become the world's largest English-speaking country. 
(Laughter) Why English? 
In a single word: opportunity. 
Opportunity for a better life, a job, to be able to pay for school, or put better food on the table. 
Imagine a student taking a giant test for three full days. 
Her score on this one test literally determines her future. 
She studies 12 hours a day for three years to prepare. 
Twenty-five percent of her grade is based on English. 
It's called the gaokao, and 80 million high school Chinese students have already taken this grueling test. 
The intensity to learn English is almost unimaginable, unless you witness it. 
Teacher: Perfect! Students: Perfect! 
T: Perfect! S: Perfect! 
T: I want to speak perfect English! 
S: I want to speak perfect English! 
T: I want to speak ... S: I want to speak ... 
T: ... perfect English! S: ... perfect English! 
T (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life! 
S (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life! 
JW: So is English mania good or bad? 
Is English a tsunami, washing away other languages? 
Not likely. 
Your native language is your life. 
But with English you can become part of a wider conversation -- a global conversation about global problems, like climate change or poverty, or hunger or disease. 
The world has other universal languages. 
Mathematics is the language of science. 
Music is the language of emotions. 
And now English is becoming the language of problem-solving. 
Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it. 
So English mania is a turning point. 
Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, English represents hope for a better future -- a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

On a cold winter night in 1916, Felix Yusupov anxiously prepared to pick up his dinner guest. 
If all went as planned, his guest would be dead by morning, though four others had already tried and failed to finish him off. 
The Russian monarchy was on the brink of collapse, and to Yusupov and his fellow aristocrats, the holy man they’d invited to dinner was the single cause of it all. 
But who was he, and how could a single monk be to blame for the fate of an empire? 
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin began his life in Siberia, born in 1869 to a peasant family. 
He might have lived a life of obscurity in his small village, if not for his conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1890s. 
Inspired by the humbled monks that wandered endlessly from holy site to holy site, he spent years on pilgrimages across Russia. 
On his travels, strangers were captivated by Rasputin’s magnetic presence. 
Some even believed he had mystical gifts of prediction and healing. 
Despite Rasputin’s heavy drinking, petty theft, and promiscuity, his reputation as a monk quickly spread beyond Siberia and attracted both laypeople and powerful Orthodox clergymen. 
When he finally reached the capital, St. Petersburg, Rasputin used his charisma and connections to win favor with the imperial family’s spiritual advisor. 
In November 1905, Rasputin was finally introduced to Russian Tsar Nicholas II. 
Nicholas and his wife Alexandra devoutly believed in the Orthodox Church, as well as in mysticism and supernatural powers, and this Siberian holy man had them transfixed. 
It was a particularly tumultuous period for Russia and their family. 
The monarchy was barely clinging to control after the Revolution of 1905. 
Their political struggles were only intensified by personal turmoil: Alexei, the heir to the throne, had a life-threatening blood disease called hemophilia. 
When Alexei suffered a severe medical crisis in 1912, Rasputin advised his parents to reject treatment from doctors. 
Alexei’s health improved, cementing the royal family’s belief that Rasputin had magical healing powers, and guaranteeing his privileged place on the royal court. 
Today, we know that the doctors had prescribed aspirin, a drug that worsens hemophilia. 
After this incident, Rasputin made a prophecy: if he died, or the royal family deserted him, both their son and their crown would soon be gone. 
Outside the royal family, people had mixed views on Rasputin. 
On one hand, peasants regarded him as one of their own, amplifying their often-unheard voice to the monarchy. 
But nobles and clergymen came to despise his presence. 
Rasputin never ceased his scandalous behavior, and they were skeptical of his so-called powers and thought he was corrupting the royal family. 
By the end of World War I, they were convinced the only way to maintain order was to eliminate this sham of a holy man. 
With this conviction, Yusupov began to plot Rasputin’s assassination. 
Though the exact details remain mysterious, our best guess at how it all unfolded comes from Yusupov’s memoirs. 
He served Rasputin a number of pastries, believing they contained cyanide. 
But unbeknownst to Yusupov, one of his co-conspirators had a change of heart, and substituted the poison with a harmless substance. 
To Yusupov’s shock, Rasputin ate them without ill effect. 
In desperation, he shot Rasputin at point-blank range. 
But Rasputin recovered, punched his attacker, and fled. 
Yusupov and his accomplices pursued him, finally killing Rasputin with a bullet to the forehead and dumping his body in the Malaya Nevka river. 
But far from stabilizing the monarchy’s authority, Rasputin’s death enraged the peasantry. 
Just as Rasputin prophesied, his murder was swiftly followed by that of the royal family. 
Whether the downfall of the Russian monarchy was a product of the monk’s curse, or the result of political tensions decades in the making, well, we may never know. 

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

How is it that a breathalyzer can measure the alcohol content in someone’s blood, hours after they had their last drink, based on their breath alone? 
Exhaled breath contains trace amounts of hundreds, even thousands, of volatile organic compounds: small molecules lightweight enough to travel easily as gases. 
One of these is ethanol, which we consume in alcoholic drinks. 
It travels through the bloodstream to tiny air sacs in the lungs, passing into exhaled air at a concentration 2,000 times lower, on average, than in the blood. 
When someone breathes into a breathalyzer, the ethanol in their breath passes into a reaction chamber. 
There, it’s converted to another molecule, called acetic acid, in a special type of reactor that produces an electric current during the reaction. 
The strength of the current indicates the amount of ethanol in the sample of air, and by extension in the blood. 
In addition to the volatile organic compounds like ethanol we consume in food and drink, the biochemical processes of our cells produce many others. 
And when something disrupts those processes, like a disease, the collection of volatile organic compounds in the breath may change, too. 
So could we detect disease by analyzing a person’s breath, without using more invasive diagnostic tools like biopsies, blood draws, and radiation? 
In theory, yes, but testing for disease is a lot more complicated than testing for alcohol. 
To identify diseases, researchers need to look at a set of tens of compounds in the breath. 
A given disease may cause some of these compounds to increase or decrease in concentration, while others may not change— the profile is likely to be different for every disease, and could even vary for different stages of the same disease. 
For example, cancers are among the most researched candidates for diagnosis through breath analysis. 
One of the biochemical changes many tumors cause is a large increase in an energy-generating process called glycolysis. 
Known as the Warburg Effect, this increase in glycolysis results in an increase of metabolites like lactate which in turn can affect a whole cascade of metabolic processes and ultimately result in altered breath composition, possibly including an increased concentration of volatile compounds such as dimethyl sulfide. 
But the Warburg Effect is just one potential indicator of cancerous activity, and doesn’t reveal anything about the particular type of cancer. 
Many more indicators are needed to make a diagnosis. 
To find these subtle differences, researchers compare the breath of healthy people with the breath of people who suffer from a particular disease using profiles based on hundreds of breath samples. 
This complex analysis requires a fundamentally different, more versatile type of sensor from the alcohol breathalyzer. 
There are a few being developed. 
Some discriminate between individual compounds by observing how the compounds move through a set of electric fields. 
Others use an array of resistors made of different materials that each change their resistance when exposed to a certain mix of volatile organic compounds. 
There are other challenges too. 
These substances are present at incredibly low concentrations— typically just parts per billion, much lower than ethanol concentrations in the breath. 
Compounds’ levels may be affected by factors other than disease, including age, gender, nutrition, and lifestyle. 
Finally, there’s the issue of distinguishing which compounds in the sample were produced in the patient’s body and which were inhaled from the environment shortly before the test. 
Because of these challenges, breath analysis isn’t quite ready yet. 
But preliminary clinical trials on lung, colon, and other cancers have had encouraging results. 
One day, catching cancer early might be as easy as breathing in and out. 

So if you live on planet Earth and you're one of seven billion people that eats food every day, I need you to pay attention, because over the next three decades, we will need to address one of the most critical global challenges of our generation. 
And I'm not talking about climate change. 
I'm talking about food and agriculture. 
In 2050, our global population is projected to reach 9.8 billion, with 68 percent of us living in urban city centers. 
In order to feed this massive population, we will need to increase our agricultural output by 70 percent over current levels. 
Just to put this number into perspective, we will need to grow more food in the next 35 to 40 years than the previous 10,000 years combined. 
Put simply, not only is our global population becoming bigger, but it's also getting denser, and we will need to grow significantly more food using significantly less land and resources. 
Complicating our current efforts to address these major demographic shifts are the challenges facing the agricultural industry today. 
Globally, one third of all the food that we produce is wasted, acquitting to 1.6 billion tons of food that spoiled on the way to the market or expired in our refrigerators or were simply thrown out by supermarkets and restaurants at the end of the day. 
Every single year, up to 600 million people will get sick eating contaminated food, highlighting the challenge that we have of maintaining global food safety. 
And, maybe unsurprisingly, the agricultural industry is the single largest consumer of fresh water, accounting for 70 percent of global usage. 
Now, you'll be relieved to know that the agricultural industry and that the global movement by universities, companies and NGOs is putting together comprehensive research and developing novel technology to address all of these issues. 
And many have been doing it for decades. 
But one of the more recent innovations in food production being deployed in industrial parks in North America, in the urban city centers of Asia, and even in the arid deserts of the Middle East is controlled environment agriculture. 
Controlled environment agriculture is actually just a fancy way of saying weather- or climate-proof farming, and many of these farms grow food three-dimensionally in vertical racks, as opposed to the two dimensions of conventional farms. 
And so this type of food production is also referred to as indoor vertical farming. 
I've been involved in the indoor vertical farming space for the past five and a half years, developing technology to make this type of food production more efficient and affordable. 
This picture was taken outside of a decommissioned shipping container that we converted into an indoor farm and then launched into the heart and the heat of Dubai. 
Indoor vertical farming is a relatively recent phenomena, commercially speaking, and the reason for this is that consumers care more about food safety and where their food comes from, and also, the necessary technology to make this possible is more readily available and lower cost, and the overall cost of food production globally is actually increasing, making this type of food production more competitive. 
So if you want to build an indoor vertical farm, you will need to replace some of the conventional elements of farming with artificial substitutes, starting with sunlight. 
In indoor vertical farms, natural sunlight is replaced with artificial lighting like LEDs. 
While there are many different types of LEDs being used, the one that we decided to install here is called "full spectrum LEDs," which was optimized for the type of vegetables that we were growing. 
Also, in order to maximize production for a given space, indoor vertical farms also utilize and install racking systems to grow vegetables vertically, and some of the biggest facilities stack their production 14 to 16 floors high. 
Now most of these farms are hydroponic or aeroponic systems, which means that instead of using soil, they use a substitute material like polyurethane sponges, biodegradable peat moss and even use inorganic materials like perlite and clay pellets. 
Another unique aspects about these farms is that they use a precise nutrient formula that is circulated and recycled throughout the facility, and this is pumped directly to the vegetables' root zone to promote plant growth. 
And lastly, these farms use a sophisticated monitoring and automation system to significantly increase productivity, efficiency and consistency, and these tools also provide the added benefit of producing food that is more traceable and safe. 
Some of the obvious benefits of growing food in this way is that you have year-round vegetable production, you have consistent quality and you have predictable output. 
Some of the other major benefits include significant resource use efficiencies, particularly water. 
For every kilogram of vegetables grown in this way, hundreds of liters of water is conserved compared to conventional farming methods. 
And with the water savings come similar savings in the use of fertilizer. 
One of the highest-yielding farms grows over 350 times more food per square meter than a conventional farm. 
And weatherproofing means complete control of incoming contaminants and pests, completely eliminating the need for the use of chemical pesticides. 
And not to be mistaken, these farms can produce enormous amounts of food, with one of the biggest facilities producing 30,000 heads of vegetables a day. 
However, as with any new technology or innovation, there are some drawbacks. 
As you would imagine, growing food in this way can be incredibly energy-intensive. 
Also, these farms can only produce a small variety of vegetables commercially and the overall cost of the production still is quite high. 
And in order to address these issues, some of the biggest and most sophisticated farms are making significant investments, starting with energy efficiency. 
In order to reduce the high energy usage, there are efforts to develop higher-efficiency LEDs, to develop lasers optimized for plant growth and using even fiber-optic cables like these to channel sunlight directly into an indoor vertical farm during the day to reduce the need for artificial lighting. 
Also, to reduce the labor costs associated with hiring a more sophisticated, more urban and also more high-skilled labor force, robotics in automation is used extensively in large-scale facilities. 
And you can never really be too resource-efficient. 
Building indoor vertical farms in and around urban city centers can help to shorten the agricultural supply chain and also help to maintain the nutritional content in vegetables. 
Also, there are food deserts in many countries that have little to no access to nutritious vegetables, and as this industry matures, it will become possible to provide more equitable access to high-quality, highly nutritious vegetables in even the most underprivileged of communities. 
And finally, and this is really exciting for me personally, indoor vertical farming can actually be integrated seamlessly into the cityscape to help repurpose idle, underutilized and unused urban infrastructure. 
In fact, this is already happening today. 
Ride-sharing services have taken hundreds of thousands of cars off the road and they have significantly reduced the need for parking. 
This is a farm that we installed in central Beijing in an underutilized underground parking structure to grow vegetables for the nearby hotels. 
Underutilized infrastructure is not simply limited to large-scale civil engineering projects, and they can also include smaller spaces like idle restaurant corners. 
This is an example of a farm that we installed directly into the partition of a hotel entrance in order to grow fresh herbs and microgreens on-site for the chefs. 
Honestly, if you look around, you will find underutilized space everywhere, under, around and inside of urban developments. 
This is a farm that we installed into an empty office corner to grow fresh vegetables for the employees in nearby cafes. 
I get to be a part of all these cool projects and working in the agricultural industry to improve access and affordability to fresh and nutritious produce, hopefully soon by anyone anywhere, has been the greatest joy and also the most humbling and intellectually challenging thing I've ever done. 
And now that I've convinced you that agriculture can be quite sexy, you'll be surprised and shocked to know that I still have trouble fully articulating how and why I decided to work, and continue to work, in the agricultural industry. 
But a couple of years ago, I found a rather unique answer hiding in plain sight. 
You see, I read an article about how your name, particularly your last name, can have a strong influence on everything from your personality to your professional career. 
This is my Japanese last name: Oda. 
And the characters translate literally into "small farm." 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Dawn and the train are both breaking when Ethic and Hedge arrive in the woods. 
The adventurers have recovered the first artifact— the Node of Power— and have come to the 198forest in search of the second. 
Here they’re welcomed by the director of the colony, Octavia. 
She established this treehouse sanctuary after the robots freed everyone from having to work. 
It was meant to be a haven where people could follow their passions, take up crafts, and find fulfillment. 
Which they did… at first. 
Some years ago everyone forgot the point. 
They abandoned arts and crafts and instead just painted and exhibited pictures of themselves over, and over, and over. 
The location of the second artifact is no secret; it’s in a tower, guarded by a garrison of bots, a bottomless ravine, and who knows what other traps. 
As soon as the tower went up with the node inside, human communication across the land went dark. 
Octavia’s been after it for years, but try as she might, the defenses thwart her. 
In order to even get to the tower, the team will need a distraction. 
Octavia has an idea: stir up the people through some well-intentioned vandalism. 
The residents’ paintings are all squares that come in different sizes, all an odd number of pixels across. 
Helper-bots pick up the finished portraits and hang them in public places for everyone to admire. 
There’s a slim margin of time when Hedge can access the paintings. 
If he were to deface each one with an X, the people would blame the helper-bots, creating just the distraction the team needs. 
If only it were so easy. 
Hedge can’t just paint an X— his painting processor requires very specific instructions. 
Treating the paintings as square grids, he can fill in one pixel, or little square, at a time. 
He can move forwards and make 90 degree turns over the canvas, but can’t move diagonally. 
How does Ethic program Hedge to paint an X over each portrait? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Here’s a hint. 
Try drawing a square grid like this, and simulating Hedge’s path over it. 
What patterns can you find to guide him? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
The challenge here is to craft a set of instructions that will work for any square grid. 
Fortunately, one of the strengths of programming is the flexibility to solve not just one problem, but a whole class of them all at once. 
It often helps to start with one case, and work towards the general. 
Let’s say we had this square. 
Hedge can measure the length of its sides and store that number as a variable. 
Now, what we need is a plan for how Hedge will paint an X, pixel by pixel. 
There’s more than one right answer for how to do this; let’s look at two. 
First, what if Hedge went row by row, like a typewriter? 
If it’s a 9 pixel by 9 pixel painting, in the first row he’d paint, skip 7, and then paint again. 
In the second row he’d skip the first, paint, skip 5, and paint. 
And so on. 
The pattern here is that for each row the pixels skipped at the beginning go up by one, and the pixels skipped in the middle go down by 2. 
Things get more complicated when Hedge reaches the center. 
Here there’s a row with just one pixel painted. 
Then the whole thing reverses— the number of pixels skipped goes down by one each time on the left, and up by two each time in the middle. 
Instructing Hedge to do this with a series of loops will work and is a perfectly fine solution. 
The main drawback is that this requires quite a bit of logic— knowing what to do in the middle, when to reverse the process, and exactly how to reverse it. 
So how might we approach this so that the logic remains consistent from start to finish? 
The key insight is to look at a grid as a series of concentric squares. 
Each square follows the same pattern— painted pixels in the corners, and unaltered pixels in between. 
So if we can figure out a way to paint one nested square, transition to the next, and repeat, we can paint them all. 
Painting the outermost one is easy. 
Start in a corner and paint that pixel. 
If we call the length of the painting n, fly forward n minus 1 spaces. 
Paint another pixel, and turn right. 
Now do the whole thing again… and again. 
Now move forward one less space, turn right, fly forward once, and Hedge will be in the next concentric square and ready to repeat the whole process. 
Each square is n minus 2 pixels smaller than the last in length and width, and we can follow this spiral pattern all the way to the center with a loop and a variable that tracks how far Hedge should fly. 
Is one of these methods better than the other? 
It really depends on what you value. 
The strength of the spiral is the simplicity of finding a pattern and reusing the same logic from start to finish. 
The advantage of the typewriter approach is that it’s a more generalized solution, meaning it can be adapted much more simply to fill in any pattern. 
For Ethic’s sake, either will do just fine. 
So here’s what happens. 
Hedge rapidly defaces all of the portraits. 
And within moments cries of anguish break out all over the forest. 
The garrison guarding the tower abandon their posts to calm the agitated people, and Ethic, Hedge, and Octavia slip through— and nearly slip into the depths of the gorge standing between them and the tower. 

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

Centuries ago, the Inca developed ingenuous suits of armor that could flex with the blows of sharp spears and maces, protecting warriors from even the fiercest physical attacks. 
These hardy structures were made not from iron or steel, but rather something unexpectedly soft: cotton. 
These thickly woven, layered quilts of cotton could distribute the energy from a blow across a large surface area, shielding warriors without restricting their mobility. 
These seemingly contradictory features— strength and flexibility, softness and durability— have their roots in the intricate biology of the nearly invisible cotton fiber. 
These fibers begin life deep within a cotton flower, on the surface of a seed. 
As many as 16,000 fibers will festoon a single seed, bulging from the seed’s surface like miniature water balloons. 
Each cotton fiber, no matter how large it grows, is made of just one cell. 
That cell has multiple layers of cell wall. 
After a few days, the sides of the first layer, called the primary cell wall, stiffen, pushing cell growth in one direction and causing the fiber to elongate. 
The fiber elongates quickly for about 16 days. 
Then it begins the next stage: strengthening the cell wall. 
It does this by making more of the carbohydrate cellulose. 
Cellulose will make up 34% of the cell wall at this stage and swiftly increases. 
This new growth also reinforces the cell wall by going against the grain of the existing wall. 
The strengthened wall is more rigid, restricting further growth. 
That means if the fiber remodels its walls too early, it will be short, and ultimately make rough, weak fabrics. 
But if cell wall strengthening begins too late, the wall won’t be sturdy enough— producing fibers that are too weak to hold fabrics together well. 
In ideal growing conditions— with the right temperature, water, fertilizer, pest control, and light— a cotton fiber can grow up to 3.6 centimeters long with only a 25 micrometer width. 
Long, fine fibers can wrap around one another better than shorter, less fine fibers, which means those long, fine fibers make stronger threads that hang together better as fabric. 
Cotton with these qualities has diverse uses— from soft textiles to the U.S. dollar bill, which is 75% cotton. 
The next crucial stage of the cotton fiber’s growth begins as it thickens its secondary cell wall by depositing large quantities of cellulose into the secondary layer. 
Cellulose goes on to make up over 90% of the fiber’s weight. 
The more cellulose that gets deposited, the denser that secondary layer becomes— and this determines the strength of the final fiber. 
This stage is essential for developing long-lasting material for the likes of, say, a t-shirt. 
The garment’s capacity to withstand years of washing and wear is largely determined by the density of that secondary cell wall. 
On the other hand, its softness is strongly influenced by the length of the fiber, established with the remodeling of the primary wall layer. 
Finally, after about 50 days, the fiber is fully grown. 
The living matter within the cell dies off, leaving behind only the cellulose. 
The dried cotton seed pod, or boll, that surrounds the fibers cracks open, unveiling a burst of several thousand fiber cells in a fluffy mass. 
The thread-like fibers we see— thinner than a human hair— are the remains of those dense, dried out walls of cellulose. 
Tens of thousands of these fibers spun into yarn will go on to make everything from fabric, to coffee filters, diapers, and fishing nets. 
And with the help of modern science, cotton might soon be softer, stronger, and more resilient than ever as researchers investigate how to optimize its growth based on nutrients, weather conditions, and genetics. 

Mark Miskin: This is a rotifer. 
It's a microorganism about a hair's width in size. 
They live everywhere on earth -- saltwater, freshwater, everywhere -- and this one is out looking for food. 
I remember the first time I saw this thing, I was like eight years old and it completely blew me away. 
I mean, here is this incredible little creature, it's hunting, swimming, going about its life, but its whole universe fits within a drop of pond water. 
Paul McEuen: So this little rotifer shows us something really amazing. 
It says that you can build a machine that is functional, complex, smart, but all in a tiny little package, one so small that it's impossible to see it. 
Now, the engineer in me is just blown away by this thing, that anyone could make such a creature. 
But right behind that wonder, I have to admit, is a bit of envy. 
I mean, nature can do it. Why can't we? 
Why can't we build tiny robots? 
Well, I'm not the only one to have this idea. 
In fact, in the last, oh, few years, researchers around the world have taken up the task of trying to build robots that are so small that they can't be seen. 
And what we're going to tell you about today is an effort at Cornell University and now at the University of Pennsylvania to try to build tiny robots. 
OK, so that's the goal. 
But how do we do it? 
How do we go about building tiny robots? 
Well, Pablo Picasso, of all people, gives us our first clue. 
Picasso said -- ["Good artists copy, great artists steal."] (Laughter) "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." 
(Laughter) OK. But steal from what? 
Well, believe it or not, most of the technology you need to build a tiny robot already exists. 
The semiconductor industry has been getting better and better at making tinier and tinier devices, so at this point they could put something like a million transistors into the size of a package that is occupied by, say, a single-celled paramecium. 
And it's not just electronics. 
They can also build little sensors, LEDs, whole communication packages that are too small to be seen. 
So that's what we're going to do. 
We're going to steal that technology. 
Here's a robot. 
(Laughter) Robot's got two parts, as it turns out. 
It's got a head, and it's got legs. 
[Steal these: Brains] (Laughter) We're going to call this a legless robot, which may sound exotic, but they're pretty cool all by themselves. 
In fact, most of you have a legless robot with you right now. 
Your smartphone is the world's most successful legless robot. 
In just 15 years, it has taken over the entire planet. 
And why not? 
It's such a beautiful little machine. 
It's incredibly intelligent, it's got great communication skills, and it's all in a package that you can hold in your hand. 
So we would like to be able to build something like this, only down at the cellular scale, the size of a paramecium. 
And here it is. 
This is our cell-sized smartphone. 
It even kind of looks like a smartphone, only it's about 10,000 times smaller. 
We call it an OWIC. 
[Optical Wireless Integrated Circuits] OK, we're not advertisers, all right? 
(Laughter) But it's pretty cool all by itself. 
In fact, this OWIC has a number of parts. 
So up near the top, there are these cool little solar cells that you shine light on the device and it wakes up a little circuit that's there in the middle. 
And that circuit can drive a little tiny LED that can blink at you and allows the OWIC to communicate with you. 
So unlike your cell phone, the OWIC communicates with light, sort of like a tiny firefly. 
Now, one thing that's pretty cool about these OWICs is we don't make them one at a time, soldering all the pieces together. 
We make them in massive parallel. 
For example, about a million of these OWICs can fit on a single four-inch wafer. 
And just like your phone has different apps, you can have different kinds of OWICs. 
There can be ones that, say, measure voltage, some that measure temperature, or just have a little light that can blink at you to tell you that it's there. 
So that's pretty cool, these tiny little devices. 
And I'd like to tell you about them in a little more detail. 
But first, I have to tell you about something else. 
I'm going to tell you a few things about pennies that you might not know. 
So this one is a little bit older penny. 
It's got a picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the back. 
But the first thing you might not know, that if you zoom in, you'll find in the center of this thing you can actually see Abraham Lincoln, just like in the real Lincoln Memorial not so far from here. 
What I'm sure you don't know, that if you zoom in even further -- (Laughter) you'll see that there's actually an OWIC on Abe Lincoln's chest. 
(Laughter) But the cool thing is, you could stare at this all day long and you would never see it. 
It's invisible to the naked eye. 
These OWICs are so small, and we make them in such parallel fashion, that each OWIC costs actually less than a penny. 
In fact, the most expensive thing in this demo is that little sticker that says "OWIC." 
(Laughter) That cost about eight cents. 
(Laughter) Now, we're very excited about these things for all sorts of reasons. 
For example, we can use them as little tiny secure smart tags, more identifying than a fingerprint. 
We're actually putting them inside of other medical instruments to give other information, and even starting to think about putting them in the brain to listen to neurons one at a time. 
In fact, there's only one thing wrong with these OWICs: it's not a robot. 
It's just a head. 
(Laughter) And I think we'll all agree that half a robot really isn't a robot at all. 
Without the legs, we've got basically nothing. 
MM: OK, so you need the legs, too, if you want to build a robot. 
Now, here it turns out you can't just steal some preexisting technology. 
If you want legs for your tiny robot, you need actuators, parts that move. 
They have to satisfy a lot of different requirements. 
They need to be low voltage. 
They need to be low power, too. 
But most importantly, they have to be small. 
If you want to build a cell-sized robot, you need cell-sized legs. 
Now, nobody knows how to build that. 
There was no preexisting technology that meets all of those demands. 
To make our legs for our tiny robots, we had to make something new. 
So here's what we built. 
This is one of our actuators, and I'm applying a voltage to it. 
When I do, you can see the actuator respond by curling up. 
Now, this might not look like much, but if we were to put a red blood cell up on the screen, it'd be about that big, so these are unbelievably tiny curls. 
They're unbelievably small, and yet this device can just bend and unbend, no problem, nothing breaks. 
So how do we do it? 
Well, the actuator is made from a layer of platinum just a dozen atoms or so thick. 
Now it turns out, if you take platinum and put it in water and apply a voltage to it, atoms from the water will attach or remove themselves from the surface of the platinum, depending on how much voltage you use. 
This creates a force, and you can use that force for voltage-controlled actuation. 
The key here was to make everything ultrathin. 
Then your actuator is flexible enough to bend to these small sizes without breaking, and it can use the forces that come about from just attaching or removing a single layer of atoms. 
Now, we don't have to build these one at a time, either. 
In fact, just like the OWICs, we can build them massively in parallel as well. 
So here's a couple thousand or so actuators, and all I'm doing is applying a voltage, and they all wave, looking like nothing more than the legs of a future robot army. 
(Laughter) So now we've got the brains and we've got the brawn. 
We've got the smarts and the actuators. 
The OWICs are the brains. 
They give us sensors, they give us power supplies, and they give us a two-way communication system via light. 
The platinum layers are the muscle. 
They're what's going to move the robot around. 
Now we can take those two pieces, put them together and start to build our tiny, tiny robots. 
The first thing we wanted to build was something really simple. 
This robot walks around under user control. 
In the middle are some solar cells and some wiring attached to it. 
That's the OWIC. 
They're connected to a set of legs which have a platinum layer and these rigid panels that we put on top that tell the legs how to fold up, which shape they should take. 
The idea is that by shooting a laser at the different solar cells, you can choose which leg you want to move and make the robot walk around. 
Now, of course, we don't build those one at a time, either. 
We build them massively in parallel as well. 
We can build something like one million robots on a single four-inch wafer. 
So, for example, this image on the left, this is a chip, and this chip has something like 10,000 robots on it. 
Now, in our world, the macro world, this thing looks like it might be a new microprocessor or something. 
But if you take that chip and you put it under a microscope, what you're going to see are thousands and thousands of tiny robots. 
Now, these robots are still stuck down. 
They're still attached to the surface that we built them on. 
In order for them to walk around, we have to release them. 
We wanted to show you how we do that live, how we release the robot army, but the process involves highly dangerous chemicals, like, really nasty stuff, and we're like a mile from the White House right now? 
Yeah. They wouldn't let us do it. 
So -- (Laughter) so we're going to show you a movie instead. (Laughs) What you're looking at here are the final stages of robot deployment. 
We're using chemicals to etch the substrate out from underneath the robots. 
When it dissolves, the robots are free to fold up into their final shapes. 
Now, you can see here, the yield's about 90 percent, so almost every one of those 10,000 robots we build, that's a robot that we can deploy and control later. 
And we can take those robots and we can put them places as well. 
So if you look at the movie on the left, that's some robots in water. 
I'm going to come along with a pipette, and I can vacuum them all up. 
Now when you inject the robots back out of that pipette, they're just fine. 
In fact, these robots are so small, they're small enough to pass through the thinnest hypodermic needle you can buy. 
Yeah, so if you wanted to, you could inject yourself full of robots. 
(Laughter) I think they're into it. 
(Laughter) On the right is a robot that we put in some pond water. 
I want you to wait for just one second. 
Ooop! 
You see that? That was no shark. That was a paramecium. 
So that's the world that these things live in. 
OK, so this is all well and good, but you might be wondering at this point, "Well, do they walk?" 
Right? That's what they're supposed to do. They better. So let's find out. 
So here's the robot and here are its solar cells in the middle. 
Those are those little rectangles. 
I want you to look at the solar cell closest to the top of the slide. 
See that little white dot? That's a laser spot. 
Now watch what happens when we start switching that laser between different solar cells on the robot. 
Off it goes! 
(Applause) Yeah! 
(Applause) Off goes the robot marching around the microworld. 
Now, one of the things that's cool about this movie is: I'm actually piloting the robot in this movie. 
In fact, for six months, my job was to shoot lasers at tiny cell-sized robots to pilot them around the microworld. 
This was actually my job. 
As far as I could tell, that is the coolest job in the world. 
(Laughter) It was just the feeling of total excitement, like you're doing the impossible. 
It's a feeling of wonder like that first time I looked through a microscope as a kid staring at that rotifer. 
Now, I'm a dad, I have a son of my own, and he's about three years old. 
But one day, he's going to look through a microscope like that one. 
And I often wonder: What is he going to see? 
Instead of just watching the microworld, we as humans can now build technology to shape it, to interact with it, to engineer it. 
In 30 years, when my son is my age, what will we do with that ability? 
Will microrobots live in our bloodstream, as common as bacteria? 
Will they live on our crops and get rid of pests? 
Will they tell us when we have infections, or will they fight cancer cell by cell? 
PM: And one cool part is, you're going to be able to participate in this revolution. 
Ten years or so from now, when you buy your new iPhone 15x Moto or whatever it's called -- (Laughter) it may come with a little jar with a few thousand tiny robots in it that you can control by an app on your cell phone. 
So if you want to ride a paramecium, go for it. 
If you want to -- I don't know -- DJ the world's smallest robot dance party, make it happen. 
(Laughter) And I, for one, am very excited about that day coming. 
MM: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

At any given moment, trillions of cells are traveling through your blood vessels, sometimes circling the body in just one minute. 
Each of these cells has its origins deep in your bones. 
Bones might seem rock-solid, but they’re actually quite porous inside. 
Large and small blood vessels enter through these holes. 
And inside most of the large bones of your skeleton is a hollow core filled with soft bone marrow. 
Marrow contains fat and other supportive tissue, but its most essential elements are blood stem cells. 
These stem cells are constantly dividing. 
They can differentiate into red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, and send about hundreds of billions of new blood cells into circulation every day. 
These new cells enter the bloodstream through holes in small capillaries in the marrow. 
Through the capillaries, they reach larger blood vessels and exit the bone. 
If there’s a problem with your blood, there’s a good chance it can be traced back to the bone marrow. 
Blood cancers often begin with genetic mutations in the stem cells. 
The stem cells themselves are not cancerous, but these mutations can interfere with the process of differentiation and result in malignant blood cells. 
So for patients with advanced blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, the best chance for a cure is often an allogeneic bone marrow transplant, which replaces the patient’s bone marrow with a donor’s. 
Here’s how it works. 
First, blood stem cells are extracted from the donor. 
Most commonly, blood stem cells are filtered out of the donor’s bloodstream by circulating the blood through a machine that separates it into different components. 
In other cases, the marrow is extracted directly from a bone in the hip, the iliac crest, with a needle. 
Meanwhile, the recipient prepares for the transplant. 
High doses of chemotherapy or radiation kill the patient’s existing marrow, destroying both malignant cells and blood stem cells. 
This also weakens the immune system, making it less likely to attack the transplanted cells. 
Then the donor cells are infused into the patient’s body through a central line. 
They initially circulate in the recipient’s peripheral bloodstream, but molecules on the stem cells, called chemokines, act as homing devices and quickly traffic them back to the marrow. 
Over the course of a few weeks, they begin to multiply and start producing new, healthy blood cells. 
Just a small population of blood stem cells can regenerate a whole body’s worth of healthy marrow. 
A bone marrow transplant can also lead to something called graft-versus-tumor activity, when new immune cells generated by the donated marrow can wipe out cancer cells the recipient’s original immune system couldn’t. 
This phenomenon can help eradicate stubborn blood cancers. 
But bone marrow transplants also come with risks, including graft-versus-host disease. 
It happens when the immune system generated by the donor cells attacks the patient’s organs. 
This life-threatening condition occurs in about 30–50% of patients who receive donor cells from anyone other than an identical twin, particularly when the stem cells are collected from the blood as opposed to the bone marrow. 
Patients may take immunosuppressant medications or certain immune cells may be removed from the donated sample in order to reduce the risk of graft-versus-host disease. 
But even if a patient avoids graft-versus-host disease, their immune system may reject the donor cells. 
So it’s crucial to find the best match possible in the first place. 
Key regions of the genetic code determine how the immune system identifies foreign cells. 
If these regions are similar in the donor and the recipient, the recipient’s immune system is more likely to accept the donor cells. 
Because these genes are inherited, the best matches are often siblings. 
But many patients who need a bone marrow transplant don’t have a matched family member. 
Those patients turn to donor registries of volunteers willing to offer their bone marrow. 
All it takes to be on the registry is a cheek swab to test for a genetic match. 
And in many cases, the donation itself isn’t much more complicated than giving blood. 
It’s a way to save someone’s life with a resource that’s completely renewable. 

Lord Shiva— primordial destroyer of evil, slayer of demons, protector, and omniscient observer of the universe— was testing his wife’s patience. 
Historically, the union between Shiva and Parvati was a glorious one. 
They maintained the equilibrium between thought and action on which the well-being of the world depended. 
Without Parvati as the agent of energy, growth, and transformation on Earth, Shiva would become a detached observer, and the world would remain static. 
But together, the two formed a divine union known as Ardhanarishvara–– a sacred combination which brought fertility and connection to all living things. 
For these reasons, Parvati was worshipped far and wide as the mother of the natural world–– and the essential counterpart to Shiva’s powers of raw creation. 
She oversaw humanity’s material comforts; and ensured that the Earth’s inhabitants were bonded to each other physically, emotionally, and spiritually. 
Yet a rift had grown between these two formidable forces. 
While Parvati sustained daily life with care and control, Shiva had begun to belittle his wife’s essential work— and insisted on quarreling about their roles in the universe. 
He believed that Brahma, the Creator of the world, had conceived the material plane purely for his own fancy. 
And therefore, all material things were merely distractions called māyā— nothing but a cosmic illusion. 
For millennia Parvati had merely smiled knowingly as Shiva dismissed the things she nurtured. 
But upon His latest rebuke, she knew she had to prove the importance of her work once and for all. 
She took flight from the world, withdrawing her half of the cosmic energy that kept the Earth turning. 
At her disappearance, a sudden, terrifying and all-encompassing scarcity enveloped the world in eerie silence. 
Without Parvati, the land became dry and barren. 
Rivers shrank and crops shriveled in the fields. 
Hunger descended on humanity. 
Parents struggled to console their starving children while their own stomachs rumbled. 
With nothing to eat, people no longer gathered over heaped bowls of rice, but withdrew and shrank from the darkening world. 
To His shock and awe, Shiva also felt the profound emptiness left by his wife’s absence. 
Despite His supreme power, He too realized that He was not immune to the need for sustenance, and His yearning felt bottomless and unbearable. 
As Shiva despaired over the desolate Earth, He came to realize that the material world could not be so easily dismissed. 
At her husband’s epiphany, the compassionate Parvati could no longer stand by and watch her devotees wasting away. 
To walk among them and restore their health, she took the form of a new avatar, carrying a golden bowl of porridge and armed with a jewel-encrusted ladle. 
As word of this hopeful figure spread, she was worshipped as Annapurna, the Goddess of food. 
With the arrival of Annapurna, the world blossomed anew. 
People rejoiced at fertility and food, and communed together to give thanks. 
Some believe that Annapurna first appeared in the sacred city of Kashi, or the Place of Freedom, on the banks of the Ganges— where she opened a kitchen to fill the bellies of the people until they could eat no more. 
But it was not only mere mortals who were served at her feast. 
Humbled at the scenes of earthly pleasure blooming all around him, Lord Shiva himself approached the goddess with an empty bowl and begged for food and forgiveness. 
For this reason, the supreme deity is sometimes portrayed as a poor beggar at the mercy of Annapurna; holding her golden bowl in her left hand, while the right forms the abhaya mudra–– a gesture of safety and assurance. 
With these symbols, this powerful avatar makes it clear that the material world is anything but an illusion. 
Rather, it is a cycle of life that must be sustained— from the feeding of open mouths and rumbling bellies, to the equilibrium of the Earth. 

Paleontology, a science geared towards small children, focused on digging up dinosaurs while sporting a "Jurassic Park" costume. 
Skulls are popped out of the ground and put on display for public gawking. 
The relevance of this, beyond clickbait, coloring books and monster movies is unknown. 
No ... 
Wait. 
That's not paleontology at all. 
Paleontology is nothing less than the study of past life. 
All past life. 
From ancestors to alien forms. 
It involves fundamental questions like "Who are we?" 
And "How did we get here?" -- using the broadest possible definition of "we": life itself. 
Dinosaurs, a category of birds, are just a small percentage of that. 
(Laughter) Yet they get the most media attention. 
[The incredible diversity of ancient life, Dinosaurs, Paleontology] It's a very accurate meme; I didn't even make this one. 
This is just the truth. 
Anyway, most of us paleontologists consider dinosaurs to be a gateway drug. 
There is so much cooler stuff in the fossil record, and we know so much about it. 
Let's go on a brief, dinosaur-free tour of the last four billion years. 
(Laughter) First up, genetic material. 
Viruses, basically, started producing proteins and wrecking their environment. 
The Earth was infected with life. 
Some of these new bacteria learned how to eat sunshine, producing oxygen, pulling in carbon from the air and destroying the iron food of other microbes by turning it into rust. 
This went on for billions of years. 
Some bacteria consumed other bacteria, gaining their power to turn oxygen into energy, becoming the precursors of animals and plants. 
But as a result, there were climate shocks, from hot to cold and back again, which ended up turning the Earth into a snowball covered with glaciers. 
The technical term for this time period is "Snowball Earth." 
(Laughter) Seven hundred, eight hundred million years ago. 
Anyway, microbes banded together, creating multicellular life. 
Six hundred million years ago, geometric colonies appeared, sucking microbes from the water. 
These were soon replaced by the ancestors of modern animals. 
The Cambrian explosion. 
Lobster relatives ate other animals, capturing them using their grasping arms. 
Armored wriggling clam worms crawled across the seafloor and into it, creating new ecosystems. 
Our tadpole-like ancestors flitted along ancient coastlines, while their eel-like relatives with gnashing throat teeth swam above the ice-cream cone corals of the first reefs, dodging school-bus-sized krakens and hungry sea scorpions. 
Plant fungus came onto land. 
But then the glaciers returned, killing pretty much everything. 
But mass extinctions open opportunities. 
Jawless fishes invaded the ocean, sporting points, prongs, and finally, fins. 
Spiders, scorpions, snails and worms came onto land. 
Somewhere around China, a fish developed jaws, and its descendants drove jawless fishes, sea scorpions and branching plankton to extinction. 
Some of these fishes, which had arm bones in their fins, sprouted fingers, seven or eight per flipper. 
On land, plants became trees, growing massive or spreading their spores only once before dying. 
But then the glaciers came back again, and it was mass extinction number two. 
It was the age of weird fishes and plated sea lilies. 
Sharks with wings. 
Sharks with buzz saw jaws. 
Sharks with fins covered in tiny teeth. 
Sharks with crushing tooth plates. 
Bony fishes that looked like modern angelfish and eels for the first time. 
Wetlands developed, sporting ten-foot-long millipedes and giant dragon flies. 
These spread across the supercontinent of Pangaea and died, creating coal, leading to a 100-million-year Ice Age. 
Finally, vertebrates made it onto land on a permanent basis, leading to alligator-like amphibians and saber-toothed protomammals. 
But then, volcanoes erupted all over Siberia, everything almost died and it was mass extinction number three. 
(Laughter) The day life nearly died. 
A single, lonely tusked mammal survived and thrived, but it was soon replaced by galloping crocodiles. 
In the ocean, marine reptiles, giant rafts made of the living relatives of sea urchins and armored squids, ammonoids, of every kind and form. 
But then, Pangaea started to split apart, forming a sea of lava that would one day become the Atlantic Ocean, spewing toxic gas into the atmosphere and mass extinction number four. 
(Laughter) Yeah, there's actually a lot more than these five, these are the big ones. 
(Laughter) So, finally, there were whale-sized fishes, and modern fishes mobbed corals, made gigantic by using their captured algae to eat sunshine. 
Crabs, stingrays and other fishes with crushing teeth appeared, smashing shells and leading to an arms race between predators and prey. 
There was an explosion of marine biodiversity. 
Mammals climbed trees, flew and did a lot of other things that are seemingly sort of modern. 
They were feeding on the first flowers pollinated by the first bees. 
There were ecological revolutions on land and at sea, leading to the modern world. 
Except that an asteroid hit Mexico, and then that triggered volcanoes on the other side of the world in India, and everything almost died again. 
(Laughter) But -- there's always a but, because we're still here -- mammals arose from the ashes, became small under extreme heat and then ever larger. 
There were palm trees and snakes in the Arctic. 
Predatory deer dogs frolicked along ancient rivers, while their relatives returned to the ocean to become the first otter-like whales. 
Not hyenas and other sort of carnivores were chased off by giant long-necked rhinos. 
Everything at this point seems kind of familiar but not really. 
In Antarctica, an ice age started, forming the first permanent polar ice cap in two hundred million years. 
This dried out the rest of the world, but it allowed the rise of grasses, of rodents, of cats. 
Somewhere in Africa, an ape started walking across the new savannah. 
Oh, and there were giant saber-toothed salmon, I just have to mention that. 
(Laughter) So, we know all of this happened and so much more. 
How? 
Why? 
Paleontology is a thriving science at the intersection of multiple other fields and technologies. 
There is no bigger data than the fossil record, and we mine every bit of it. 
We use CAT scans, we use isotopes, we use genomes, we use robots, we use mathematical simulations and all kinds of analytics. 
We maximize all of it so that we can understand the past and how evolution works. 
It also lets us make predictions for the future. 
What will happen after the next mass extinction? 
What weird things will show up? 
Will mammals get smaller again? 
Will there even be mammals? 
In sum, we have learned a lot about dinosaurs. 
But there's so much left to learn from the other 99.9 percent of things that have ever lived. 
And that's paleontology. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

You never give it any thought, and there are billions of them out there, but the amount of design and passion and creativity that goes into this little disc is remarkable. 
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] The coffee cup lid is a lid for your coffee cup. 
It snaps on. 
It has an opening. 
You've got lids with a little latch that opens and closes. 
You've got ones that are in creative shapes. 
Coffee cup lids have their own vocabulary. 
People talk about the "peripheral skirts," the "press-in dimples," the "fragrance outlets," the "slosh factor." 
But you need these words, because so much thought and innovation goes into these coffee cup lids. 
Our society is just more and more mobile. 
Everything is on the move. 
The good part: it's convenient. 
You can drink coffee anywhere, you don't have the stay in the diner. 
It can be in the subway. You can be walking. 
The bad part is, it's harder to savor a coffee when you're taking it on the road. 
The first patent for a lid on a cup was in 1934, but it was for cold beverages. 
And in 1950, this guy named James Reifsnyder invented the first snap-on lid. 
But it didn't have an opening for drinking. 
In the '60s there was this huge cultural shift, where people started drinking coffee on the move. 
And 7-Eleven was the first to sell coffee to go. 
And then came this revolution in 1967. 
A man named Alan Frank invented a lid that you could peel a tab off, like in the shape of a guitar pick, and drink it from there. 
In 1975, another big advance: you could peel back a tab and attach it to the lid itself. 
So, more and more people started drinking coffee on the go. 
In 1984, a watershed moment in the history of coffee cup lids: the birth of the traveler lid. 
And it is iconic -- you've seen it a million times. 
And it solved a whole host of problems. 
It's designed so that you don't splash your face, because it's higher than any of the other ones. 
And it's got this protruding rim, so it slightly cools the coffee before it hits your lips. 
It's got a small depression in the center for your nose, so you can really get in there and get maximum aroma. 
It's got this tiny air hole that lets the steam out and stops it from creating a vacuum. 
This is one of those objects where you just don't notice it until it dribbles on your lap. 
So I think the coffee cup lid will just continue to evolve, and you're going to see a move away from single-use plastic lids to lids that are a little more sustainable. 
We're not going to stop moving. 
We're not going to stop drinking coffee. 
And I think that's what these coffee lid engineers are trying to do, is to make it so that the experience of taking it on the road is as good as sitting in a restaurant, drinking from a ceramic cup. 
Because, you know, coffee is serious business. 

Growing up in Missouri, they would kind of take us out into the woods, and they would give you a map, and they would give you a compass, and you had to find your way home. 
And without the compass, you can't even read the map. 
That's what I'm here to tell you. 
The compass is the key. 
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] A compass is most simply a piece of metal that has been magnetized, so that it will turn towards the Earth's magnetic pole. 
The one that we all think of is the pocket compass. 
It looks like a watch, right? 
You can hold it in your hand and watch the little needle bounce around until you find north. 
Magnetism is still a pretty mysterious force to physicists, but what we do know for sure is that a compass works because the Earth is this giant magnet. 
And when you use a compass, you are in touch with the very center of our planet, where this kind of roiling ball of molten iron is spinning around and creating a magnetic field. 
Just like a magnet you can play with on your tabletop, it has a north pole and a south pole, and we use compasses to find our way north because of that fact. 
The earliest known compass comes from about 200 BC in China. 
They figured out that some of the metal coming out of the ground was naturally magnetic, and so they fashioned this magnetized metal into this kind of ladle-looking thing, put it on a brass plate and then it would point north. 
It seems to have been primarily used to improve feng shui, so they could figure out what was the best way for energy to flow through their living spaces. 
Sailors were probably the early adopters of the more portable versions of it, because no matter where the sun was, no matter what the condition of the stars were, they would always be able to find north. 
Now, much later, the Europeans are the ones who innovate and come up with the compass rose. 
It essentially laid out what north, south, east and west looked like, and it also enabled you to kind of create new directions, like northwest, southeast, what have you. 
And for the first time, they knew where they were going. 
That's kind of a big deal. 
But also, I think it was part of this general reinvigoration of European science. 
You might know it as the Renaissance. 
Lots of new tools were invented, from the telescope to the microscope. 
Maps got better because of compasses, right? 
Because then you start to understand which direction is which, you get a lot more detail, and that just kind of changes the human relationship to the world. 
The compass with a map is like a superpower. 
Everything that we think of as world history would not have taken place without the compass: the age of exploration, Magellan circumnavigating the globe, even the fact that we know it is a globe. 
The compass ends up getting embedded in all these other tools, because it is such a functional object. 
So you might have it embedded in your multi-tool, you might have it embedded in your phone. 
The compass is everywhere, because it's literally how we find our way across the face of the Earth. 
So you can go off and explore, and find out what is over that next hill or that next horizon, but you can also reliably find your way home. 

I think that at the time, Catwoman had a really cool pair of glasses in the Batman series that was on television. 
And I wanted to be cool like her. 
It didn't occur to me that glasses were really a medical device. 
(Small Thing.) (Big Idea.) When light rays reflect off an object and enter the eye through the cornea, your retina converts this light into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain, which interprets the impulses and allows you to understand what you're seeing. 
Eyeglasses help you see. 
The earliest forms of eye gear can be traced back 4,000 years. 
Cultures that needed to adapt to climates that were snowy created eye shields, and they were made of bone and animal hides. 
They had small slits for people to see through, but no lenses. 
The first vision aid was called a reading stone and was invented over 1,000 years ago. 
It's not exactly clear who invented the first eyeglasses, but many people attribute it to the Italians. 
Early versions of eyeglasses were called rivet spectacles. 
They were two magnifying glasses that were hinged together at the bridge of the nose. 
It took some time for eyeglasses to land on the perfect design. 
They didn't really have sides, which are also called temples, or arms, until about the 17th century. 
Modern-day eyeglasses feature a pair of rims that hold corrective lenses, a bridge that connects the rims, sides that slide behind the ears, hinges that connect the sides to the frames, and on some glasses, a pair of temple tips for behind the ear comfort. 
In American culture, 20th century cinema helped popularize eyeglasses. 
Audiences would see glamorous actresses and actors donning glasses to take on a different persona. 
Sometimes a pair of glasses became popularized by the actual person that was wearing them, and then that personality trait was projected into the actual device. 
You had the aviator glasses, which showed a forward-thinking, adventurous type of person. 
Glasses with heavy frames signified intelligence or nerdiness. 
Wayfarers signified this kind of nerdy punk, the outlaw, the misfit. 
Glasses have become so popular as a fashion device that some people actually don glasses without a prescription lens at all, because they want to portray a certain attribute about themselves. 
Glasses are a lifeline to people. 
People that can't see well enough to drive, well enough to cook, well enough to read rely on glasses for maintaining their lives. 
And there's lots of other objects in our society that have been created to help overcome various physical obstacles. 
And it's only the eyeglasses that have catapulted to that fashion statement. 
Wouldn't it be wonderful if anything that we use, any device that we've invented to help our humanity could also be elevated in the same way? 
(Upbeat music) 

A few years ago, my obsession with productivity got so bad that I suffered an episode of burnout that scared the hell out of me. 
I'm talking insomnia, weight gain, hair loss -- the works. 
I was so overworked that my brain literally couldn't come up with another idea. 
That indicated to me that my identity was linked with this idea of productivity. 
[The Way We Work] Do you feel guilty if you haven't been productive enough during the day? 
Do you spend hours reading productivity hacks, trying new frameworks and testing new apps to get even more done? 
I've tried them all -- task apps, calendar apps, time-management apps, things that are meant to manage your day. 
We've been so obsessed with doing more that we've missed the most important thing. 
Many of these tools aren't helping. 
They're making things worse. 
OK, let's talk about productivity for a second. 
Historically, productivity as we know it today was used during the industrial revolution. 
It was a system that measured performance based on consistent output. 
You clocked into your shift and were responsible for creating X number of widgets on the assembly line. 
At the end of the day, it was pretty easy to see who worked hard and who hadn't. 
When we shifted to a knowledge economy, people suddenly had tasks that were much more abstract, things like writing, problem-solving or strategizing, tasks that weren't easy to measure. 
Companies struggled to figure out how to tell who was working and who wasn't, so they just adopted the old systems as best as they could, leading to things like the dreaded time sheet where everyone is under pressure to justify how they spend every second of their day. 
There's just one problem. 
These systems don't make a lot of sense for creative work. 
We still think of productivity as an endurance sport. 
You try to churn out as many blog posts or we cram our day full of meetings. 
But this model of constant output isn't conducive to creative thought. 
Today, knowledge workers are facing a big challenge. 
We're expected to be constantly productive and creative in equal measure. 
But it's actually almost impossible for our brains to continuously generate new ideas with no rest. 
In fact, downtime is a necessity for our brain to recover and to operate properly. 
Consider that according to a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, letting our minds wander is an essential mental state that helps us develop our identity, process social interactions, and it even influences our internal moral compass. 
Our need for a break flies in the face of our cultural narrative about hustling, in other words, the stories that we as a society tell each other about what success looks like and what it takes to get there. 
Stories like the American Dream, which is one of our most deeply rooted beliefs. 
This tells us that if we work hard, we'll be successful. 
But there's a flip side. 
If you aren't successful, it must mean that you're not working hard enough. 
And if you don't think you're doing enough, of course you're going to stay late, pull all-nighters and push yourself hard even when you know better. 
Productivity has wrapped itself up in our self-worth, so that it's almost impossible for us to allow ourselves to stop working. 
The average US employee only takes half of their allocated paid vacation leave, further proving that even if we have the option to take a break, we don't. 
To be clear, I don't think that productivity or trying to improve our performance is bad. 
I'm just saying that the current models we're using to measure our creative work don't make sense. 
We need systems that work with our creativity and not against it. 
[SO HOW DO WE FIX IT?] There is no quick fix for this problem. 
And I know, I know, that sucks. 
No one loves a good framework or a good acronym better than me. 
But the truth is everyone has their own narratives that they have to uncover. 
It wasn't until I started digging around my own beliefs around work that I began to unravel the root of my own work story, finally being able to let go of destructive behaviors and make positive, long-lasting changes. 
And the only way to do that is by asking yourself some hard questions. 
Does being busy make you feel valuable? 
Who do you hold up as an example of success? 
Where did your ideas of work ethic come from? 
How much of who you are is linked to what you do? 
Your creativity, it has its own rhythms. 
Our energy fluctuates daily, weekly, even seasonally. 
I know that I'm always more energetic at the beginning of the week than at the end, so I front-load my workweek to account for that fact. 
As a proud night owl, I free up my afternoons and evenings for creative work. 
And I know I'll get more writing done in the cozy winter months than during the summer. 
And that's the secret. 
Dismantling myths, challenging your old views, identifying your narratives -- this is the real work that we need to be doing. 
We aren't machines, and I think it's time that we stopped working like one. 

Ethic, Hedge, and Octavia stand on the edge of a bottomless ravine. 
It’s the only thing between them and the tower that houses the second of three powerful artifacts. 
They’ve got a brief window of time to get across before the guards return. 
With Hedge’s fuel gauge on empty he won’t be able to fly Ethic across, so the only option is to make a bridge. 
Fortunately, the floating stacks of stones nearby are bridge components— invented by Octavia herself— called hover-blocks. 
Activate a pile with a burst of energy, and they’ll self-assemble to span the ravine as Ethic walks across. 
But there is, of course, a catch. 
The hover-blocks are only stable when they’re perfectly palindromic. 
Meaning they have to form a sequence that’s the same when viewed forwards and backwards. 
The stacks start in random orders, but will always put themselves into a palindromic configuration if they can. 
If they get to a point where a palindrome isn’t possible, the bridge will collapse, and whoever’s on it will fall into the ravine. 
Let’s look at an example. 
This stack would make itself stable. 
First the A blocks hold themselves in place. 
Then the B’s. 
And finally the C would nestle right between the B’s. 
However, suppose there was one more A. 
First two A blocks form up, then two B’s, but now the remaining C and A have nowhere to go, so the whole thing falls apart. 
The Node of Power enables Hedge to energize a single stack of blocks. 
What instructions can Ethic give Hedge to allow him to efficiently find and power a stable palindromic stack? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Examples of palindromes include ANNA, RACECAR, and MADAM IM ADAM. 
Counting the number of times a given letter appears in a palindrome will reveal a helpful pattern. 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Let’s first look at a naïve solution to this problem. 
A naïve solution is a simple, brute-force approach that isn’t optimized— but will get the job done. 
Naïve solutions are helpful ways to analyze problems, and work as stepping stones to better solutions. 
In this case, a naïve solution is to approach a pile of blocks, try all the arrangements, and see if one is a palindrome by reading it forward and then backwards. 
The problem with this approach is that it would take a tremendous amount of time. 
If Hedge tried one combination every second, a stack of just 10 different blocks would take him 42 days to exhaust. 
That’s because the total time is a function of the factorial of the number of blocks there are. 
10 blocks have over 3 million combinations. 
What this naïve solution shows is that we need a much faster way to tell whether a pile of blocks can form a palindrome. 
To start, it may be intuitively clear that a pile of all different blocks will never form one. 
The first and last blocks can’t be the same if there are no repeats. 
So when can a given sequence become a palindrome? 
One way to figure that out is to analyze a few existing palindromes. 
In ANNA, there are 2 A’s and 2 N’s. 
RACECAR has 2 R’s, 2 A’s, 2 C’s, and 1 E. 
And MADAM IM ADAM has 4 M’s, 4 A’s, 2 D’s, and 1 I. 
The pattern here is that most of the letters occur an even number of times, and there’s at most 1 that occurs just once. 
Is that it? 
What if RACECAR had 3 E’s instead of 1? 
We could tack the new E’s onto the ends and still get a palindrome, so 3 is ok. 
But make that 3 E’s and 3 C’s, and there’s nowhere for the last C to go. 
So the most generalized insight is that at most one letter can appear an odd number of times, but the rest have to be even. 
Hedge can count the letters in each stack and organize them into a dictionary, which is a tidy way of storing information. 
A loop could then go through and count how many times odd numbers appear. 
If there are less than 2 odd characters, the stack can be made into a palindrome. 
This approach is much, much faster than the naïve solution. 
Instead of factorial time, it takes linear time. 
That’s where the time increases in proportion to the number of blocks there are. 
Now write a loop for Hedge to approach the piles individually, and stop when he finds a good one, and you’ll be ready to go. 
Here’s what happens: Hedge is fast, but there are so many piles it takes a long time. 
Too long. 
Ethic and Hedge are safe. 
But Octavia is not so lucky. 

I live in Utah, a place known for having some of the most awe-inspiring natural landscapes on this planet. 
It's easy to be overwhelmed by these amazing views, and to be really fascinated by these sometimes alien-looking formations. 
As a scientist, I love observing the natural world. 
But as a cell biologist, I'm much more interested in understanding the natural world at a much, much smaller scale. 
I'm a molecular animator, and I work with other researchers to create visualizations of molecules that are so small, they're essentially invisible. 
These molecules are smaller than the wavelength of light, which means that we can never see them directly, even with the best light microscopes. 
So how do I create visualizations of things that are so small we can't see them? 
Scientists, like my collaborators, can spend their entire professional careers working to understand one molecular process. 
To do this, they carry out a series of experiments that each can tell us a small piece of the puzzle. 
One kind of experiment can tell us about the protein shape, while another can tell us about what other proteins it might interact with, and another can tell us about where it can be found in a cell. 
And all of these bits of information can be used to come up with a hypothesis, a story, essentially, of how a molecule might work. 
My job is to take these ideas and turn them into an animation. 
This can be tricky, because it turns out that molecules can do some pretty crazy things. 
But these animations can be incredibly useful for researchers to communicate their ideas of how these molecules work. 
They can also allow us to see the molecular world through their eyes. 
I'd like to show you some animations, a brief tour of what I consider to be some of the natural wonders of the molecular world. 
First off, this is an immune cell. 
These kinds of cells need to go crawling around in our bodies in order to find invaders like pathogenic bacteria. 
This movement is powered by one of my favorite proteins called actin, which is part of what's known as the cytoskeleton. 
Unlike our skeletons, actin filaments are constantly being built and taken apart. 
The actin cytoskeleton plays incredibly important roles in our cells. 
They allow them to change shape, to move around, to adhere to surfaces and also to gobble up bacteria. 
Actin is also involved in a different kind of movement. 
In our muscle cells, actin structures form these regular filaments that look kind of like fabric. 
When our muscles contract, these filaments are pulled together and they go back to their original position when our muscles relax. 
Other parts of the cytoskeleton, in this case microtubules, are responsible for long-range transportation. 
They can be thought of as basically cellular highways that are used to move things from one side of the cell to the other. 
Unlike our roads, microtubules grow and shrink, appearing when they're needed and disappearing when their job is done. 
The molecular version of semitrucks are proteins aptly named motor proteins, that can walk along microtubules, dragging sometimes huge cargoes, like organelles, behind them. 
This particular motor protein is known as dynein, and its known to be able to work together in groups that almost look, at least to me, like a chariot of horses. 
As you see, the cell is this incredibly changing, dynamic place, where things are constantly being built and disassembled. 
But some of these structures are harder to take apart than others, though. 
And special forces need to be brought in in order to make sure that structures are taken apart in a timely manner. 
That job is done in part by proteins like these. 
These donut-shaped proteins, of which there are many types in the cell, all seem to act to rip apart structures by basically pulling individual proteins through a central hole. 
When these kinds of proteins don't work properly, the types of proteins that are supposed to get taken apart can sometimes stick together and aggregate and that can give rise to terrible diseases, such as Alzheimer's. 
And now let's take a look at the nucleus, which houses our genome in the form of DNA. 
In all of our cells, our DNA is cared for and maintained by a diverse set of proteins. 
DNA is wound around proteins called histones, which enable cells to pack large amounts of DNA into our nucleus. 
These machines are called chromatin remodelers, and the way they work is that they basically scoot the DNA around these histones and they allow new pieces of DNA to become exposed. 
This DNA can then be recognized by other machinery. 
In this case, this large molecular machine is looking for a segment of DNA that tells it it's at the beginning of a gene. 
Once it finds a segment, it basically undergoes a series of shape changes which enables it to bring in other machinery that in turn allows a gene to get turned on or transcribed. 
This has to be a very tightly regulated process, because turning on the wrong gene at the wrong time can have disastrous consequences. 
Scientists are now able to use protein machines to edit genomes. 
I'm sure all of you have heard of CRISPR. 
CRISPR takes advantage of a protein known as Cas9, which can be engineered to recognize and cut a very specific sequence of DNA. 
In this example, two Cas9 proteins are being used to excise a problematic piece of DNA. 
For example, a part of a gene that may give rise to a disease. 
Cellular machinery is then used to basically glue two ends of the DNA back together. 
As a molecular animator, one of my biggest challenges is visualizing uncertainty. 
All of the animations I've shown to you represent hypotheses, how my collaborators think a process works, based on the best information that they have. 
But for a lot of molecular processes, we're still really at the early stages of understanding things, and there's a lot to learn. 
The truth is that these invisible molecular worlds are vast and largely unexplored. 
To me, these molecular landscapes are just as exciting to explore as a natural world that's visible all around us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

In 2013, a team of researchers held a math test. 
The exam was administered to over 1,100 American adults, and designed, in part, to test their ability to evaluate sets of data. 
Hidden among these math problems were two almost identical questions. 
Both problems used the same difficult data set, and each had one objectively correct answer. 
The first asked about the correlation between rashes and a new skin cream. 
The second asked about the correlation between crime rates and gun control legislation. 
Participants with strong math skills were much more likely to get the first question correct. 
But despite being mathematically identical, the results for the second question looked totally different. 
Here, math skills weren’t the best predictor of which participants answered correctly. 
Instead, another variable the researchers had been tracking came into play: political identity. 
Participants whose political beliefs aligned with a correct interpretation of the data were far more likely to answer the problem right. 
Even the study’s top mathematicians were 45% more likely to get the second question wrong when the correct answer challenged their political beliefs. 
What is it about politics that inspires this kind of illogical error? 
Can someone’s political identity actually affect their ability to process information? 
The answer lies in a cognitive phenomenon that has become increasingly visible in public life: partisanship. 
While it’s often invoked in the context of politics, partisanship is more broadly defined as a strong preference or bias towards any particular group or idea. 
Our political, ethnic, religious, and national identities are all different forms of partisanship. 
Of course, identifying with social groups is an essential and healthy part of human life. 
Our sense of self is defined not only by who we are as individuals, but also by the groups we belong to. 
As a result, we’re strongly motivated to defend our group identities, protecting both our sense of self and our social communities. 
But this becomes a problem when the group’s beliefs are at odds with reality. 
Imagine watching your favorite sports team commit a serious foul. 
You know that’s against the rules, but your fellow fans think it’s totally acceptable. 
The tension between these two incompatible thoughts is called cognitive dissonance, and most people are driven to resolve this uncomfortable state of limbo. 
You might start to blame the referee, complain that the other team started it, or even convince yourself there was no foul in the first place. 
In a case like this, people are often more motivated to maintain a positive relationship with their group than perceive the world accurately. 
This behavior is especially dangerous in politics. 
On an individual scale, allegiance to a party allows people to create a political identity and support policies they agree with. 
But partisan-based cognitive dissonance can lead people to reject evidence that’s inconsistent with the party line or discredits party leaders. 
And when entire groups of people revise the facts in service of partisan beliefs, it can lead to policies that aren’t grounded in truth or reason. 
This problem isn’t new— political identities have been around for centuries. 
But studies show that partisan polarization has increased dramatically in the last few decades. 
One theory explaining this increase is the trend towards clustering geographically in like-minded communities. 
Another is the growing tendency to rely on partisan news or social media bubbles. 
These often act like echo chambers, delivering news and ideas from people with similar views. 
Fortunately, cognitive scientists have uncovered some strategies for resisting this distortion filter. 
One is to remember that you’re probably more biased than you think. 
So when you encounter new information, make a deliberate effort to push through your initial intuition and evaluate it analytically. 
In your own groups, try to make fact-checking and questioning assumptions a valued part of the culture. 
Warning people that they might have been presented with misinformation can also help. 
And when you’re trying to persuade someone else, affirming their values and framing the issue in their language can help make people more receptive. 
We still have a long way to go before solving the problem of partisanship. 
But hopefully, these tools can help keep us better informed, and capable of making evidence-based decisions about our shared reality. 

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

London, 1928: a group of mold spores surf a breeze through a lab. 
They drift onto a petri dish, and when they land, they germinate a medical revolution. 
This lab belongs to Alexander Fleming, a Scottish scientist investigating the properties of infectious bacteria. 
At this time, Fleming is away on vacation. 
When he returns, he finds a colony of mold growing on a petri dish he’d forgotten to place in his incubator. 
And around this colony of mold is a zone completely and unexpectedly clear of bacteria. 
In studying this mysterious phenomenon, Fleming came to realize that the mold was secreting some kind of compound that was killing the bacteria. 
The mold was a species in the Penicillium genus, so Fleming dubbed the antibacterial compound “penicillin.” What Fleming stumbled upon was a microbial defense system. 
The penicillium mold constantly produces penicillin in order to defend itself from threats, such as nearby bacterial colonies that might consume its resources. 
Penicillin destroys many types of bacteria by disrupting synthesis of their cell walls. 
These walls get their strength from a thick, protective mesh of sugars and amino acids, that are constantly being broken down and rebuilt. 
Penicillin binds to one of the compounds that weaves this mesh together and prevents the wall from being reconstructed at a critical phase. 
Meanwhile, penicillin stimulates the release of highly reactive molecules that cause additional damage. 
Eventually, the cell’s structure breaks down completely. 
This two-pronged attack is lethal to a wide range of bacteria, whether in petri-dishes, our bodies, or elsewhere. 
It’s not, however, harmful to our own cells, because those don’t have cell walls. 
For a decade or so after Fleming’s discovery, penicillin remained a laboratory curiosity. 
But during World War II, researchers figured out how to isolate the active compound and grow the mold in larger quantities. 
They then went on to win the Nobel Prize for their work. 
Teams at Oxford and several American drug companies continued development, and within a few years it was commercially available. 
Penicillin and similar compounds quickly transformed the treatment of infections. 
For the time being, they remain some of the most important, life-saving antibiotics used in medicine. 
However, the more we use any antibiotic, the more bacteria evolve resistance to it. 
In the case of penicillin, some bacteria produce compounds that can break down the key structure that interferes with cell wall synthesis. 
As antibiotic use has increased, more and more bacteria have evolved this defense, making these antibiotics ineffective against a growing number of bacterial infections. 
This means it’s essential that doctors not overprescribe the drug. 
Meanwhile, 5 to 15% of patients in developed countries self-identify as allergic to penicillin, making it the most commonly reported drug allergy. 
However, the vast majority— over 90%— of people who think they’re allergic to penicillin actually are not. 
Why the misperception? 
Many patients acquire the allergy label as children, when a rash appears after they’re treated for an infection with penicillin or closely related drugs. 
The rash is often blamed on penicillin, while the more likely culprit is the original infection, or a reaction between the infection and the antibiotic. 
However, genuine penicillin allergies, where our immune systems mistake penicillin for an attacker, do occur rarely and can be very dangerous. 
So if you think you’re allergic but don’t know for sure, your best bet is to visit an allergist. 
They’ll complete an evaluation that’ll confirm whether or not you have the allergy. 
Even if you do have a penicillin allergy, your immune cells that react to the drug may lose their ability to recognize it. 
In fact, about 80% of people who are allergic to penicillin outgrow their allergy within ten years. 
This is great news for people who currently identify as allergic to penicillin; the drug may one day save their lives, as it has done for so many others. 

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

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

One morning, 18 years ago, I stepped out of a New York City subway on a beautiful day in September. 
The sun was warm and bright, the sky was a clear, perfect blue. 
I had my six-month-old son in one of those front-facing baby carriers, you know, so he could see everything. 
And when I turned right on Sixth Avenue, what he saw was the World Trade Center on fire. 
As soon as I realized that this was an attack, the first thing I did, without even really thinking about it, was to take my baby and turn him around in that carrier. 
I didn't want him to see what was going on. 
And I just remember feeling so grateful that he was still young enough that I didn't have to tell him that someone had done this on purpose. 
9/11 was like crossing a border, a hostile border into dangerous, uncharted territory. 
The world was suddenly in this terrifying new place, and I was in this place as a new mother. 
I remember my thoughts kind of ping-ponging around from, "How am I ever going to protect this baby?" 
to, "How am I ever going to get some sleep?" 
Well, my son turned 18 this year, along with millions of other people who were babies on 9/11. 
And in that time, we have all crossed into this hostile, uncharted territory of climate breakdown, of endless wars, of economic meltdowns, of deep political divisions, of the many crises around the world that I don't need to list off, because they are blaring at you every single day from your news feed. 
But there is something I've learned in these 18 years of parenting and in my years leading a global women's rights organization. 
There is a way to face these big crises in the world without feeling overwhelmed and despairing. 
It's simple, and it's powerful. 
It's to think like a mother. 
Now, to be clear, you don't have to be a woman or a parent to do this. 
Thinking like a mother is a lens that's available to everybody. 
The poet Alexis De Veaux writes, "Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth. 
It's an understanding of the needs of the world." 
Now, it's easy to focus on all of the obstacles to making this the world we want: greed, inequality, violence. 
Yes, there is all of that. 
But there's also the option to plant a seed, a different seed, and cultivate what you want to see grow, even in the midst of crisis. 
Majid from Iraq understands this. 
He is a housepainter by trade and someone who believes deeply in equal rights for women. 
When ISIS invaded northern Iraq where he lives, he worked with a local women's organization to help build an underground railroad, an escape network for women's rights activists and LGBTIQ folks who were targeted with assassination. 
And when I asked Majid why he risked his own life to bring people to safety, he said to me, "If we want a brighter future, we have to build it now in the dark times so that one day we can live in the light." 
That's what social justice work is, and that's what mothers do. 
We act in the present with an idea of the future that we want to bring about. 
All of the best ideas seem impossible at first. 
But just in my lifetime, we've seen the end of apartheid, the affirmation that women's rights are human rights, marriage equality, the fall of dictators who ruled for decades and so much more. 
All of these things seemed impossible until people took action to make them happen, and then, like, almost right away, they seemed inevitable. 
When I was growing up, whether we were stuck in traffic or dealing with a family tragedy, my mother would say, "Something good is going to happen, we just don't know what it is yet." 
Now, I will admit that my brothers and I make fun of her for this, but people ask me all the time how I deal with the suffering that I see in my work in refugee camps and disaster zones, and I think of my mom and that seed of possibility that she planted in me. 
Because, when you believe that something good is coming and you're part of making it happen, you start to be able to see beyond the suffering to how things could be. 
Today, there is a new set of necessary ideas that seem impossible but one day will feel inevitable: that we could end violence against women, make war a thing of the past, learn to live in balance with nature before it's too late and make sure that everybody has what they need to thrive. 
Of course, being able to picture a future like this is not the same thing as knowing what to do to make it come about, but thinking like a mother can help with that, too. 
A few years ago, East Africa was gripped by a famine, and women I know from Somalia walked for days carrying their hungry children in search of food and water. 
A quarter of a million people died, and half of them were babies and toddlers. 
And while this catastrophe unfolded, too much of the world looked away. 
But a group of women farmers in Sudan, including Fatima Ahmed -- that's her holding the corn -- heard about what was happening. 
And they pooled together the extra money that they had from their harvest and asked me to send it to those Somali mothers. 
Now, these farmers could have decided that they didn't have the power to act. 
They were barely getting by themselves, some of them. 
They lived without electricity, without furniture. 
But they overrode that. 
They did what mothers do: they saw themselves as the solution and they took action. 
You do it all the time if you have kids. 
You make major decisions about their health care, their education, their emotional well-being, even if you're not a doctor or a teacher or a therapist. 
You recognize what your child needs and you step up to provide it the best you can. 
Thinking like a mother means seeing the whole world through the eyes of those who are responsible for its most vulnerable people. 
And we're not used to thinking of subsistence farmers as philanthropists, but those women were practicing the root meaning of philanthropy: love for humanity. 
What's at the core of thinking like a mother shouldn't be a surprise: it's love. 
Because, love is more than just an emotion. 
It's a capacity, a verb, an endlessly renewable resource -- and not just in our private lives. 
We recognize hate in the public sphere. 
Right? Hate speech, hate crimes. 
But not love. 
What is love in the public sphere? 
Well, Cornel West, who is not a mother but thinks like one, says it best: "Justice is what love looks like in public." 
And when we remember that every policy is an expression of social values, love stands out as that superstar value, the one best able to account for the most vulnerable among us. 
And when we position love as a kind of leading edge in policy making, we get new answers to fundamental social questions, like, "What's the economy for?" 
"What is our commitment to those in the path of the hurricane?" 
"How do we greet those arriving to our borders?" 
When you think like a mother, you prioritize the needs of the many, not the whims of the few. 
When you think like a mother, you don't build a seawall around beachfront property, because that would divert floodwaters to communities that are still exposed. 
When you think like a mother, you don't try to prosecute someone for leaving water for people crossing the desert. 
Because, you know -- (Applause) Because you know that migration, just like mothering, is an act of hope. 
Now, not every mother thinks like a mother. 
When presented with a choice, some of us have made the wrong one, hiding behind weapons or barbed wire or privilege to deny the rest of the world, thinking they can see their way to safety in some kind of armed lifeboat fueled by racism and xenophobia. 
Not every mother is a role model, but all of us have a choice. 
Are we going to jump on that armed lifeboat or work together to build a mother ship that can carry everyone? 
You know how to build that mother ship, how to repair the world and ease the suffering. 
Think like a mother. 
Thinking like a mother is a tool we can all use to build the world we want. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 1881, doctor William Halsted rushed to help his sister Minnie, who was hemorrhaging after childbirth. 
He quickly inserted a needle into his arm, withdrew his own blood, and transferred it to her. 
After a few uncertain minutes, she began to recover. 
Halsted didn’t know how lucky they’d gotten. 
His transfusion only worked because he and his sister happened to have the same blood type— something that isn’t guaranteed, even among close relatives. 
Blood types hadn’t been discovered by Halsted’s time, though people had been experimenting with transfusions for centuries— mostly unsuccessfully. 
In 1667, a French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denis became the first to try the technique on a human. 
Denis transfused sheep’s blood into Antoine Mauroy, a man likely suffering from psychosis, in the hopes that it would reduce his symptoms. 
Afterward, Mauroy was in good spirits. 
But after a second transfusion, he developed a fever, severe pain in his lower back, intense burning in his arm, and he urinated a thick, black liquid. 
Though nobody knew it at the time, these were the signs of a dangerous immune response unfolding inside his body. 
This immune response starts with the production of proteins called antibodies, which distinguish the body’s own cells from intruders. 
They do so by recognizing the foreign proteins, or antigens, embedded in an intruder’s cell membrane. 
Antibodies latch onto the antigens, signaling other immune cells to attack and destroy the foreign cells. 
The destroyed cells are flushed from the body in urine. 
In extreme cases, the massive break down of cells causes clots in the bloodstream that disrupt the flow of blood to vital organs, overload the kidneys, and cause organ failure. 
Fortunately, Denis’s patient survived the transfusion. 
But, after other cross-species transfusions proved fatal, the procedure was outlawed across Europe, falling out of favor for several centuries. 
It wasn’t until 1901 that Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner discovered blood types, the crucial step in the success of human to human blood transfusions. 
He noticed that when different types were mixed together, they formed clots. 
This happens when antibodies latch on to cells with foreign antigens, causing blood cells to clump together. 
But if the donor cells are the same blood type as the recipient’s cells, the donor cells won’t be flagged for destruction, and won’t form clumps. 
By 1907, doctors were mixing together small amounts of blood before transfusing it. 
If there were no clumps, the types were a match. 
This enabled them to save thousands of lives, laying the foundation for modern transfusions. 
Up to this point, all transfusions had occurred in real time, directly between two individuals. 
That’s because blood begins to clot almost immediately after coming into contact with air— a defense mechanism to prevent excessive blood loss after injury. 
In 1914, researchers discovered that the chemical sodium citrate stopped blood coagulating by removing the calcium necessary for clot formation. 
Citrated blood could be stored for later use— the first step in making large scale blood transfusions possible. 
In 1916, a pair of American scientists found an even more effective anticoagulant called heparin, which works by deactivating enzymes that enable clotting. 
We still use heparin today. 
At the same time, American and British researchers developed portable machines that could transport donor blood onto the battlefields of World War I. 
Combined with the newly-discovered heparin, medics safely stored and preserved liters of blood, wheeling it directly onto the battlefield to transfuse wounded soldiers. 
After the war, this crude portable box would become the inspiration for the modern-day blood bank, a fixture of hospitals around the world. 

A new drug reduces the risk of heart attacks by 40%. 
Shark attacks are up by a factor of two. 
Drinking a liter of soda per day doubles your chance of developing cancer. 
These are all examples of relative risk, a common way risk is presented in news articles. 
Risk evaluation is a complicated tangle of statistical thinking and personal preference. 
One common stumbling block is the difference between relative risks like these and what are called absolute risks. 
Risk is the likelihood that an event will occur. 
It can be expressed as either a percentage— for example, that heart attacks occur in 11% of men between the ages of 60 and 79— or as a rate— that one in two million divers along Australia’s western coast will suffer a fatal shark bite each year. 
These numbers express the absolute risk of heart attacks and shark attacks in these groups. 
Changes in risk can be expressed in relative or absolute terms. 
For example, a review in 2009 found that mammography screenings reduced the number of breast cancer deaths from five women in one thousand to four. 
The absolute risk reduction was about .1%. 
But the relative risk reduction from 5 cases of cancer mortality to four is 20%. 
Based on reports of this higher number, people overestimated the impact of screening. 
To see why the difference between the two ways of expressing risk matters, let’s consider the hypothetical example of a drug that reduces heart attack risk by 40%. 
Imagine that out of a group of 1,000 people who didn’t take the new drug, 10 would have heart attacks. 
The absolute risk is 10 out of 1,000, or 1%. 
If a similar group of 1,000 people did take the drug, the number of heart attacks would be six. 
In other words, the drug could prevent four out of ten heart attacks— a relative risk reduction of 40%. 
Meanwhile, the absolute risk only dropped from 1% to 0.6%— but the 40% relative risk decrease sounds a lot more significant. 
Surely preventing even a handful of heart attacks, or any other negative outcome, is worthwhile— isn’t it? 
Not necessarily. 
The problem is that choices that reduce some risks can put you in the path of others. 
Suppose the heart-attack drug caused cancer in one half of 1% of patients. 
In our group of 1,000 people, four heart attacks would be prevented by taking the drug, but there would be five new cases of cancer. 
The relative reduction in heart attack risk sounds substantial and the absolute risk of cancer sounds small, but they work out to about the same number of cases. 
In real life, everyone’s individual evaluation of risk will vary depending on their personal circumstances. 
If you know you have a family history of heart disease you might be more strongly motivated to take a medication that would lower your heart-attack risk, even knowing it provided only a small reduction in absolute risk. 
Sometimes, we have to decide between exposing ourselves to risks that aren’t directly comparable. 
If, for example, the heart attack drug carried a higher risk of a debilitating, but not life-threatening, side effect like migraines rather than cancer, our evaluation of whether that risk is worth taking might change. 
And sometimes there isn’t necessarily a correct choice: some might say even a minuscule risk of shark attack is worth avoiding, because all you’d miss out on is an ocean swim, while others wouldn’t even consider skipping a swim to avoid an objectively tiny risk of shark attack. 
For all these reasons, risk evaluation is tricky at baseline, and reporting on risk can be misleading, especially when it shares some numbers in absolute terms and others in relative terms. 
Understanding how these measures work will help you cut through some of the confusion and better evaluate risk. 

At roughly 4pm on July 20, 1969, mankind was just minutes away from landing on the surface of the moon. 
But before the astronauts began their final descent, an emergency alarm lit up. 
Something was overloading the computer, and threatened to abort the landing. 
Back on Earth, Margaret Hamilton held her breath. 
She'd led the team developing the pioneering in-flight software, so she knew this mission had no room for error. 
But the nature of this last-second emergency would soon prove her software was working exactly as planned. 
Born 33 years earlier in Paoli, Indiana, Hamilton had always been inquisitive. 
In college, she studied mathematics and philosophy, before taking a research position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pay for grad school. 
Here, she encountered her first computer while developing software to support research into the new field of chaos theory. 
Next at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Hamilton developed software for America’s first air defense system to search for enemy aircraft. 
But when she heard that renowned engineer Charles Draper was looking for help sending mankind to the moon, she immediately joined his team. 
NASA looked to Draper and his group of over 400 engineers to invent the first compact digital flight computer, the Apollo Guidance Computer. 
Using input from astronauts, this device would be responsible for guiding, navigating and controlling the spacecraft. 
At a time when unreliable computers filled entire rooms, the AGC needed to operate without any errors, and fit in one cubic foot of space. 
Draper divided the lab into two teams, one for designing hardware and one for developing software. 
Hamilton led the team that built the on-board flight software for both the Command and Lunar Modules. 
This work, for which she coined the term “software engineering," was incredibly high stakes. 
Human lives were on the line, so every program had to be perfect. 
Margaret’s software needed to quickly detect unexpected errors and recover from them in real time. 
But this kind of adaptable program was difficult to build, since early software could only process jobs in a predetermined order. 
To solve this problem, Margaret designed her program to be “asynchronous,” meaning the software's more important jobs would interrupt less important ones. 
Her team assigned every task a unique priority to ensure that each job occurred in the correct order and at the right time— regardless of any surprises. 
After this breakthrough, Margaret realized her software could help the astronauts work in an asynchronous environment as well. 
She designed Priority Displays that would interrupt astronaut’s regularly scheduled tasks to warn them of emergencies. 
The astronaut could then communicate with Mission Control to determine the best path forward. 
This marked the first time flight software communicated directly— and asynchronously— with a pilot. 
It was these fail safes that triggered the alarms just before the lunar landing. 
Buzz Aldrin quickly realized his mistake— he’d inadvertently flipped the rendezvous radar switch. 
This radar would be essential on their journey home, but here it was using up vital computational resources. 
Fortunately, the Apollo Guidance Computer was well equipped to manage this. 
During the overload, the software restart programs allowed only the highest priority jobs to be processed— including the programs necessary for landing. 
The Priority Displays gave the astronauts a choice— to land or not to land. 
With minutes to spare, Mission Control gave the order. 
The Apollo 11 landing was about the astronauts, Mission Control, software and hardware all working together as an integrated system of systems. 
Hamilton’s contributions were essential to the work of engineers and scientists inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s goal to reach the Moon. 
And her life-saving work went far beyond Apollo 11— no bugs were ever found in the in-flight software for any crewed Apollo missions. 
After her work on Apollo, Hamilton founded a company that uses its unique universal systems language to create breakthroughs for systems and software. 
In 2003, NASA honored her achievements with the largest financial award they’d ever given to an individual. 
And 47 years after her software first guided astronauts to the moon, Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for changing the way we think about technology. 

If you ask evolutionary biologists when did humans become humans, some of them will say that, well, at some point we started standing on our feet, became biped and became the masters of our environment. 
Others will say that because our brain started growing much bigger, that we were able to have much more complex cognitive processes. 
And others might argue that it's because we developed language that allowed us to evolve as a species. 
Interestingly, those three phenomena are all connected. 
We are not sure how or in which order, but they are all linked with the change of shape of a little bone in the back of your neck that changed the angle between our head and our body. 
That means we were able to stand upright but also for our brain to evolve in the back and for our voice box to grow from seven centimeters for primates to 11 and up to 17 centimetres for humans. 
And this is called the descent of the larynx. 
And the larynx is the site of your voice. 
When baby humans are born today, their larynx is not descended yet. 
That only happens at about three months old. 
So, metaphorically, each of us here has relived the evolution of our whole species. 
And talking about babies, when you were starting to develop in your mother's womb, the first sensation that you had coming from the outside world, at only three weeks old, when you were about the size of a shrimp, were through the tactile sensation coming from the vibrations of your mother's voice. 
So, as we can see, the human voice is quite meaningful and important at the level of the species, at the level of the society -- this is how we communicate and create bonds, and at the personal and interpersonal levels -- with our voice, we share much more than words and data, we share basically who we are. 
And our voice is indistinguishable from how other people see us. 
It is a mask that we wear in society. 
But our relationship with our own voice is far from obvious. 
We rarely use our voice for ourselves; we use it as a gift to give to others. 
It is how we touch each other. 
It's a dialectical grooming. 
But what do we think about our own voice? 
So please raise your hand if you don't like the sound of your voice when you hear it on a recording machine. 
(Laughter) Yeah, thank you, indeed, most people report not liking the sound of their voice recording. 
So what does that mean? 
Let's try to understand that in the next 10 minutes. 
I'm a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, part of the Opera of the Future group, and my research focuses on the relationship people have with their own voice and with the voices of others. 
I study what we can learn from listening to voices, from the various fields, from neurology to biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics. 
In our group we create tools and experiences to help people gain a better applied understanding of their voice in order to reduce the biases, to become better listeners, to create more healthy relationships or just to understand themselves better. 
And this really has to come with a holistic approach on the voice. 
Because, think about all the applications and implications that the voice may have, as we discover more about it. 
Your voice is a very complex phenomenon. 
It requires a synchronization of more than 100 muscles in your body. 
And by listening to the voice, we can understand possible failures of what happens inside. 
For example: listening to very specific types of turbulences and nonlinearity of the voice can help predict very early stages of Parkinson's, just through a phone call. 
Listening to the breathlessness of the voice can help detect heart disease. 
And we also know that the changes of tempo inside individual words is a very good marker of depression. 
Your voice is also very linked with your hormone levels. 
Third parties listening to female voices were able to very accurately place the speaker on their menstrual cycle. 
Just with acoustic information. 
And now with technology listening to us all the time, Alexa from Amazon Echo might be able to predict if you're pregnant even before you know it. 
So think about -- (Laughter) Think about the ethical implications of that. 
Your voice is also very linked to how you create relationships. 
You have a different voice for every person you talk to. 
If I take a little snippet of your voice and I analyze it, I can know whether you're talking to your mother, to your brother, your friend or your boss. 
We can also use, as a predictor, the vocal posture. 
Meaning, how you decide to place your voice when you talk to someone. 
And you vocal posture, when you talk to your spouse, can help predict not only if, but also when you will divorce. 
So there is a lot to learn from listening to voices. 
And I believe this has to start with understanding that we have more than one voice. 
So, I'm going to talk about three voices that most of us posses, in a model of what I call the mask. 
So when you look at the mask, what you see is a projection of a character. 
Let's call that your outward voice. 
This is also the most classic way to think about the voice, it's a way of projecting yourself in the world. 
The mechanism for this projection is well understood. 
Your lungs contract your diaphragm and that creates a self-sustained vibration of your vocal fold, that creates a sound. 
And then the way you open and close the cavities in you mouth, your vocal tract is going to transform the sound. 
So everyone has the same mechanism. 
But voices are quite unique. 
It's because very subtle differences in size, physiology, in hormone levels are going to make very subtle differences in your outward voice. 
And your brain is very good at picking up those subtle differences from other people's outward voices. 
In our lab, we are working on teaching machines to understand those subtle differences. 
And we use deep learning to create a real-time speaker identification system to help raise awareness on the use of the shared vocal space -- so who talks and who never talks during meetings -- to increase group intelligence. 
And one of the difficulties with that is that your voice is also not static. 
We already said that it changes with every person you talk to but it also changes generally throughout your life. 
At the beginning and at the end of the journey, male and female voices are very similar. 
It's very hard to distinguish the voice of a very young girl from the voice of a very young boy. 
But in between, your voice becomes a marker of your fluid identity. 
Generally, for male voices there's a big change at puberty. 
And then for female voices, there is a change at each pregnancy and a big change at menopause. 
So all of that is the voice other people hear when you talk. 
So why is it that we're so unfamiliar with it? 
Why is it that it's not the voice that we hear? 
So, let's think about it. 
When you wear a mask, you actually don't see the mask. 
And when you try to observe it, what you will see is inside of the mask. 
And that's your inward voice. 
So to understand why it's different, let's try to understand the mechanism of perception of this inward voice. 
Because your body has many ways of filtering it differently from the outward voice. 
So to perceive this voice, it first has to travel to your ears. 
And your outward voice travels through the air while your inward voice travels through your bones. 
This is called bone conduction. 
Because of this, your inward voice is going to sound in a lower register and also more musically harmonical than your outward voice. 
Once it travels there, it has to access your inner ear. 
And there's this other mechanism taking place here. 
It's a mechanical filter, it's a little partition that comes and protects your inner ear each time you produce a sound. 
So it also reduces what you hear. 
And then there is a third filter, it's a biological filter. 
Your cochlea -- it's a part of your inner ear that processes the sound -- is made out of living cells. 
And those living cells are going to trigger differently according to how often they hear the sound. 
It's a habituation effect. 
So because of this, as your voice is the sound you hear the most in your life, you actually hear it less than other sounds. 
Finally, we have a fourth filter. 
It's a neurological filter. 
Neurologists found out recently that when you open your mouth to create a sound, your own auditory cortex shuts down. 
So you hear your voice but your brain actually never listens to the sound of your voice. 
Well, evolutionarily that might make sense, because we know cognitively what we are going to sound like so maybe we don't need to spend energy analyzing the signal. 
And this is called a corollary discharge and it happens for every motion that your body does. 
The exact definition of a corollary discharge is a copy of a motor command that is sent by the brain. 
This copy doesn't create any motion itself but instead is sent to other regions of the brain to inform them of the impending motion. 
And for the voice, this corollary discharge also has a different name. 
It is your inner voice. 
So let's recapitulate. 
We have the mask, the outward voice, the inside of the mask, your inward voice, and then you have your inner voice. 
And I like to see this one as the puppeteer that holds the strings of the whole system. 
Your inner voice is the one you hear when you read a text silently, when you rehearse for an important conversation. 
Sometimes is hard to turn it off, it's really hard to look at the text written in your native language, without having this inner voice read it. 
It's also the voice that refuse to stop singing the stupid song you have in your head. 
(Laughter) And for some people it's actually impossible to control it. 
And that's the case of schizophrenic patients, who have auditory hallucinations. 
Who can't distinguish at all between voices coming from inside and outside their head. 
So in our lab, we are also working on small devices to help those people make those distinctions and know if a voice is internal or external. 
You can also think about the inner voice as the voice that speaks in your dream. 
This inner voice can take many forms. 
And in your dreams, you actually unleash the potential of this inner voice. 
That's another work we are doing in our lab: trying to access this inner voice in dreams. 
So even if you can't always control it, the inner voice -- you can always engage with it through dialogue, through inner dialogues. 
And you can even see this inner voice as the missing link between thought and actions. 
So I hope I've left you with a better appreciation, a new appreciation of all of your voices and the role it plays inside and outside of you -- as your voice is a very critical determinant of what makes you humans and of how you interact with the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ethic and Hedge are on the ground floor of a massive tower. 
Barriers of energy separate them from their quest’s second goal: the Node of Creation. 
To reach it, Ethic must use three energy streams to climb the tower. 
As soon as she steps forward a timer will begin counting down from 60 seconds. 
At the back of the room there’s a basin made of invisible towers that can hold energy between them. 
After one minute, a torrent of energy will pour down from above, filling one unit at a time, with a force field preventing it from spilling out the front or back. 
During the 60 calm seconds, Ethic and Hedge must decide exactly how many units of energy will fall. 
For each of the three challenges, they must choose the amount that will fill the basin exactly. 
If they do so, the energy will propel them further upwards. 
But if they get the amount at all wrong, the energy lift will fail, dropping them. 
Diagrams on the walls illustrate some examples. 
This configuration will capture exactly 2 units of energy. 
This configuration will capture 4— 3 here, and 1 here. 
And this one will also capture 4, because any energy on the right would spill out. 
The energy will rain down in such a way that it’ll only overflow if there’s no space that could hold it. 
Hedge can make one tower of blocks visible at a time and count how tall it is, but he can’t look at the whole structure all at once. 
How does Ethic program Hedge to figure out exactly how much energy each basin can hold? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Here’s one way of thinking about what’s happening: each unoccupied cell will hold energy if and only if there is a wall eventually to its left, and a wall eventually to its right. 
But it would take a long time for Hedge to check this for each individual cell. 
So what if he were to consider a whole column of blocks at a time? 
How many units of energy can this hold, for instance? 
Pause now to figure it out for yourself. 
Let’s analyze the problem by looking at our example. 
There are 5 columns of blocks here. 
The leftmost one can’t hold any energy, because there’s nothing higher than it. 
The 2nd stack can have 3 units above it, as they would be trapped between these two 4 block stacks. 
We get 3 units by taking the height where the energy would level off— 4, and subtracting the height of the stack— so that’s 4 minus 1. 
The 3rd stack is similar— 4 to the left, 4 to the right, and it’s 3 high, so it’ll hold 4 minus 3 equals 1 unit. 
The 4th stack and 5th stacks have nothing higher than them to the right, so they can’t hold any energy. 
We can adapt this idea into an algorithm. 
Considering one column at a time as the point of reference, Hedge can look to the left stack by stack to find the height of the tallest one, look to the right to find the height of the tallest one, and take the smaller of the two as the height the energy can fill up to. 
If the result is higher than the column in question, subtract the height of the original column, and the result will be the number of units that column can hold. 
If it's equal to or below the level of the column in question, the energy would spill off. 
Hedge can apply that to an entire basin with a loop that starts on the left-most column and moves right, one column at a time. 
For each column, he’ll run the same steps— look all the way left for the tallest, do the same to the right, take the lower height of the two, subtract the original column height, and increase the grand total if that number is positive. 
His loop will repeat as many times as there are columns. 
That will work, but it’ll take a long time for a large basin. 
At every step Hedge repeats the action of looking left and looking right. 
If there are N stacks, he’ll look at all N stacks N times. 
Is there a faster way? 
Here’s one time saver: before doing anything else, Hedge can start on the left, and keep a running tally of what the highest stack is. 
Here that would be 2, 2 again, since the first was higher, then 4, 4, 4. 
He can then find the highest right-most stacks by doing the same going right-to-left: 1, 3, 4, 4, 4. 
In the end he’ll have a table like this in his memory. 
Now, Hedge can take one more pass to calculate how much energy there will be above every stack with the same equation from before: take the smaller of the stored left and right values, and subtract the height of the current tower. 
Instead of looking at N stacks N times, he’ll look at N stacks just 3 times— which is what’s called linear time. 
There are ways to optimize the solution even further, but this is good enough for our heroes. 
Ethic and Hedge work as one. 
The first cascade is a breeze, and they rise up the tower. 
The second is a little tougher. 
The third is huge, with dozens of stacks of blocks. 
The timer ticks down towards zero, but Ethic’s program is fast. 
She gets the wheel in position just in time, and the energy lifts them to the Node of Creation. 
Like the first, it reveals a vision: memories of years gone by. 
The world machine changed everything, and Ethic, in her position as chief robotics engineer, grew troubled by what she saw. 
When the Bradbarrier went up to keep the people in, she knew something was seriously wrong. 
So she created three artifacts with the ability to restore people’s power, creativity, and memory, and smuggled them to three communities. 
Before she could tell people how to use them, the government discovered her efforts and sent bots to arrest her and the other programmers. 
The last thing Ethic used the world machine to create was a robot that would protect the ancient device from the forces of ignorance by enclosing it in a giant maze. 
She named her creation Hedge. 
Without warning, the energy lift flickers, then fizzles out. 

Gripped with vengeful passion, The Queen of the Night tears across the stage. 
She begins to sing her titular aria, one of the most famous sections from Mozart’s beloved opera, "The Magic Flute." 
The orchestra fills the hall with music, but the queen’s voice soars above the instruments. 
Its melody rings out across thousands of patrons, reaching seats 40 meters away— all without any assistance from a microphone. 
How is it possible that this single voice can be heard so clearly, above the strains of dozens of instruments? 
The answer lies in the physics of the human voice, and the carefully honed technique of an expert opera singer. 
All the music in this opera house originates from the vibrations created by instruments— whether it’s the strings of a violin or the vocal folds of a performer. 
These vibrations send waves into the air, which our brains interpret as sound. 
The frequency of these vibrations–– specifically, the number of waves per second–– is how our brains determine the pitch of a single note. 
But in fact, every note we hear is actually a combination of multiple vibrations. 
Imagine a guitar string vibrating at its lowest frequency. 
This is called the fundamental, and this low pitch is what our ears mostly use to identify a note. 
But this lowest vibration triggers additional frequencies called overtones, which layer on top of the fundamental. 
These overtones break down into specific frequencies called harmonics, or partials— and manipulating them is how opera singers work their magic. 
Every note has a set of frequencies that comprise its harmonic series. 
The first partial vibrates at twice the frequency of the fundamental. 
The next partial is three times the fundamental’s frequency, and so on. 
Virtually all acoustic instruments produce harmonic series, but each instrument’s shape and material changes the balance of its harmonics. 
For example, a flute emphasizes the first few partials, but in a clarinet’s lowest register, the odd-numbered partials resonate most strongly. 
The strength of various partials is part of what gives each instrument its unique sonic signature. 
It also affects an instrument’s ability to stand out in a crowd, because our ears are more strongly attuned to some frequencies than others. 
This is the key to an opera singer’s power of projection. 
An operatic soprano— the highest of the four standard voice parts— can produce notes with fundamental frequencies ranging from 250 to 1,500 vibrations per second. 
Human ears are most sensitive to frequencies between 2,000 and 5,000 vibrations per second. 
So if the singer can bring out the partials in this range, she can target a sensory sweet spot where she’s most likely to be heard. 
Higher partials are also advantageous because there’s less competition from the orchestra, whose overtones are weaker at those frequencies. 
The result of emphasizing these partials is a distinctive ringing timbre called a singer’s squillo. 
Opera singers work for decades to create their squillo. 
They can produce higher frequencies by modifying the shape and tension in their vocal folds and vocal tract. 
And by shifting the position of their tongues and lips, they accentuate some overtones while dampening others. 
Singers also increase their range of partials with vibrato— a musical effect in which a note slightly oscillates in pitch. 
This creates a fuller sound that rings out over the instruments’ comparatively narrow vibratos. 
Once they have the right partials, they employ other techniques to boost their volume. 
Singers expand their lung capacity and perfect their posture for consistent, controlled airflow. 
The concert hall helps as well, with rigid surfaces that reflect sound waves towards the audience. 
All singers take advantage of these techniques, but different vocal signatures demand different physical preparation. 
A Wagnerian singer needs to build up stamina to power through the composer’s four-hour epics. 
While bel canto singers require versatile vocal folds to vault through acrobatic arias. 
Biology also sets some limits— not every technique is feasible for every set of muscles, and voices change as singers age. 
But whether in an opera hall or a shower stall, these techniques can turn un-amplified voices into thundering musical masterpieces. 

[As of the morning February 27, 2020, there were at least 82,000 confirmed cases worldwide of the coronavirus and 2,810 deaths from it. 
TED invited Dr. David Heymann to share the latest findings about the outbreak.] [What happens if you get infected with the coronavirus?] This looks like a very mild disease, like a common cold, in the majority of people. 
There are certain people who get infected and have very serious illness; among them are health workers. 
It's a very serious infection in them, as they get a higher dose than normal people, and at the same time, they have no immunity. 
So in the general population, it's likely that the dose of virus that you receive when you are infected is much less than the dose that a health worker would receive, health workers having more serious infections. 
So your infection would be less serious, hopefully. 
So that leaves the elderly and those with comorbidities to really be the ones that we have to make sure are taken care of in hospitals. 
[Who are the people who should be most concerned about this?] Well, the most concerned are people who are, first of all, in developing countries and who don't have access to good medical care and may not have access at all to a hospital, should an epidemic occur in their country. 
Those people would be at great risk, especially the elderly. 
Elderly in all populations are at risk, but especially those who can't get to oxygen. 
In industrialized countries, it's the very elderly who have comorbidities, who have diabetes, who have other diseases, who are at risk. 
The general population doesn't appear to be at great risk. 
[What pre-existing medical conditions put people at higher risk?] First of all, pulmonary disease existing as a comorbidity is also important. 
In general, the elderly are at greater risk, especially those over 70, because their immune systems are not as effective as they might have once been, and they are more susceptible to infections. 
In addition, in some instances in China, there's been a coinfection with influenza and at the same time, there have been some bacterial superinfections on the pneumonias that are occurring. 
[Where can we find up-to-date information?] The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta keeps track and has updates on a regular basis on its website. 
Also, the World Health Organization in Geneva, which is coordinating many of the activities going on internationally, also has a website with daily updates. 
It's our responsibility to get that information as individuals, so we understand and can make sure that we can contribute in our own way to prevention of major spread. 
[You led the global response to the SARS outbreak in 2003. 
How does this outbreak compare?] That's the same problem with all new infections. 
This is an infection that's coming to humans who have never been exposed to this virus before. 
They don't have any antibody protection, and it's not clear whether their immune system can handle this virus or not. 
This is a virus that usually finds itself in bats or in other animals, and all of a sudden, it's in humans. 
And humans just don't have experience with this virus. 
But gradually, we are beginning to learn a lot, as we did with SARS. 
And you know, there are certainly a larger number of deaths than there were with SARS. 
But when you divide that by a denominator of persons who are infected, there are many, many more persons infected than there were with SARS. 
The case fatality ratio, that is the ratio of deaths to the numbers of cases in SARS, was about 10 percent. 
With the current coronavirus, COVID-19, it is two percent or probably less. 
So it's a much less virulent virus, but it's still a virus that causes mortality, and that's what we don't want entering human populations. 
[Have we responded adequately at border crossings, such as airports?] It's clearly understood that airports or any land borders cannot prevent a disease from entering. 
People in the incubation period can cross that border, can enter countries and can then infect others when they become sick. 
So borders are not a means of preventing infections from entering a country by checking temperatures. 
Borders are important because you can provide to people arriving from areas that might be at risk of having had infection, provide them with an understanding, either a printed understanding or a verbal understanding, of what the signs and symptoms are of this infection, and what they should do if they feel that they might be infected. 
[What's the timeline for a vaccine?] Vaccines are under development right now, there's a lot of research going on. 
That research requires first that the vaccine be developed, then that it be studied for safety and effectiveness in animals, who are challenged with the virus after they are vaccinated, and then it must go into human studies. 
The animal studies have not yet begun, but will soon begin for certain vaccines. 
And it's thought that by the end of the year, or early next year, there may be some candidate vaccines that can then be studied for licensing by regulatory agencies. 
So we're talking about at least a year until there's vaccine available that can be used in many populations. 
[What questions about the outbreak are still unanswered?] It's clear we know how it transmits, we don't know how easily it transmits in humans, in communities or in unenclosed areas. 
We know, for example, that in the enclosed area of a cruise ship, it spread very easily. 
We need to better understand how it will spread once it gets into more open areas where people are exposed to people who might be sick. 
[What about the global response could be improved?] A major problem in the world today is that we look at outbreaks in developing countries as something that we need to go and stop. 
So when there's an outbreak of Ebola, we think "How can we go and stop this outbreak in the country?" 
We don't think about "How can we help that country strengthen its capacity, so that it can detect and respond to infections?" 
So we haven't invested enough in helping countries develop their core capacity in public health. 
What we've done is invested in many mechanisms globally, which can provide support to other countries to go and help stop outbreaks. 
But we want to see a world where every country can do its best to stop its own outbreaks. 
[Will we see more emerging disease outbreaks in the future?] Today, there are over seven billion people. 
And when those people come into the world, they demand more food, they demand a whole series of things and they live closer together. 
In fact, we're an urban world, where people live in urban areas. 
And at the same time, we're growing more animals, and those animals are contributing food to humans as well. 
So what we see is that that animal-human interface is becoming closer and closer together. 
And this intensive agriculture of animals and this intensive increase in human populations living together on the same planet is really a melting pot where outbreaks can occur and do occur. 
We will eventually have more and more of these outbreaks. 
So an emerging infection today is just a warning of what will happen in the future. 
We have to make sure that that technical collaboration in the world is there to work together to make sure that we can understand these outbreaks when they occur and rapidly provide the information necessary to control them. 
[Is the worst behind us?] I can't predict with accuracy. 
So all I can say is that we must all be prepared for the worst-case scenario. 
And at the same time, learn how we can protect ourselves and protect others should we become a part of that epidemic. 
[To learn more, visit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention World Health Organization] 

I'm an immigrant from Venezuela, and I've lived in the US for six years. 
If you ask me about my life as an expatriate, I would say that I've been lucky. 
But it hasn't been easy. 
Growing up, I never thought that I was going to leave my homeland. 
I participated in my first student protest in 2007, when the president shut down one of the most important news networks. 
I was getting my bachelor's degree in communications, and that was the first time I realized I couldn't take free speech for granted. 
We knew things were getting bad, but we never saw what was coming: an economic crisis, infrastructure breaking down, citywide electrical blackouts, the decline of public health care and shortage of medicines, disease outbreaks and starvation. 
I moved to Canada with my husband in 2013, and we always thought we'd move back home when the crisis improved. 
But we never did. 
Nearly all my childhood friends have left the country, but my parents are still there. 
There have been moments where I've called my mom, and I could hear people screaming and crying in the background as teargas bombs exploded in the streets. 
And my mom, as if I couldn't hear it, would always tell me, (Speaking Spanish) "We're fine, don't worry." 
But of course, I worry. 
It's my parents, and I'm 4,000 miles away. 
Today, I'm just one of more than four million Venezuelans who have left their home country. 
A lot of my friends are Venezuelan immigrants, and in the last few years, we've begun talking about how we could make a difference when we live so far away. 
That is how Code for Venezuela was born in 2019. 
It began with a hackathon, because we are experts in tech, and we thought we could use our tech skills to create solutions for people on the ground. 
But first, we needed to find some experts actually living inside Venezuela to guide us. 
We'd see so many other hackathons that came up with wily, ambitious, incredible technological solutions that sounded great in theory but ultimately failed to work in the actual countries they were intended to help. 
Many of us have been living abroad for years, and we are detached from the day-to-day problems that people are facing in Venezuela. 
So we turned to the experts actually living inside of the country. 
For example, Julio Castro, a doctor and one of the leaders of Médicos por la Salud. 
When the government stopped publishing official health care data in 2015, Dr. Julio began collecting information himself, using an informal but coordinated system of cell phone communications. 
They track available personnel, medical supplies, mortality data, disease outbreaks; compile it into a report; and then share that on Twitter. 
He became our go-to expert on health care in Venezuela. 
Luis Carlos Díaz, a widely recognized journalist who reports acts of censorship and human rights violations suffered by the people of Venezuela, he helps us make sense of what is happening there, since the news is controlled by the government. 
We call these people our heroes on the ground. 
With their expert advice, we came up with a series of challenges for hackathon participants. 
In that first hackathon, we had 300 participants from seven countries come up with 16 different project submissions. 
We picked the projects with the most potential and continued working on them after the event. 
Today, I'll share two of our most successful projects to give you a taste of the impact we are having so far. 
They're called MediTweet and Blackout Tracker. 
MediTweet is an intelligent Twitter bot that helps Venezuelans find the medicine they need. 
Right now in Venezuela, if you get sick and you go to a hospital, there is a good chance they won't have the right medical supplies to treat you. 
The situation is so bad that patients often get a "shopping list" from the doctor instead of a prescription. 
I live the need for this firsthand. 
My mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2015. 
She needed to have a lumbar puncture to get a final diagnosis and treatment plan. 
But the needle for this procedure wasn't available. 
I was in Venezuela at that time, and I was seeing my mom getting worse in front of me every day. 
After looking everywhere, we found the needle in a site that is like the eBay of Latin America. 
I met the seller in a local bakery, and it was like buying something on the black market. 
My mom brought the needle to her doctor, and he did the procedure. 
Without this, she could have died. 
But it's not just medical supplies, it's medicines, too. 
When she was first diagnosed, we bought her treatment in a state pharmacy, and it was, like, practically free. 
But then the state pharmacy ran out, and we still had six months of treatment ahead. 
Six months of treatment ahead. 
We bought some medicines online and the rest in Mexico. 
Now she's in her third year of remission, and every time that I call, she tells me, "I'm fine, don't worry." 
But not everyone can afford to leave the country, and many aren't healthy enough to travel. 
That is why people turn to Twitter, buying and selling medicines using the hashtag #ServicioPublico, meaning "public service." 
Our Twitter bot scans Twitter for the hashtag #ServicioPublico and connects users who are asking for specific medicines with those who are selling their private leftovers. 
We also pool the location data of those Twitter users and use it for a visualization tool. 
It gives local organizations like Médicos por la Salud a sense of where they have a shortage. 
We can also apply machine learning algorithms to detect clusters of disease. 
If they've received humanitarian aid, this could help them to make better decisions about the distributions of the supplies. 
Our second project, is called Blackout Tracker. 
Venezuela is currently going through an electricity crisis. 
Last year, Venezuela suffered what some people consider the worst power failures in Venezuelan history. 
I had two long days without communication with my parents. 
Some cities experienced blackouts every day. 
But you only know about this on social media. 
The government won't report blackouts on the news. 
When the power goes out, many Venezuelans, we quickly tweet out the location with the hashtag #SinLuz, meaning "without electricity," before their phones ran out of battery, so people around the country know what is happening. 
Like MediTweet, Blackout Tracker scans Twitter for the hashtag #SinLuz and creates a map using the location data of those users. 
You can quickly see where the blackouts are happening today and how many blackouts have happened over time. 
People want to know what is happening, and this is our answer. 
But it's also a way of holding the government accountable. 
It's easy for them to deny that the problem exists or make excuses, because there is no official data on it. 
Blackout Tracker shows how bad the problem really is. 
Now, some people in Silicon Valley may look at these projects and say that there are no major technological innovations. 
But that is the point. 
These projects are not insanely advanced, but it's what the people of Venezuela need, and they can have a tremendous impact. 
Beyond these projects, perhaps our most significant accomplishment is that a movement has been created, one where people around the world are coming together to use their professional skills to create solutions for the people of Venezuela. 
And because we are partnering with locals, we are creating the solutions that people want and need. 
What is so great about this is that we are using our professional skills, so it comes easily and naturally. 
It's not that hard for us to make a difference. 
If someone from San Francisco were to hire professionals to create solutions like MediTweet or Blackout Tracker, it would cost a small fortune. 
By donating our services, we are making a bigger impact than if we were just to donate money. 
And you can do the same thing -- not in Venezuela, necessarily, but in your own community. 
In a world that is more connected than ever, we still see how specialized communities can be living isolated or in silos. 
There are so many great ways to help, but I believe that you can use your professional skills to connect diverse communities and create effective solutions through those relationships. 
Anyone with knowledge and professional skills has a powerful force to bring hope to a community. 
For us at Code for Venezuela, this is just the beginning. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Stress -- we all know what it is and we all handle it differently. 
Whether it's our thoughts speeding up or slowing down, eating our emotions or not at all, difficulty sleeping or just getting out of bed. 
Frankly, it sucks. 
(Laughter) But there's good stress too, you know, like preparing for the biggest public speaking event you've ever given. 
(Laughter) (Applause) On a global platform. 
(Laughter) No, even the good stress can mess with you, but it's the bad stress that I came to talk about. 
And probably not for the reason you'd expect. 
I'm a relationship manager for affluent individuals. 
Meaning, I work with wealthy folks and their families, hip to hip, helping them achieve their financial goals. 
I like to keep the economy in mind, because I know that whatever impacts the economy, impacts my clients, and it turns out stress is impacting the economy in a massive way. 
What if I told you that by some estimates, the cost of work-related stress in the US is close to 300 billion dollars annually? 
Workplace stress, the stress causing this massive impact, is related to productivity and wellness. 
Today, that's what we're here to talk about. 
And by the way, it's linked to employee disengagement, chronic diseases that impact your work and work-related injuries and illnesses. 
And when you add up the cost of all five factors, it's an estimated 2.2 trillion dollars annually. 
That represents 12 percent of our GDP. 
Now I know what you're thinking, "That is a lot of money, and how?" 
Stress is this deeply personal thing, it's crazy to think it can have such a massive impact. 
But consider this thought experiment to explain how. 
Imagine a single mother working a stressful job, in a stress-filled environment, where she sits 90 percent of the time. 
Maybe she doesn't have time to cook, so she chooses meals based off of convenience, which usually means what? 
Overly processed, high-sugar foods. 
Over time, this poor diet, mixed with stress from work, leads to a chronic disease. 
Let's call it diabetes. 
Medical care cost her and the company more money, which means more stress. 
Now, she's worried about her health and making ends meet, so she's probably distracted and less productive. 
But she can't be, remember? 
She's a single mother. 
Now she's thinking, "What if something happens to me? 
Who is going to take care of my child? 
Who is going to take care of my baby?" 
More stress. 
Now take that scenario, tweak it whichever way you'd like, and lay it over the nation, and you might start to see how we run up against that multitrillion dollar cost. 
This all hits very close to home for me. 
My father's one of the hardest-working and most intelligent people that I know. 
Don't get me wrong, mom worked and provided too, but he definitely embraced the role of being the primary breadwinner. 
And I'm sure most of us can understand the stress and pressure that comes with taking care of our families. 
But when you combine that with workplace stress, do you know what could happen? 
Developing irreversible high blood pressure, eventually losing function of your kidneys and spending a decade on dialysis -- his fate. 
Now I'm happy to report that he did get a kidney transplant just last year. 
However -- (Applause and cheers) However, for nearly a decade, neither the economy nor my family got the benefit from his work ethic or his intelligence, and as he would say, that's just really sad commentary. 
All I'm saying is, I think stress impacts the economy by reducing productivity and increasing health care costs. 
Right? 
But here's what doesn't. 
Current research from the World Health Organization puts global spending on health at 7.8 trillion dollars. 
Research from the Global Wellness Institute suggests that the 4.5-trillion-dollar global wellness industry grew from 3.7 to 4.2 trillion between 2015 and 2017, and sees that growth into 2022. 
So what, why do you care? 
Because that growth is nearly twice as fast as the global economy, averaging about 3.3 percent in the same period. 
So what does all that mean? 
Every year, we're spending more per year on health, and the industries all about developing overall well-being and living a healthier lifestyle are growing almost twice as fast as the global economy, and yet, we're losing trillions of dollars per year in output. 
So what's up? 
(Laughter) Well, stress levels are up, and I believe that needs to change. 
I also believe the way we think about stress needs to change. 
So let's try by reframing how we view it. 
See, we tend to think about stress as a consequence, but I see it as a culture. 
Where do most of us spend our time? 
Where we face that scale of finding that work-life balance. 
So the bonds between work, stress, health and wellness have never been closer. 
And yet, there's a massive disconnect in how we approach stress and well-being in the workplace. 
And we could blame many things, right? 
New tech, laser focus on shareholder returns, or my favorite, keeping up with the Joneses and taking pictures while we try. 
But at the end of the day, I'm afraid that we've created a culture where personal care and overall well-being are given the back seat. 
I believe the answer lies in three fundamental pillars. 
And if you find yourselves thinking, "Rob, I've heard this before, tell me something I don't know," ask yourself, if we already know what to do, then what have we been doing? 
First, corporations. 
Specifically, how a corporation's culture and communication style play a pivotal role in the stress and well-being of a workplace. 
The DNA of a company is its culture, right? 
It sets the tone, even goes as far as defining the company. 
But I think companies should invest in the overall mental, physical and emotional well-being of their employees the way they invest in innovation, R and D, right? 
And do I think that this would increase productivity and reduce stress? 
But for it to really stick, a company has to figure out a way to measure the overall well-being of its employees with the same accuracy and precision that they project growth and earnings. 
And if this sounds like a tall order, ask yourself what really is a company's most competitive advantage. 
Its people. 
We know this. 
And just like anything in a company, it has to start at the top. 
So if you're a leader, openly showing how you care for your mental health and overall well-being is a huge catalyst. 
It's no secret I'm a soccer fan, so growing up, I had a couple of coaches. 
And I always had one who would lead the heavy cardio workouts. 
He would not stand on the side and spectate. 
He would participate. 
And that did three things. 
It made it difficult for me to complain. 
(Laughter) I always made sure to keep up, and I always felt more dialed in to the exercise. 
It's the same idea. 
And finally, communication. 
In order for me to really help my clients achieve their financial goals, requires that I actively listen and then respond. 
Let your employees tell you what stresses them out. 
Let them tell you what wellness benefits they need. 
And then act. 
And acting on what they tell you will show how serious you take that feedback, and I can't help but feel the company will win in the long run. 
Because properly equipped employees will be more productive and less stressed. 
Next, I'd like to ask help from everyone's favorite uncle. 
That's right, the government has to play a role in this. 
The World Economic Forum and the Harvard School of Public Health estimate that from 2011 to 2030, major chronic diseases and mental illnesses will cost the global economy 47 trillion dollars. 
And it's 2020. 
Now I'm not saying stress causes all major chronic diseases, or all mental illnesses, but even if a portion of it is, imagine how much lower that number could be if the government did what it does best -- serve as the enforcer. 
But in this case, for higher workplace standards. 
I don't know, maybe even corporate tax-incentive programs to help raise those standards, but the best wellness corporate policies and initiatives backed by a forward-thinking government won't matter much without help from the most crucial pillar. 
You. 
That's right, stress and managing it is so dynamic, you have to play your part. 
And it's going to benefit you and the economy. 
Look folks, I'm not a psychologist, OK? 
But I have taken steps to develop my own mental health and overall well-being, so here's my last two cents. 
I think a crucial first step is for everyone is to be honest with themselves. 
About what? 
About putting your mental, physical and emotional well-being in the rear view and the damage it has caused. 
Honest about placing public opinion above self-preservation. 
Honest about how we define ourselves and what actually does. 
Sure, your career contributes to a portion of who you are. 
But are we allowing it to define us just a little too much? 
And ask, "Is this bringing me the value I saw with what it costs me?" 
And I don't just mean the dollars. 
For me, being honest meant to get a good, hard look at my relationship with my thoughts, courage and failure. 
Started years ago in this tournament championship game, coach comes to me and says, "Rob Cooke, you step up, we can't lose today." 
Failed. 
We lost. 
(Laughter) Thanks for laughing. 
(Laughter) Feels good. 
No, but ... 
You know, after that, it stayed with me for a while, to the point where any opportunity to step up, grow, develop, I'd quietly bow my head, step back. 
And then I discovered mindfulness. 
And I continued to develop it in my daily life to this day. 
To live in the present, the now. 
Now I get it, mindfulness may not be for everyone, but when I think of some of the most successful and impactful people, I see a common trend. 
Mastery of their mental game. 
It's all about developing awareness, acknowledgment and acceptance of your current thoughts, emotions, environment and physical state. 
Right? 
Now I didn't say never facing stress. 
But the management of that stress -- that's the benefit, again, for you and the economy. 
I'll leave you with this thought. 
We all know that retirement is all about saving more now for later. 
What if we treated our mental health and overall well-being in the same capacity? 
Develop and save more of you now for later in life. 
Doing nothing means more cost, and worse, less time. 
And of the two, which can't you get back? 
So let's start moving this culture of stress forward, and start living happier, healthier and hopefully, more productive lives. 
(Applause) 

At the age of 21, Simone de Beauvoir became the youngest person to take the philosophy exams at France’s most esteemed university. 
She passed with flying colors. 
But as soon as she mastered the rules of philosophy, she wanted to break them. 
She’d been schooled on Plato’s Theory of Forms, which dismissed the physical world as a flawed reflection of higher truths and unchanging ideals. 
But for de Beauvoir, earthly life was enthralling, sensual, and anything but static. 
Her desire to explore the physical world to its fullest would shape her life, and eventually, inspire a radical new philosophy. 
Endlessly debating with her romantic and intellectual partner Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir explored free will, desire, rights and responsibilities, and the value of personal experience. 
In the years following WWII, these ideas would converge into the school of thought most closely associated with their work: existentialism. 
Where Judeo-Christian traditions taught that humans are born with preordained purpose, de Beauvoir and Sartre proposed a revolutionary alternative. 
They argued that humans are born free, and thrown into existence without a divine plan. 
As de Beauvoir acknowledged, this freedom is both a blessing and a burden. 
In "The Ethics of Ambiguity" she argued that our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life’s meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the same. 
As de Beauvoir wrote, “A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied.” This philosophy challenged its students to navigate the ambiguities and conflicts our desires produce, both internally and externally. 
And as de Beauvoir sought to find her own purpose, she began to question: if everyone deserves to freely pursue meaning, why was she restricted by society’s ideals of womanhood? 
Despite her prolific writing, teaching and activism, de Beauvoir struggled to be taken seriously by her male peers. 
She’d rejected her Catholic upbringing and marital expectations to study at university, and write memoirs, fiction and philosophy. 
But the risks she was taking by embracing this lifestyle were lost on many of her male counterparts, who took these freedoms for granted. 
They had no intellectual interest in de Beauvoir’s work, which explored women’s inner lives, as well the author’s open relationship and bisexuality. 
To convey the importance of her perspective, de Beauvoir embarked on her most challenging book yet. 
Just as she’d created the foundations of existentialism, she’d now redefine the limits of gender. 
Published in 1949, "The Second Sex" argues that, like our life’s meaning, gender is not predestined. 
As de Beauvoir famously wrote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” And to “become” a woman, she argued, was to become the Other. 
De Beauvoir defined Othering as the process of labeling women as less than the men who’d historically defined, and been defined as, the ideal human subjects. 
As the Other, she argued that women were considered second to men, and therefore systematically restricted from pursuing freedom. 
"The Second Sex" became an essential feminist treatise, offering a detailed history of women’s oppression and a wealth of anecdotal testimony. 
"The Second Sex"’s combination of personal experience and philosophical intervention provided a new language to discuss feminist theory. 
Today, those conversations are still informed by de Beauvoir’s insistence that in the pursuit of equality, “there is no divorce between philosophy and life.” Of course, like any foundational work, the ideas in "The Second Sex" have been expanded upon since its publication. 
Many modern thinkers have explored additional ways people are Othered that de Beauvoir doesn’t acknowledge. 
These include racial and economic identities, as well as the broader spectrum of gender and sexual identities we understand today. 
De Beauvoir’s legacy is further complicated by accusations of sexual misconduct by two of her university students. 
In the face of these accusations, she had her teaching license revoked for abusing her position. 
In this aspect and others, de Beauvoir’s life remains controversial— and her work represents a contentious moment in the emergence of early feminism. 
She participated in those conversations for the rest of her life; writing fiction, philosophy, and memoirs until her death in 1986. 
Today, her work offers a philosophical language to be reimagined, revisited and rebelled against— a response this revolutionary thinker might have welcomed. 

For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow. 
I'm mentioning all this -- I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew -- about our lives, about our careers -- comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality. 
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. 
It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. 
I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. 
Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. 
One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. 
In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. 
There's a real problem with snobbery, because sometimes people from outside the U.K. 
imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon, fixated on country houses and titles. 
The bad news is that's not true. 
Snobbery is a global phenomenon; we are a global organization, this is a global phenomenon. 
What is a snob? 
A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you, and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. 
That is snobbery. 
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. 
You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" 
According to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses. 
(Laughter) Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. 
(Laughter) Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. 
Unfortunately, most people are not our mothers. 
Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love -- not romantic love, though that may be something -- but love in general, respect -- they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy. 
And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. 
You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. 
I don't think we are particularly materialistic. 
I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. 
It's not the material goods we want; it's the rewards we want. 
It's a new way of looking at luxury goods. 
The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think, "This is somebody who's greedy." 
Think, "This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love." 
(Laughter) Feel sympathy, rather than contempt. 
There are other reasons -- (Laughter) There are other reasons why it's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before. 
One of these, and it's paradoxical, because it's linked to something that's rather nice, is the hope we all have for our careers. 
Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan. 
We're told, from many sources, that anyone can achieve anything. 
We've done away with the caste system, we are now in a system where anyone can rise to any position they please. 
And it's a beautiful idea. 
Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. 
There are no strictly defined hierarchies. 
There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. 
Envy, it's a real taboo to mention envy, but if there's one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy. 
And it's linked to the spirit of equality. 
I think it would be very unusual for anyone here, or anyone watching, to be envious of the Queen of England. 
Even though she is much richer than any of you are, and she's got a very large house, the reason why we don't envy her is because she's too weird. 
(Laughter) She's simply too strange. 
We can't relate to her, she speaks in a funny way, she comes from an odd place. 
So we can't relate to her, and when you can't relate to somebody, you don't envy them. 
The closer two people are -- in age, in background, in the process of identification -- the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. 
The problem of modern society is it turns the whole world into a school. 
Everybody's wearing jeans, everybody's the same. 
And yet, they're not. 
So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation. 
It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. 
But the point is, it doesn't feel that way. 
It's made to feel, by magazines and other media outlets, that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage -- you, too, could start a major thing. 
(Laughter) The consequences of this problem make themselves felt in bookshops. 
When you go to a large bookshop and look at the self-help sections, as I sometimes do -- if you analyze self-help books produced in the world today, there are basically two kinds. 
The first kind tells you, "You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible!" 
The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "low self-esteem," or impolitely call, "feeling very bad about yourself." 
There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. 
So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback. 
There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious -- about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before. 
And it's, again, linked to something nice. 
And that nice thing is called meritocracy. 
Everybody, all politicians on Left and Right, agree that meritocracy is a great thing, and we should all be trying to make our societies really, really meritocratic. 
In other words -- what is a meritocratic society? 
A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top, nothing should hold you back. 
It's a beautiful idea. 
The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. 
In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. 
And that makes failure seem much more crushing. 
You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an "unfortunate" -- literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. 
Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a "loser." 
There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. 
It's no longer the gods, it's us. We're in the driving seat. 
That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. 
It leads, in the worst cases -- in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim -- it leads to increased rates of suicide. 
There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. 
And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally -- they own their success, but they also own their failure. 
Is there any relief from some of these pressures that I've been outlining? 
I think there is. 
Let's take meritocracy. 
This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it's a crazy idea, completely crazy. 
I will support any politician of Left and Right, with any halfway-decent meritocratic idea; I am a meritocrat in that sense. 
But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic; it's an impossible dream. 
The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, bad at the bottom, exactly done as it should be, is impossible. 
There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc. 
We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should. 
I'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in "The City of God," where he says, "It's a sin to judge any man by his post." 
In modern English that would mean it's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to, dependent on their business card. 
It's not the post that should count. 
According to St. Augustine, only God can really put everybody in their place; he's going to do that on the Day of Judgment, with angels and trumpets, and the skies will open. 
Insane idea, if you're a secularist person, like me. 
But something very valuable in that idea, nevertheless. 
In other words, hold your horses when you're coming to judge people. 
You don't necessarily know what someone's true value is. 
That is an unknown part of them, and we shouldn't behave as though it is known. 
There is another source of solace and comfort for all this. 
When we think about failing in life, when we think about failure, one of the reasons why we fear failing is not just a loss of income, a loss of status. 
What we fear is the judgment and ridicule of others. 
The number one organ of ridicule, nowadays, is the newspaper. 
If you open the newspaper any day of the week, it's full of people who've messed up their lives. 
They've slept with the wrong person, taken the wrong substance, passed the wrong piece of legislation -- whatever it is, and then are fit for ridicule. 
In other words, they have failed. And they are described as "losers." 
Now, is there any alternative to this? 
I think the Western tradition shows us one glorious alternative, which is tragedy. 
Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. 
A few years ago, I was thinking about this, and I went to "The Sunday Sport," a tabloid newspaper I don't recommend you start reading if you're not familiar with it already. 
(Laughter) And I went to talk to them about certain of the great tragedies of Western art. 
I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories, if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon. 
I mentioned Othello; they'd not heard of it but were fascinated. 
(Laughter) I asked them to write a headline for the story. 
They came up with "Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills Senator's Daughter." 
Splashed across the headline. 
I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. 
Again, a book they were enchanted to discover. 
And they wrote "Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud." 
(Laughter) And then my favorite -- they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys -- my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding." 
(Laughter) (Applause) In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. 
At the other end of the spectrum, you've got tragedy and tragic art. 
And I suppose I'm arguing that we should learn a little bit about what's happening in tragic art. 
It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. 
He is not a loser, though he has lost. 
And I think that is the message of tragedy to us, and why it's so very, very important, I think. 
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. 
We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. 
We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. 
And so we tend to worship ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes. 
That's a very new situation. 
Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. 
We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature. 
Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. 
It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. 
And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. 
We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us. 
What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. 
And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. 
If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. 
You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. 
My own theory of success -- I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? 
But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word "success" might mean. 
Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. 
We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. 
Nonsense. 
So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. 
And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding. 
And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. 
They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. 
Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. 
No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true. 
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. 
These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. 
When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. 
When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. 
We are highly open to suggestion. 
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. 
We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. 
Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along. 
So, I'm going to end it there. 
But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. 
But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. 
Let's probe away at our notions of success. 
Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. 
But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a "loser," with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers? 
Alain De Botton: Yes, I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. 
Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. 
So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. 
That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic. 
CA: I mean, do you believe that you can combine your kind of kinder, gentler philosophy of work with a successful economy? 
Or do you think that you can't, but it doesn't matter that much that we're putting too much emphasis on that? 
AB: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. 
You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? 
And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. 
And it's a very hard line to make. 
We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option. 
CA: Alain De Botton. 
AB: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I want to lead here by talking a little bit about my credentials to bring this up with you, because, quite honestly, you really, really should not listen to any old person with an opinion about COVID-19. 
(Laughter) So I've been working in global health for about 20 years, and my specific technical specialty is in health systems and what happens when health systems experience severe shocks. 
I've also worked in global health journalism; I've written about global health and biosecurity for newspapers and web outlets, and I published a book a few years back about the major global health threats facing us as a planet. 
I have supported and led epidemiology efforts that range from evaluating Ebola treatment centers to looking at transmission of tuberculosis in health facilities and doing avian influenza preparedness. 
I have a master's degree in International Health. 
I'm not a physician. I'm not a nurse. 
My specialty isn't patient care or taking care of individual people. 
My specialty is looking at populations and health systems, what happens when diseases move on the large level. 
If we're ranking sources of global health expertise on a scale of one to 10, one is some random person ranting on Facebook and 10 is the World Health Organization, I'd say you can probably put me at like a seven or an eight. 
So keep that in mind as I talk to you. 
I'll start with the basics here, because I think that's gotten lost in some of the media noise around COVID-19. 
So, COVID-19 is a coronavirus. 
Coronaviruses are a specific subset of virus, and they have some unique characteristics as viruses. 
They use RNA instead of DNA as their genetic material, and they're covered in spikes on the surface of the virus. 
They use those spikes to invade cells. 
Those spikes are the corona in coronavirus. 
COVID-19 is known as a novel coronavirus because, until December, we'd only heard of six coronaviruses. 
COVID-19 is the seventh. 
It's new to us. 
It just had its gene sequencing, it just got its name. 
That's why it's novel. 
If you remember SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, those were coronaviruses. 
And they're both called respiratory syndromes, because that's what coronaviruses do -- they go for your lungs. 
They don't make you puke, they don't make you bleed from the eyeballs, they don't make you hemorrhage. 
They head for your lungs. 
COVID-19 is no different. 
It causes a range of respiratory symptoms that go from stuff like a dry cough and a fever all the way out to fatal viral pneumonia. 
And that range of symptoms is one of the reasons it's actually been so hard to track this outbreak. 
Plenty of people get COVID-19 but so gently, their symptoms are so mild, they don't even go to a health care provider. 
They don't register in the system. 
Children, in particular, have it very easy with COVID-19, which is something we should all be grateful for. 
Coronaviruses are zoonotic, which means that they transmit from animals to people. 
Some coronaviruses, like COVID-19, also transmit person to person. 
The person-to-person ones travel faster and travel farther, just like COVID-19. 
Zoonotic illnesses are really hard to get rid of, because they have an animal reservoir. 
One example is avian influenza, where we can abolish it in farmed animals, in turkeys, in ducks, but it keeps coming back every year because it's brought to us by wild birds. 
You don't hear a lot about it because avian influenza doesn't transmit person-to-person, but we have outbreaks in poultry farms every year all over the world. 
COVID-19 most likely skipped from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. 
Now for the less basic parts. 
This is not the last major outbreak we're ever going to see. 
There's going to be more outbreaks, and there's going to be more epidemics. 
That's not a maybe. That's a given. 
And it's a result of the way that we, as human beings, are interacting with our planet. 
Human choices are driving us into a position where we're going to see more outbreaks. 
Part of that is about climate change and the way a warming climate makes the world more hospitable to viruses and bacteria. 
But it's also about the way we're pushing into the last wild spaces on our planet. 
When we burn and plow the Amazon rain forest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted to farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they've never come into contact with before, and those populations have new kinds of diseases: bacteria, viruses, stuff we're not ready for. 
Bats, in particular, have a knack for hosting illnesses that can infect people, but they're not the only animals that do it. 
So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming. 
We can't stop the outbreaks with quarantine or travel restrictions. 
That's everybody's first impulse: "Let's stop the people from moving. Let's stop this outbreak from happening." 
But the fact is, it's really hard to get a good quarantine in place. 
It's really hard to set up travel restrictions. 
Even the countries that have made serious investments in public health, like the US and South Korea, can't get that kind of restriction in place fast enough to actually stop an outbreak instantly. 
There's logistical reasons for that, and there's medical reasons. 
If you look at COVID-19 right now, it seems like it could have a period where you're infected and show no symptoms that's as long as 24 days. 
So people are walking around with this virus showing no signs. 
They're not going to get quarantined. Nobody knows they need quarantining. 
There's also some real costs to quarantine and to travel restrictions. 
Humans are social animals, and they resist when you try to hold them into place and when you try to separate them. 
We saw in the Ebola outbreak that as soon as you put a quarantine in place, people start trying to evade it. 
Individual patients, if they know there's a strict quarantine protocol, may not go for health care, because they're afraid of the medical system or they can't afford care and they don't want to be separated from their family and friends. 
Politicians, government officials, when they know that they're going to get quarantined if they talk about outbreaks and cases, may conceal real information for fear of triggering a quarantine protocol. 
And, of course, these kinds of evasions and dishonesty are exactly what makes it so difficult to track a disease outbreak. 
We can get better at quarantines and travel restrictions, and we should, but they're not our only option, and they're not our best option for dealing with these situations. 
The real way for the long haul to make outbreaks less serious is to build the global health system to support core health care functions in every country in the world so that all countries, even poor ones, are able to rapidly identify and treat new infectious diseases as they emerge. 
China's taken a lot of criticism for its response to COVID-19. 
But the fact is, what if COVID-19 had emerged in Chad, which has three and a half doctors for every hundred thousand people? 
What if it had emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which just released its last Ebola patient from treatment? 
The truth is, countries like this don't have the resources to respond to an infectious disease -- not to treat people and not to report on it fast enough to help the rest of the world. 
I led an evaluation of Ebola treatment centers in Sierra Leone, and the fact is that local doctors in Sierra Leone identified the Ebola crisis very quickly, first as a dangerous, contagious hemorrhagic virus and then as Ebola itself. 
But, having identified it, they didn't have the resources to respond. 
They didn't have enough doctors, they didn't have enough hospital beds and they didn't have enough information about how to treat Ebola or how to implement infection control. 
Eleven doctors died in Sierra Leone of Ebola. 
The country only had 120 when the crisis started. 
By way of contrast, Dallas Baylor Medical Center has more than a thousand physicians on staff. 
These are the kinds of inequities that kill people. 
First, they kill the poor people when the outbreaks start, and then they kill people all over the world when the outbreaks spread. 
If we really want to slow down these outbreaks and minimize their impact, we need to make sure that every country in the world has the capacity to identify new diseases, treat them and report about them so they can share information. 
COVID-19 is going to be a huge burden on health systems. 
COVID-19 has also revealed some real weaknesses in our global health supply chains. 
Just-in-time-ordering, lean systems are great when things are going well, but in a time of crisis, what it means is we don't have any reserves. 
If a hospital -- or a country -- runs out of face masks or personal protective equipment, there's no big warehouse full of boxes that we can go to to get more. 
You have to order more from the supplier, you have to wait for them to produce it and you have to wait for them to ship it, generally from China. 
That's a time lag at a time when it's most important to move quickly. 
If we'd been perfectly prepared for COVID-19, China would have identified the outbreak faster. 
They would have been ready to provide care to infected people without having to build new buildings. 
They would have shared honest information with citizens so that we didn't see these crazy rumors spreading on social media in China. 
And they would have shared information with global health authorities so that they could start reporting to national health systems and getting ready for when the virus spread. 
National health systems would then have been able to stockpile the protective equipment they needed and train health care providers on treatment and infection control. 
We'd have science-based protocols for what to do when things happen, like cruise ships have infected patients. 
And we'd have real information going out to people everywhere, so we wouldn't see embarrassing, shameful incidents of xenophobia, like Asian-looking people getting attacked on the street in Philadelphia. 
But even with all of that in place, we would still have outbreaks. 
The choices we're making about how we occupy this planet make that inevitable. 
As far as we have an expert consensus on COVID-19, it's this: here in the US, and globally, it's going to get worse before it gets better. 
We're seeing cases of human transmission that aren't from returning travel, that are just happening in the community, and we're seeing people infected with COVID-19 when we don't even know where the infection came from. 
Those are signs of an outbreak that's getting worse, not an outbreak that's under control. 
It's depressing, but it's not surprising. 
Global health experts, when they talk about the scenario of new viruses, this is one of the scenarios that they look at. 
We all hoped we'd get off easy, but when experts talk about viral planning, this is the kind of situation and the way they expect the virus to move. 
I want to close here with some personal advice. 
Wash your hands. 
Wash your hands a lot. 
I know you already wash your hands a lot because you're not disgusting, but wash your hands even more. 
Set up cues and routines in your life to get you to wash your hands. 
Wash your hands every time you enter and leave a building. 
Wash your hands when you go into a meeting and when you come out of a meeting. 
Get rituals that are based around handwashing. 
Sanitize your phone. 
You touch that phone with your dirty, unwashed hands all the time. 
I know you take it into the bathroom with you. 
(Laughter) So sanitize your phone and consider not using it as often in public. 
Maybe TikTok and Instagram can be home things only. 
Don't touch your face. 
Don't rub your eyes. 
Don't bite your fingernails. 
Don't wipe your nose on the back of your hand. 
I mean, don't do that anyway because, gross. 
(Laughter) Don't wear a face mask. 
Face masks are for sick people and health care providers. 
If you're sick, your face mask holds in all your coughing and sneezing and protects the people around you. 
And if you're a health care provider, your face mask is one tool in a set of tools called personal protective equipment that you're trained to use so that you can give patient care and not get sick yourself. 
If you're a regular healthy person wearing a face mask, it's just making your face sweaty. 
(Laughter) Leave the face masks in stores for the doctors and the nurses and the sick people. 
If you think you have symptoms of COVID-19, stay home, call your doctor for advice. 
If you're diagnosed with COVID-19, remember it's generally very mild. 
And if you're a smoker, right now is the best possible time to quit smoking. 
I mean, if you're a smoker, right now is always the best possible time to quit smoking, but if you're a smoker and you're worried about COVID-19, I guarantee that quitting is absolutely the best thing you can do to protect yourself from the worst impacts of COVID-19. 
COVID-19 is scary stuff, at a time when pretty much all of our news feels like scary stuff. 
And there's a lot of bad but appealing options for dealing with it: panic, xenophobia, agoraphobia, authoritarianism, oversimplified lies that make us think that hate and fury and loneliness are the solution to outbreaks. 
But they're not. 
They just make us less prepared. 
There's also a boring but useful set of options that we can use in response to outbreaks, things like improving health care here and everywhere; investing in health infrastructure and disease surveillance so that we know when the new diseases come; building health systems all over the world; looking at strengthening our supply chains so they're ready for emergencies; and better education, so we're capable of talking about disease outbreaks and the mathematics of risk without just blind panic. 
We need to be guided by equity here, because in this situation, like so many, equity is actually in our own self-interest. 
So thank you so much for listening to me today, and can I be the first one to tell you: wash your hands when you leave the theater. 
(Applause) 

[How can we control the coronavirus pandemic?] [From infectious disease expert Adam Kucharski] [Question 1: What does containment mean when it comes to outbreaks?] Containment is this idea that you can focus your effort on control very much on the cases and their contacts. 
So you're not causing disruption to the wider population, you have a case that comes in, you isolate them, you work out who they've come into contact with, who's potentially these opportunities for exposure and then you can follow up those people, maybe quarantine them, to make sure that no further transmission happens. 
So it's a very focused, targeted method, and for SARS, it worked remarkably well. 
But I think for this infection, because some cases are going to be missed, or undetected, you've really got to be capturing a large chunk of people at risk. 
If a few slip through the net, potentially, you're going to get an outbreak. 
[Question 2: If containment isn't enough, what comes next?] In that respect, it would be about massive changes in our social interactions. 
And so that would require, of the opportunities that could spread the virus so these kind of close contacts, everybody in the population, on average, will be needing to reduce those interactions potentially by two-thirds to bring it under control. 
That might be through working from home, from changing lifestyle and kind of where you go in crowded places and dinners. 
And of course, these measures, things like school closures, and other things that just attempt to reduce the social mixing of a population. 
[Question 3: What are the risks that we need people to think about?] It's not just whose hand you shake, it's whose hand that person goes on to shake. 
And I think we need to think about these second-degree steps, that you might think you have low risk and you're in a younger group, but you're often going to be a very short step away from someone who is going to get hit very hard by this. 
And I think we really need to be socially minded and think this could be quite dramatic in terms of change of behavior, but it needs to be to reduce the impact that we're potentially facing. 
[Question 4: How far apart should people stay from each other?] I think it's hard to pin down exactly, but I think one thing to bear in mind is that there's not so much evidence that this is a kind of aerosol and it goes really far -- it's reasonably short distances. 
I don't think it's the case that you're sitting a few meters away from someone and the virus is somehow going to get across. 
It's in closer interactions, and it's why we're seeing so many transmission events occur in things like meals and really tight-knit groups. 
Because if you imagine that's where you can get a virus out and onto surfaces and onto hands and onto faces, and it's really situations like that we've got to think more about. 
[Question 5: What kind of protective measures should countries put in place?] I think that's what people are trying to piece together, first in terms of what works. 
It's only really in the last sort of few weeks we've got a sense that this thing can be controllable with this extent of interventions, but of course, not all countries can do what China have done, some of these measures incur a huge social, economic, psychological burden on populations. 
And of course, there's the time limit. 
In China, they've had them in for six weeks, it's tough to maintain that, so we need to think of these tradeoffs of all the things we can ask people to do, what's going to have the most impact on actually reducing the burden. 
[To learn more, visit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [World Health Organization] 

In 1165, copies of a strange letter began to circulate throughout Western Europe. 
It spoke of a fantastical realm, containing the Tower of Babel and the Fountain of Youth— all ruled over by the letter’s mysterious author: Prester John. 
Today, we know that this extraordinary king never existed. 
But the legend of this mythical kingdom and its powerful ruler would impact the decisions of European leaders for the next 400 years. 
Prester John’s myth would propel the age of exploration, inspire intercontinental diplomacy, and indirectly begin a civil war. 
When Prester John’s letter appeared, Europe was embroiled in the Crusades. 
In this series of religious wars, Europeans campaigned to seize what they regarded as the Christian Holy Land. 
The Church vilified any faith outside of Christianity, including that of the Jewish and Muslim communities populating the region. 
Crusaders were eager to find Christian kingdoms to serve as allies in their war. 
And they were particularly interested in rumors of a powerful Christian king who had defeated an enormous Muslim army in the Far East. 
In fact, it was a Mongol horde including converted Christian tribes that had routed the army. 
But news of this victory traveled unreliably. 
Merchants and emissaries filled gaps in the story with epic poems and Biblical fragments. 
By the time the story reached Europe, the Mongol horde had been replaced with a great Christian army, commanded by a king who shared the Crusader’s vision of marching on Jerusalem. 
And when a letter allegedly written by this so-called “Prester John” appeared, European rulers were thrilled. 
While the letter’s actual author remains unknown, its stereotypes about the East and alignment with European goals indicate it was a Western forgery. 
But despite the letter’s obvious origins as European propaganda, the appeal of Prester John’s myth was too great for the Crusaders to ignore. 
Before long, European mapmakers were guessing the location of his mythical kingdom. 
In the 13th and 14th centuries, European missionaries went East, along the newly revived Silk Road. 
They weren’t searching for the letter’s author, who would have been over a century old; but rather, for his descendants. 
The title of Prester John was briefly identified with several Central Asian rulers, but it soon became clear that the Mongols were largely non-Christian. 
And as their Empire began to decline, Europeans began pursuing alternate routes to the Far East, and new clues to Prester John’s location. 
At the same time these explorers went south, Ethiopian pilgrims began traveling north. 
In Rome, these visitors quickly attracted the interest of European scholars and cartographers. 
Since Ethiopia had been converted to Christianity in the 4th century, the stories of their African homeland fit perfectly into Prester John’s legend. 
Portuguese explorers scoured Africa for the kingdom, until a mix of confusion and diplomacy finally turned myth into reality. 
The Ethiopians graciously received their European guests, who were eager to do business with the ruler they believed to be Prester John. 
Though the Ethiopians were initially confused by the Portuguese’s unusual name for their Emperor, they were savvy enough to recognize the diplomatic capital it afforded them. 
The Ethiopian diplomats played the part of Prester John’s subjects, and the Portuguese triumphantly announced an alliance with the fabled sovereign— over 350 years after the European letter had begun the search. 
But this long-awaited partnership was quickly tested. 
A decade later, the Sultanate of Adal, a regional power supported by the Ottoman Empire, invaded Ethiopia. 
The Portuguese sent troops that helped Ethiopians win this conflict. 
But by this time, it was clear that Ethiopia was not the powerful ally Europe had hoped. 
Worse still, the increasingly intolerant Roman Catholic Church now deemed the Ethiopian sect of Christianity heretical. 
Their subsequent attempts to convert the people they once revered as ideal Christians would eventually spark a civil war, and in the 1630s, Ethiopia cut ties with Europe. 
Over the next two centuries, the legend of Prester John slowly faded into oblivion— ending the reign of a king who made history despite having never existed. 

In January of 1953, a tidal surge shook the North Sea. 
The titanic waves flooded the Dutch coastline, killing almost 2,000 people. 
54 years later, a similar storm threatened the region. 
But this time, the Netherlands were ready. 
As the water swelled, state-of-the-art computer sensors activated emergency protocols. 
Over the next 30 minutes, a pair of 240-meter steel arms swung shut, protecting the channel ahead. 
Using 680-tonne ball joints, the barrier moved in rhythm with the shifting wind and waves. 
By morning, the storm had passed with minimal flooding. 
The first field activation of the Maeslantkering had been a resounding success. 
As one of the planet’s largest mobile structures, this storm surge barrier is a marvel of human engineering. 
But the Maeslantkering is just one part of a massive, interlocking system of water controls known as the Delta Works— the most sophisticated flood prevention project in the world. 
The Netherlands has a long history with water management. 
The country lies along the delta of three major European rivers, and nearly a quarter of its territory is below sea level. 
This geography makes the region extremely prone to flooding. 
So much so, that some of the earliest Dutch governing bodies were informal “water boards” that coordinated flood protection projects. 
But after the storms of 1953, the Dutch government took more official measures. 
They established the Delta Commission, and tasked them with protecting the entire southwestern region. 
Focusing on densely populated cities, their aim was to reduce the annual odds of flooding below 1 in 10,000— about 100 times as safe as the average coastal city. 
Accomplishing this lofty goal required various infrastructure projects along the southwestern coast. 
The first line of defense was to dam the region’s flood-prone estuaries. 
These large inlets fed many of the country’s rivers into the North Sea, and during storms they allowed flood water to surge inland. 
Using a series of dams, the Delta Commission transformed these estuaries into expansive lakes that serve as nature preserves and community parks. 
However, this solution wouldn’t work for the Nieuwe Waterweg. 
As the lifeblood of the local shipping industry, this passage had to be kept open in safe conditions, and barricaded during storm surges. 
In 1998, the completed Maeslantkering provided the flexible protection necessary. 
Alongside additional barriers, like grassy dikes and concrete seawalls, these fortifications made up the bulk of the Delta Works project, which was primarily focused on holding back ocean storms. 
But in the following decades, the Dutch pursued additional plans to complement the Delta Works and protect against floods further inland. 
Under the "Room for the River" plan, farms and dikes were relocated away from the shore. 
This left more space for water to collect in low-lying floodplains, creating reservoirs and habitats for local wildlife. 
This strategic retreat not only decreased flood risk, but allowed for the redeveloped settlements to be built more densely and sustainably. 
Perhaps no city embodies the Netherlands' multi-pronged approach to water management as much as Rotterdam, a thriving city almost entirely below sea level. 
When a storm threatens, densely populated older districts are protected by traditional dikes. 
Meanwhile, newer districts have been artificially elevated, often sporting green roofs that store rainwater. 
Numerous structures around the city transform into water storage facilities, including parking garages and plazas which normally serve as theaters and sports arenas. 
Meanwhile in the harbor, floating pavilions rise with the water level. 
These are the first of several planned amphibious structures, some of which house water purification systems and solar collectors. 
These strategies are just some of the technologies and policies that have put the Netherlands at the cutting edge of water management. 
The country continues to find new ways to make cities more resilient to natural disasters. 
And as the rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten low-lying cities across the world, the Netherlands offers an exceptional example of how to go with the flow. 

Working in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, he began his career as a neurologist before pioneering the discipline of psychoanalysis. 
He proposed that people are motivated by unconscious desires and repressed memories, and their problems can be addressed by making those motivations conscious through talk therapy. 
His influence towers above that of all other psychologists in the public eye. 
But was Sigmund Freud right about human nature? 
And were his methods scientific? 
Order, order. Today on the stand we have… Dad? 
Ahem, no, your honor. 
This is Doctor Sigmund Freud, one of the most innovative thinkers in the history of psychology. 
An egomaniac who propagated pseudoscientific theories. 
Well, which is it? 
He tackled issues medicine refused to address. 
Freud’s private practice treated women who suffered from what was called hysteria at the time, and their complaints hadn’t been taken seriously at all. 
From the women with depression he treated initially to World War I veterans with PTSD, Freud’s talking cure worked, and the visibility he gave his patients forced the medical establishment to acknowledge their psychological disorders were real. 
He certainly didn’t help all his patients. 
Freud was convinced that our behavior is shaped by unconscious urges and repressed memories. 
He invented baseless unconscious or irrational drivers behind the behavior of trauma survivors— and caused real harm. 
How’s that? 
He misrepresented some of his most famous case studies, claiming his treatment had cured patients when in fact they had gotten worse. 
Later therapists influenced by his theories coaxed their patients into "recovering" supposedly repressed memories of childhood abuse that never happened. 
Lives and families were torn apart. 
You can’t blame Freud for later misapplications of his work— that would be projecting. 
Plenty of his ideas were harmful without any misapplication. 
He viewed homosexuality as a developmental glitch. 
He coined the term penis envy— meaning women are haunted for life by their lack of penises. 
Freud was a product of his era. 
Yes, some of the specifics were flawed, but he created a new space for future scientists to explore, investigate, and build upon. 
Modern therapy techniques that millions of people rely on came out of the work he started with psychoanalysis. 
And today everyone knows there’s an unconscious— that idea was popularized Freud. 
Psychologists today only believe in a “cognitive unconscious,” the fact that you aren’t aware of everything going on at a given moment. 
Freud took this idea way too far, ascribing deep meaning to everything. 
He built his theories on scientific ideas that were outdated even in his own time, not just by today’s standards— for example, he thought individual psychology is derived from the biological inheritance of events in ancient history. 
And I mean ancient— like the Ice Age or the killing of Moses. 
Freud and his closest allies actually believed these prehistorical traumas had ongoing impacts on human psychology. 
He thought that the phase of cold indifference to sexuality during pubescence was literally an echo of the Ice Age. 
With fantastical beliefs like these, how can we take him seriously? 
Any renowned thinker from centuries past has ideas that seem fantastical by today’s standards, but we can’t discount their influence on this basis. 
Freud was an innovator linking ideas across many fields. 
His concepts have become everyday terms that shape how we understand and talk about our own experiences. 
The Oedipus complex? Ego and id? Defense mechanisms? Death wishes? 
All Freud. 
But Freud didn’t present himself as a social theorist— he insisted that his work was scientific. 
Are you saying he… repressed inconvenient facts? 
Freud’s theories were unfalsifiable. 
Wait, so you’re saying he was right? 
No, his ideas were framed so that there’s no way to empirically verify them. 
Freud didn’t even necessarily believe in the psychoanalysis he was peddling. 
He was pessimistic about the impact of therapy. 
What! I think I need to lie down! 
Many of Sigmund Freud’s ideas don’t hold up to modern science, and his clinical practices don’t meet today’s ethical standards. 
At the same time, he sparked a revolution in psychology and society, and created a vocabulary for discussing emotion. 
Freud made his share of mistakes. 
But is a thinker responsible for how subsequent generations put their ideas to use? 
Do they deserve the blame, credit, or redemption when we put history on trial? 

Flanked by two powerful European nations, the English Channel has long been one of the world’s most important maritime passages. 
Yet for most of its history, the channel’s rocky shores and stormy weather made crossing a dangerous prospect. 
Engineers of the early 1800's proposed numerous plans for spanning the 33 kilometer gap. 
Their designs included artificial islands linked by bridges, submerged tubes suspended from floating platforms, and an underwater passage more than twice the length of any existing tunnel. 
By the end of the century, this last proposal had captured European imagination. 
The invention of the tunnel boring machine and the discovery of a stable layer of chalk marl below the seabed made this fantastic tunnel more feasible. 
But the project’s most urgent obstacles were ones no engineer could solve. 
At the time, Britons viewed their geographic isolation as a strategic advantage, and fears about French invasion shut down plans for the tunnel. 
The rise of aerial warfare rendered these worries obsolete, but new economic concerns arose to replace them. 
Finally, 100 years after the initial excavation, the two countries reached an agreement— the tunnel would proceed with private funding. 
In 1985, a group of French and British companies invested the modern equivalent of 14 billion pounds, making the tunnel the most expensive infrastructure project to date. 
The design called for three separate tunnels— one for trains to France, one for trains to England, and one service tunnel between them. 
Alongside crossover chambers, emergency passages, and air ducts, this amounted to over 200 kilometers of tunnels. 
In 1988, workers began excavating from both sides, planning to meet in the middle. 
Early surveys of the French coast revealed the site was full of fault lines. 
These small cracks let water seep into the rock, so engineers had to develop waterproof boring machines. 
The British anticipated drier conditions, and forged ahead with regular borers. 
But only months into the work, water flooded in through undetected fissures. 
To drill in this wet chalk, the British had to use grout to seal the cracks created in the borer’s wake, and even work ahead of the main borer to reinforce the chalk about to be drilled. 
With these obstacles behind them, both teams began drilling at full speed. 
Boring machines weighing up to 1,300 tons drilled at nearly 3.5 meters per hour. 
As they dug, they installed lining rings to stabilize the tunnel behind them, making way for support wagons following each machine. 
Even at top speed, work had to proceed carefully. 
The chalk layer followed a winding path between unstable rock and clay, punctured by over 100 boring holes made by previous surveyors. 
Furthermore, both teams had to constantly check their coordinates to ensure they were on track to meet within 2 centimeters of each other. 
To maintain this delicate trajectory, the borers employed satellite positioning systems, as well as paleontologists who used excavated fossils to confirm they were at the right depth. 
During construction, the project employed over 13,000 people and cost the lives of ten workers. 
But after two and a half years of tunneling, the two sides finally made contact. 
British worker Graham Fagg emerged on the French side, becoming the first human to cross the channel by land since the Ice Age. 
There was still work to be done— from installing crossover chambers and pumping stations, to laying over a hundred miles of tracks, cables, and sensors. 
But on May 6, 1994, an opening ceremony marked the tunnel’s completion. 
Full public service began 16 months later, with trains for passengers and rail shuttles for cars and trucks. 
Today, the Channel Tunnel services over 20 million passengers a year, transporting riders across the channel in just 35 minutes. 
Unfortunately, not everyone has the privilege of making this trip legally. 
Thousands of refugees have tried to enter Britain through the tunnel in sometimes fatal attempts. 
These tragedies have transformed the tunnel’s southern entrance into an ongoing site of conflict. 
Hopefully, the structure’s history can serve as a reminder that humanity is at their best when breaking down barriers. 

It was one of the strangest trials in Dutch history. 
The defendant in this 1947 case was an art forger who had counterfeited millions of dollars worth of paintings. 
But he wasn’t arguing his innocence— in fact, his life depended on proving that he had committed the fraud. 
Like many art forgers, Han van Meegeren was an artist whose original works had failed to bring him renown. 
Embittered towards the art world, van Meegeren set out to make fools of his detractors. 
He learned all he could about the Old Masters— their biographies, their techniques, and their materials. 
The artist he chose for his deception was 17th century Baroque painter Johannes Vermeer— an ambitious decision given Vermeer was famed for his carefully executed and technically brilliant domestic scenes. 
Working in secret for six years, the forger perfected his art, copying numerous works as practice. 
He mixed his own paints after researching the raw materials and pigments available in Vermeer’s time. 
He bought 17th century canvases, created his own brushes, and aged the works by applying synthetic resin and baking them to dry and crack the paint. 
A forensic test could have detected the synthetic resin. 
But at the time, such tests were neither advanced nor widespread, and even today verification of a painting’s authenticity relies on the assessment of art specialists. 
So it’s a matter of their subjective judgment— as well as their reputation. 
And this is where van Meegeren truly outwitted the art world. 
From his research, he knew historians believed Vermeer had an early period of religious painting influenced by the Italian painter Caravaggio. 
The leading authority on Vermeer, Abraham Bredius, was a huge proponent of this theory, though none of these works had surfaced. 
So van Meegeren decided to make one. 
He called it "The Supper at Emmaus." 
Bredius declared van Meegeren’s fake the masterpiece of Vermeer’s oeuvre. 
Van Meegeren’s forgery was not totally up to Vermeer’s technical standards, but these inconsistencies could be made to fit the narrative: this was an early work, produced before the artist had come into his own. 
With the stamp of approval from the art world, the fake was sold in 1937 for the equivalent of over $4 million in today’s money. 
The success prompted van Meegeren to forge and sell more works through various art dealers. 
As unbelievable as it may sound, the art world continued to believe in their authenticity. 
When the Nazis occupied Holland during the Second World War, Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s top generals, sought to add a Vermeer to his collection of artwork looted from all over Europe. 
Van Meegeren obliged, selling him an alleged early Vermeer painting titled "Christ with the Adulteress." 
As the tide of the war turned, so did van Meegeren’s luck. 
Following the Allied victory, he was arrested for delivering a priceless piece of Dutch heritage to the Nazis— an act of treasonous collaboration punishable by death. 
To prove the painting wasn’t a national treasure, he explained step-by-step how he had forged it. 
But he faced an unexpected obstacle— the very expert who had enabled his scam. 
Moved to protect his reputation, Bredius defended the painting’s authenticity. 
With few options left, van Meegeren set to work on a "new" Vermeer. 
When he presented the fake to the court, they finally believed him. 
He was acquitted for collaborating with the Nazis— and sentenced to a year imprisonment for fraud. 
Though there’s evidence that van Meegeren did, in fact, collaborate with the Nazis, he managed to convince the public that he had tricked Göring on purpose, transforming his image into that of a folk hero who had swindled the Nazis. 
Thanks to this newfound notoriety, his works became valuable in their own right— so much so that they were later forged in turn by his own son. 
The same canvases went from revered classics to despised forgeries to works of art respected for the skill and notoriety of the forger. 

I'm going to talk about your mindset. 
Does your mindset correspond to my dataset? 
(Laughter) If not, one or the other needs upgrading, isn't it? 
When I talk to my students about global issues, and I listen to them in the coffee break, they always talk about "we" and "them." 
And when they come back into the lecture room I ask them, "What do you mean with "we" and "them"? 
"Oh, it's very easy. It's the western world and it's the developing world," they say. 
"We learned it in college." 
And what is the definition then? "The definition? 
Everyone knows," they say. 
But then you know, I press them like this. 
So one girl said, very cleverly, "It's very easy. 
Western world is a long life in a small family. 
Developing world is a short life in a large family." 
And I like that definition, because it enabled me to transfer their mindset into the dataset. 
And here you have the dataset. 
So, you can see that what we have on this axis here is size of family. One, two, three, four, five children per woman on this axis. 
And here, length of life, life expectancy, 30, 40, 50. 
Exactly what the students said was their concept about the world. 
And really this is about the bedroom. 
Whether the man and woman decide to have small family, and take care of their kids, and how long they will live. 
It's about the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have soap, water and food, you know, you can live long. 
And the students were right. It wasn't that the world consisted -- the world consisted here, of one set of countries over here, which had large families and short life. Developing world. 
And we had one set of countries up there which was the western world. 
They had small families and long life. 
And you are going to see here the amazing thing that has happened in the world during my lifetime. 
Then the developing countries applied soap and water, vaccination. 
And all the developing world started to apply family planning. 
And partly to USA who help to provide technical advice and investment. 
And you see all the world moves over to a two child family, and a life with 60 to 70 years. 
But some countries remain back in this area here. 
And you can see we still have Afghanistan down here. 
We have Liberia. We have Congo. 
So we have countries living there. 
So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And we, in fact, when we have played this over the world. 
I was at the Global Health Conference here in Washington last week, and I could see the wrong concept even active people in United States had, that they didn't realize the improvement of Mexico there, and China, in relation to United States. 
Look here when I move them forward. 
Here we go. 
They catch up. There's Mexico. 
It's on par with United States in these two social dimensions. 
There was less than five percent of the specialists in Global Health that was aware of this. 
This great nation, Mexico, has the problem that arms are coming from North, across the borders, so they had to stop that, because they have this strange relationship to the United States, you know. 
But if I would change this axis here, I would instead put income per person. 
Income per person. I can put that here. 
And we will then see a completely different picture. 
By the way, I'm teaching you how to use our website, Gapminder World, while I'm correcting this, because this is a free utility on the net. 
And when I now finally got it right, I can go back 200 years in history. 
And I can find United States up there. 
And I can let the other countries be shown. 
And now I have income per person on this axis. 
And United States only had some, one, two thousand dollars at that time. 
And the life expectancy was 35 to 40 years, on par with Afghanistan today. 
And what has happened in the world, I will show now. 
This is instead of studying history for one year at university. 
You can watch me for one minute now and you'll see the whole thing. 
(Laughter) You can see how the brown bubbles, which is west Europe, and the yellow one, which is the United States, they get richer and richer and also start to get healthier and healthier. 
And this is now 100 years ago, where the rest of the world remains behind. 
Here we come. And that was the influenza. 
That's why we are so scared about flu, isn't it? 
It's still remembered. The fall of life expectancy. 
And then we come up. Not until independence started. 
Look here You have China over there, you have India over there, and this is what has happened. 
Did you note there, that we have Mexico up there? 
Mexico is not at all on par with the United States, but they are quite close. 
And especially, it's interesting to see China and the United States during 200 years, because I have my oldest son now working for Google, after Google acquired this software. 
Because in fact, this is child labor. My son and his wife sat in a closet for many years and developed this. 
And my youngest son, who studied Chinese in Beijing. 
So they come in with the two perspectives I have, you know? 
And my son, youngest son who studied in Beijing, in China, he got a long-term perspective. 
Whereas when my oldest son, who works for Google, he should develop by quarter, or by half-year. 
Or Google is quite generous, so he can have one or two years to go. 
But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period, for 100 years, when they went backwards. 
And then they would remember the first part of last century, which was really bad, and we could go by this so-called Great Leap Forward. 
But this was 1963. 
Mao Tse-Tung eventually brought health to China, and then he died, and then Deng Xiaoping started this amazing move forward. 
Isn't it strange to see that the United States first grew the economy, and then gradually got rich? 
Whereas China could get healthy much earlier, because they applied the knowledge of education, nutrition, and then also benefits of penicillin and vaccines and family planning. 
And Asia could have social development before they got the economic development. 
So to me, as a public health professor, it's not strange that all these countries grow so fast now. 
Because what you see here, what you see here is the flat world of Thomas Friedman, isn't it. 
It's not really, really flat. 
But the middle income countries -- and this is where I suggest to my students, stop using the concept "developing world." 
Because after all, talking about the developing world is like having two chapters in the history of the United States. 
The last chapter is about present, and president Obama, and the other is about the past, where you cover everything from Washington to Eisenhower. 
Because Washington to Eisenhower, that is what we find in the developing world. 
We could actually go to Mayflower to Eisenhower, and that would be put together into a developing world, which is rightly growing its cities in a very amazing way, which have great entrepreneurs, but also have the collapsing countries. 
So, how could we make better sense about this? 
Well, one way of trying is to see whether we could look at income distribution. 
This is the income distribution of peoples in the world, from $1. This is where you have food to eat. 
These people go to bed hungry. 
And this is the number of people. 
This is $10, whether you have a public or a private health service system. This is where you can provide health service for your family and school for your children, and this is OECD countries: Green, Latin America, East Europe. 
This is East Asia, and the light blue there is South Asia. 
And this is how the world changed. 
It changed like this. 
Can you see how it's growing? And how hundreds of millions and billions is coming out of poverty in Asia? 
And it goes over here? 
And I come now, into projections, but I have to stop at the door of Lehman Brothers there, you know, because -- (Laughter) that's where the projections are not valid any longer. 
Probably the world will do this. 
and then it will continue forward like this. 
But more or less, this is what will happen, and we have a world which cannot be looked upon as divided. 
We have the high income countries here, with the United States as a leading power; we have the emerging economies in the middle, which provide a lot of the funding for the bailout; and we have the low income countries here. 
Yeah, this is a fact that from where the money comes, they have been saving, you know, over the last decade. 
And here we have the low income countries where entrepreneurs are. 
And here we have the countries in collapse and war, like Afghanistan, Somalia, parts of Congo, Darfur. 
We have all this at the same time. 
That's why it's so problematic to describe what has happened in the developing world. 
Because it's so different, what has happened there. 
And that's why I suggest a slightly different approach of what you would call it. 
And you have huge differences within countries also. 
I heard that your departments here were by regions. 
Here you have Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Arab states, East Europe, Latin America, and OECD. 
And on this axis, GDP. 
And on this, heath, child survival, and it doesn't come as a surprise that Africa south of Sahara is at the bottom. 
But when I split it, when I split it into country bubbles, the size of the bubbles here is the population. 
Then you see Sierra Leone and Mauritius, completely different. 
There is such a difference within Sub-Saharan Africa. 
And I can split the others. Here is the South Asian, Arab world. 
Now all your different departments. 
East Europe, Latin America, and OECD countries. 
And here were are. We have a continuum in the world. 
We cannot put it into two parts. 
It is Mayflower down here. It is Washington here, building, building countries. 
It's Lincoln here, advancing them. 
It's Eisenhower bringing modernity into the countries. 
And then it's United States today, up here. 
And we have countries all this way. 
Now, this is the important thing of understanding how the world has changed. 
At this point I decided to make a pause. 
(Laughter) And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. 
Many are not aware of -- no, this is not a joke. 
This is very serious. 
It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. 
(Applause) And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. 
And providing data free of charge on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much. 
Quite the opposite of the World Bank, who compiled data with government money, tax money, and then they sell it to add a little profit, in a very inefficient, Gutenberg way. 
(Applause) But the people doing that at the World Bank are among the best in the world. 
And they are highly skilled professionals. 
It's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in the modern way, as we do. 
And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. 
And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor. 
(Laughter) And I'm not paid to come here, no. 
I would like to show you what happens with the data, what we can show with this data. 
Look here. This is the world. 
With income down there and child mortality. 
And what has happened in the world? 
Since 1950, during the last 50 years we have had a fall in child mortality. 
And it is the DHS that makes it possible to know this. 
And we had an increase in income. 
And the blue former developing countries are mixing up with the former industrialized western world. 
We have a continuum. But we still have, of course, Congo, up there. We still have as poor countries as we have had, always, in history. 
And that's the bottom billion, where we've heard today about a completely new approach to do it. 
And how fast has this happened? 
Well, MDG 4. 
The United States has not been so eager to use MDG 4. 
But you have been the main sponsor that has enabled us to measure it, because it's the only child mortality that we can measure. 
And we used to say that it should fall four percent per year. 
Let's see what Sweden has done. 
We used to boast about fast social progress. 
That's where we were, 1900. 
1900, Sweden was there. 
Same child mortality as Bangladesh had, 1990, though they had lower income. 
They started very well. They used the aid well. 
They vaccinated the kids. They get better water. 
And they reduced child mortality, with an amazing 4.7 percent per year. They beat Sweden. 
I run Sweden the same 16 year period. 
Second round, it's Sweden, 1916, against Egypt, 1990. 
Here we go. Once again the USA is part of the reason here. 
They get safe water, they get food for the poor, and they get malaria eradicated. 
5.5 percent. They are faster than the millennium development goal. 
And third chance for Sweden, against Brazil here. 
Brazil here has amazing social improvement over the last 16 years, and they go faster than Sweden. 
This means that the world is converging. 
The middle income countries, the emerging economy, they are catching up. 
They are moving to cities, where they also get better assistance for that. 
Well the Swedish students protest at this point. 
They say, "This is not fair, because these countries had vaccines and antibiotics that were not available for Sweden. 
We have to do real-time competition." 
Okay. I give you Singapore, the year I was born. 
Singapore had twice the child mortality of Sweden. 
It's the most tropical country in the world, a marshland on the equator. 
And here we go. It took a little time for them to get independent. 
But then they started to grow their economy. 
And they made the social investment. They got away malaria. 
They got a magnificent health system that beat both the U.S. and Sweden. 
We never thought it would happen that they would win over Sweden! 
(Applause) All these green countries are achieving millennium development goals. 
These yellow are just about to be doing this. 
These red are the countries that doesn't do it, and the policy has to be improved. 
Not simplistic extrapolation. 
We have to really find a way of supporting those countries in a better way. 
We have to respect the middle income countries on what they are doing. 
And we have to fact-base the whole way we look at the world. 
This is dollar per person. This is HIV in the countries. 
The blue is Africa. 
The size of the bubbles is how many are HIV affected. 
You see the tragedy in South Africa there. 
About 20 percent of the adult population are infected. 
And in spite of them having quite a high income, they have a huge number of HIV infected. 
But you also see that there are African countries down here. 
There is no such thing as an HIV epidemic in Africa. 
There's a number, five to 10 countries in Africa that has the same level as Sweden and United States. 
And there are others who are extremely high. 
And I will show you that what has happened in one of the best countries, with the most vibrant economy in Africa and a good governance, Botswana. 
They have a very high level. It's coming down. 
But now it's not falling, because there, with help from PEPFAR, it's working with treatment. And people are not dying. 
And you can see it's not that easy, that it is war which caused this. 
Because here, in Congo, there is war. 
And here, in Zambia, there is peace. 
And it's not the economy. Richer country has a little higher. 
If I split Tanzania in its income, the richer 20 percent in Tanzania has more HIV than the poorest one. 
And it's really different within each country. 
Look at the provinces of Kenya. They are very different. 
And this is the situation you see. 
It's not deep poverty. It's the special situation, probably of concurrent sexual partnership among part of the heterosexual population in some countries, or some parts of countries, in south and eastern Africa. 
Don't make it Africa. Don't make it a race issue. 
Make it a local issue. And do prevention at each place, in the way it can be done there. 
So to just end up, there are things of suffering in the one billion poorest, which we don't know. 
Those who live beyond the cellphone, those who have yet to see a computer, those who have no electricity at home. 
This is the disease, Konzo, I spent 20 years elucidating in Africa. 
It's caused by fast processing of toxic cassava root in famine situation. 
It's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the '30s. 
It's similar to other nutritional diseases. 
It will never affect a rich person. 
We have seen it here in Mozambique. 
This is the epidemic in Mozambique. This is an epidemic in northern Tanzania. 
You never heard about the disease. 
But it's much more than Ebola that has been affected by this disease. 
Cause crippling throughout the world. 
And over the last two years, 2,000 people has been crippled in the southern tip of Bandundu region. 
That used to be the illegal diamond trade, from the UNITA-dominated area in Angola. 
That has now disappeared, and they are now in great economic problem. 
And one week ago, for the first time, there were four lines on the Internet. 
Don't get confused of the progress of the emerging economies and the great capacity of people in the middle income countries and in peaceful low income countries. 
There is still mystery in one billion. 
And we have to have more concepts than just developing countries and developing world. 
We need a new mindset. The world is converging, but -- but -- but not the bottom billion. 
They are still as poor as they've ever been. 
It's not sustainable, and it will not happen around one superpower. 
But you will remain one of the most important superpowers, and the most hopeful superpower, for the time to be. 
And this institution will have a very crucial role, not for United States, but for the world. 
So you have a very bad name, State Department. This is not the State Department. 
It's the World Department. 
And we have a high hope in you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

This is the tale of two ancient cities and the trees that determined their destinies. 
In 3,000 BC Uruk was more densely populated than modern day New York City. 
This crowded capital had to continually expand their irrigation system to feed its growing population. 
2,500 years later in Sri Lanka, the city of Anuradhapura had a similar problem. 
They were also growing constantly, and like Uruk, their city relied heavily on an elaborate irrigation system. 
As Uruk grew, its farmers began chopping down trees to make space for more crops. 
In Anuradhapura, however, trees were sacred. 
Their city housed an offshoot of the Bodhi tree under which Buddha himself was said to have attained enlightenment. 
Religious reverence slowed farmer’s axes and even led the city to plant additional trees in urban parks. 
Initially, Uruk’s expansion worked well. 
But without trees to filter their water supply, Uruk’s irrigation system became contaminated. 
Evaporating water left mineral deposits, which rendered the soil too salty for agriculture. 
Conversely, Anuradhapura’s irrigation system was designed to work in concert with the surrounding forest. 
Their city eventually grew to more than twice Uruk’s population, and today, Anuradhapura still cares for a tree planted over 2,000 years ago. 
We may think of nature as being unconnected to our urban spaces, but trees have always been an essential part of successful cities. 
Trees act like a natural sponge, absorbing storm water runoff before releasing it back into the atmosphere. 
The webs of their roots protect against mudslides while allowing soil to retain water and filter out toxins. 
Roots help prevent floods, while reducing the need for storm drains and water treatment plants. 
Their porous leaves purify the air by trapping carbon and other pollutants, making them essential in the fight against climate change. 
Humanity has been uncovering these arboreal benefits for centuries. 
But trees aren’t just crucial to the health of a city’s infrastructure; they play a vital role in the health of its citizens as well. 
In the 1870’s, Manhattan had few trees outside the island’s parks. 
Without trees to provide shade, buildings absorbed up to nine times more solar radiation during deadly summer heat waves. 
Combined with the period’s poor sanitation standards, the oppressive heat made the city a breeding ground for bacteria like cholera. 
In modern day Hong Kong, tall skyscrapers and underground infrastructure make it difficult for trees to grow. 
This contributes to the city’s dangerously poor air quality, which can cause bronchitis and diminished lung function. 
Trees affect our mental health as well. 
Research indicates that the presence of green foliage increases attention spans and decreases stress levels. 
It’s even been shown that hospital patients with views of brick walls recover more slowly than those with views of trees. 
Fortunately, many cities are full of views like this— and that’s no accident. 
As early as the 18th century, city planners began to embrace the importance of urban trees. 
In 1733, Colonel James Oglethorpe planned the city of Savannah, Georgia to ensure that no neighborhood was more than a 2-minute walk from a park. 
After World War II, Copenhagen directed all new development along five arteries— each sandwiched between a park. 
This layout increased the city’s resilience to pollution and natural disasters. 
And urban trees don’t just benefit people. 
Portland’s Forest Park preserves the region’s natural biodiversity, making the city home to various local plants, 112 bird species, and 62 species of mammals. 
No city is more committed to trees than Singapore. 
Since 1967, Singapore’s government has planted over 1.2 million trees, including those within 50-meter tall vertical gardens called supertrees. 
These structures sustain themselves and nearby conservatories with solar energy and collected rainwater. 
Trees and vegetation currently cover over 50% of Singapore’s landmass, reducing the need for air conditioning and encouraging low-pollution transportation. 
By 2050, it’s estimated that over 65% of the world will be living in cities. 
City planners can lay an eco-friendly foundation, but it’s up to the people who live in these urban forests to make them homes for more than humans. 

Every single one of us will lose or has already lost something we rely on every single day. 
I am of course talking about our keys. 
(Laughter) Just kidding. 
What I actually want to talk about is one of our most important senses: vision. 
Every single day we each lose a little bit of our ability to refocus our eyes until we can't refocus at all. 
We call this condition presbyopia, and it affects two billion people worldwide. 
That's right, I said billion. 
If you haven't heard of presbyopia, and you're wondering, "Where are these two billion people?" 
here's a hint before I get into the details. 
It's the reason why people wear reading glasses or bifocal lenses. 
I'll get started by describing the loss in refocusing ability leading up to presbyopia. 
As a newborn, you would have been able to focus as close as six and a half centimeters, if you wished to. 
By your mid-20s, you have about half of that focusing power left. 
10 centimeters or so, but close enough that you never notice the difference. 
By your late 40s though, the closest you can focus is about 25 centimeters, maybe even farther. 
Losses in focusing ability beyond this point start affecting near-vision tasks like reading, and by the time you reach age 60, nothing within a meter radius of you is clear. 
Right now some of you are probably thinking, that sounds bad but he means you in a figurative sense, only for the people that actually end up with presbyopia. 
But no, when I say you, I literally mean that every single one of you will someday be presbyopic if you aren't already. 
That sounds a bit troubling. 
I want to remind you that presbyopia has been with us for all of human history and we've done a lot of different things to try and fix it. 
So to start, let's imagine that you're sitting at a desk, reading. 
If you were presbyopic, it might look a little something like this. 
Anything close by, like the magazine, will be blurry. 
Moving on to solutions. 
First, reading glasses. 
These have lenses with a single focal power tuned so that near objects come into focus. 
But far objects necessarily go out of focus, meaning you have to constantly switch back and forth between wearing and not wearing them. 
To solve this problem Benjamin Franklin invented what he called "double spectacles." 
Today we call those bifocals, and what they let him do was see far when he looked up and see near when he looked down. 
Today we also have progressive lenses which get rid of the line by smoothly varying the focal power from top to bottom. 
The downside to both of these is that you lose field of vision at any given distance, because it gets split up from top to bottom like this. 
To see why that's a problem, imagine that you're climbing down a ladder or stairs. 
You look down to get your footing but it's blurry. 
Why would it be blurry? 
Well, you look down and that's the near part of the lens, but the next step was past arm's reach, which for your eyes counts as far. 
The next solution I want to point out is a little less common but comes up in contact lenses or LASIK surgeries, and it's called monovision. 
It works by setting up the dominant eye to focus far and the other eye to focus near. 
Your brain does the work of intelligently putting together the sharpest parts from each eye's view, but the two eyes see slightly different things, and that makes it harder to judge distances binocularly. 
So where does that leave us? 
We've come up with a lot of solutions but none of them quite restore natural refocusing. 
None of them let you just look at something and expect it to be in focus. 
But why? 
Well, to explain that we'll want to take a look at the anatomy of the human eye. 
The part of the eye that allows us to refocus to different distances is called the crystalline lens. 
There are muscles surrounding the lens that can deform it into different shapes, which in turn changes its focusing power. 
What happens when someone becomes presbyopic? 
It turns out that the crystalline lens stiffens to the point that it doesn't really change shape anymore. 
Now, thinking back on all the solutions I listed earlier, we can see that they all have something in common with the others but not with our eyes, and that is that they're all static. 
It's like the optical equivalent of a pirate with a peg leg. 
What is the optical equivalent of a modern prosthetic leg? 
The last several decades have seen the creation and rapid development of what are called "focus-tunable lenses." 
There are several different types. 
Mechanically-shifted Alvarez lenses, deformable liquid lenses and electronically-switched, liquid crystal lenses. 
Now these have their own trade-offs, but what they don't skimp on is the visual experience. 
Full-field-of-view vision that can be sharp at any desired distance. 
OK, great. The lenses we need already exist. 
Problem solved, right? 
Not so fast. 
Focus-tunable lenses add a bit of complexity to the equation. 
The lenses don't have any way of knowing what distance they should be focused to. 
What we need are glasses that, when you're looking far, far objects are sharp, and when you look near, near objects come into focus in your field of view, without you having to think about it. 
What I've worked on these last few years at Stanford is building that exact intelligence around the lenses. 
Our prototype borrows technology from virtual and augmented reality systems to estimate focusing distance. 
We have an eye tracker that can tell what direction our eyes are focused in. 
Using two of these, we can triangulate your gaze direction to get a focus estimate. 
Just in case though, to increase reliability, we also added a distance sensor. 
The sensor is a camera that looks out at the world and reports distances to objects. 
We can again use your gaze direction to get a distance estimate for a second time. 
We then fuse those two distance estimates and update the focus-tunable lens power accordingly. 
The next step for us was to test our device on actual people. 
So we recruited about 100 presbyopes and had them test our device while we measured their performance. 
What we saw convinced us right then that autofocals were the future. 
Our participants could see more clearly, they could focus more quickly and they thought it was an easier and better focusing experience than their current correction. 
To put it simply, when it comes to vision, autofocals don't compromise like static corrections in use today do. 
But I don't want to get ahead of myself. 
There's a lot of work for my colleagues and me left to do. 
For example, our glasses are a bit -- (Laughter) bulky, maybe? 
And one reason for this is that we used bulkier components that are often intended for research use or industrial use. 
Another is that we need to strap everything down because current eye-tracking algorithms don't have the robustness that we need. 
So moving forward, as we move from a research setting into a start-up, we plan to make future autofocals eventually look a little bit more like normal glasses. 
For this to happen, we'll need to significantly improve the robustness of our eye-tracking solution. 
We'll also need to incorporate smaller and more efficient electronics and lenses. 
That said, even with our current prototype, we've shown that today's focus-tunable lens technology is capable of outperforming traditional forms of static correction. 
So it's only a matter of time. 
It's pretty clear that in the near future, instead of worrying about which pair of glasses to use and when, we'll be able to just focus on the important things. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Helen Walters: Huang, it's so good to see you. 
Thank you for joining us. How's your 2020 been? 
Huang Hung: My 2020 started totally normal. 
In January, I went to Paris, did my interview for the fashion week there, came back to Beijing on January 22nd, and finding things a little bit tense because there were a lot of rumors. 
Having lived through SARS, I wasn't that concerned. 
And on the 23rd, I had a friend of mine from New York come to my house who had a flu, and we had dinner together, and another friend who came, who left the next day for Australia for vacation on an airplane. 
So we were not taking this terribly seriously until there was a lockdown. 
HW: And we've seen that echo around the world. 
I think still some people find it hard to understand the magnitude of some of the measures that China took. 
I mean -- what else are we missing about China's response in all of this? 
HH: You know, historically, we're just two very different countries in terms of culture and history. 
I mean, these are two completely different human experiences for its people. 
So, for China, when the lockdown happens, people are OK. 
People are OK with it, because they think that's what a good parent should do. 
You know, if a kid gets sick, you put him in the other room, and you lock him up and make sure that the other kids don't get sick. 
And they expect that out of the government. 
But when it is outside of China, from America, it becomes a huge issue of the right political thing to do and whether it's infringing on personal freedom. 
So the issues that you have to deal with in a democratic society are issues that one does not have to deal with in China. 
I have to say that there's a word in Chinese that doesn't exist in any other language, and the word is called "guāi." 
It is what you call a kid who listens to his or her parents. 
So I think, as a people, we are very "guāi." 
We have this sort of authoritarian figure that Chinese always look up to, and they do expect the government to actually take the actions, and they will deal with it. 
However much suffering there is, they feel that, OK, if big brother says that this has to be done, then it must be done. 
And that really defines China as a separate mentality, Chinese has a separate mentality, as, say, people in Europe and America. 
HW: That sense of collective responsibility sometimes feels a little absent from this culture. 
At the same time, there are, I think, valid concerns around surveillance and data privacy, things like that. 
What is the balance here, and what is the right trade-off between surveillance and freedom? 
HH: I think in the internet age, it is somewhere between China and the US. 
I think when you take individual freedom versus collective safety, there has to be a balance somewhere there. 
With surveillance, the head of Baidu, Robin Li, once said the Chinese people are quite willing to give up certain individual rights in exchange for convenience. 
Actually, he was completely criticized on Chinese social media, but I think he is right. 
Chinese people are willing to give up certain rights. 
For example, we have ... 
Chinese mostly are very proud of the payment system we have, which is you can go anywhere just with your iPhone and pay for everything, and all they do is face-scan. 
I think that probably freaks Americans out. 
You know, China right now, we're still under semi-lockdown, so if you go anywhere, there's an app where you scan and you input your mobile phone number, and the app will tell the guard at the entrance of the mall, for example, where you have been for the past 14 days. 
Now, when I told that to an American, she was horrified, and she thought it was such an invasion of privacy. 
On the other hand, as someone who is Chinese and has lived in China for the past 20 years, although I understand that American mentality, I still find I'm Chinese enough to think, "I don't mind this, and I am better, I feel safer entering the mall because everybody has been scanned," whereas, I think individual freedom as an abstract concept in a pandemic like this is actually really meaningless. 
So I think the West really needs to move a step towards the East and to think about the collective as a whole rather than only think about oneself as an individual. 
HW: The rise of antagonistic rhetoric between the US and China is obviously troubling, and the thing is, the countries are interlinked whether people understand global supply chains or not. 
Where do you think we head next? 
HH: You know, this is the most horrifying thing that came out of this, the kind of nationalistic sentiments on both sides in this pandemic. 
Because I'm an optimist, I think what will come out of this is that both sides will realize that this is a fight that the entire human race has to do together and not apart. 
Despite the rhetoric, the global economy has grown to such an integration that decoupling will be extremely costly and painful for both the United States and China. 
HW: It's also been interesting to me to see the criticism that China has received quite vocally. 
For instance, they've been criticized for downplaying the death toll, arguably, also for trying to demonize Dr. Li, the Wuhan doctor who first raised the alarm about the coronavirus. 
I just saw a report in "The New York Times" that Weibo users have been posting repeatedly on the last post of Dr. Li and using this as kind of a living memorial to him, chatting to him. 
There's something like 870,000 comments and growing on that last post. 
Do you see a change in the media? 
Do you see a change in the approach to Chinese leadership that actually could lead to China swinging perhaps more to the center, just as perhaps America needs to swing more towards a Chinese model? 
HH: Unfortunately, not really, because I think there is a way between authoritarian governments and its people to communicate. 
The night that Dr. Li died, when it was announced that he died, the Chinese social media just blew up. 
Even though he was unjustly treated as a whistleblower, he still went to work in the hospital and tried to save lives as a doctor, and then he died because he contracted the disease. 
So there was anger, frustration, and all of that came out in kind of commemorating a figure that they feel that the government had wronged. 
The verdict and sort of the official voice on: "Who is Dr. Li? Is he a good guy or a bad guy?" 
completely changed 180 degrees. 
He went from a doctor who misbehaved to the hero who warned the people. 
So under authoritarian government, they still are very aware of public opinion, but, on the other hand, when people complain and when they commemorate Dr. Li, do they really want to change the system? 
And my answer is no, because they don't like that particular decision, but they don't want to change the system. 
And one of the reasons is because they have never, ever known another system. 
This is the system they know how to work. 
HW: What is wok-throwing, Huang? 
HH: Oh, wok-throwing is when you blame somebody else. 
Basically, someone who is responsible in a slang Chinese is someone who carries a black wok. 
You are made to be the scapegoat for something that is bad. 
So basically, Trump started calling it the "Chinese virus," the "Wuhan virus," and trying to blame the entire coronavirus pandemic on the Chinese. 
And then the Chinese, I think, threw the wok back at the Americans. 
So it was a very funny joke on Chinese social media, that wok-throwing. 
There's a wok-throwing gymnastics aerobics exercise video that went viral. 
HW: But tell us, Huang: You're also doing dances on TikTok, right? 
HH: Oh, of course. 
I'm doing a lot of wok-throwing aerobics on TikTok. 
HW: I mean, a potential silver lining of all of this is that it has laid bare some of the inequities, inequalities in the system, some of the broken structures that we have, and if we're smart, we can rebuild better. 
HH: Yes. I think one of the silver linings of this pandemic is that we do realize that the human race has to do something together rather than to be distinguished by our race, by the color of our skin or by our nationality; that this virus obviously is not discriminating against anyone, whether you are rich or poor, important or not important or whatever skin color or nationality you are. 
So it is a time to be together, rather than to try to pull the world apart and crawl back to our own nationalistic shells. 
HW: It's a beautiful sentiment. 
Huang Hung, thank you so much for joining us from Beijing. 
Stay well, please. 
HH: Thank you, Helen, and you stay well as well. 

When I was a kid, my mom and I made this deal. 
I was allowed to take three mental health rest days every semester as long as I continued to do well in school. 
This was because I started my mental health journey when I was only six years old. 
I was always what my grade-school teachers would call "a worrier," but later on we found out that I have trauma-induced anxiety and clinical depression. 
This made growing up pretty hard. 
I was worried about a lot of things that other kids weren't, and school got really overwhelming sometimes. 
This resulted in a lot of breakdowns, panic attacks -- sometimes I was super productive, and other days I couldn't get anything done. 
This was all happening during a time when mental health wasn't being talked about as much as it is now, especially youth mental health. 
Some semesters I used all of those rest days to the fullest. 
Others, I didn't need any at all. 
But the fact that they were always an option is what kept me a happy, healthy and successful student. 
Now I'm using those skills that I learned as a kid to help other students with mental health challenges. 
I'm here today to offer you some insight into the world of teenage mental health: what's going on, how did we get here and what can we do? 
But first you need to understand that while not everyone has a diagnosed mental illness like I do, absolutely everyone -- all of you have mental health. 
All of us have a brain that needs to be cared for in similar ways that we care for our physical well-being. 
Our head and our body are connected by much more than just our neck after all. 
Mental illness even manifests itself in some physical ways, such as nausea, headaches, fatigue and shortness of breath. 
So since mental health affects all of us, shouldn't we be coming up with solutions that are accessible to all of us? 
That brings me to my second part of my story. 
When I was in high school I had gotten pretty good at managing my own mental health. 
I was a successful student, and I was president of the Oregon Association of Student Councils. 
But it was around this time that I began to realize mental health was much a bigger problem than just for me personally. 
Unfortunately, my hometown was touched by multiple suicides during my first year in high school. 
I saw those tragedies shake our entire community, and as the president of a statewide group, I began hearing more and more stories from students where this had also happened in their town. 
So in 2018 at our annual summer camp, we held a forum with about 100 high school students to discuss teenage mental health. 
What could we do? 
We approached this conversation with an enormous amount of empathy and honesty, and the results were astounding. 
What struck me the most was that every single one of my peers had a story about a mental health crisis in their school, no matter if they were from a tiny town in eastern Oregon or the very heart of Portland. 
This was happening everywhere. 
We even did some research, and we found out that suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10 to 24 in Oregon. 
The second leading cause. 
We knew we had to do something. 
So over the next few months, we made a committee called Students for a Healthy Oregon, and we set out to end the stigma against mental health. 
We also wanted to prioritize mental health in schools. 
With the help of some lobbyists and a few mental health professionals, we put forth House Bill 2191. 
This bill allows students to take mental health days off from school the same way you would a physical health day. 
Because oftentimes that day off is the difference between feeling a whole lot better and a whole lot worse -- kind of like those days my mom gave me when I was younger. 
So over the next few months, we lobbied and researched and campaigned for our bill, and in June of 2019 it was finally signed into law. 
(Applause and cheers) This was a groundbreaking moment for Oregon students. 
Here's an example of how this is playing out now. 
Let's say a student is having a really hard month. 
They're overwhelmed, overworked, they're falling behind in school, and they know they need help. 
Maybe they've never talked about mental health with their parents before, but now they have a law on their side to help initiate that conversation. 
The parent still needs to be the one to call the school and excuse the absence, so it's not like it's a free pass for the kids, but most importantly, now that school has that absence recorded as a mental health day, so they can keep track of just how many students take how many mental health days. 
If a student takes too many, they'll be referred to the school counselor for a check-in. 
This is important because we can catch students who are struggling before it's too late. 
One of the main things we heard at that forum in 2018 is that oftentimes stepping forward and getting help is the hardest step. 
We're hoping that this law can help with that. 
This not only will start teaching kids young how to take care of themselves and practice self-care and stress management, but it could also literally save lives. 
Now students from multiple other states are also trying to pass these laws. 
I'm currently working with students in both California and Colorado to do the same, because we believe that students everywhere deserve a chance to feel better. 
Aside from all the practical reasons and technicalities, House Bill 2191 is really special because of the core concept behind it: that physical and mental health are equal and should be treated as such. 
In fact, they're connected. 
Take health care for example. 
Think about CPR. 
If you were put in a situation where you had to administer CPR, would you know at least a little bit of what to do? 
Think to yourself -- most likely yes because CPR trainings are offered in most schools, workplaces and even online. 
We even have songs that go with it. 
But how about mental health care? 
I know I was trained in CPR in my seventh-grade health class. 
What if I was trained in seventh grade how to manage my mental health or how to respond to a mental health crisis? 
I'd love to see a world where each of us has a toolkit of skills to help a friend, coworker, family member or even stranger going through a mental health crisis. 
And these resources should be especially available in schools because that's where students are struggling the most. 
The other concept that I sincerely hope you take with you today is that it is always OK to not be OK, and it is always OK to take a break. 
It doesn't have to be a whole day; sometimes that's not realistic. 
But it can be a few moments here and there to check in with yourself. 
Think of life like a race ... 
like a long-distance race. 
If you sprint in the very beginning you're going to get burnt out. 
You may even hurt yourself from pushing too hard. 
But if you pace yourself, if you take it slow, sometimes intentionally, and you push yourself other times, you are sure to be way more successful. 
So please, look after each other, look after the kids and teens in your life especially the ones that look like they have it all together. 
Mental health challenges are not going away, but as a society, we can learn how to manage them by looking after one another. 
And look after yourself, too. 
As my mom would say, "Once in a while, take a break." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

[In January 2020, Christian Happi and Pardis Sabeti presented an Audacious idea] [Sentinel: An early warning system to detect and track the next pandemic] [Here's how it would work ...] Christian Happi: Sentinel is a proactive early warning system to preempt pandemics. 
It is built on three major pillars. 
Pardis Sabeti: The first pillar is Detect. 
Christian and I have been studying infectious diseases together around the world for two decades. 
We have been using genome sequencing. 
Reading out the complete genetic information of a microbe, it allows us to identify viruses, even those we've never seen before, track them as they spread and watch for new mutations. 
And now with the powerful gene-editing technology CRISPR, we can use this genetic information to rapidly design exquisitely sensitive diagnostic tests for any microbe. 
CH: One of these tools is called SHERLOCK. 
It can be used to test known viruses on simple paper strips. 
It is very inexpensive, and frontline health workers can use SHERLOCK to detect the most common or the most threatening viruses within an hour. 
PS: The other tool is CARMEN. 
It requires a lab, but it can test for hundreds of viruses simultaneously. 
So hospital lab staff can test patient samples for a broad range of viruses within a day. 
Our second pillar is Connect. 
Connect everyone and share this information across the public health community. 
In most outbreaks, hospital staff share case information through paper, Excel -- if at all. 
This makes tracking an outbreak through space and time and coordinating a response extremely difficult. 
So we're developing a cloud-based system and mobile applications that connect community health workers, clinicians, public health teams -- everyone -- and allows them to upload data, perform analysis, share insights and coordinate a response and action plan in real time. 
CH: Our third pillar is Empower. 
An outbreak surveillance system can only succeed if we empower frontline health workers that are already out there taking care of communities. 
It requires a lot of training. 
Pardis and I are very much aware of that. 
We've spent the past 10 years training hundreds of young African scientists and clinicians. 
Over the next five years, we will train an additional 1,000 health workers to use Sentinel detection tools and empower them to train their colleagues. 
This way, we will improve the original health care system and integrate surveillance into medical practice. 
[Since presenting their Audacious plan at TED, the world has changed ...] Briar Goldberg: So here we are. We're recording this. 
It's April 7th, 2020, and obviously, we are in the throes of this crazy global pandemic caused by this new coronavirus. 
So you two have been working together forever, and you really came together pretty aggressively with the Ebola crisis back in 2014. 
What does it feel like from your perspective? 
CH: Pretty much six years after the Ebola outbreak, we're really facing another crisis, and we still pretty much, like, we never learned from the previous crisis. 
And that, really, for me, is heartbreaking. 
PS: I think that this pandemic has shown us how unprepared we are everywhere in the world. 
Christian and our partners together had diagnostics at our hospital sites in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Senegal in early February. 
Most states in the United States didn't have it until far later. 
It tells us that we are all in this together, and we are all very much behind the curve. 
BG: So, this Sentinel system is amazing, but I know that the question that's on everybody's mind is: How is that playing into the here and now? 
PS: You know, we describe Sentinel as a pandemic preemption system, and here we are in a pandemic. 
But what's great is that, actually, the same tools you need to preempt a pandemic are the ones that you need to respond to one. 
And so all of the technologies that we have laid out -- the point-of-care testing, the multiplex testing, the discovery and tracking of the virus as it's changing, and the overlay of the mobile applications to dashboard -- are all critical. 
CH: For us, it is a war. 
We are basically committed for 24 hours' turnaround time in order to give results, and that requires for us to work around the clock nonstop. 
So it's a pretty challenging moment. 
We are away from family. 
At least I have the privilege to see family today, and then I'm sure tomorrow I'm heading back in the trenches. 
In my lab, we sequenced the first COVID-19 genome on the African continent, and that really was done within 48 hours. 
This is revolutionary coming from Africa and then making this information available for the global health community to see what the virus within Africa looks like. 
I believe that with technologies and knowledge and then sharing information, we can do better and then we can overcome. 
PS: The whole idea of Sentinel is that we all stand guard over each other. 
We all watch. 
Each one of us is a sentinel. 
Each one of us, being able to monitor what is making us sick, can share that with the rest of our community. 
And I think that is what I profoundly want, is for us to all stand guard and watch over each other. 
[Dr. Pardis Sabeti and Dr. Christian Happi] [Ingenious scientists. 
Courageous partners. 
Global heroes.] 

Helen Walters: So, Chris, who's up first? 
Chris Anderson: Well, we have a man who's worried about pandemics pretty much his whole life. 
He played an absolutely key role, more than 40 years ago, in helping the world get rid of the scourge of smallpox. 
And in 2006, he came to TED to warn the world of the dire risk of a global pandemic, and what we might do about it. 
So please welcome here Dr. Larry Brilliant. 
Larry, so good to see you. 
Larry Brilliant: Thank you, nice to see you. 
CA: Larry, in that talk, you showed a video clip that was a simulation of what a pandemic might look like. 
I would like to play it -- this gave me chills. 
Larry Brilliant (TED2006): Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like, so we know what we're talking about. 
Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. 
It initially goes quite slowly, you get two or three discrete locations. 
Then there will be secondary outbreaks. 
And the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. 
Within three weeks, it will be everywhere in the world. 
Now if we had an undo button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started, if we could find it early and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail, that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. 
CA: Larry, that phrase you mentioned there, "early detection," "early response," that was a key theme of that talk, you made us all repeat it several times. 
Is that still the key to preventing a pandemic? 
LB: Oh, surely. 
You know, when you have a pandemic, something moving at exponential speed, if you miss the first two weeks, if you're late the first two weeks, it's not the deaths and the illness from the first two weeks you lose, it's the two weeks at the peak. 
Those are prevented if you act early. 
Early response is critical, early detection is a condition precedent. 
CA: And how would you grade the world on its early detection, early response to COVID-19? 
LB: Of course, you gave me this question earlier, so I've been thinking a lot about it. 
I think I would go through the countries, and I've actually made a list. 
I think the island republics of Taiwan, Iceland and certainly New Zealand would get an A. 
The island republic of the UK and the United States -- which is not an island, no matter how much we may think we are -- would get a failing grade. 
I'd give a B to South Korea and to Germany. 
And in between ... 
So it's a very heterogeneous response, I think. 
The world as a whole is faltering. 
We shouldn't be proud of what's happening right now. 
CA: I mean, we got the detection pretty early, or at least some doctors in China got the detection pretty early. 
LB: Earlier than the 2002 SARS, which took six months. 
This took about six weeks. 
And detection means not only finding it, but knowing what it is. 
So I would give us a pretty good score on that. 
The transparency, the communication -- those are other issues. 
CA: So what was the key mistake that you think the countries you gave an F to made? 
LB: I think fear, political incompetence, interference, not taking it seriously soon enough -- it's pretty human. 
I think throughout history, pretty much every pandemic is first viewed with denial and doubt. 
But those countries that acted quickly, and even those who started slow, like South Korea, they could still make up for it, and they did really well. 
We've had two months that we've lost. 
We've given a virus that moves exponentially a two-month head start. 
That's not a good idea, Chris. 
CA: No, indeed. 
I mean, there's so much puzzling information still out there about this virus. 
What do you think the scientific consensus is going to likely end up being on, like, the two key numbers of its infectiousness and its fatality rate? 
LB: So I think the kind of equation to keep in mind is that the virus moves dependent on three major issues. 
One is the R0, the first number of secondary cases that there are when the virus emerges. 
In this case, people talk about it being 2.2, 2.4. 
But a really important paper three weeks ago, in the "Emerging Infectious Diseases" journal came out, suggesting that looking back on the Wuhan data, it's really 5.7. 
So for argument's sake, let's say that the virus is moving at exponential speed and the exponent is somewhere between 2.2 and 5.7. 
The other two factors that matter are the incubation period or the generation time. 
The longer that is, the slower the pandemic appears to us. 
When it's really short, like six days, it moves like lightning. 
And then the last, and the most important -- and it's often overlooked -- is the density of susceptibles. 
This is a novel virus, so we want to know how many customers could it potentially have. 
And as it's novel, that's eight billion of us. 
The world is facing a virus that looks at all of us like equally susceptible. 
Doesn't matter our color, our race, or how wealthy we are. 
CA: I mean, none of the numbers that you've mentioned so far are in themselves different from any other infections in recent years. 
What is the combination that has made this so deadly? 
LB: Well, it is exactly the combination of the short incubation period and the high transmissibility. 
But you know, everybody on this call has known somebody who has the disease. 
Sadly, many have lost a loved one. 
This is a terrible disease when it is serious. 
And I get calls from doctors in emergency rooms and treating people in ICUs all over the world, and they all say the same thing: "How do I choose who is going to live and who is going to die? 
I have so few tools to deal with." 
It's a terrifying disease, to die alone with a ventilator in your lungs, and it's a disease that affects all of our organs. 
It's a respiratory disease -- perhaps misleading. 
Makes you think of a flu. 
But so many of the patients have blood in their urine from kidney disease, they have gastroenteritis, they certainly have heart failure very often, we know that it affects taste and smell, the olfactory nerves, we know, of course, about the lung. 
The question I have: is there any organ that it does not affect? 
And in that sense, it reminds me all too much of smallpox. 
What's the way forward from here? 
LB: Well, the way forward is still the same. 
Rapid detection, rapid response. 
Finding every case, and then figuring out all the contacts. 
We've got great new technology for contact tracing, we've got amazing scientists working at the speed of light to give us test kits and antivirals and vaccines. 
We need to slow down, the Buddhists say slow down time so that you can put your heart, your soul, into that space. 
We need to slow down the speed of this virus, which is why we do social distancing. 
Just to be clear -- flattening the curve, social distancing, it doesn't change the absolute number of cases, but it changes what could be a Mount Fuji-like peak into a pulse, and then we won't also lose people because of competition for hospital beds, people who have heart attacks, need chemotherapy, difficult births, can get into the hospital, and we can use the scarce resources we have, especially in the developing world, to treat people. 
So slow down, slow down the speed of the epidemic, and then in the troughs, in between waves, jump on, double down, step on it, and find every case, trace every contact, test every case, and then only quarantine the ones who need to be quarantined, and do that until we have a vaccine. 
CA: So it sounds like we have to get past the stage of just mitigation, where we're just trying to take a general shutdown, to the point where we can start identifying individual cases again and contact-trace for them and treat them separately. 
I mean, to do that, that seems like it's going to take a step up of coordination, ambition, organization, investment, that we're not really seeing the signs of yet in some countries. 
Can we do this, how can we do this? 
LB: Oh, of course we can do this. 
I mean, Taiwan did it so beautifully, Iceland did it so beautifully, Germany, all with different strategies, South Korea. 
It really requires competent governance, a sense of seriousness, and listening to the scientists, not the politicians following the virus. 
Of course we can do this. 
Let me remind everybody -- this is not the zombie apocalypse, it's not a mass extinction event. 
You know, 98, 99 percent of us are going to get out of this alive. 
We need to deal with it the way we know we can, and we need to be the best version of ourselves. 
Both sitting at home as well as in science, and certainly in leadership. 
CA: And might there be even worse pathogens out there in the future? 
Like, can you picture or describe an even worse combination of those numbers that we should start to get ready for? 
LB: Well, smallpox had an R0 of 3.5 to 4.5, so that's probably about what I think this COVID will be. 
But it killed a third of the people. 
But we had a vaccine. 
So those are the different sets that you have. 
But what I'm mostly worried about, and the reason that we made "Contagion" and that was a fictional virus -- I repeat, for those of you watching, that's fiction. 
We created a virus that killed a lot more than this one did. 
CA: You're talking about the movie "Contagion" that's been trending on Netflix. 
And you were an advisor for. 
LB: Absolutely, that's right. 
But we made that movie deliberately to show what a real pandemic looked like, but we did choose a pretty awful virus. 
And the reason we showed it like that, going from a bat to an apple, to a pig, to a cook, to Gwyneth Paltrow, was because that is in nature what we call spillover, as zoonotic diseases, diseases of animals, spill over to human beings. 
And if I look backwards three decades or forward three decades -- looking backward three decades, Ebola, SARS, Zika, swine flu, bird flu, West Nile, we can begin almost a catechism and listen to all the cacophony of these names. 
But there were 30 to 50 novel viruses that jumped into human beings. 
And I'm afraid, looking forward, we are in the age of pandemics, we have to behave like that, we need to practice One Health, we need to understand that we're living in the same world as animals, the environment, and us, and we get rid of this fiction that we are some kind of special species. 
To the virus, we're not. 
CA: Mmm. 
You mentioned vaccines, though. 
Do you see any accelerated path to a vaccine? 
LB: I do. 
I'm actually excited to see that we're doing something that we only get to think of in computer science, which is we're changing what should have always been, or has always been, rather, multiple sequential processes. 
Do safety testing, then you test for effectiveness, then for efficiency. 
And then you manufacture. 
We're doing all three or four of those steps, instead of doing it in sequence, we're doing in parallel. 
Bill Gates has said he's going to build seven vaccine production lines in the United States, and start preparing for production, not knowing what the end vaccine is going to be. 
We're simultaneously doing safety tests and efficacy tests. 
I think the NIH has jumped up. 
I'm very thrilled to see that. 
CA: And how does that translate into a likely time line, do you think? 
A year, 18 months, is that possible? 
LB: You know, Tony Fauci is our guru in this, and he said 12 to 18 months. 
I think that we will do faster than that in the initial vaccine. 
But you may have heard that this virus may not give us the long-term immunity -- that something like smallpox would do. 
So we're trying to make vaccines where we add adjuvants that actually make the vaccine create better immunity than the disease, so that we can confer immunity for many years. 
That's going to take a little longer. 
CA: Last question, Larry. 
Back in 2006, as a winner of the TED Prize, we granted you a wish, and you wished the world would create this pandemic preparedness system that would prevent something like this happening. 
I feel like we, the world, let you down. 
If you were to make another wish now, what would it be? 
LB: Well, I don't think we're let down in terms of speed of detection. 
I'm actually pretty pleased. 
When we met in 2006, the average one of these viruses leaping from an animal to a human, it took us six months to find that -- like the first Ebola, for example. 
We're now finding the first cases in two weeks. 
I'm not unhappy about that, I'd like to push it down to a single incubation period. 
It's a bigger issue for me. 
What I found is that in the Smallpox Eradication Programme people of all colors, all religions, all races, so many countries, came together. 
And it took working as a global community to conquer a global pandemic. 
Now, I feel that we have become victims of centrifugal forces. 
We're in our nationalistic kind of barricades. 
We will not be able to conquer a pandemic unless we believe we're all in it together. 
This is not some Age of Aquarius, or Kumbaya statement, this is what a pandemic forces us to realize. 
We are all in it together, we need a global solution to a global problem. 
Anything less than that is unthinkable. 
CA: Larry Brilliant, thank you so very much. 
LB: Thank you, Chris. 

In 1905, psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon designed a test for children who were struggling in school in France. 
Designed to determine which children required individualized attention, their method formed the basis of the IQ test. 
Beginning in the late 19th century, researchers hypothesized that cognitive abilities like verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills reflected an underlying general intelligence, or g factor. 
Simon and Binet designed a battery of tests to measure each of these abilities and combine the results into a single score. 
Questions were adjusted for each age group, and a child’s score reflected how they performed relative to others their age. 
Dividing someone’s score by their age and multiplying the result by 100 yielded the intelligence quotient, or IQ. 
Today, a score of 100 represents the average of a sample population, with 68% of the population scoring within 15 points of 100. 
Simon and Binet thought the skills their test assessed would reflect general intelligence. 
But both then and now, there’s no single agreed upon definition of general intelligence. 
And that left the door open for people to use the test in service of their own preconceived assumptions about intelligence. 
What started as a way to identify those who needed academic help quickly became used to sort people in other ways, often in service of deeply flawed ideologies. 
One of the first large-scale implementations occurred in the United States during WWI, when the military used an IQ test to sort recruits and screen them for officer training. 
At that time, many people believed in eugenics, the idea that desirable and undesirable genetic traits could and should be controlled in humans through selective breeding. 
There were many problems with this line of thinking, among them the idea that intelligence was not only fixed and inherited, but also linked to a person’s race. 
Under the influence of eugenics, scientists used the results of the military initiative to make erroneous claims that certain racial groups were intellectually superior to others. 
Without taking into account that many of the recruits tested were new immigrants to the United States who lacked formal education or English language exposure, they created an erroneous intelligence hierarchy of ethnic groups. 
The intersection of eugenics and IQ testing influenced not only science, but policy as well. 
In 1924, the state of Virginia created policy allowing for the forced sterilization of people with low IQ scores— a decision the United States Supreme Court upheld. 
In Nazi Germany, the government authorized the murder of children based on low IQ. 
Following the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, the discriminatory uses of IQ tests were challenged on both moral and scientific grounds. 
Scientists began to gather evidence of environmental impacts on IQ. 
For example, as IQ tests were periodically recalibrated over the 20th century, new generations scored consistently higher on old tests than each previous generation. 
This phenomenon, known as the Flynn Effect, happened much too fast to be caused by inherited evolutionary traits. 
Instead, the cause was likely environmental— improved education, better healthcare, and better nutrition. 
In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists also attempted to use IQ tests to evaluate things other than general intelligence, particularly schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric conditions. 
These diagnoses relied in part on the clinical judgment of the evaluators, and used a subset of the tests used to determine IQ— a practice later research found does not yield clinically useful information. 
Today, IQ tests employ many similar design elements and types of questions as the early tests, though we have better techniques for identifying potential bias in the test. 
They’re no longer used to diagnose psychiatric conditions. 
But a similarly problematic practice using subtest scores is still sometimes used to diagnose learning disabilities, against the advice of many experts. 
Psychologists around the world still use IQ tests to identify intellectual disability, and the results can be used to determine appropriate educational support, job training, and assisted living. 
IQ test results have been used to justify horrific policies and scientifically baseless ideologies. 
That doesn’t mean the test itself is worthless— in fact, it does a good job of measuring the reasoning and problem-solving skills it sets out to. 
But that isn’t the same thing as measuring a person’s potential. 
Though there are many complicated political, historical, scientific, and cultural issues wrapped up in IQ testing, more and more researchers agree on this point, and reject the notion that individuals can be categorized by a single numerical score. 

How many of you have ever heard someone say privacy is dead? 
Raise your hand. 
How many of you have heard someone say they don't care about their privacy because they don't have anything to hide? 
Go on. 
(Laughter) Now, how many of you use any kind of encryption software? 
Raise your hand. 
Or a password to protect an online account? 
Or curtains or blinds on your windows at home? 
(Laughter) OK, so that's everyone, I think. 
(Laughter) So why do you do these things? 
My guess is, it's because you care about your privacy. 
The idea that privacy is dead is a myth. 
The idea that people don't care about their privacy because "they have nothing to hide" or they've done nothing wrong is also a myth. 
I'm guessing that you would not want to publicly share on the internet, for the world to see, all of your medical records. 
Or your search histories from your phone or your computer. 
And I bet that if the government wanted to put a chip in your brain to transmit every one of your thoughts to a centralized government computer, you would balk at that. 
(Laughter) That's because you care about your privacy, like every human being. 
So, our world has changed fast. 
And today, there is understandably a lot of confusion about what privacy is and why it matters. 
Privacy is not secrecy. 
It's control. 
I share information with my doctor about my body and my health, expecting that she is not going to turn around and share that information with my parents, or my boss or my kids. 
That information is private, not secret. 
I'm in control over how that information is shared. 
You've probably heard people say that there's a fundamental tension between privacy on the one hand and safety on the other. 
But the technologies that advance our privacy also advance our safety. 
Think about fences, door locks, curtains on our windows, passwords, encryption software. 
All of these technologies simultaneously protect our privacy and our safety. 
Dragnet surveillance, on the other hand, protects neither. 
In recent years, the federal government tasked a group of experts called The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board with examining post-9/11 government surveillance programs, dragnet surveillance programs. 
Those experts could not find a single example of that dragnet surveillance advancing any safety -- didn't identify or stop a single terrorist attack. 
You know what that information was useful for, though? 
Helping NSA employees spy on their romantic interests. 
(Laughter) (Audience: Wow.) Another example is closer to home. 
So millions of people across the United States and the world are adopting so-called "smart home" devices, like internet-connected surveillance cameras. 
But we know that any technology connected to the internet can be hacked. 
And so if a hacker gets into your internet-connected surveillance camera at home, they can watch you and your family coming and going, finding just the right time to strike. 
You know what can't be hacked remotely? 
Curtains. 
(Laughter) Fences. 
Door locks. 
(Laughter) Privacy is not the enemy of safety. 
It is its guarantor. 
Nonetheless, we daily face a propaganda onslaught telling us that we have to give up some privacy in exchange for safety through surveillance programs. 
Face surveillance is the most dangerous of these technologies. 
There are two primary ways today governments use technologies like this. 
One is face recognition. 
That's to identify someone in an image. 
The second is face surveillance, which can be used in concert with surveillance-camera networks and databases to create records of all people's public movements, habits and associations, effectively creating a digital panopticon. 
This is a panopticon. 
It's a prison designed to allow a few guards in the center to monitor everything happening in the cells around the perimeter. 
The people in those prison cells can't see inside the guard tower, but the guards can see into every inch of those cells. 
The idea here is that if the people in those prison cells know they're being watched all the time, or could be, they'll behave accordingly. 
Similarly, face surveillance enables a centralized authority -- in this case, the state -- to monitor the totality of human movement and association in public space. 
And here's what it looks like in real life. 
In this case, it's not a guard in a tower, but rather a police analyst in a spy center. 
The prison expands beyond its walls, encompassing everyone, everywhere, all the time. 
In a free society, this should terrify us all. 
For decades now, we've watched cop shows that push a narrative that says technologies like face surveillance ultimately serve the public good. 
But real life is not a cop drama. 
The bad guy didn't always do it, the cops definitely aren't always the good guys and the technology doesn't always work. 
Take the case of Steve Talley, a financial analyst from Colorado. 
In 2015, Talley was arrested, and he was charged with bank robbery on the basis of an error in a facial recognition system. 
Talley fought that case and he eventually was cleared of those charges, but while he was being persecuted by the state, he lost his house, his job and his kids. 
Steve Talley's case is an example of what can happen when the technology fails. 
But face surveillance is just as dangerous when it works as advertized. 
Just consider how trivial it would be for a government agency to put a surveillance camera outside a building where people meet for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. 
They could connect that camera to a face-surveillance algorithm and a database, press a button and sit back and collect a record of every person receiving treatment for alcoholism. 
It would be just as easy for a government agency to use this technology to automatically identify every person who attended the Women's March or a Black Lives Matter protest. 
Even the technology industry is aware of the gravity of this problem. 
Microsoft's president Brad Smith has called on Congress to intervene. 
Google, for its part, has publicly declined to ship a face surveillance product, in part because of these grave human and civil rights concerns. 
And that's a good thing. 
Because ultimately, protecting our open society is much more important than corporate profit. 
The ACLU's nationwide campaign to get the government to pump the brakes on the adoption of this dangerous technology has prompted reasonable questions from thoughtful people. 
What makes this technology in particular so dangerous? 
Why can't we just regulate it? 
In short, why the alarm? 
Face surveillance is uniquely dangerous for two related reasons. 
One is the nature of the technology itself. 
And the second is that our system fundamentally lacks the oversight and accountability mechanisms that would be necessary to ensure it would not be abused in the government's hands. 
First, face surveillance enables a totalizing form of surveillance never before possible. 
Every single person's every visit to a friend's house, a government office, a house of worship, a Planned Parenthood, a cannabis shop, a strip club; every single person's public movements, habits and associations documented and catalogued, not on one day, but on every day, merely with the push of a button. 
This kind of totalizing mass surveillance fundamentally threatens what it means to live in a free society. 
Our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, our privacy, our right to be left alone. 
You may be thinking, "OK, come on, but there are tons of ways the government can spy on us." 
And yes, it's true, the government can track us through our cell phones, but if I want to go to get an abortion, or attend a political meeting, or even just call in sick and play hooky and go to the beach ... 
(Laughter) I can leave my phone at home. 
I cannot leave my face at home. 
And that brings me to my second primary concern: How we might meaningfully regulate this technology. 
Today, if the government wants to know where I was last week, they can't just hop into a time machine and go back in time and follow me. 
And they also, the local police right now, don't maintain any centralized system of tracking, where they're cataloging every person's public movements all the time, just in case that information some day becomes useful. 
Today, if the government wants to know where I was last week, or last month or last year, they have to go to a judge, get a warrant and then serve that warrant on my phone company, which by the way, has a financial interest in protecting my privacy. 
With face surveillance, no such limitations exist. 
This is technology that is 100 percent controlled by the government itself. 
So how would a warrant requirement work in this context? 
Is the government going to go to a judge and get a warrant, and then serve the warrant on themselves? 
That would be like me giving you my diary, and saying, "Here, you can hold on to this forever, but you can't read it until I say it's OK." 
So what can we do? 
The only answer to the threat posed by the government's use of face surveillance is to deny the government the capacity to violate the public's trust, by denying the government the ability to build these in-house face-surveillance networks. 
And that's exactly what we're doing. 
The ACLU is part of a nationwide campaign to pump the brakes on the government's use of this dangerous technology. 
We've already been successful, from San Francisco to Somerville, Massachusetts, we have passed municipal bans on the government's use of this technology. 
And plenty of other communities here in Massachusetts and across the country are debating similar measures. 
Some people have told me that this movement is bound to fail. 
That ultimately, merely because the technology exists, it will be deployed in every context by every government everywhere. 
Privacy is dead, right? 
So the narrative goes. 
Well, I refuse to accept that narrative. 
And you should, too. 
We can't allow Jeff Bezos or the FBI to determine the boundaries of our freedoms in the 21st century. 
If we live in a democracy, we are in the driver's seat, shaping our collective future. 
We are at a fork in the road right now. 
We can either continue with business as usual, allowing governments to adopt and deploy these technologies unchecked, in our communities, our streets and our schools, or we can take bold action now to press pause on the government's use of face surveillance, protect our privacy and to build a safer, freer future for all of us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause and cheers) 

Your hands, up close, are anything but smooth. 
With peaks and valleys, folds and rifts, there are plenty of hiding places for a virus to stick. 
If you then touch your face, the virus can infect you. 
But there are two extraordinarily simple ways you can keep that from happening: soap and water, and hand sanitizer. 
So which is better? 
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is one of many viruses whose protective outer surface is made of a lipid bilayer. 
These lipids are pin shaped molecules whose heads are attracted to water, and tails are repulsed by it. 
So in water-rich environments, lipids naturally form a shell like this, with the heads outside and the tails inside. 
Their shared reaction to water makes the lipids stick loosely together— this is called the hydrophobic effect. 
This outer structure helps the molecular machinery of the virus break through cellular membranes and hijack our cells. 
But it has thousands upon thousands of weak points where the right molecules could pry it apart. 
And this is where soap comes in. 
A single drop of any brand of soap contains quadrillions of molecules called amphiphiles, which resemble biological lipids. 
Their tails, which are similarly repulsed by water, compete for space with the lipids that make up the virus’s shell. 
But they’re just different enough to break up the regularity of the virus’s membrane, making the whole thing come crashing down. 
Those amphiphiles then form bubbles of their own around particles including the virus’s RNA and proteins. 
Apply water, and you’ll wash that whole bubble away. 
Hand sanitizers work less like a crowbar, and more like an earthquake. 
When you surround a coronavirus with water, the hydrophobic effect gives the bonds within the membrane their strength. 
That same effect also holds the big proteins that form coronavirus’s spikes in place and in the shape that enables them to infect your cells. 
If you dry the virus out in air, it keeps its stability. 
But now surround it with a high concentration of an alcohol, like the ethanol or isopropanol found in most hand-sanitizers. 
This makes the hydrophobic effect disappear, and gives the molecules room to move around. 
The overall effect is like removing all of the nails and mortar from a house and then hitting it with an earthquake. 
The cell’s membrane collapses and those spike proteins crumble. 
In either method, the actual process of destroying the virus happens in just a second or two. 
But doctors recommend at least 20 seconds of hand-washing because of the intricate landscape that is your hand. 
Soap and sanitizer need to get everywhere, including your palms, fingertips, the outsides of your hands, and between your fingers, to protect you properly. 
And when it comes to a coronavirus outbreak, doctors recommend washing your hands with soap and water whenever possible. 
Even though both approaches are similarly effective at killing the virus, soap and water has two benefits: first it washes away any dirt which could otherwise hide virus particles. 
But more importantly, it’s simply easier to fully cover your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds. 
Of course, hand sanitizer is more convenient to use on the go. 
In the absence of a sink, use the sanitizer as thoroughly as possible and rub your hands together until they’re dry. 
Unfortunately, there are billions of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water, which is a huge problem at any time but especially during an outbreak. 
Researchers and aid groups are working to provide solutions for these communities. 
One example is a device that uses salt, water, and a car battery to make chlorinated water that kills harmful pathogens and is safe for hand-washing. 
So wherever possible, soap and water are recommended for a coronavirus, but does that mean it's best for every viral outbreak? 
Not necessarily. 
Many common colds are caused by rhinoviruses that have a geometric protein structure called a capsid instead of a lipid membrane. 
The capsid doesn't have nearly as many weak points where soap amphiphiles can pry it apart, so it takes longer for soap to be effective. 
However some of its surface proteins are still vulnerable to the destabilizing effect of hand sanitizer. 
In this and similar cases, hand sanitizer may be more effective, especially if you then wash your hands to remove residual particles. 
The best way to know which to use for any given outbreak is to do what's best for all things illness-related: follow the advice of accredited medical professionals. 

For almost a decade, scientists chased the source of a deadly new virus through China’s tallest mountains and most isolated caverns. 
They finally found it here: in the bats of Shitou Cave. 
The virus in question was a coronavirus that caused an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003. 
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses covered in little protein spikes that look like a crown— or "corona" in Latin. 
There are hundreds of known coronaviruses. 
Seven of them infect humans, and can cause disease. 
The coronavirus SARS-CoV causes SARS, MERS-CoV causes MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 causes the disease COVID-19. 
Of the seven human coronaviruses, four cause colds, mild, highly contagious infections of the nose and throat. 
Two infect the lungs, and cause much more severe illnesses. 
The seventh, which causes COVID-19, has features of each: it spreads easily, but can severely impact the lungs. 
When an infected person coughs, droplets containing the virus spray out. 
The virus can infect a new person when the droplets enter their nose or mouth. 
Coronaviruses transmit best in enclosed spaces, where people are close together. 
Cold weather keeps their delicate casing from drying out, enabling the virus to survive for longer between hosts, while UV exposure from sunlight may damage it. 
These seasonal variations matter more for established viruses. 
But because no one is yet immune to a new virus, it has so many potential hosts that it doesn’t need ideal conditions to spread. 
In the body, the protein spikes embed in the host’s cells and fuse with them— enabling the virus to hijack the host cell’s machinery to replicate its own genes. 
Coronaviruses store their genes on RNA. 
All viruses are either RNA viruses or DNA viruses. 
RNA viruses tend to be smaller, with fewer genes, meaning they infect many hosts and replicate quickly in those hosts. 
In general, RNA viruses don’t have a proofreading mechanism, whereas DNA viruses do. 
So when an RNA virus replicates, it’s much more likely to have mistakes called mutations. 
Many of these mutations are useless or even harmful. 
But some make the virus better suited for certain environments— like a new host species. 
Epidemics often occur when a virus jumps from animals to humans. 
This is true of the RNA viruses that caused the Ebola, Zika, and SARS epidemics, and the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Once in humans, the virus still mutates— usually not enough to create a new virus, but enough to create variations, or strains, of the original one. 
Coronaviruses have a few key differences from most RNA viruses. 
They’re some of the largest, meaning they have the most genes. 
That creates more opportunity for harmful mutations. 
To counteract this risk, coronaviruses have a unique feature: an enzyme that checks for replication errors and corrects mistakes. 
This makes coronaviruses much more stable, with a slower mutation rate, than other RNA viruses. 
While this may sound formidable, the slow mutation rate is actually a promising sign when it comes to disarming them. 
After an infection, our immune systems can recognize germs and destroy them more quickly if they infect us again so they don’t make us sick. 
But mutations can make a virus less recognizable to our immune systems— and therefore more difficult to fight off. 
They can also make antiviral drugs and vaccines less effective, because they’re tailored very specifically to a virus. 
That’s why we need a new flu vaccine every year— the influenza virus mutates so quickly that new strains pop up constantly. 
The slower mutation rate of coronaviruses means our immune systems, drugs, and vaccines might be able to recognize them for longer after infection, and therefore protect us better. 
Still, we don’t know how long our bodies remain immune to different coronaviruses. 
There’s never been an approved treatment or vaccine for a coronavirus. 
We haven’t focused on treating the ones that cause colds, and though scientists began developing treatments for SARS and MERS, the epidemics ended before those treatments completed clinical trials. 
As we continue to encroach on other animals’ habitats, some scientists say a new coronavirus jumping to humans is inevitable— but if we investigate these unknowns, it doesn’t have to be devastating. 

A mountain separating two lakes. 
A room papered floor to ceiling with bridal satins. 
The lid of an immense snuffbox. 
These seemingly unrelated images take us on a tour of a sperm whale’s head in Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick." 
On the surface, the book is the story of Captain Ahab’s hunt for revenge against Moby Dick, the white whale who bit off his leg. 
But though the book features pirates, typhoons, high-speed chases, and giant squid, you shouldn’t expect a conventional seafaring adventure. 
Instead, it’s a multilayered exploration of not only the intimate details of life aboard a whaling ship, but also subjects from across human and natural history, by turns playful and tragic, humorous, and urgent. 
The narrator guiding us through these explorations is a common sailor called Ishmael. 
Ishmael starts out telling his own story as he prepares to escape the “damp and drizzly November in [his] soul” by going to sea. 
But after he befriends the Pacific Islander Queequeg and joins Ahab’s crew aboard the Pequod, Ishmael becomes more of an omniscient guide for the reader than a traditional character. 
While Ahab obsesses over revenge and first mate Starbuck tries to reason with him, Ishmael takes us on his own quest for meaning throughout “the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.” In his telling, life’s biggest questions loom large, even in the smallest details. 
Like his narrator, Melville was a restless and curious spirit, who gained an unorthodox education working as a sailor on a series of grueling voyages around the world in his youth. 
He published "Moby Dick" in 1851, when the United States’ whaling industry was at its height. 
Nantucket, where the Pequod sets sail, was the epicenter of this lucrative and bloody global industry which decimated the world’s whale populations. 
Unusually for his time, Melville doesn’t shy away from the ugly side of this industry, even taking the whale’s perspective at one point, when he speculates on how terrifying the huge shadows of the ships must be to the creature swimming below. 
The author’s first-hand familiarity with whaling is evident over and over again in Ishmael’s vivid descriptions. 
In one chapter, the skin of a whale’s penis becomes protective clothing for a crewman. 
Chapters with titles as unpromising as “Cistern and Buckets” become some of the novel’s most rewarding as Ishmael compares bailing out a sperm-whale’s head to midwifery, which leads to reflections on Plato. 
Tangling whale-lines provoke witty reflections on the “ever-present perils” entangling all mortals. 
He draws on diverse branches of knowledge, like zoology, gastronomy, law, economics, mythology, and teachings from a range of religious and cultural traditions. 
The book experiments with writing style as much as subject matter. 
In one monologue, Ahab challenges Moby Dick in Shakespearean style: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” One chapter is written as a playscript, where members of the Pequod’s multi-ethnic crew chime in individually and in chorus. 
African and Spanish sailors trade insults while a Tahitian seaman longs for home, Chinese and Portuguese crewmembers call for a dance, and one young boy prophesies disaster. 
In another chapter, Ishmael sings the process of decanting whale oil in epic style, as the ship pitches and rolls in the midnight sea and the casks rumble like landslides. 
A book so wide-ranging has something for everyone. 
Readers have found religious and political allegory, existential enquiry, social satire, economic analysis, and representations of American imperialism, industrial relations and racial conflict. 
As Ishmael chases meaning and Ahab chases the white whale, the book explores the opposing forces of optimism and uncertainty, curiosity and fear that characterize human existence no matter what it is we’re chasing. 
Through "Moby Dick’s" many pages, Melville invites his readers to leap into the unknown, to join him on the hunt for the “ungraspable phantom of life.” 

A new virus emerges and spreads like wildfire. 
In order to contain it, researchers must first collect data about who’s been infected. 
Two main viral testing techniques are critical: one tells you if you have the virus and the other shows if you’ve already had it. 
So, how exactly do these tests work? 
PCR, or polymerase chain reaction testing, targets the virus’s genetic material in the body and is used to diagnose someone who is currently infected. 
Yet, this genetic material may be present in such imperceptible amounts that actually detecting it is difficult. 
This is where PCR comes in: it’s widely used to amplify genetic information to large enough quantities that it can be readily observed. 
To develop a PCR test for a never-before-seen virus, researchers first sequence its genetic material, or genome, and identify regions that are unique to that specific virus. 
PCR then targets these particular segments. 
A PCR test begins by collecting a sample: this can be blood for hepatitis viruses, feces for poliovirus, and samples from the nose or throat for coronaviruses. 
The sample is taken to a central laboratory where PCR is performed to test for the presence of the virus’ genome. 
Genetic information can be encoded via DNA or RNA. 
HPV, for example, uses DNA, while SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19, uses RNA. 
Before running the PCR, the viral RNA— if present— must be reverse transcribed to make a strand of complementary DNA. 
Researchers then run the PCR. 
If the virus is present in the sample, its unique regions of genetic code will be identified by complementary primers and copied by enzymes. 
One strand of DNA becomes hundreds of millions, which are detected using probes marked with fluorescent dye. 
If the PCR machine senses fluorescence, the sample has tested positive for the virus, meaning the individual is infected. 
Immunoassays, on the other hand, tap into the immune system’s memory of the virus, showing if someone has previously been infected. 
They work by targeting virus-specific antibodies generated by the immune system during infection. 
These are specialized classes of proteins that identify and fight foreign substances, like viruses. 
Immunoassays may detect IgG antibodies, the most abundant class, and IgM antibodies, the type that’s first produced in response to a new infection. 
The presence of IgM antibodies suggests a recent infection, but since it can take the body over a week to produce a detectable amount, they’re unreliable in diagnosing current infections. 
Meanwhile, IgG antibodies circulate for an extended period after infection; their presence usually indicates that someone was exposed and recovered. 
Before the immunoassay, health professionals draw blood from an individual. 
This sample then comes into contact with a portion of the virus of interest. 
If the body has, in fact, been exposed to the virus in the past, the body’s virus-specific antibodies will bind to it during the test. 
This reaction produces a change in color, indicating that the sample tested positive and that the individual has been exposed to the virus. 
Immunoassays are especially important when it comes to retroactively diagnosing people who were infected but went untested. 
And there’s exciting potential for those who have developed immunity to a virus: in some cases, their blood plasma could be used as treatment in people who are currently fighting it. 
PCR and immunoassays are always in the process of becoming more accurate and efficient. 
For example, innovations in PCR have led to the use of self-contained testing devices that relay results within one hour. 
Digital PCR, which quantifies individual pieces of target DNA, shows promise in further boosting accuracy. 
And although immunoassays are difficult to develop quickly, researchers in Singapore were able to create one for SARS-CoV-2 even before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. 
These tests— along with the scientists who develop them and the health professionals who administer them— are absolutely essential. 
And when deployed early, they can save millions of lives. 

In the 16th century, Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius described how a suffocating animal could be kept alive by inserting a tube into its trachea and blowing air to inflate its lungs. 
In 1555, this procedure didn’t warrant much acclaim. 
But today, Vesalius’s treatise is recognized as the first description of mechanical ventilation— a crucial practice in modern medicine. 
To appreciate the value of ventilation, we need to understand how the respiratory system works. 
We breathe by contracting our diaphragms, which expands our chest cavities. 
This allows air to be drawn in, inflating the alveoli— millions of small sacs inside our lungs. 
Each of these tiny balloons is surrounded by a mesh of blood-filled capillaries. 
This blood absorbs oxygen from the inflated alveoli and leaves behind carbon dioxide. 
When the diaphragm is relaxed, the CO2 is exhaled alongside a mix of oxygen and other gases. 
When our respiratory systems are working correctly, this process happens automatically. 
But the respiratory system can be interrupted by a variety of conditions. 
Sleep apnea stops diaphragm muscles from contracting. 
Asthma can lead to inflamed airways which obstruct oxygen. 
And pneumonia, often triggered by bacterial or viral infections, attacks the alveoli themselves. 
Invading pathogens kill lung cells, triggering an immune response that can cause lethal inflammation and fluid buildup. 
All these situations render the lungs unable to function normally. 
But mechanical ventilators take over the process, getting oxygen into the body when the respiratory system cannot. 
These machines can bypass constricted airways, and deliver highly oxygenated air to help damaged lungs diffuse more oxygen. 
There are two main ways ventilators can work— pumping air into the patient’s lungs through positive pressure ventilation, or allowing air to be passively drawn in through negative pressure ventilation. 
In the late 19th century, ventilation techniques largely focused on negative pressure, which closely approximates natural breathing and provides an even distribution of air in the lungs. 
To achieve this, doctors created a tight seal around the patient’s body, either by enclosing them in a wooden box or a specially sealed room. 
Air was then pumped out of the chamber, decreasing air pressure, and allowing the patient’s chest cavity to expand more easily. 
In 1928, doctors developed a portable, metal device with pumps powered by an electric motor. 
This machine, known as the iron lung, became a fixture in hospitals through the mid-20th century. 
However, even the most compact negative pressure designs heavily restricted a patient’s movement and obstructed access for caregivers. 
This led hospitals in the 1960’s to shift towards positive pressure ventilation. 
For milder cases, this can be done non-invasively. 
Often, a facemask is fitted over the mouth and nose, and filled with pressurized air which moves into the patient’s airway. 
But more severe circumstances require a device that takes over the entire breathing process. 
A tube is inserted into the patient’s trachea to pump air directly into the lungs, with a series of valves and branching pipes forming a circuit for inhalation and exhalation. 
In most modern ventilators, an embedded computer system allows for monitoring the patient’s breathing and adjusting the airflow. 
These machines aren’t used as a standard treatment, but rather, as a last resort. 
Enduring this influx of pressurized air requires heavy sedation, and repeated ventilation can cause long-term lung damage. 
But in extreme situations, ventilators can be the difference between life and death. 
And events like the COVID-19 pandemic have shown that they’re even more essential than we thought. 
Because current models are bulky, expensive, and require extensive training to operate, most hospitals only have a few in supply. 
This may be enough under normal circumstances, but during emergencies, this limited cache is stretched thin. 
The world urgently needs more low-cost and portable ventilators, as well as a faster means of producing and distributing this life-saving technology. 

Language is endlessly variable. 
Each of us can come up with an infinite number of sentences in our native language, and we’re able to do so from an early age— almost as soon as we start to communicate in sentences. 
How is this possible? 
In the early 1950s, Noam Chomsky proposed a theory based on the observation that the key to this versatility seems to be grammar: the familiar grammatical structure of an unfamiliar sentence points us toward its meaning. 
He suggested that there are grammatical rules that apply to all languages, and that the rules are innate— the human brain is hardwired to process language according to these rules. 
He labelled this faculty universal grammar, and it launched lines of inquiry that shaped both the field of linguistics and the emerging field of cognitive science for decades to come. 
Chomsky and other researchers set out to investigate the two main components of universal grammar: first, whether there are, in fact, grammar rules that are universal to all languages, and, second, whether these rules are hardwired in the brain. 
In attempts to establish the universal rules of grammar, Chomsky developed an analytical tool known as generative syntax, which represents the order of words in a sentence in hierarchical syntax trees that show what structures are possible. 
Based on this tree, we could suggest a grammar rule that adverbs must occur in verb phrases. 
But with more data, it quickly becomes clear that adverbs can appear outside of verb phrases. 
This simplified example illustrates a major problem: it takes a lot of data from each individual language to establish the rules for that language, before we can even begin to determine which rules all languages might have in common. 
When Chomsky proposed universal grammar, many languages lacked the volume of recorded samples necessary to analyze them using generative syntax. 
Even with lots of data, mapping the structure of a language is incredibly complex. 
After 50 years of analysis, we still haven’t completely figured out English. 
As more linguist data was gathered and analyzed, it became clear that languages around the world differ widely, challenging the theory that there were universal grammar rules. 
In the 1980s, Chomsky revised his theory in an attempt to accommodate this variation. 
According to his new hypothesis of principles and parameters, all languages shared certain grammatical principles, but could vary in their parameters, or the application of these principles. 
For example, a principle is “every sentence must have a subject," but the parameter of whether the subject must be explicitly stated could vary between languages. 
The hypothesis of principles and parameters still didn’t answer the question of which grammatical principles are universal. 
In the early 2000s, Chomsky suggested that there’s just one shared principle, called recursion, which means structures can be nested inside each other. 
Take this sentence, which embeds a sentence within a sentence within a sentence. 
Or this sentence, which embeds a noun phrase in a noun phrase in a noun phrase. 
Recursion was a good candidate for a universal grammar rule because it can take many forms. 
However, in 2005 linguists published findings on an Amazonian language called Piraha, which doesn’t appear to have any recursive structures. 
So what about the other part of Chomsky’s theory, that our language faculty is innate? 
When he first proposed universal grammar, the idea that there was a genetically determined aspect of language acquisition had a profound, revolutionary impact. 
It challenged the dominant paradigm, called behaviorism. 
Behaviorists argued that all animal and human behaviors, including language, were acquired from the outside by the mind, which starts out as a blank slate. 
Today, scientists agree that behaviorism was wrong, and there is underlying, genetically encoded biological machinery for language learning. 
Many think the same biology responsible for language is also responsible for other aspects of cognition. 
So they disagree with Chomsky’s idea that there is a specific, isolated, innate language faculty in the brain. 
The theory of universal grammar prompted the documentation and study of many languages that hadn’t been studied before. 
It also caused an old idea to be reevaluated and eventually overthrown to make room for our growing understanding of the human brain. 

Consider this unfortunately familiar scenario. 
Several months ago a highly infectious, sometimes deadly respiratory virus infected humans for the first time. 
It then proliferated faster than public health measures could contain it. 
Now the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a pandemic, meaning that it’s spreading worldwide. 
The death toll is starting to rise and everyone is asking the same question: when will the pandemic end? 
The WHO will likely declare the pandemic over once the infection is mostly contained and rates of transmission drop significantly throughout the world. 
But exactly when that happens depends on what global governments choose to do next. 
They have three main options: Race through it, Delay and Vaccinate, or Coordinate and Crush. 
One is widely considered best, and it may not be the one you think. 
In the first, governments and communities do nothing to halt the spread and instead allow people to be exposed as quickly as possible. 
Without time to study the virus, doctors know little about how to save their patients, and hospitals reach peak capacity almost immediately. 
Somewhere in the range of millions to hundreds of millions of people die, either from the virus or the collapse of health care systems. 
Soon the majority of people have been infected and either perished or survived by building up their immune responses. 
Around this point herd immunity kicks in, where the virus can no longer find new hosts. 
So the pandemic fizzles out a short time after it began. 
But there’s another way to create herd immunity without such a high cost of life. 
Let’s reset the clock to the moment the WHO declared the pandemic. 
This time, governments and communities around the world slow the spread of the virus to give research facilities time to produce a vaccine. 
They buy this crucial time through tactics that may include widespread testing to identify carriers, quarantining the infected and people they’ve interacted with, and physical distancing. 
Even with these measures in place, the virus slowly spreads, causing up to hundreds of thousands of deaths. 
Some cities get the outbreak under control and go back to business as usual, only to have a resurgence and return to physical distancing when a new case passes through. 
Within the next several years, one or possibly several vaccines become widely, and hopefully freely, available thanks to a worldwide effort. 
Once 40-90% of the population has received it— the precise amount varying based on the virus— herd immunity kicks in, and the pandemic fizzles out. 
Let’s rewind the clock one more time, to consider the final strategy: Coordinate and Crush. 
The idea here is to simultaneously starve the virus, everywhere, through a combination of quarantine, social distancing, and restricting travel. 
The critical factor is to synchronize responses. 
In a typical pandemic, when one country is peaking, another may be getting its first cases. 
Instead of every leader responding to what’s happening in their jurisdiction, here everyone must treat the world as the giant interconnected system it is. 
If coordinated properly, this could end a pandemic in just a few months, with low loss of life. 
But unless the virus is completely eradicated— which is highly unlikely— there will be risks of it escalating to pandemic levels once again. 
And factors like animals carrying and transmitting the virus might undermine our best efforts altogether. 
So which strategy is best for this deadly, infectious respiratory virus? 
Racing through it is a quick fix, but would be a global catastrophe, and may not work at all if people can be reinfected. 
Crushing the virus through Coordination alone is also enticing for its speed, but only reliable with true and nearly impossible global cooperation. 
That’s why vaccination, assisted by as much global coordination as possible, is generally considered to be the winner; it’s the slow, steady, and proven option in the race. 
Even if the pandemic officially ends before a vaccine is ready, the virus may reappear seasonally, so vaccines will continue to protect people. 
And although it may take years to create, disruptions to most people’s lives won’t necessarily last the full duration. 
Breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of symptoms can make viruses much less dangerous, and therefore require less extreme containment measures. 
Take heart: the pandemic will end. 
Its legacy will be long-lasting, but not all bad; the breakthroughs, social services, and systems we develop can be used to the betterment of everyone. 
And if we take inspiration from the successes and lessons from the failures, we can keep the next potential pandemic so contained that our children’s children won’t even know its name. 

Two sisters take the same DNA test. 
The results show that one sister is 10% French, the other 0%. 
Both sisters share the same two parents, and therefore the same set of ancestors. 
So how can one be 10% more French than the other? 
Tests like these rely on our DNA to answer questions about our ancestry, but our DNA actually can’t tell us everything about who we are or where we’re from. 
DNA tests are great at answering some questions, like who your parents are, but can provide baffling results to others, like whether you have ancestors from a particular region. 
To understand why, it helps to know where our DNA comes from in the first place. 
Each person’s DNA consists of about 6 billion base pairs stored in 23 pairs of chromosomes— 46 total. 
That may seem like a dizzying amount of information, but 99% of our genome is shared among all humans. 
The remaining 1% contains everything distinct about an individual’s ancestry. 
Commercial DNA tests utilize less than 1% of that 1%. 
One chromosome in each pair comes from each parent. 
These halves join at conception: when a sperm and egg, each with only 23 chromosomes, combine. 
The story of our ancestry becomes muddled before conception. 
That’s because the 23 chromosomes in a sperm or egg aren’t identical to the chromosomes of every other cell in the body. 
As they go from a cell with 46 chromosomes to a sex cell with only 23, the chromosomes within each pair swap some sections. 
This process is called recombination, and it means that every sperm or egg contains single chromosomes that are a unique mash up of each pair. 
Recombination occurs uniquely in each sex cell— making two sisters’ chromosomes different not only from their parents’, but from each other’s. 
Recombination happens before conception, so you get exactly half of your DNA from each parent, but going further back things get more complicated. 
Without recombination, you would get 1/4 from each grandparent, 1/8 from each great-grandparent, and so on, but because recombination happens every generation, those numbers vary. 
The more generations removed an ancestor is, the more likely they won’t be represented in your DNA at all. 
For example, without recombination, just 1/64 of your DNA would come from each ancestor six generations back. 
Because of recombination, that number can be higher, though we don’t know for sure how high— or it can as low as 0. 
So one sister isn’t more French in the sense of having more ancestors from France. 
Instead, the French ancestors are simply more represented in her DNA. 
But the story doesn’t end there. 
Tests don’t trace the DNA of the sisters' actual French ancestors— we don’t have access to the genomes of deceased individuals from previous generations. 
Instead, these results are based on a comparison to the DNA of people living in France today. 
The tests look for genetic markers, or combinations of genetic markers. 
These markers are short sequences that appear in specific places. 
The sister deemed "more French" shares genetic markers with people currently living in France. 
The assumption is that these shared markers indicate ancestors from the same place: France. 
It’s important to note that results are based on people who’ve had their genomes sequenced— 80-90% of which are of European descent. 
Many indigenous peoples are barely represented, if at all. 
The test won’t reveal heritage from people not represented in the database, and shouldn’t be used to prove race or ethnicity. 
And as more people get sequenced, your results might change. 
Looking further back, you may get a result like 2% Neanderthal. 
Though Neanderthals were a separate species from humans, that 2% doesn’t come out of the 99% of our genome shared among all humans, but the 1% that varies. 
That’s because about 40,000 years ago, certain human populations interbred with Neanderthals, meaning some people alive today have Neanderthal ancestors. 
Many Neanderthal ancestors, in fact: there are so many generations in 40,000 years that a single Neanderthal’s genetic contribution would be untraceable. 
You can be both 100% French and 2% Neanderthal— though both come from the 1% of DNA that makes us different, they’re accounting for different things. 
Looking for traces of our ancestry in our DNA gets complicated very quickly. 
Both the way we inherit DNA and the information available for testing makes it difficult to say certain things with 100% certainty. 

A canvas drenched in sunset hues, colors radiating like flame. 
At first glance, this painting may appear to be an impossible, abstract image. 
But a closer look reveals the tender stems, lush petals and velvety texture of a Canna Lily. 
This metamorphosis of natural subjects into abstract geometry is commonplace in the work of Georgia O’Keeffe— the revolutionary American painter and sculptor. 
But the magic behind this transformation remains just as elusive as the artist herself. 
Born in Wisconsin in 1887, O’Keeffe spent her childhood plucking wildflowers and arranging fruits to paint. 
At seventeen, she moved to Chicago to study at the prestigious Art Institute. 
Her teachers trained her to faithfully reproduce reality in the conventions of European masters. 
Although she enjoyed the solitude and precision of this work, O’Keeffe felt little personal connection to it. 
After moving to New York, she was increasingly drawn to the clean lines, striking composition and vivid colors of Japanese art. 
O’Keeffe soon found a teacher whose lessons inspired her to put those interests into practice. 
Unlike her previous teachers, Arthur Wesley Dow urged his students to focus on more abstract representations of light, shape, and color. 
These lessons manifested in O’Keeffe’s first series of abstract drawings. 
Rendered in charcoal, they present a series of undulating lines, bold shading and billowing clouds. 
These drawings defy easy classification— suggesting, but never quite matching, any specific natural reference. 
Earlier European painters in the Cubist tradition had employed rigid geometry to abstract external subjects. 
But here, O’Keeffe employed the shapes and rhythms of nature to capture her internal feelings. 
Experiments like these would soon become a cornerstone of an artistic movement called American Modernism. 
Although no single style defines Modernist painting, its proponents shared a desire to challenge the realist traditions that dominated art education. 
Beginning in the late 1910’s, Modernist painting often used geometric shapes and bold colors to probe the American psyche. 
O’Keeffe threw herself into these experiments — but she was reluctant to share her new work. 
However, when a friend sent her charcoals to the art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, he became entranced. 
In 1916, he arranged for a grand exhibition in New York. 
This marked the beginning of O’Keeffe’s career as a popular artist— and a relationship that would lead to marriage in 1924. 
Marriage didn’t diminish O’Keeffe’s taste for solitude. 
She travelled widely to teach, and often retreated to paint for months at a time. 
Whether she was exploring the craggy canyons of Texas, the quiet forests of South Carolina, or the sun-bleached desert of New Mexico, her creative process was based on ritual and close observation. 
She paid meticulous attention to small details, and spent hours mixing paints to create exactly the right colors. 
When she found the perfect hue, she’d record it in her ever-growing collection of handmade color cards. 
O’Keeffe also experimented with perspective to celebrate objects that were often overlooked. 
In "Rams Head with Hollyhock," she places a weathered skull and a delicate flower high above the hills below. 
This massive skull overshadows the landscape, casting both the skeleton and the mountains in a new, eerie light. 
The public was captivated by her unique perspective and secretive behavior. 
She was particularly praised for her massive flower paintings, ranging from fiery poppies to ghostly calla lillies. 
Stieglitz and other critics of the time were infatuated by Freudian psychology, and were quick to link these paintings to female genitalia. 
But O’Keeffe dismissed such interpretations. 
She resented the male gaze that dominated the art world, and demanded her work be respected for its emotional evocation of the natural world. 
Eventually, O’Keeffe settled down in New Mexico, near one of her favorite artist retreats. 
In her 70’s, her eyesight began to fail, but she continued to mine the landscape’s mysteries in new, tactile mediums. 
O’Keeffe kept creating until her death at 98, and is remembered as the “Mother of American Modernism.” Decades on, her work retains its wild energy— and O’Keeffe her personal mystique. 

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

When a new pathogen emerges, our bodies and healthcare systems are left vulnerable. 
In times like these, there’s an urgent need for a vaccine to create widespread immunity with minimal loss of life. 
So how quickly can we develop vaccines when we need them most? 
Vaccine development can generally be split into three phases. 
In exploratory research, scientists experiment with different approaches to find safe and replicable vaccine designs. 
Once these are vetted in the lab, they enter clinical testing, where vaccines are evaluated for safety, efficacy, and side effects across a variety of populations. 
Finally, there’s manufacturing, where vaccines are produced and distributed for public use. 
Under regular circumstances, this process takes an average of 15 to 20 years. 
But during a pandemic, researchers employ numerous strategies to move through each stage as quickly as possible. 
Exploratory research is perhaps the most flexible. 
The goal of this stage is to find a safe way to introduce our immune system to the virus or bacteria. 
This gives our body the information it needs to create antibodies capable of fighting a real infection. 
There are many ways to safely trigger this immune response, but generally, the most effective designs are also the slowest to produce. 
Traditional attenuated vaccines create long lasting resilience. 
But they rely on weakened viral strains that must be cultivated in non-human tissue over long periods of time. 
Inactivated vaccines take a much faster approach, directly applying heat, acid, or radiation to weaken the pathogen. 
Sub-unit vaccines, that inject harmless fragments of viral proteins, can also be created quickly. 
But these faster techniques produce less robust resilience. 
These are just three of many vaccine designs, each with their own pros and cons. 
No single approach is guaranteed to work, and all of them require time-consuming research. 
So the best way to speed things up is for many labs to work on different models simultaneously. 
This race-to-the-finish strategy produced the first testable Zika vaccine in 7 months, and the first testable COVID-19 vaccine in just 42 days. 
Being testable doesn’t mean these vaccines will be successful. 
But models that are deemed safe and easily replicable can move into clinical testing while other labs continue exploring alternatives. 
Whether a testable vaccine is produced in four months or four years, the next stage is often the longest and most unpredictable stage of development. 
Clinical testing consists of three phases, each containing multiple trials. 
Phase I trials focus on the intensity of the triggered immune response, and try to establish that the vaccine is safe and effective. 
Phase II trials focus on determining the right dosage and delivery schedule across a wider population. 
And Phase III trials determine safety across the vaccine’s primary use population, while also identifying rare side effects and negative reactions. 
Given the number of variables and the focus on long-term safety, it’s incredibly difficult to speed up clinical testing. 
In extreme circumstances, researchers run multiple trials within one phase at the same time. 
But they still need to meet strict safety criteria before moving on. 
Occasionally, labs can expedite this process by leveraging previously approved treatments. 
In 2009, researchers adapted the seasonal flu vaccine to treat H1N1— producing a widely available vaccine in just six months. 
However, this technique only works when dealing with familiar pathogens that have well-established vaccine designs. 
After a successful Phase III trial, a national regulatory authority reviews the results and approves safe vaccines for manufacturing. 
Every vaccine has a unique blend of biological and chemical components that require a specialized pipeline to produce. 
To start production as soon as the vaccine is approved, manufacturing plans must be designed in parallel to research and testing. 
This requires constant coordination between labs and manufacturers, as well as the resources to adapt to sudden changes in vaccine design— even if that means scrapping months of work. 
Over time, advances in exploratory research and manufacturing should make this process faster. 
Preliminary studies suggest that future researchers may be able to swap genetic material from different viruses into the same vaccine design. 
These DNA and mRNA based vaccines could dramatically expedite all three stages of vaccine production. 
But until such breakthroughs arrive, our best strategy is for labs around the world to cooperate and work in parallel on different approaches. 
By sharing knowledge and resources, scientists can divide and conquer any pathogen. 

June 8, 2010, Russell Wilson, fourth-round pick to the Colorado Rockies baseball. 
I'm fired up, one of the highest moments of my life. 
Every kid's dream to be drafted by a Major League Baseball team. 
June 8, 2010. 
June 9, 2010 -- (Imitating flatline sound) The line goes flat. 
My dad passes away. 
The highest of the high to the lowest of the low. 
Just like that. 
My dad laying in his deathbed, just tears running down my face, you know, what do I do next? 
My mind racing, memories, flashbacks, moments, early mornings, getting up, taking grounders and throwing, speed outs and deep post routes to my brother and my dad, to early morning car rides to AAU baseball, to my dad being the third-base coach. 
Fast-forward to the championship high of winning a Super Bowl, holding up the Lombardi Trophy and the emotions and the excitement of it all, blue and green confetti all over the place and knowing that you just won the Super Bowl, to a year later, the pressure of the game, the ball on the one-yard line, and this is the chance to win the game, and it doesn't work. 
And however many millions and millions of people all over the world watching. 
And having to walk to the media, and what do I say next, what do I do, what do I think? 
Being married at a young age and just coming out of college and everything else, to, you know, shortly after, marriage not working out and realizing, you know what? 
Life happens. 
Life happens, life happens to all of us. 
Loss of family members, divorce, fear, pain, depression, concerns, worries. 
When you think about being superpositive -- yes, I'm positive by nature, but positivity, you know, it doesn't always work, because when you're down 16-nothing in an NFC championship game, and people are like, "Russ, we're not going to be able to win this game, man, it's not a great situation right now," or when you're facing cancer, or when you have things you have to deal with or finances and this and that, like, how do we deal with it? 
It's hard to be positive in the midst of it all. 
And what I definitely knew was this: that negativity works 100 percent of the time. 
Negativity was going to get me nowhere. 
I started saying to myself, "New are his mercies every morning," new beginnings, new starts. 
And despite hardship and pain and worries and wanting to get through it and "How do I do this?", I started thinking about a car. 
You know how when you drive a car, you've got stick shift and you want to shift to neutral? 
You go from first gear to second gear, all the way to fifth? 
You've got to know how to shift to neutral. 
And I needed to shift to neutral immediately, before I crashed. 
Sitting there after the Super Bowl, I had a decision to make: Will I let this define my career? Will I let it define my life? 
Hell, no. 
What I found out was this: that mindset is a skill. 
It can be taught and learned. 
I started 10 years ago, training my mind, with this guy named Trevor Moawad, my mental conditioning coach. 
He's been with me for 10 years, and we've been best friends and partners ever since. 
As athletes, we train the body, we train ourselves to be able to run fast, throw farther, jump higher and do these different things, but why don't we train our mind? 
What do you want your life to look like? 
Write it out, talk about it, say it. 
What's our language, what does it look like, watch these highlights, Russell, when you're in your best moments. 
What does that look like? 
And be that, live that, sound like that. 
The best free throw shooters, they don't worry about the shot they just missed. 
They think about this shot, this putt, this throw, this first down. 
Then I met this kid Milton Wright, 19 years old, he had cancer three different times. 
This day when I went to see him, he was frustrated, "Russ, I'm done, I don't want to do this anymore, it's my time to go." 
I started telling him this story about my dad, how he used to say, "Son, why not you? 
Why don't you graduate early, play pro football and pro baseball? 
Why not you, why not you?" 
I said, "Milton, why not you? 
If you tried T-cell therapy, and you try this and it doesn't work, you won't remember it." 
So Milton got a smile on his face and said, "You're exactly right. 
Yes, I do have cancer, Russ. 
But I can either let this kill me, not just physically, but I can also let it kill me emotionally and mentally. 
And I have a choice right now, in the midst of the problem, in the midst of the storm, to decide to overcome." 
One of the questions I always get asked about neutral thinking is this: "Does that mean I don't have any emotion?" 
And I always say, absolutely not. 
Yeah, we have emotions, we have real-life situations, we have things to deal with. 
But what you have to be able to do is to stay focused on the moment and to not be superemotional. 
It's OK to have emotions, but don't be emotional. 
When people look at me, they see that I'm the highest-paid player in the NFL, they see that I have the girl and Ciara, that I have the family and this and that. 
But I still have real-life situations. 
We all do. 
We all have, you know, sadness and loss and depression and worries and fear. 
I didn't just get here. 
What's the truth, and how do I come through this better? 
And that's really, kind of, how my mind started shifting. 
It was not just on the success of it all or the failure of it, it was on the process, like: What is the next step, how do I do this right here, right now? 
We have a choice to make in life. 
And for me, when I was young and I didn't have much, I made a choice. 
I made a choice that I was going to believe that great things were going to happen, that I was going to have my mindset right, and I was going to have the right language and the right things to think about, which helped prepare me for today. 
Because I'm just human. 
I just have the ability to throw the ball a long way and run around and make some cool and fun throws and make some people smile. 
But the reality is that I still have pressure, I still have worries, I still have fears, I still have things that happen. 
Still have loss. 
Positivity can be dangerous. 
But what always works is negativity. 
I never wanted to live in negativity, so I stayed in neutral. 
I kept my shift in neutral. 
And so that's where I lived, and that's where I've been living ever since. 

Imagine we want to build a new space port at one of four recently settled Martian bases, and are holding a vote to determine its location. 
Of the hundred colonists on Mars, 42 live on West Base, 26 on North Base, 15 on South Base, and 17 on East Base. 
For our purposes, let’s assume that everyone prefers the space port to be as close to their base as possible, and will vote accordingly. 
What is the fairest way to conduct that vote? 
The most straightforward solution would be to just let each individual cast a single ballot, and choose the location with the most votes. 
This is known as plurality voting, or "first past the post." 
In this case, West Base wins easily, since it has more residents than any other. 
And yet, most colonists would consider this the worst result, given how far it is from everyone else. 
So is plurality vote really the fairest method? 
What if we tried a system like instant runoff voting, which accounts for the full range of people’s preferences rather than just their top choices? 
Here’s how it would work. 
First, voters rank each of the options from 1 to 4, and we compare their top picks. 
South receives the fewest votes for first place, so it’s eliminated. 
Its 15 votes get allocated to those voters’ second choice— East Base— giving it a total of 32. 
We then compare top preferences and cut the last place option again. 
This time North Base is eliminated. 
Its residents’ second choice would’ve been South Base, but since that’s already gone, the votes go to their third choice. 
That gives East 58 votes over West’s 42, making it the winner. 
But this doesn’t seem fair either. 
Not only did East start out in second-to-last place, but a majority ranked it among their two least preferred options. 
Instead of using rankings, we could try voting in multiple rounds, with the top two winners proceeding to a separate runoff. 
Normally, this would mean West and North winning the first round, and North winning the second. 
But the residents of East Base realize that while they don’t have the votes to win, they can still skew the results in their favor. 
In the first round, they vote for South Base instead of their own, successfully keeping North from advancing. 
Thanks to this "tactical voting" by East Base residents, South wins the second round easily, despite being the least populated. 
Can a system be called fair and good if it incentivizes lying about your preferences? 
Maybe what we need to do is let voters express a preference in every possible head-to-head matchup. 
This is known as the Condorcet method. 
Consider one matchup: West versus North. 
All 100 colonists vote on their preference between the two. 
So that's West's 42 versus the 58 from North, South, and East, who would all prefer North. 
Now do the same for the other five matchups. 
The victor will be whichever base wins the most times. 
Here, North wins three and South wins two. 
These are indeed the two most central locations, and North has the advantage of not being anyone’s least preferred choice. 
So does that make the Condorcet method an ideal voting system in general? 
Not necessarily. 
Consider an election with three candidates. 
If voters prefer A over B, and B over C, but prefer C over A, this method fails to select a winner. 
Over the decades, researchers and statisticians have come up with dozens of intricate ways of conducting and counting votes, and some have even been put into practice. 
But whichever one you choose, it's possible to imagine it delivering an unfair result. 
It turns out that our intuitive concept of fairness actually contains a number of assumptions that may contradict each other. 
It doesn’t seem fair for some voters to have more influence than others. 
But nor does it seem fair to simply ignore minority preferences, or encourage people to game the system. 
In fact, mathematical proofs have shown that for any election with more than two options, it’s impossible to design a voting system that doesn’t violate at least some theoretically desirable criteria. 
So while we often think of democracy as a simple matter of counting votes, it’s also worth considering who benefits from the different ways of counting them. 

At some point between the 1st and 5th century CE, the Hindu sage Patañjali began to codify the ancient, meditative traditions practiced throughout India. 
He recorded techniques nearly as old as Indian civilization itself in 196 manuals called the Yoga Sutras. 
These texts defined yoga as the ‘yoking’ or restraining of the mind from focusing on external objects in efforts to reach a state of pure consciousness. 
Over time, yoga came to incorporate physical elements from gymnastics and wrestling. 
Today, there are a multitude of approaches to modern yoga— though most still maintain the three core elements of Patañjali’s practice: physical postures, breathing exercises, and spiritual contemplation. 
This blend of physical and mental exercise is widely believed to have a unique set of health advantages. 
Such as improving strength and flexibility, boosting heart and lung function, and enhancing psychological well-being. 
But what have contemporary studies shown regarding the benefits of this ancient tradition? 
Despite attempts by many researchers, it's tough to make specific claims about yoga's advantages. 
Its unique combination of activities makes it difficult to determine which component is producing a specific health benefit. 
Additionally, yoga studies are often made up of small sample sizes that lack diversity, and the heavy reliance on self-reporting makes results subjective. 
However, there are some health benefits that have more robust scientific support than others. 
Let’s start with flexibility and strength. 
Twisting your body into yoga’s physical postures stretches multiple muscle groups. 
In the short term, stretching can change the water content of these muscles, ligaments, and tendons to make them more elastic. 
Over time, regular stretching stimulates stem cells which then differentiate into new muscle tissue and other cells that generate elastic collagen. 
Frequent stretching also reduces the body’s natural reflex to constrict muscles, improving your pain tolerance for feats of flexibility. 
Researchers haven’t found that any one form of yoga improves flexibility more than another, so the impact of specific postures is unclear. 
But like other low-impact exercises, yoga reliably improves fitness and flexibility in healthy populations. 
The practice has also been shown to be a potentially powerful therapeutic tool. 
In studies involving patients with a variety of musculo-skeletal disorders, yoga was more helpful at reducing pain and improving mobility than other forms of low-impact exercise. 
Adding yoga to an existing exercise routine can improve strength and flexibility for hard to treat conditions like chronic lower back pain, rheumatoid arthritis, and osteoporosis. 
Yoga’s mix of physical exercise and regimented breathing has proven similarly therapeutic for lung health. 
Lung diseases like chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma shrink the passageways that carry oxygen, while weakening the membrane that brings oxygen into the blood. 
But breathing exercises like those found in yoga relax the muscles constricting those passageways and improve oxygen diffusion. 
Increasing the blood’s oxygen content is especially helpful for those with weak heart muscles who have difficulty pumping enough oxygen throughout the body. 
And for those with healthy hearts, this practice can lower blood pressure and reduce risk factors for cardiovascular disease. 
Yoga’s most widely celebrated benefit may be the most difficult to prove: its psychological effects. 
Despite the longstanding association between yoga and psychological wellbeing, there’s little conclusive evidence on how the practice affects mental health. 
One of the biggest claims is that yoga improves symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders. 
Since diagnosis of these conditions varies widely as do their origin and severity, it’s difficult to quantify yoga’s impact. 
However, there is evidence to suggest that yoga can help reduce the symptoms of stress, as well as meditation or relaxation. 
Research on the effects of yoga is still evolving. 
In the future, we’ll need larger studies, incorporating diverse participants, which can measure yoga’s impact on heart attacks, cancer rates, cognitive function and more. 
But for now, yoga can continue its ancient tradition as a way to exercise, reflect, and relax. 

“I am an invisible man.” “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel.” These three opening lines, from Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man," Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs. Dalloway," and Italo Calvino’s "If on a winter’s night a traveler," each establish a different point of view. 
Who is telling a story, and from what perspective, are some of the most important choices an author makes. 
Told from a different point of view, a story can transform completely. 
Take this fairytale: "Rapunzel, Rapunzel," the Prince called, "let down your hair." 
Rapunzel unbraided her hair and slung it out the window. 
The prince climbed her tresses into the tower. 
Rapunzel is typically told like this, with the narrator outside the story. 
This point of view is called third person. 
But Rapunzel can also be told by a character in the story— a first person narrator. 
The tail end of Rapunzel’s locks plopped down at my feet. 
I grabbed on and began to climb… ugh! 
I couldn’t untangle myself. 
Strands came off all over me, sticking to my sweat. 
In a first person narrative, the story can change dramatically depending on which character is the narrator. 
Say Rapunzel was narrating instead of the prince: I hope he appreciates how long it takes to unbraid 25 feet of hair, I thought. 
OUCH! I'll be honest; I thought my scalp would stretch off of my skull. 
"Can you climb any faster?" I yelled. 
In second person, the narrator addresses the story to the reader: He calls your name. He wants you to let your hair down. 
You just finished braiding it, but hey– you don't get a lot of visitors. 
Third person, first person, and second person perspectives each have unique possibilities and constraints. 
So how do you choose a point of view for your story? 
Constraints aren’t necessarily a bad thing— they can help focus a story or highlight certain elements. 
For example, a third person narrator is necessarily a bit removed from the characters. 
But that can be good for stories where a feeling of distance is important. 
A third person narrator can be either limited, meaning they stick close to one character’s thoughts and feelings, or they can be omniscient, able to flit between characters’ minds and give the reader more information. 
A first person story creates closeness between the reader and the narrator. 
It’s also restricted by the narrator’s knowledge. 
This can create suspense as the reader finds out information along with the character. 
A first person narrator doesn’t necessarily have to represent the character’s experience faithfully— they can be delusional or dishonest. 
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel "The Remains of the Day," Stevens, an aging British butler in 1956, recounts his many years of service, but fails to acknowledge the flaws of the man he serves. 
The cracks in his narrative eventually draw the reader’s attention to the under-acknowledged failings of the culture and class system he inhabits. 
Justin Torres’s novel, "We the Animals," begins with a plural first person narrator: “We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.” Partway through the story, the point of view shifts to first person singular, from we to I, as the boys come of age and one brother feels alienated from the others. 
Second person is a less common choice. 
It requires the writer to make the reader suspend disbelief to become another “you.” Placing the reader in a character’s perspective can build urgency and suspense. 
Sometimes, though, second person is intended to distance the narrator from their own story, rather than bring the reader closer to the story. 
In these cases, second person narrators refer to themselves as “you” rather than “I.” Writers are constantly experimenting with fresh variations on point of view. 
New virtual and augmented reality technologies may expand the possibilities for this experimentation. 
By placing people at a particular vantage point in virtual space, how might we change the way we tell and experience stories? 

It’s just after sunrise, and 16-year-old Mori Banshirô is already hard at work practicing drills with his long sword. 
Banshirô is an ambitious samurai in training, and today he must impress his teachers more than ever. 
Today he’ll make his request to travel to the capital city of Edo for a year of martial and scholarly studies, and he needs their support, along with his father’s. 
The year is 1800 in the castle town of Kôchi, capital of the Tosa domain in Japan. 
The daimyo rules the domain, and about 1,500 samurai retainers serve him. 
For 200 years, Japan has been at peace, and the samurai, once primarily warriors, now play a much wider range of roles— they are also government officials, scholars, teachers, and even masters of the tea ceremony or artists. 
To prepare for these diverse responsibilities, young samurai like Banshirô study the “twin paths” of literary learning and the martial arts. 
At 15, he went through the rites of adulthood and received the daishô— a pair of swords. 
The long sword is for training and combat, while the short sword has a sole, solemn purpose— to commit ritual suicide, or seppuku, if he dishonors himself, his family, or the daimyo. 
Banshirô idolizes the legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi, a renowned swordsman who lived 150 years earlier. 
But Banshirô doesn’t admire his swordsmanship alone. 
Miyamoto Musashi was also a master calligrapher and painter. 
That’s the real reason Banshirô wants to go to Edo— he secretly wants to be a painter, too. 
After finishing his practice at home, he bids his father goodbye and walks to school. 
His father is preparing to accompany the daimyo to the capital. 
The Tokugawa shogun, head of the Japanese military government, requires all the regional rulers to alternate years between their castle town in the home domain and the capital city. 
The costly treks back and forth keep the daimyo subordinate and prevent them from building up their own military forces to challenge the shogunate. 
The daimyo’s wife and children live in the capital full time, where they serve as hostages to ensure his loyalty. 
But the practice doesn’t just affect the daimyo— it determines much of the rhythm of life in Japan. 
Samurai must accompany the daimyo to Edo. 
This year it’s Banshirô’s father’s turn to go, and Banshirô is desperate to go with him; but given that he’s still in training, he’ll need permission from both his father and the domain. 
At school, Banshirô’s first lesson is in swordfighting. 
Under his teacher’s stern eye, he pairs up with his classmates and goes through the routines he’s been practicing. 
At the end of the lesson, he reminds the instructor of his request to go to Edo. 
The instructor cracks his first smile of the day, and Banshirô feels confident he will gain his support. 
Next, Banshirô practices archery, horsemanship, and swimming before his academic courses in the afternoon. 
Courses cover Confucian philosophy, morality, and history. 
When the instructor calls on him, he has the response on the tip of his tongue, ensuring another supporter for his campaign. 
By the end of the day, Banshirô feels confident that his formal request will be approved, but the greatest challenge is still ahead of him: convincing his father. 
His father believes the martial arts are more important than the literary arts, so Banshirô doesn’t mention his artistic ambitions. 
Instead, he talks about renowned sword instructors he can train with, and teaching certifications he can earn to improve his professional prospects back in Kôchi. 
Then, he makes his final, strongest argument: if he goes this time and succeeds, his father can retire and send him instead in the future. 
It’s this last point that finally sells him— Banshirô’s father agrees to take him on his tour of duty. 
In the bustle of the capital city, Banshirô will finally have the opportunity to pursue his secret ambition to become a painter. 

When Nicolas Bourbaki applied to the American Mathematical Society in the 1950s, he was already one of the most influential mathematicians of his time. 
He’d published articles in international journals and his textbooks were required reading. 
Yet his application was firmly rejected for one simple reason— Nicolas Bourbaki did not exist. 
Two decades earlier, mathematics was in disarray. 
Many established mathematicians had lost their lives in the first World War, and the field had become fragmented. 
Different branches used disparate methodology to pursue their own goals. 
And the lack of a shared mathematical language made it difficult to share or expand their work. 
In 1934, a group of French mathematicians were particularly fed up. 
While studying at the prestigious École normale supérieure, they found the textbook for their calculus class so disjointed that they decided to write a better one. 
The small group quickly took on new members, and as the project grew, so did their ambition. 
The result was the "Éléments de mathématique," a treatise that sought to create a consistent logical framework unifying every branch of mathematics. 
The text began with a set of simple axioms— laws and assumptions it would use to build its argument. 
From there, its authors derived more and more complex theorems that corresponded with work being done across the field. 
But to truly reveal common ground, the group needed to identify consistent rules that applied to a wide range of problems. 
To accomplish this, they gave new, clear definitions to some of the most important mathematical objects, including the function. 
It’s reasonable to think of functions as machines that accept inputs and produce an output. 
But if we think of functions as bridges between two groups, we can start to make claims about the logical relationships between them. 
For example, consider a group of numbers and a group of letters. 
We could define a function where every numerical input corresponds to the same alphabetical output, but this doesn’t establish a particularly interesting relationship. 
Alternatively, we could define a function where every numerical input corresponds to a different alphabetical output. 
This second function sets up a logical relationship where performing a process on the input has corresponding effects on its mapped output. 
The group began to define functions by how they mapped elements across domains. 
If a function’s output came from a unique input, they defined it as injective. 
If every output can be mapped onto at least one input, the function was surjective. 
And in bijective functions, each element had perfect one to one correspondence. 
This allowed mathematicians to establish logic that could be translated across the function’s domains in both directions. 
Their systematic approach to abstract principles was in stark contrast to the popular belief that math was an intuitive science, and an over-dependence on logic constrained creativity. 
But this rebellious band of scholars gleefully ignored conventional wisdom. 
They were revolutionizing the field, and they wanted to mark the occasion with their biggest stunt yet. 
They decided to publish "Éléments de mathématique" and all their subsequent work under a collective pseudonym: Nicolas Bourbaki. 
Over the next two decades, Bourbaki’s publications became standard references. 
And the group’s members took their prank as seriously as their work. 
Their invented mathematician claimed to be a reclusive Russian genius who would only meet with his selected collaborators. 
They sent telegrams in Bourbaki’s name, announced his daughter’s wedding, and publicly insulted anyone who doubted his existence. 
In 1968, when they could no longer maintain the ruse, the group ended their joke the only way they could. 
They printed Bourbaki’s obituary, complete with mathematical puns. 
Despite his apparent death, the group bearing Bourbaki’s name lives on today. 
Though he’s not associated with any single major discovery, Bourbaki’s influence informs much current research. 
And the modern emphasis on formal proofs owes a great deal to his rigorous methods. 
Nicolas Bourbaki may have been imaginary— but his legacy is very real. 

For years I've been feeling frustrated, because as a religious historian, I've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. 
Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what's been called the Golden Rule. 
Sometimes it comes in a positive version -- "Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself." 
And equally important is the negative version -- "Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you." 
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. 
And people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. 
People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, "all day and every day," not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism, but to do it all day and every day, you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself. 
And it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao. 
Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence. 
But you know you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. 
Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort. 
Often people don't really want to be compassionate. 
I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. 
And that of course defeats the object of the exercise. 
Now why was I so grateful to TED? 
Because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century, enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than I could have ever conceived. 
Because I feel an urgency about this. 
If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. 
The task of our time, one of the great tasks of our time, is to build a global society, as I said, where people can live together in peace. 
And the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem. 
And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule. 
This is the source of all morality, this imaginative act of empathy, putting yourself in the place of another. 
And so we have a choice, it seems to me. 
We can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith, or we can go back to the rabbis. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, who, when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. 
That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary." 
And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate. 
And we need to revive that spirit. 
And it's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down. 
We have to make this happen, and we can do it with the modern communications that TED has introduced. 
Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners. 
In Singapore, we have a group going to use the Charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in Singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. 
In Malaysia, there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people, young people, and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. 
Throughout Europe, the Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, are discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths. 
But it can't stop there. It can't stop with the launch. 
Religious teaching, this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines. 
Religious teaching must always lead to action. 
And I intend to work on this till my dying day. 
And I want to continue with our partners to do two things -- educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. 
Education because we've so dropped out of compassion. 
People often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody. 
But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it. 
You also have to do it. 
I want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another. 
The same applies to educators. 
I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. 
And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling. 
I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions. 
And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking, so that because people have this Charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech, disdainful remarks from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry. 
Because we can change the world, we have the ability. 
I would never have thought of putting the Charter online. 
I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. 
And TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas. 
Because that is what is so wonderful about TED. 
In this room, all this expertise, if we joined it all together, we could change the world. 
And of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable. 
But I'd just like to quote, finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author whom I don't quote very often, C.S. Lewis. 
But he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a schoolgirl. 
It's in his book "The Four Loves." 
He said that he distinguished between erotic love, when two people gaze, spellbound, into each other's eyes. 
And then he compared that to friendship, when two people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal. 
We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. 
And I am convinced. 
I felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at Vevey, that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences melt away. 
And we learn amity. 
And we learn to live together and to get to know one another. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I'm a writer and a journalist, and I'm also an insanely curious person, so in 22 years as a journalist, I've learned how to do a lot of new things. 
And three years ago, one of the things I learned how to do was to become invisible. 
I became one of the working homeless. 
I quit my job as a newspaper editor after my father died in February of that same year, and decided to travel. 
His death hit me pretty hard. 
And there were a lot of things that I wanted to feel and deal with while I was doing that. 
I've camped my whole life. And I decided that living in a van for a year to do this would be like one long camping trip. 
So I packed my cat, my Rottweiler and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van, and drove off into the sunset, having fully failed to realize three critical things. 
One: that society equates living in a permanent structure, even a shack, with having value as a person. 
Two: I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality, if we let it. 
Three: I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle. 
At first, living in the van was great. 
I showered in campgrounds. I ate out regularly. 
And I had time to relax and to grieve. 
But then the anger and the depression about my father's death set in. 
My freelance job ended. And I had to get a full-time job to pay the bills. 
What had been a really mild spring turned into a miserably hot summer. 
And it became impossible to park anywhere -- (Laughs) -- without being very obvious that I had a cat and a dog with me, and it was really hot. 
The cat came and went through an open window in the van. 
The doggy went into doggy day care. 
And I sweated. 
Whenever I could, I used employee showers in office buildings and truck stops. 
Or I washed up in public rest rooms. 
Nighttime temperatures in the van rarely dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, making it difficult or impossible to sleep. 
Food rotted in the heat. 
Ice in my ice chest melted within hours, and it was pretty miserable. 
I couldn't afford to find an apartment, or couldn't afford an apartment that would allow me to have the Rottweiler and the cat. 
And I refused to give them up, so I stayed in the van. 
And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night, I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet. 
When winter weather set in, the temperatures dropped below freezing. And they stayed there. 
And I faced a whole new set of challenges. 
I parked a different place every night so I would avoid being noticed and hassled by the police. 
I didn't always succeed. 
But I felt out of control of my life. 
And I don't know when or how it happened, but the speed at which I went from being a talented writer and journalist to being a homeless woman, living in a van, took my breath away. 
I hadn't changed. My I.Q. hadn't dropped. 
My talent, my integrity, my values, everything about me remained the same. 
But I had changed somehow. 
I spiraled deeper and deeper into a depression. 
And eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic. 
And I went. I hadn't bathed in three days. 
I was as smelly and as depressed as anyone in line. 
I just wasn't drunk or high. 
And when several of the homeless men realized that, including a former university professor, they said, "You aren't homeless. Why are you really here?" 
Other homeless people didn't see me as homeless, but I did. 
Then the professor listened to my story and he said, "You have a job. You have hope. 
The real homeless don't have hope." 
A reaction to the medication the clinic gave me for my depression left me suicidal. And I remember thinking, "If I killed myself, no one would notice." 
A friend told me, shortly after that, that she had heard that Tim Russert, a nationally renowned journalist, had been talking about me on national T.V. 
An essay I'd written about my father, the year before he died, was in Tim's new book. 
And he was doing the talk show circuit. And he was talking about my writing. 
And when I realized that Tim Russert, former moderator of "Meet the Press," was talking about my writing, while I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I started laughing. 
You should too. 
(Laughter) I started laughing because it got to the point where, was I a writer, or was I a homeless woman? 
So I went in the bookstore. And I found Tim's book. 
And I stood there. And I reread my essay. 
And I cried. 
Because I was a writer. 
I was a writer. 
Shortly after that I moved back to Tennessee. 
I alternated between living in a van and couch surfing with friends. 
And I started writing again. 
By the summer of the following year I was a working journalist. 
I was winning awards. I was living in my own apartment. 
I was no longer homeless. 
And I was no longer invisible. 
Thousands of people work full and part-time jobs, and live in their cars. 
But society continues to stigmatize and criminalize living in your vehicle or on the streets. 
So the homeless, the working homeless, primarily remain invisible. 
But if you ever meet one, engage them, encourage them, and offer them hope. 
The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope. 
And I'm not here to be the poster girl for the homeless. 
I'm not here to encourage you to give money to the next panhandler you meet. 
But I am here to tell you that, based on my experience, people are not where they live, where they sleep, or what their life situation is at any given time. 
Three years ago I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and today I'm speaking at TED. 
Hope always, always finds a way. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

¿Hablas español? Parlez-vous français? 你会说中文吗？ If you answered, "sí," "oui," or "会" and you're watching this in English, chances are you belong to the world's bilingual and multilingual majority. 
And besides having an easier time traveling or watching movies without subtitles, knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends. 
So what does it really mean to know a language? 
Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading. 
While a balanced bilingual has near equal abilities across the board in two languages, most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in varying proportions. 
And depending on their situation and how they acquired each language, they can be classified into three general types. 
For example, let's take Gabriella, whose family immigrates to the US from Peru when she's two-years old. 
As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her. 
Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends. 
Finally, Gabriella's parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learn a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language. 
Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent or pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to a casual observer. 
But recent advances in brain imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain. 
It's well known that the brain's left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split. 
The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has lead to the critical period hypothesis. 
According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left. 
If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. 
Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than in their native one. 
But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. 
Some of these are even visible, such as higher density of the grey matter that contains most of your brain's neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language. 
The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years. 
The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts. 
Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed a child's development by forcing them to spend too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies. 
And while a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. 
This is the part of the brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information. 
So, while bilingualism may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex and actively engaged, and even if you didn't have the good fortune of learning a second language as a child, it's never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, "Hello," to, "Hola," "Bonjour" or "你好’s" because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way. 

This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. 
And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. 
And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
She said, "What leads to success?" 
And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer. 
So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. 
And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? 
So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick. 
And the first thing is passion. 
Freeman Thomas says, "I'm driven by my passion." 
TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money. 
Carol Coletta says, "I would pay someone to do what I do." 
And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway. 
Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, "It's all hard work. 
Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun." 
Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
(Laughter) TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. 
I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics. 
(Laughter) Good! 
(Applause) Alex Garden says, "To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it." 
And it's focus. 
Norman Jewison said to me, "I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing." 
And push! 
Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push." 
You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt. 
Goldie Hawn says, "I always had self-doubts. 
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
I didn't think I'd make it." 
Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." 
(Laughter) Serve! 
A lot of kids want to be millionaires. 
The first thing I say is: "OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. 
Because that's the way people really get rich." 
Ideas! 
TEDster Bill Gates says, "I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company." 
I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas -- it's just doing some very simple things. 
And I give lots of evidence. 
Persist! 
Joe Kraus says, "Persistence is the number one reason for our success." 
You've got to persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! 
Which of course means "Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure." 
(Laughter) So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED. 
(Laughter) Or failing that, do the eight things -- and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success. 
Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews! 

There are a lot of web 2.0 consultants who make a lot of money. 
In fact, they make their living on this stuff. 
I'm going to try to save you all the time and money and go through it in the next three minutes, so bear with me. 
Started a website in 2005 with a few friends, called Reddit.com. 
It's what you'd call a social news website; basically, the democratic front page of the best stuff on the web. 
You find some interesting content -- say, a TED Talk -- submit it to Reddit, and a community of your peers votes up if they like it, down if they don't. 
That creates the front page. 
It's always rising, falling; a half million people visit every day. 
But this isn't about Reddit. 
It's about discovering new things that pop up on the web. 
In the last four years, we've seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends get born right on our front page. 
This isn't about Reddit itself, it's actually about humpback whales. 
Well, technically, it's about Greenpeace, an environmental organization that wanted to stop the Japanese government's whaling campaign. 
The whales were getting killed; they wanted to put an end to it. 
One of the ways they wanted to do it was to put a tracking chip inside one of the whales. 
But to personify the movement, they wanted to name it. 
So in true web fashion, they put together a poll, where they had a bunch of very erudite, very thoughtful, cultured names. 
I believe this is the Farsi word for "immortal." 
I think this means "divine power of the ocean" in a Polynesian language. 
And then there was this: "Mister Splashy Pants." 
(Laughter) And this was a special name. 
Mister Pants, or "Splashy" to his friends, was very popular on the Internet. 
In fact, someone on Reddit thought, "What a great thing, we should all vote this up." 
And Redditors responded and all agreed. 
So the voting started. 
We got behind it ourselves; we changed our logo for the day, from the alien to Splashy, to help the cause. 
And it wasn't long before other sites like Fark and Boing Boing and the rest of the Internet started saying, "We love Splashy Pants!" 
So it went from about five percent, which was when this meme started, to 70 percent at the end of voting. 
Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. 
Just kidding -- Greenpeace actually wasn't that crazy about it, because they wanted one of the more thoughtful names to win. 
They said, "No, just kidding. We'll give it another week of voting." 
Well, that got us a little angry, so we changed it to Fightin' Splashy. 
(Laughter) And the Reddit community -- really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. 
Facebook groups were created. 
Facebook applications were created. 
The idea was, "Vote your conscience, vote for Mister Splashy Pants." 
People were putting up signs in the real world about this whale. 
(Laughter) This was the final vote: 78 percent of the votes. 
To give you an idea of the landslide, the next highest name pulled in three. 
There was a clear lesson: the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants. 
Which is obvious. It's a great name. 
Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, "Mister Splashy Pants." 
(Laughter) I think that's what helped drive this. 
What was cool were the repercussions. 
Greenpeace created an entire marketing campaign around it -- Mister Splashy Pants shirts and pins, an e-card so you could send your friend a dancing Splashy. 
But even more important was that they accomplished their mission. 
The Japanese government called off their whaling expedition. 
Mission accomplished: Greenpeace was thrilled, the whales were happy -- that's a quote. 
(Laughter) And actually, Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate, but they weren't whale lovers. 
A few, certainly, but we're talking about a lot of people, really interested and caught up in this meme. 
Greenpeace came back to the site and thanked Reddit for its participation. 
But this wasn't really altruism; just interest in doing something cool. 
This is how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. 
The Internet provides a level playing field. 
Your link is as good as your link, which is as good as my link. 
With a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter your budget. 
That is, as long as you can keep net neutrality in place. 
Another important thing is it costs nothing to get content online. 
There are so many publishing tools available, it only takes a few minutes to produce something. 
and the cost of iteration is so cheap, you might as well. 
If you do, be genuine. Be honest, up-front. 
One of the great lessons Greenpeace learned is that it's OK to lose control, OK to take yourself a little less seriously, given that, even though it's a very serious cause, you could ultimately achieve your goal. 
That's the final message I want to share: you can do well online. 
But no longer is the message coming from just the top down. 
If you want to succeed you've got to be OK to lose control. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. 
I seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. 
Because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. So ... 
so I did a spot on CNN the other day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. 
And I think that -- that's not really surprising though, is it? 
Because that's kind of the world that we live in now, a world stuck in fast-forward. 
A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time. 
Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. 
To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is in my bio there; I'll just toss it out again -- "These days even instant gratification takes too long." (Laughter) And if you think about how we to try to make things better, what do we do? 
No, we speed them up, don't we? So we used to dial; now we speed dial. 
We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. 
And of course, we used to date and now we speed date. 
And even things that are by their very nature slow -- we try and speed them up too. 
So I was in New York recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course, a new evening course. 
And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. 
So this -- the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, salute the sun, but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. 
I mean, these are sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at. 
But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. 
We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives -- on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. 
And sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life, instead of the good life. 
And I think for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness. 
You know, a burnout, or eventually the body says, "I can't take it anymore," and throws in the towel. 
Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to listen to them. 
And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slow down -- you know, I'd be speed reading "The Cat In The Hat." 
I'd be -- you know, I'd be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page, and of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. 
And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills, a clash between my speed and his slowness. 
And this went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people. 
And one of them made reference to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." 
And I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. 
My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah -- what a great idea! 
This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." 
But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different, and I took a step back, and I thought, "Whoa -- you know, has it really come to this? 
Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day?" 
And I put away the newspaper -- and I was getting on a plane -- and I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time -- which is I did nothing. 
I just thought, and I thought long and hard. 
And by the time I got off that plane, I'd decided I wanted to do something about it. 
I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else. 
And I had two questions in my head. 
The first was, how did we get so fast? 
And the second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? 
Now, if you think about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. 
You think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. 
But I think if you cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. 
In other cultures, time is cyclical. 
It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. 
It's always renewing and refreshing itself. 
Whereas in the West, time is linear. 
It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. 
You either use it, or lose it. 
"Time is money," as Benjamin Franklin said. 
And I think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation. 
Time is scarce, so what do we do? 
Well -- well, we speed up, don't we? 
We try and do more and more with less and less time. 
We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line -- a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. 
And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mindset? 
And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best. 
Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that, although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're road kill, the opposite turns out to be true: that by slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. 
They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better. 
And, in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration, lie what a lot of people now refer to as the "International Slow Movement." 
Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what's going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement. 
Started in Italy, but has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. 
And it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. 
I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance of farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. 
They want to get back to slower rhythms. 
And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. 
And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. 
So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space. 
And in some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. 
It's saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. 
In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. 
And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of healing. 
Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstream approval. 
But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. 
And blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them. 
Sex. There's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? 
I was coming to -- well -- no pun intended there. 
I was making my way, let's say, slowly to Oxford, and I went through a news agent, and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it said on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." 
So, you know, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. 
Now, you know, I like a quickie as much as the next person, but I think that there's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex -- from slowing down in the bedroom. 
You know, you tap into that -- those deeper, sort of, psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with the buildup. 
You can get more bang for your buck, let's say. 
I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn't they, when they sang the praises of "a lover with a slow hand." 
Now, we all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. 
And of course, in Italy where -- I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure -- they've launched an official Slow Sex movement. 
The workplace. 
Right across much of the world -- North America being a notable exception -- working hours have been coming down. 
And Europe is an example of that, and people finding that their quality of life improves as they're working less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. 
Now, clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in France -- too much, too soon, too rigid. 
But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. 
And Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on Earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy. 
And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro-company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug -- to take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys and laptops -- you at the back -- mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought. 
It's not just, though, these days, adults who overwork, though, is it? It's children, too. 
I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid-'80s, and I look at kids now, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. 
And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill. 
But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and you're finding that, you know, towns in the United States are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month, so that people can, you know, decompress and have some family time, and slow down. 
Homework is another thing. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more. 
So there was a case up in Scotland recently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "What are you -- you know, our kids will fall" -- the headmaster said, "No, no, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." 
And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math, science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. 
And I think what's very revealing is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks; they have CVs jammed with extracurriculars, to the point that would make your eyes water. 
But they lack spark; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside -- they don't know how to dream. And so what these Ivy League schools, and Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. 
And in Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter to undergraduates -- freshmen -- telling them that they'll get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes, if they do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them. 
And even if they sometimes do nothing at all. 
And that letter is called -- very revealing, I think -- "Slow Down!" -- with an exclamation mark on the end. 
So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same: that less is very often more, that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? 
I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticket while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true, but that's not all of it. 
I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. 
And if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. 
And if any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going. 
(Laughter) But why is it so hard to slow down? 
I think there are various reasons. 
One is that speed is fun, you know, speed is sexy. 
It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. 
I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension -- that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. 
We fill our head with distraction, with busyness, so that we don't have to ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? 
Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? 
Another reason -- although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason -- why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. 
"Slow" is a dirty word in our culture. 
It's a byword for "lazy," "slacker," for being somebody who gives up. 
You know, "he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being stupid. 
I guess what the Slow Movement -- the purpose of the Slow Movement, or its main goal, really, is to tackle that taboo, and to say that yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as "bad slow." 
You know, I got stuck on the M25, which is a ring road around London, recently, and spent three-and-a-half hours there. And I can tell you, that's really bad slow. 
But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea, of the Slow Movement, is that there is such a thing as "good slow," too. 
And good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV switched off. 
Or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. 
Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life. 
Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. 
And I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world -- you know, business press, but also big companies and leadership organizations. 
Because people at the top of the chain, people like you, I think, are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system, there's too much busyness, and it's time to find, or get back to that lost art of shifting gears. 
Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it's not just in the developed world that this idea's been taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status -- China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on -- these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement, many people in them, and there's a debate going on in their media, on the streets. 
Because I think they're looking at the West, and they're saying, "Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that." 
So all of that said, is it, I guess, is it possible? 
That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. 
And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic. 
I still love speed. You know, I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busyness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. 
I play squash and ice hockey, two very fast sports, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. 
But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise. 
(Laughter) And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. 
My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. 
I no longer hear time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. 
I can actually hear it now, because I see my time is ticking off. 
And the upshot of all of that is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive than I ever have. 
I feel like I'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it. 
And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger. 
And for me, I guess, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's sort of where the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. You know, at the end of the day, I go into my son's room. 
I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just slow down to his pace and we read. 
And because children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. 
They need you to move at their rhythm. 
I find that 10 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, "You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me." 
And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. 
And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. 
It's become my reward at the end of the day, something I really cherish. 
And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this: a few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. 
I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, and my son came down the stairs and he'd made a card for me. And he was carrying it. 
He'd gone and stapled two cards, very like these, together, and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. 
And he said to me, or he handed this to me, and I read it, and it said, "To Daddy, love Benjamin." 
And I thought, "Aw, that's really sweet. 
Is that a good luck on the book tour card?" 
And he said, "No, no, no, Daddy -- this is a card for being the best story reader in the world." 
And I thought, "Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work." 
Thank you very much. 

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

In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. 
Millions of people were in severe need of help. 
The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. 
But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims. 
When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail. 
The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps. 
But help was coming. 
At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. 
And it took them four days. 
The new software they used? Google Mapmaker. 
Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. 
People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store. 
Maps matter. 
Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. 
For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone. 
In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable. 
And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere. 
Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now. 
So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries. 
You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal. 
And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore. 
This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning. 
This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time. 
This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet. 
Welcome to the new world. 
(Applause) 

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

So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says, "Excuse me, what is the name of this block?" 
And you say, "I'm sorry, well, this is Oak Street, that's Elm Street. 
This is 26th, that's 27th." 
He says, "OK, but what is the name of that block?" 
You say, "Well, blocks don't have names. 
Streets have names; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets." 
He leaves, a little confused and disappointed. 
So, now imagine you're standing on a street, anywhere in Japan, you turn to a person next to you and say, "Excuse me, what is the name of this street?" 
They say, "Oh, well that's Block 17 and this is Block 16." 
And you say, "OK, but what is the name of this street?" 
And they say, "Well, streets don't have names. 
Blocks have names. 
Just look at Google Maps here. There's Block 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. 
All of these blocks have names, and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks. 
And you say then, "OK, then how do you know your home address?" 
He said, "Well, easy, this is District Eight. 
There's Block 17, house number one." 
You say, "OK, but walking around the neighborhood, I noticed that the house numbers don't go in order." 
He says, "Of course they do. They go in the order in which they were built. 
The first house ever built on a block is house number one. 
The second house ever built is house number two. 
Third is house number three. It's easy. It's obvious." 
So, I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn't even know we had, and realize that the opposite of them may also be true. 
So, for example, there are doctors in China who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy. 
So, any month you are healthy you pay them, and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you're healthy, not sick. 
(Applause) In most music, we think of the "one" as the downbeat, the beginning of the musical phrase: one, two, three, four. 
But in West African music, the "one" is thought of as the end of the phrase, like the period at the end of a sentence. 
So, you can hear it not just in the phrasing, but the way they count off their music: two, three, four, one. 
And this map is also accurate. 
(Laughter) There's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite is also true. 
So, let's never forget, whether at TED, or anywhere else, that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true. 
Domo arigato gozaimashita. 

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

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

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

We are drowning in news. 
Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year. 
That's just one source. 
My question is: How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run? 
That's the idea behind The Long News. 
It's a project by The Long Now Foundation, which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. 
And what we're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now. 
And when you look at the news through that filter, a lot falls by the wayside. 
To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year, is this going to matter in a decade? 
Or this? 
Or this? 
Really? 
Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years? 
Okay, that was kind of cool. 
(Laughter) But the top story of this past year was the economy, and I'm just betting that, sooner or later, this particular recession is going to be old news. 
So, what kind of stories might make a difference for the future? 
Well, let's take science. 
Someday, little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things. 
That someday is already here if you're a mouse. 
Some recent stories: nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom; they're sending genes into the brain; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body. 
What about resources? How are we going to feed nine billion people? 
We're having trouble feeding six billion today. 
As we heard yesterday, there's over a billion people hungry. 
Britain will starve without genetically modified crops. 
Bill Gates, fortunately, has bet a billion on [agricultural] research. 
What about global politics? 
The world's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda, and they may. 
They've overtaken the U.S. as the world's biggest car market, they've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter, and they've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers. 
We're finding all kinds of ways to push back the limits of what we know. 
Some recent discoveries: There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica; there's a self-directed robot scientist that's made a discovery -- soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years. 
It seems that with or without us, life will go on. 
But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one: water found on the moon. 
Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there. 
And if NASA doesn't do it, China might, or somebody in this room might write a big check. 
My point is this: In the long run, some news stories are more important than others. 
(Applause) 

Ladies and gentlemen, at TED we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement. 
So let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under three minutes and dissect some lessons from it. 
First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. 
What he's doing is so easy to follow. 
Here's his first follower with a crucial role; he's going to show everyone else how to follow. 
Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. 
Now it's not about the leader anymore; it's about them, plural. 
Now, there he is calling to his friends. 
Now, if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. 
It takes guts to stand out like that. 
The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. 
Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts -- three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. 
So a movement must be public. 
It's important to show not just the leader, but the followers, because you find that new followers emulate the followers, not the leader. 
Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. 
Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. 
Now we've got a movement. 
(Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. 
So those that were sitting on the fence before now have no reason not to. 
They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, but they will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry. 
(Laughter) So, over the next minute, you'll see all of those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in. 
And that's how you make a movement. 
But let's recap some lessons from this. 
So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. 
(Laughter) Okay, but we might have missed the real lesson here. 
The biggest lesson, if you noticed -- did you catch it? -- is that leadership is over-glorified. 
Yes, it was the shirtless guy who was first, and he'll get all the credit, but it was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. 
So, as we're told that we should all be leaders, that would be really ineffective. 
If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. 
And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. 
And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Now, I want to start with a question: When was the last time you were called "childish"? 
For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
Which really bothers me. 
After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
Now, what have kids done? 
Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
The traits the word "childish" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Then again, who's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren't exactly what the world needs? 
Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "That won't benefit me." 
For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking, like my wish that no one went hungry, or that everything were free, a kind of utopia. 
How many of you still dream like that, and believe in the possibilities? 
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos. 
On the other hand, we kids still dream about perfection. 
And that's a good thing, because in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first. 
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
For instance, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, my home state -- yoohoo, Washington! 
(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
The resident artist said they got some of their best ideas from the program, because kids don't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes, they just think of good ideas. 
Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
(Laughter) Now, our inherent wisdom doesn't have to be insider's knowledge. 
Kids already do a lot of learning from adults, and we have a lot to share. 
I think that adults should start learning from kids. 
Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd -- teachers and students, and I like this analogy: It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, "Do this, do that." 
The students should teach their teachers. 
Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal. 
The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
(Laughter) True story, by the way. 
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "Don't do that, don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. 
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. 
My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. 
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules. 
(Laughter) I loved to write from the age of four, and when I was six, my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word. 
Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
Many publishers were not quite so encouraging. 
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
Children's publisher not working with children? 
I don't know, you're kind of alienating a large client there. 
(Laughter) One publisher, Action Publishing, was willing to take that leap and trust me, and to listen to what I had to say. 
They published my first book, "Flying Fingers," you see it here. 
And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
I appreciate your attention today, because to show that you truly care, you listen. 
But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
You must lend an ear today, because we are the leaders of tomorrow, which means we're going to take care of you when you're old and senile. 
(Laughter) No, really, we are going to be the next generation, the ones who will bring this world forward. 
And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
Are you ready to make the match? 
Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 

In my industry, we believe that images can change the world. 
Okay, we're naive, we're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. 
The truth is that we know that the images themselves don't change the world, but we're also aware that, since the beginning of photography, images have provoked reactions in people, and those reactions have caused change to happen. 
So let's begin with a group of images. 
I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't recognize many or most of them. 
They're best described as iconic: so iconic, perhaps, they're cliches. 
In fact, they're so well-known that you might even recognize them in a slightly or somewhat different form. 
(Laughter) But I think we're looking for something more. 
We're looking for something more. 
We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something -- in other words, to act. 
Well, this image you've all seen. 
It changed our view of the physical world. 
We had never seen our planet from this perspective before. 
Many people credit a lot of the birth of the environmental movement to our seeing the planet like this for the first time -- its smallness, its fragility. 
Forty years later, this group, more than most, are well aware of the destructive power that our species can wield over our environment. 
And at last, we appear to be doing something about it. 
This destructive power takes many different forms. 
For example, these images taken by Brent Stirton in the Congo. 
These gorillas were murdered, some would even say crucified, and unsurprisingly, they sparked international outrage. 
Most recently, we've been tragically reminded of the destructive power of nature itself with the recent earthquake in Haiti. 
Well, I think what is far worse is man's destructive power over man. 
Samuel Pisar, an Auschwitz survivor, said, and I'll quote him, "The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man, when he loses his moral compass and his reason." 
There's another kind of crucifixion. 
The horrifying images from Abu Ghraib as well as the images from Guantanamo had a profound impact. 
The publication of those images, as opposed to the images themselves, caused a government to change its policies. 
Some would argue that it is those images that did more to fuel the insurgency in Iraq than virtually any other single act. 
Furthermore, those images forever removed the so-called moral high ground of the occupying forces. 
Let's go back a little. 
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was basically shown in America's living rooms day in, day out. 
News photos brought people face to face with the victims of the war: a little girl burned by napalm, a student killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest. 
In fact, these images became the voices of protest themselves. 
Now, images have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion, ignorance, and in particular -- I've given a lot of talks on this but I'll just show one image -- the issue of HIV/AIDS. 
In the 1980s, the stigmatization of people with the disease was an enormous barrier to even discussing or addressing it. 
A simple act, in 1987, of the most famous woman in the world, the Princess of Wales, touching an HIV/AIDS infected baby did a great deal, especially in Europe, to stop that. 
She, better than most, knew the power of an image. 
So when we are confronted by a powerful image, we all have a choice: We can look away, or we can address the image. 
Thankfully, when these photos appeared in The Guardian in 1998, they put a lot of focus and attention and, in the end, a lot of money towards the Sudan famine relief efforts. 
Did the images change the world? 
No, but they had a major impact. 
Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other. 
We all saw those images after Katrina, and I think for millions of people they had a very strong impact. 
And I think it's very unlikely that they were far from the minds of Americans when they went to vote in November 2008. 
Unfortunately, some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them. 
I'll show you one photo here, and it's a photo by Eugene Richards of an Iraq War veteran from an extraordinary piece of work, which has never been published, called War Is Personal. 
But images don't need to be graphic in order to remind us of the tragedy of war. 
John Moore set up this photo at Arlington Cemetery. 
After all the tense moments of conflict in all the conflict zones of the world, there's one photograph from a much quieter place that haunts me still, much more than the others. 
Ansel Adams said, and I'm going to disagree with him, "You don't take a photograph, you make it." 
In my view, it's not the photographer who makes the photo, it's you. 
We bring to each image our own values, our own belief systems, and as a result of that, the image resonates with us. 
My company has 70 million images. 
I have one image in my office. 
Here it is. 
I hope that the next time you see an image that sparks something in you, you'll better understand why, and I know that speaking to this audience, you'll definitely do something about it. 
And thank you to all the photographers. 
(Applause) 

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

I want to tell you about someone. 
I'm going to call him Ravi Nanda. 
I'm changing his name to protect his safety. 
Ravi's from a community of herdspeople in Gujarat on the western coast of India, same place my own family comes from. 
When he was 10 years old, his entire community was forced to move because a multinational corporation constructed a manufacturing facility on the land where they lived. 
Then, 20 years later, the same company built a cement factory 100 meters from where they live now. 
India has got strong environmental regulations on paper, but this company has violated many of them. 
Dust from that factory covers Ravi's mustache and everything he wears. 
I spent just two days in his place, and I coughed for a week. 
Ravi says that if people or animals eat anything that grows in his village or drink the water, they get sick. 
He says children now walk long distances with cattle and buffalo to find uncontaminated grazing land. 
He says many of those kids have dropped out of school, including three of his own. 
Ravi has appealed to the company for years. 
He said, "I've written so many letters my family could cremate me with them. 
They wouldn't need to buy any wood." 
(Laughter) He said the company ignored every one of those letters, and so in 2013, Ravi Nanda decided to use the last means of protest he thought he had left. 
He walked to the gates of that factory with a bucket of petrol in his hands, intending to set himself on fire. 
Ravi is not alone in his desperation. 
The UN estimates that worldwide, four billion people live without basic access to justice. 
These people face grave threats to their safety, their livelihoods, their dignity. 
There are almost always laws on the books that would protect these people, but they've often never heard of those laws, and the systems that are supposed to enforce those laws are corrupt or broken or both. 
We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it. 
Right now, in Sierra Leone, in Cambodia, in Ethiopia, farmers are being cajoled into putting their thumbprints on 50-year lease agreements, signing away all the land they've ever known for a pittance without anybody even explaining the terms. 
Governments seem to think that's OK. 
Right now, in the United States, in India, in Slovenia, people like Ravi are raising their children in the shadow of factories or mines that are poisoning their air and their water. 
There are environmental laws that would protect these people, but many have never seen those laws, let alone having a shot at enforcing them. 
And the world seems to have decided that's OK. 
What would it take to change that? 
Law is supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justice into living institutions that hold us together. 
Law is supposed to be the difference between a society ruled by the most powerful and one that honors the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. 
That's why I told my grandmother 20 years ago that I wanted to go to law school. 
Grandma didn't pause. She didn't skip a beat. 
She said to me, "Lawyer is liar." 
(Laughter) That was discouraging. 
(Laughter) But grandma's right, in a way. 
Something about law and lawyers has gone wrong. 
We lawyers are usually expensive, first of all, and we tend to focus on formal court channels that are impractical for many of the problems people face. 
Worse, our profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. 
Law is like riot gear on a police officer. 
It's intimidating and impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath. 
If we're going to make justice a reality for everyone, we need to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape. 
Lawyers are crucial in that fight, no doubt, but we can't leave it to lawyers alone. 
In health care, for example, we don't just rely on doctors to serve patients. 
We have nurses and midwives and community health workers. 
The same should be true of justice. 
Community legal workers, sometimes we call them community paralegals, or barefoot lawyers, can be a bridge. 
These paralegals are from the communities they serve. 
They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. 
They don't focus on the courts alone. 
They look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. 
Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll handle it for you. I've got you." 
Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow." 
Community paralegals saved my own relationship to law. 
After about a year in law school, I almost dropped out. 
I was thinking maybe I should have listened to my grandmother. 
It was when I started working with paralegals in Sierra Leone, in 2003, that I began feeling hopeful about the law again, and I have been obsessed ever since. 
Let me come back to Ravi. 
2013, he did reach the gates of that factory with the bucket of petrol in his hands, but he was arrested before he could follow through. 
He didn't have to spend long in jail, but he felt completely defeated. 
Then, two years later, he met someone. 
I'm going to call him Kush. 
Kush is part of a team of community paralegals that works for environmental justice on the Gujarat coast. 
Kush explained to Ravi that there was law on his side. 
Kush translated into Gujarati something Ravi had never seen. 
It's called the "consent to operate." 
It's issued by the state government, and it allows the factory to run only if it complies with specific conditions. 
So together, they compared the legal requirements with reality, they collected evidence, and they drafted an application -- not to the courts, but to two administrative institutions, the Pollution Control Board and the district administration. 
Those applications started turning the creaky wheels of enforcement. 
A pollution officer came for a site inspection, and after that, the company started running an air filtration system it was supposed to have been using all along. 
It also started covering the 100 trucks that come and go from that plant every day. 
Those two measures reduced the air pollution considerably. 
The case is far from over, but learning and using law gave Ravi hope. 
There are people like Kush walking alongside people like Ravi in many places. 
Today, I work with a group called Namati. 
Namati helps convene a global network dedicated to legal empowerment. 
All together, we are over a thousand organizations in 120 countries. 
Collectively, we deploy tens of thousands of community paralegals. 
Let me give you another example. 
This is Khadija Hamsa. 
She is one of five million people in Kenya who faces a discriminatory vetting process when trying to obtain a national ID card. 
It is like the Jim Crow South in the United States. 
If you are from a certain set of tribes, most of them Muslim, you get sent to a different line. 
Without an ID, you can't apply for a job. 
You can't get a bank loan. 
You can't enroll in university. 
You are excluded from society. 
Khadija tried off and on to get an ID for eight years, without success. 
Then she met a paralegal working in her community named Hassan Kassim. 
Hassan explained to Khadija how vetting works, he helped her gather the documents she needed, helped prep her to go before the vetting committee. 
Finally, she was able to get an ID with Hassan's help. 
First thing she did with it was use it to apply for birth certificates for her children, which they need in order to go to school. 
In the United States, among many other problems, we have a housing crisis. 
In many cities, 90 percent of the landlords in housing court have attorneys, while 90 percent of the tenants do not. 
In New York, a new crew of paralegals -- they're called Access to Justice Navigators -- helps people to understand housing law and to advocate for themselves. 
Normally in New York, one out of nine tenants brought to housing court gets evicted. 
Researchers took a look at 150 cases in which people had help from these paralegals, and they found no evictions at all, not one. 
A little bit of legal empowerment can go a long way. 
I see the beginnings of a real movement, but we're nowhere near what's necessary. 
Not yet. 
In most countries around the world, governments do not provide a single dollar of support to paralegals like Hassan and Kush. 
Most governments don't even recognize the role paralegals play, or protect paralegals from harm. 
I also don't want to give you the impression that paralegals and their clients win every time. 
Not at all. 
That cement factory behind Ravi's village, it's been turning off the filtration system at night, when it's least likely that the company would get caught. 
Running that filter costs money. 
Ravi WhatsApps photos of the polluted night sky. 
This is one he sent to Kush in May. 
Ravi says the air is still unbreathable. 
At one point this year, Ravi went on hunger strike. 
Kush was frustrated. 
He said, "We can win if we use the law." 
Ravi said, "I believe in the law, I do, but it's not getting us far enough." 
Whether it's India, Kenya, the United States or anywhere else, trying to squeeze justice out of broken systems is like Ravi's case. 
Hope and despair are neck and neck. 
And so not only do we urgently need to support and protect the work of barefoot lawyers around the world, we need to change the systems themselves. 
Every case a paralegal takes on is a story about how a system is working in practice. 
When you put those stories together, it gives you a detailed portrait of the system as a whole. 
People can use that information to demand improvements to laws and policies. 
In India, paralegals and clients have drawn on their case experience to propose smarter regulations for the handling of minerals. 
In Kenya, paralegals and clients are using data from thousands of cases to argue that vetting is unconstitutional. 
This is a different way of approaching reform. 
This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. 
This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary people trying to make the rules and systems work. 
This transformation in the relationship between people and law is the right thing to do. 
It's also essential for overcoming all of the other great challenges of our times. 
We are not going to avert environmental collapse if the people most affected by pollution don't have a say in what happens to the land and the water, and we won't succeed in reducing poverty or expanding opportunity if poor people can't exercise their basic rights. 
And I believe we won't overcome the despair that authoritarian politicians prey upon if our systems stay rigged. 
I called Ravi before coming here to ask permission to share his story. 
I asked if there was any message he wanted to give people. 
He said, "[Gujarati]." 
Wake up. 
"[Gujarati]." 
Don't be afraid. 
"[Gujarati]." 
Fight with paper. 
By that I think he means fight using law rather than guns. 
"[Gujarati]." 
Maybe not today, maybe not this year, maybe not in five years, but find justice. 
If this guy, whose entire community is being poisoned every single day, who was ready to take his own life -- if he's not giving up on seeking justice, then the world can't give up either. 
Ultimately, what Ravi calls "fighting with paper" is about forging a deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape law. 
Making that happen, winning that fight, requires all of us. 
Thank you guys. Thank you. 
(Applause) Kelo Kubu: Thanks, Vivek. 
So I'm going to make a few assumptions that people in this room know what the Sustainable Development Goals are and how the process works, but I want us to talk a little bit about Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions. 
Vivek Maru: Yeah. Anybody remember the Millennium Development Goals? 
They were adopted in 2000 by the UN and governments around the world, and they were for essential, laudable things. 
It was reduce child mortality by two thirds, cut hunger in half, crucial things. 
But there was no mention of justice or fairness or accountability or corruption, and we have made progress during the 15 years when those goals were in effect, but we are way behind what justice demands, and we're not going to get there unless we take justice into account. 
And so when the debate started about the next development framework, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, our community came together around the world to argue that access to justice and legal empowerment should be a part of that new framework. 
And there was a lot of resistance. 
Those things are more political, more contentious than the other ones, so we didn't know until the night before whether it was going to come through. 
We squeaked by. 
The 16th out of 17 goals commits to access to justice for all, which is a big deal. 
It's a big deal, yes. Let's clap for justice. 
(Applause) Here's the scandal, though. 
The day the goals were adopted, most of them were accompanied by big commitments: a billion dollars from the Gates Foundation and the British government for nutrition; 25 billion in public-private financing for health care for women and children. 
On access to justice, we had the words on the paper, but nobody pledged a penny, and so that is the opportunity and the challenge that we face right now. 
The world recognizes more than ever before that you can't have development without justice, that people can't improve their lives if they can't exercise their rights, and what we need to do now is turn that rhetoric, turn that principle, into reality. 
(Applause) KK: How can we help? What can people in this room do? 
VM: Great question. Thank you for asking. 
I would say three things. 
One is invest. 
If you have 10 dollars, or a hundred dollars, a million dollars, consider putting some of it towards grassroots legal empowerment. 
It's important in its own right and it's crucial for just about everything else we care about. 
Number two, push your politicians and your governments to make this a public priority. 
Just like health or education, access to justice should be one of the things that a government owes its people, and we're nowhere close to that, neither in rich countries or poor countries. 
Number three is: be a paralegal in your own life. 
Find an injustice or a problem where you live. 
It's not hard to find, if you look. 
Is the river being contaminated, the one that passes through the city where you live? 
Are there workers getting paid less than minimum wage or who are working without safety gear? 
Get to know the people most affected, find out what the rules say, see if you can use those rules to get a solution. 
If it doesn't work, see if you can come together to improve those rules. 
Because if we all start knowing law, using law and shaping law, then we will be building that deeper version of democracy that I believe our world desperately needs. 
(Applause) KK: Thanks so much, Vivek. VM: Thank you. 

The creative process -- you know this -- from the first idea to the final product, is a long process. 
It's super-iterative, lots of refinement, blood, sweat, tears and years. 
And we're not saying you're going to go out for a walk and come back with the Sistine Chapel in your left hand. 
So what frame of the creative process did we focus on? 
Just this first part. 
Just brainstorming, coming up with a new idea. 
We actually ran four studies with a variety of people. 
You were either walking indoors or outdoors. 
And all of these studies found the same conclusion. 
I'm only going to tell you about one of them today. 
One of the tests we used for creativity was alternate uses. 
In this test, you have four minutes. 
Your job is to come up with as many other ways to use common everyday objects as you can think of. 
So, for example, what else would you do with a key, other than to use it for opening up a lock? 
Clearly, you could use it as a third eyeball for a giraffe, right? 
Maybe. That's sort of interesting, kind of new. But is it creative? 
So people came up with as many ideas as they could, and we had to decide: Is this creative or not? 
The definition of creativity that a lot of people go with is "appropriate novelty." 
For something to be appropriate, it has to be realistic, so unfortunately, you can't use a key as an eyeball. 
Boo! 
But "novel," the second thing, is that nobody had to have said it. 
So for us, it had to be appropriate first, and then for novelty, nobody else in the entire population that we surveyed could have said it. 
So you might think you could use a key to scratch somebody's car, but if somebody else said that, you didn't get credit for it. 
Neither of you did. 
However, only one person said this: "If you were dying and it were a murder mystery, and you had to carve the name of the murderer into the ground with your dying words." 
One person said this. 
(Laughter) And it's a creative idea, because it's appropriate and it's novel. 
You either did this test and came up with ideas while you were seated or while you were walking on a treadmill. 
(Laughter) They did the test twice, with different objects. 
Three groups: the first group sat first and then sat again for the second test. 
The second group sat first and then did the second test while walking on a treadmill. 
The third group -- and this is interesting -- they walked on the treadmill first, and then they sat. 
OK, so the two groups that sat together for the first test, they looked pretty similar to each other, and they averaged about 20 creative ideas per person. 
The group that was walking on the treadmill did almost twice as well. 
And they were just walking on a treadmill in a windowless room. 
Remember, they took the test twice. 
The people who sat twice for that second test didn't get any better; practice didn't help. 
But these same people who were sitting and then went on the treadmill got a boost from walking. 
Here's the interesting thing. 
The people who were walking on the treadmill still had a residue effect of the walking, and they were still creative afterwards. 
So the implication of this is that you should go for a walk before your next big meeting and just start brainstorming right away. 
We have five tips for you that will help make this the best effect possible. 
First, you want to pick a problem or a topic to brainstorm. 
So, this is not the shower effect, when you're in the shower and all of a sudden, a new idea pops out of the shampoo bottle. 
This is something you're thinking about ahead of time. 
They're intentionally thinking about brainstorming a different perspective on the walk. 
Secondly -- I get asked this a lot: Is this OK while running? 
Well, the answer for me is that if I were running, the only new idea I would have would be to stop running, so ... 
(Laughter) But if running for you is a comfortable pace, good. 
It turns out, whatever physical activity is not taking a lot of attention. 
So just walking at a comfortable pace is a good choice. 
Also, you want to come up with as many ideas as you can. 
One key of creativity is to not lock on that first idea. 
Keep going. 
Keep coming up with new ones, until you pick one or two to pursue. 
You might worry that you don't want to write them down, because what if you forget them? 
So the idea here is to speak them. 
Everybody was speaking their new ideas. 
So you can put your headphones on and record through your phone and then just pretend you're having a creative conversation, right? 
Because the act of writing your idea down is already a filter. 
You're going to be like, "Is this good enough to write down?" 
And then you write it down. 
So just speak as many as you can, record them and think about them later. 
And finally: don't do this forever. Right? 
If you're on the walk and that idea's not coming to you, come back to it later at another time. 
I think we're coming up on a break right now, so I have an idea: Why don't you grab a leash and take your thoughts for a walk? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been playing TED for nearly a decade, and I've very rarely played any new songs of my own. 
And that was largely because there weren't any. 
(Laughter) So I've been busy with a couple of projects, and one of them was this: The Nutmeg. 
A 1930s ship's lifeboat, which I've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in England. 
And, so now, when the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel. 
During the day, the Nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse, and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast. 
So that when it gets dark, I've got plenty of power. 
And I can light up the Nutmeg like a beacon. 
And so I go in there until the early hours of the morning, and I work on new songs. 
I'd like to play to you guys, if you're willing to be the first audience to hear it. 
(Applause) It's about Billie Holiday. 
And it appears that, some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night, until she reappeared in the morning. 
But I know where she was. 
She was with me on my lifeboat. 
And she was hot. 
(Music) ♫ Billie crept softly ♫ ♫ into my waking arms ♫ ♫ warm like a sip of sour mash ♫ ♫ Strange fruit for ♫ ♫ a sweet hunk of trash ♫ ♫ Panic at the stage door ♫ ♫ of Carnegie Hall ♫ ♫ "Famous Jazz Singer Gone AWOL" ♫ ♫ Must have left the building ♫ ♫ body and soul ♫ ♫ On a creaky ♫ ♫ piano stool tonight ♫ ♫ as the moon is my ♫ ♫ only witness ♫ ♫ She was breathing ♫ ♫ in my ear ♫ ♫ "This time it's love" ♫ ♫ But love is a loaded pistol ♫ ♫ By daybreak she's gone ♫ ♫ Over the frozen river, home ♫ ♫ Me and Johnny Walker ♫ ♫ See in the new age ♫ ♫ alone ♫ ♫ Stay with me ♫ ♫ again tonight ♫ ♫ Billie, time, ♫ ♫ time is a wily trickster ♫ ♫ Still an echo ♫ ♫ in my heart says, ♫ ♫ "This time it's love" ♫ (Applause) 

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

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

The Philippines: an idyllic country with some of the clearest water and bluest skies on the planet. 
It is also the epicenter of one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world. 
On the surface, it seems as if we are just a late bloomer. 
However, the reasons for our current epidemic are much more complicated and may foreshadow a global resurgence of HIV. 
While overall new cases of HIV continue to drop in the world, this trend may be short-lived when the next wave of more aggressive and resistant viruses arrive. 
HIV has a potential to transform itself into a new and different virus every time it infects a cell. 
Despite the remarkable progress we've made in reversing the epidemic, the truth is that we are just a few viral mutations away from disaster. 
To appreciate the profound way in which HIV transforms itself every time it reproduces, let's make a genetic comparison. 
If we look at the DNA variation among humans of different races from different continents, the actual DNA difference is only 0.1 percent. 
If we look at the genetic difference between humans, great apes, and rhesus macaques, that number is seven percent. 
In contrast, the genetic difference between HIV subtypes from different patients may be as much as 35 percent. 
Within a person infected with HIV, the genetic difference between an infecting mother virus and subsequent daughter viruses has been shown to be as much as five percent. 
This is the equivalent of a gorilla giving birth to a chimpanzee, then to an orangutan, then to a baboon, then to any random great ape within its lifetime. 
There are nearly 100 subtypes of HIV, with new subtypes being discovered regularly. 
HIV in the developed world is almost all of one subtype: subtype B. 
Mostly everything we know and do to treat HIV is based on studies on subtype B, even though it only accounts for 12 percent of the total number of cases of HIV in the world. 
But because of the profound genetic difference among different subtypes, some subtypes are more likely to become drug-resistant or progress to AIDS faster. 
We discovered that the explosion of HIV cases in the Philippines is due to a shift from the Western subtype B to a more aggressive Southeast Asian subtype AE. 
We are seeing younger and sicker patients with high rates of drug resistance. 
Initial encroachment of this subtype is already occurring in developed countries, including Australia, Canada and the United States. 
We may soon see a similar explosion of cases in these countries. 
And while we think that HIV is done and that the tide has turned for it, just like with real tides, it can come right back. 
In the early 1960s, malaria was on the ropes. 
As the number of cases dropped, people and governments stopped paying attention. 
The result was a deadly resurgence of drug-resistant malaria. 
We need to think of HIV not as a single virus that we think we've figured out, but as a collection of rapidly evolving and highly unique viruses, each of which can set off the next deadly epidemic. 
We are incorporating more powerful and new tools to help us detect the next deadly HIV strain, and this needs to go hand in hand with urgent research on the behavior and proper treatment of non-B subtypes. 
We need to convince our governments and our funding agencies that HIV is not yet done. 
Over 35 million people have died of HIV. 
We are on the verge of an AIDS-free generation. 
We need to pay attention. 
We need to remain vigilant and follow through. 
Otherwise, millions more will die. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I would be willing to bet I'm the dumbest guy in the room, because I couldn't get through school; I struggled with school. 
But I knew at a very early age that I loved money, I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing. 
I was raised to be an entrepreneur. 
What I've been really passionate about ever since -- and I've never spoken about this ever, until now -- so this is the first time anyone's heard it, except my wife, three days ago. 
I told her that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. 
It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. 
Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. 
We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. 
My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. 
Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's Entrepreneurial Master's Program. 
It was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. 
When I was in grade two, I won a citywide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "Hey, this kid's a good speaker. 
He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized." 
No one said, "Get him a coach in speaking." 
They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. 
So as kids show these traits -- and we need to start looking for them -- I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. 
Unfortunately, the school system is grooming this world to say, "Let's be a lawyer," or, "Let's be a doctor." 
We're missing that opportunity, because no one ever says, "Hey, be an entrepreneur." 
Entrepreneurs are people -- we have a lot of them in this room -- who have ideas and passions or see these needs in the world and decide to stand up and do it. 
And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. 
We have the ability to get the groups of people around us that want to build that dream with us. 
And I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age, of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that's a problem today. 
Every problem out there, somebody has the idea for. 
And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen, because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. 
I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish -- the old parable: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. 
If we can teach our kids to be entrepreneurial, the ones that show the traits to be, like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones with entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? 
We could have these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. 
What we do is teach our kids the things they shouldn't do: don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. 
Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs; the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. 
And the media says it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo or Crosby. 
Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
The reason I avoided an MBA program, other than that I didn't get into any, since I had a 61 percent average out of high school, then a 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton, is that our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
They teach them to work in corporations. 
So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. 
Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found -- and this should be on all your reading lists -- the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur a hero is "Atlas Shrugged." 
Everything else in the world looks at entrepreneurs and says we're bad people. 
Both my grandfathers and my dad were entrepreneurs. 
My brother, sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. 
We all decided to start these things because it's the only place we fit. 
We didn't fit in normal work; we couldn't work for somebody else, we're stubborn and we have all these other traits. 
But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. 
I'm a big part of a couple organizations called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. 
I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference. 
And everyone I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. 
I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. 
So this thing right here is freaking me out. 
(Laughter) It's probably why I'm a bit panicked, other than all the caffeine I've had and the sugar. 
But this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. 
Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. 
Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? 
Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. 
All three of the founders of Netscape had it. 
I could go on and on. 
Kids -- you can see these signs in kids. 
And we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "Don't be an entrepreneurial type. 
Fit into this other system and try to become a student." 
Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. 
I stole essays. I cheated on exams. 
I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. 
But as an entrepreneur, you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. 
So I just figured that out earlier. 
(Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. 
I'm also quoted -- and I told the person who wrote the textbook -- I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies -- in managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. 
I open up chapter eight, talking about budgeting. 
I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. 
But kids, you can see these signs in them. 
The definition of entrepreneur is "a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture." 
That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program, or that you have to get through school. 
We've heard, "Is it nurture or is it nature?" Right? 
Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? 
Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. 
I was groomed as an entrepreneur. 
When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early age, when my dad realized I didn't fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school, that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. 
He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies where we could employ other people. 
I was in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords, calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much they'd pay me for coat hangers. 
And my mom came into the room and said, "Where are you going to get the hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" 
And I said, "Let's go look in the basement." 
We went down to the basement, and I opened up this cupboard. 
There was about 1,000 hangers that I'd collected, because, when I told her I was going out to play, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect hangers to put in the basement, because I saw her a few weeks before that -- you could get paid, they used to pay two cents per coat hanger. 
So I was like, well, there's all kinds of hangers, so I'll just go get them. 
And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. 
This one guy offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. 
I even knew at seven years old that I could get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay it, because it multiplied up. 
At seven years old I figured it out. 
I got three and a half cents for 1,000 hangers. 
I sold license plate protectors door to door. 
My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me them at wholesale. 
At nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license-plate protectors door to door. 
And I remember this one customer so vividly -- I also did some other stuff with these clients, I sold newspapers, and he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me, ever. 
But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license-plate protector. 
And he's like, "We don't need one." 
Remember, I'm nine years old. 
I'm like, "You have two cars and they don't have license-plate protectors. 
And this car has one license plate that's all crumpled up." 
He said, "That's my wife's car." 
I said, "Why don't we test one on her car and see if it lasts longer?" 
So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. 
If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. 
I learned that at a young age. 
When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. 
I would go biking up to the end of the beach, buy all the comics from the poor kids, then go back to the other end of the beach to sell them to the rich kids. 
It was obvious to me: buy low, sell high. 
You've got this demand over here that has money. 
The rich people do. Obvious, right? 
It's like a recession. 
So there's a recession. 
Go get some of that. I learned that at a young age. 
I also learned, don't reveal your source: I got beat up after four weeks of this, because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics, and didn't like that he was paying more. 
I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. 
I didn't want a paper route, but my dad said, "That's your next business." 
Not only did he get me one, but I had to get two. 
He wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did. 
Then I realized: collecting tips is how you made all the money. 
So I'd collect tips and get payment. 
I would collect for the papers -- he could just deliver them. 
Because then I realized I could make money. 
By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. 
(Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. 
He had all these old automotive parts lying around. 
They had this old brass and copper. 
I asked what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. 
I said, "Wouldn't somebody pay for that?" And he goes, "Maybe." 
Remember: at 10 years old, 34 years ago, I saw opportunity in this stuff, I saw there was money in garbage. 
And I collected it from the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. 
Then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. 
And I thought that was kind of cool. 
Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? 
and making money off that, too. 
We made these pincushions for our moms for Mother's Day out of wooden clothespins -- when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. 
And you'd make these chairs. 
And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. 
And you could stuff pins in them. 
Because people used to sew and they needed a pincushion. 
But I realized you had to have options, so I spray-painted a whole bunch of them brown, so when I went to the door, it wasn't, "Do you want to buy one?" 
It was, "Which color would you like?" 
I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no, especially if you have two options, the brown one or the clear one. 
So I learned that lesson at a young age. 
Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. 
But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing, that if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person, because you can't sell them more. 
So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. 
Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. 
I would go to the golf course and caddy for people, but I realized there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole, that had this huge hill, and people could never get their bags up it. 
So I'd sit there in a lawn chair and carry for all the people who didn't have caddies. 
I'd carry their golf bags to the top; they'd pay me a dollar, while my friends worked for hours hauling some guy's bag around for 10 bucks. 
That doesn't make sense. Figure out a way to make more money faster. 
Every week, I'd go to the corner store and buy all these pops, Then I'd deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. 
They'd give me their orders for the following week. 
I'd deliver pop and charge twice. 
You didn't need contracts, you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. 
These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. 
But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. 
I'm like, screw that. They're in the pond. And nobody's going into the pond. 
So I'd go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes, just pick them up with both feet. 
You can't do it onstage. 
You get the golf balls, throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done, you've got a couple hundred of them. 
But the problem is, people didn't want all the golf balls. 
So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? 
I had the Pinnacles, DDHs and the really cool ones. 
Those sold for two dollars each. 
Then I had the good ones that didn't look crappy: 50 cents each. 
And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. 
And they could use those for practice balls. 
I sold sunglasses when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. 
This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you, because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. 
But it paid the bills. 
So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. 
Then when the school shut me down -- they called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it -- I went to the gas stations and sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. 
That was cool because then, I had retail outlets. 
I think I was 14. 
Then I paid my entire way through first year of university at Carlton by selling wineskins door to door. 
You know you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? 
So what, right? But you know what? 
Stuff that down your shorts when you go to a football game, you can get booze in for free. 
Everybody bought them. 
I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. 
It had our university logo on it. 
You know, we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that nurture the traits you need to be entrepreneurs? 
Why don't you teach them not to waste money? 
I remember being told to walk out into the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta. 
I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "Go pick it up. 
I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you waste a penny." 
I remember that lesson to this day. 
Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. 
Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. 
An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. 
Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. 
That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. 
What I do with my kids, nine and seven, is teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. 
Come and tell me what it is. 
And then, you know what we do? We negotiate. 
They go around looking for what it is, then we negotiate what they'll get paid. 
They don't have a regular check, but they have opportunities to find more stuff, and learn the skill of negotiating and of finding opportunities. 
You breed that kind of stuff. 
Each of my kids has two piggy banks. 
Fifty percent of all the money they earn goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. 
The toy account, they spend on whatever they want. 
The 50 percent in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. 
they walk up with me. 
Every year, all the money in the bank goes to their broker. 
I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. 
It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." 
Shit, you've missed 25 years. 
You can teach those habits to young kids, when they don't even feel the pain yet. 
Don't read bedtime stories every night -- maybe four nights of the week, and three nights, have them tell stories. 
Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? 
It teaches them to sell, teaches them creativity, teaches them to think on their feet. 
Do that kind of stuff, have fun with it. 
Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just in front of their friends, and do plays and have speeches. 
Those are entrepreneurial traits you want to be nurturing. 
Show them grumpy employees. 
When you see grumpy customer service, point it out. 
Say, "By the way, that guy is a crappy employee." 
(Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. 
(Laughter) We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to get a tutor. 
Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk in the house right now, all the toys they outgrew two years ago and said, "Why don't we sell some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?" 
And they actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when offers come in. 
They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. 
But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. 
Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. 
Then 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent in their toy account. 
Some of the entrepreneurial traits you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. 
All these traits, you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. 
Look for that kind of stuff. 
There's two traits I want you to also look out for that we don't get out of their system. 
Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. 
(Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. 
Bipolar disorder is nicknamed "the CEO disease." 
When Steve Jurvetson, Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape -- imagine if they were given Ritalin. 
Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. 
(Laughter) These are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom, as well as everything else. 
I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. 
But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them? 
Because there's huge opportunities in that. 
I want to close with a quick video that was done by one of the companies I mentor. 
These guys, Grasshopper. 
It's about kids. 
Hopefully, this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. 
[Kid... "And you thought you could do anything?"] [You still can.] [Because a lot of what we consider impossible] [is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [one individual can make a difference] [Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country:] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [or perhaps they didn't own anything except for] [a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers] [innovators] [until they came up with the name] [entrepreneurs] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see] [when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation] [changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] [Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you] [stay connected with friends, family and colleagues] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone Even... you] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights,] [but most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid] [when everything was within your reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] [it still is.] Thank you very much for having me. 

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

Who here is fascinated by life under the sea? 
Fantastic. 
Now, what did we just do? 
Let's dissect this for a second. 
The simple action of an individual raising a hand led many others to do the same. 
Now, it's true that when individuals in a social network have common priorities, it's often beneficial to copy one another. 
Think back to grade school and dressing like the cool kids made you "cool." 
But copying behavior is also common in wild animals. 
For example, some birds copy the alarm calls of other birds to spread information about approaching predators. 
But could copying behavior in wild animals affect entire ecosystems that we humans depend on? 
I was led to this question while studying coral reefs, which support millions of people through fisheries and tourism here in Africa and around the world. 
But coral reefs depend on fish that perform a critical job by eating algae. 
Because if left unchecked, these algae can kill coral and take over entire coral reefs, a costly change that is difficult or impossible to reverse. 
So to understand how fish may prevent this, I spy on them while they're eating algae, which can be difficult for them to do in open parts of the reef exposed to predators, some of which, on rare occasion, appear to realize I'm watching them. 
(Laughter) So clearly, clearly, for reef fish, dining out can be scary. 
But I wanted to understand how these fish do their job in risky situations. 
So my colleagues and I put massive video camera stands in a coral reef to remotely monitor entire feeding grounds that produce a lot of algae but are exposed to predators. 
And this perspective from above shows us the feeding behavior and precise movements of many different fish, shown here with colored dots. 
And by analyzing thousands of fish movements to and from feeding grounds, we discovered a pattern. 
These fish, despite being from different species and not swimming in schools, were copying one another, such that one fish entering these dangerous feeding grounds could lead many others to do the same. 
And fish stayed for longer and ate more algae when they were surrounded by more feeding fish. 
Now, this could be happening because even simple movements by individual fish can inadvertently communicate vital information. 
For example, if even one fish sees a predator and flees, this can alert many others to danger. 
And a fish safely entering feeding grounds can show others that the coast is clear. 
So it turns out that even when these fish are different species, they are connected within social networks which can provide information on when it's safe to eat. 
And our analyses indicate that fish simply copying other fish in their social network could account for over 60 percent of the algae eaten by the fish community, and thus could be critical to the flow of energy and resources through coral reef ecosystems. 
But these findings also suggest that overfishing, a common problem in coral reefs, not only removes fish, but it could break up the social network of remaining fish, which may hide more and eat less algae because they're missing critical information. 
And this would make coral reefs more vulnerable than we currently predict. 
So remarkably, fish social networks allow the actions of one to spread to many and could affect entire coral reefs, which feed millions of us and support the global economy for all of us. 
Now, our discovery points us towards better ways to sustainably manage coral reefs, but it also shows us, we humans are not just affected by the actions of other humans, but we could be affected by the actions of individual fish on a distant coral reef through their simple copying behavior. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My name is Stuart Duncan, but I'm actually probably better known online as "AutismFather." 
That's me on the internet. 
I know the resemblance is uncanny. 
(Laughter) But I'm going to talk a little bit today about Minecraft. 
That's my Minecraft character. 
If you don't know the game very well, don't worry too much about it. 
It's just the medium that I used at the time to fill a need. 
And what I want to talk about applies to pretty much every situation. 
So about four years ago, I started a Minecraft server for children with autism and their families, and I called it "Autcraft." 
And since then, we've been in the news all around the world, on television and radio and magazines. 
Buzzfeed called us "one of the best places on the internet." 
We're also the subject of an award-winning research paper called "Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism." 
It's a bit of a mouthful. 
But you get the idea, I think. 
So I want to talk a little bit about that research paper and what it's about, but first I have to give you a little bit of history on how the server came to be. 
Back in 2013, everybody was playing Minecraft, kids and adults alike, with and without autism, of course. 
But it was the big thing. 
But I saw parents on social media reaching out to other parents, asking if their autistic children could play together. 
And the reason is that when they tried to play on public servers, they kept running into bullies and trolls. 
When you have autism, you behave a little differently sometimes, sometimes a lot differently. 
And we all know a little bit of difference is all you really need for a bully to make you their next target. 
So these terrible, terrible people online, they would destroy everything that they tried to make, they would steal all their stuff, and they would kill them over and over again, making the game virtually unplayable. 
But the worst part, the part that really hurt the most, was what these bullies would say to these kids. 
They'd call them rejects and defects and retards. 
And they would tell these kids, some as young as six years old, that society doesn't want them, and their own parents never wanted a broken child, so they should just kill themselves. 
And of course, these kids, you understand, they would sign off from these servers angry and hurt. 
They would break their keyboards, they'd quite literally hate themselves, and their parents felt powerless to do anything. 
So I decided I had to try and help. 
I have autism, my oldest son has autism, and both my kids and I love Minecraft, so I have to do something. 
So I got myself a Minecraft server, and I spent some time, built a little village with some roads and a big welcome sign and this guy and a lodge up on a mountaintop, and tried to make it inviting. 
The idea was pretty simple. 
I had a white list, so only people that I approved could join, and I would just monitor the server as much as I could, just to make sure that nothing went wrong. 
And that was it, that was the whole promise: to keep the kids safe so they could play. 
When it was done, I went to Facebook and posted a pretty simple message to my friends list, not publicly. 
I wanted to see if there was any interest in this, and if it really could help. 
Turns out that I greatly underestimated just how much this was needed, because within 48 hours, I got 750 emails. 
I don't have that many Facebook friends. 
(Laughter) Within eight days, I had to upgrade the hosting package eight times, from the bottom package to the most expensive package they had, and now, almost four years later, I have 8,000 names on the white list from all around the world. 
But the reason I'm up here today to talk to you isn't just because I gave kids a safe place to play. 
It's what happened while they played. 
I started hearing from parents who said their children were learning to read and write by playing on the server. 
At first they spelled things by sound, like most kids do, but because they were part of a community, they saw other people spelling the same words properly and just picked it up. 
I started hearing from parents who said that their nonverbal children were starting to speak. 
They only talked about Minecraft, but they were talking. 
(Laughter) Some kids made friends at school for the first time ever. 
Some started to share, even give things to other people. 
It was amazing. 
And every single parent came to me and said it was because of Autcraft, because of what you're doing. 
But why, though? 
How could all of this be just from a video game server? 
Well, it goes back to that research paper I was talking about. 
In it, she covers some of the guidelines I used when I created the server, guidelines that I think help encourage people to be their very best. 
I hope. 
For example, communication. 
It can be tough for kids with autism. 
It could be tough for grown-ups without autism. 
But I think that kids should not be punished, they should be talked to. 
Nine times out of ten, when the kids on the server act out, it's because of something that's happened in the day at school or home. 
Maybe a pet died. 
Sometimes it's just a miscommunication between two kids. 
One doesn't say what they're about to do. 
And so we just offer to help. 
We always tell the children on the server that we're not mad, and they're not in trouble; we only want to help. 
And it shows that not only do we care, but we respect them enough to listen to their point of view. 
Respect goes a long way. 
Plus, it shows them that they have everything they need to be able to resolve these problems on their own in the future and maybe even avoid them, because, you know, communication. 
On most servers, as video games are, children are rewarded, well, players are rewarded, for how well they do in a competition, right? 
The better you do, the better reward you get. 
That can be automated; the server does the work, the code is there. 
On Autcraft, we don't do that. 
We have things like "Player of the Week" and "CBAs," which is "Caught Being Awesome." 
(Laughter) We award players ranks on the servers based on the attributes they exhibit, such as the "Buddy" rank for people who are friendly towards others, and "Junior Helper" for people that are helpful towards others. 
We have "Senior Helper" for the adults. 
But they're obvious, right? 
Like, people know what to expect and how to earn these things because of how they're named. 
As soon as somebody signs onto the server, they know that they're going to be rewarded for who they are and not what they can do. 
Our top award, the AutismFather Sword, which is named after me because I'm the founder, is a very powerful sword that you can't get in the game any other way than to show that you completely put the community above yourself, and that compassion and kindness is at the core of who you are. 
We've given away quite a few of those swords, actually. 
I figure, if we're watching the server to make sure nothing bad happens, we should also watch for the good things that happen and reward people for them. 
We're always trying to show all the players that everybody is considered to be equal, even me. 
But we know we can't treat people equally to do that. 
Some of the players get angry very easily. 
Some of them have additional struggles on top of autism, such as OCD or Tourette's. 
So, I have this knack of remembering all of the players. 
I remember their first day, the conversations we've had, things we've talked about, things they've built. 
So when somebody comes to me with a problem, I handle that situation differently than I would with any other player, based on what I know about them. 
For the other admins and helpers, we document everything so that, whether it's good or bad or a concerning conversation, it's there, so everybody is aware. 
I want to give you one example of this one player. 
He was with us for a little while, but at some point he started spamming dashes in the chat, like a big long line of dashes all the way across the screen. 
A little while later, he'd do it again. 
The other players asked him not to do that, and he'd say, "OK." 
And then he'd do it again. 
It started to frustrate the other players. 
They asked me to mute him or to punish him for breaking the rules, but I knew there had to be something more to it. 
So I went to his aunt, who is the contact that I have for him. 
She explained that he had gone blind in one eye and was losing his vision in the other. 
So what he was doing was splitting up the chat into easier-to-see blocks of text, which is pretty smart. 
So that very same night, I talked to a friend of mine who writes code and we created a brand-new plug-in for the server that makes it so that any player on the server, including him, of course, could just enter a command and instantly have every single line separated by dashes. 
Plus, they can make it asterisks or blank lines or anything they want -- whatever works best for them. 
We even went a little bit extra and made it so it highlights your name, so that it's easier to see if somebody mentions you. 
It's just one example of how doing a little bit extra, a small modification, still helps everybody be on equal footing, even though you did a little extra just for that one player. 
The big one is to be not afraid. 
The children on my server are not afraid. 
They are free to just be themselves, and it's because we support and encourage and celebrate each other. 
We all know what it feels like to be the outcast and to be hated simply for existing, and so when we're together on the server, we're not afraid anymore. 
For the first two years or so on the server, I talked to two children per week on average that were suicidal. 
But they came to me because I'm the one that made them feel safe. 
They felt like I was the only person in the world they could talk to. 
So I guess my message is: whether you have a charity or some other organization, or you're a teacher or a therapist or you're a parent who is just doing your very best, or you're an autistic, like I am, no matter who you are, you absolutely must help these children strip away those fears before you do anything else, because anything else is going to feel forced unless they're not afraid. 
It's why positive reinforcement will always do better than any form of punishment. 
They want to learn when they feel safe and happy. 
It just happens naturally; they don't even try to learn. 
These are words from the kids on the server to describe the server. 
The one thing I would hope that you could take away is that no matter what somebody else is going through in life right now, whether they're being bullied at school or at home, if they're questioning their sexuality or even their gender, which happens a lot in the autism community, if they're feeling alone or even suicidal, you have to live your life in such a way that that person feels like they can come to and tell you. 
They have to feel perfectly safe in talking to you about it. 
If you want to see a group of autistic children -- kids who society wrongly thinks are supposed to be antisocial and lacking in empathy -- if you want to see them come together and build the most compassionate and friendly and generous community you've ever seen, the kind of place that people would write about as one of the best places on the internet, they'll do that. 
I've seen it. 
I'm there every day. 
But they have some huge obstacles that they have to overcome to do that, and it would be really helpful to have somebody there who could help to show them that the only thing they really have to fear is self-doubt. 
So I guess I'm asking you to please be that person for them, because to them, those kids -- it means everything. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

To kick the bucket, bite the dust, cash in your chips, check out, depart, expire, launch into eternity ... 
These are all euphemisms we use in humor to describe the one life event we are all going to experience: death. 
But most of us don't want to acknowledge death, we don't want to plan for it, and we don't want to discuss it with the most important people in our lives. 
I grew up in an Australian community where people got old or sick and passed away, and only the adults attended the funeral. 
My parents would come home looking sad and drained, but they didn't discuss it with us. 
So I was ignorant to death and of the grieving process. 
At 15, I got my invitation. 
A dear neighbor who was like an aunt to me died suddenly of a heart attack, and I attended my first funeral and did my first reading. 
I didn't know the tightness in my chest and the dryness in my mouth was normal. 
The celebrant got some of the facts wrong, and it made me really angry. 
He talked about how she loved knitting. 
Knitting. 
(Laughter) He didn't mention that, at 75, she still mowed her own lawn, built an amazing fish pond in her front yard and made her own ginger beer. 
I'm pretty sure "keen knitter" isn't what she would have chosen for her eulogy. 
(Laughter) I believe if we discuss death as part of day-to-day living, we give ourselves the opportunity to reflect on our core values, share them with our loved ones, and then our survivors can make informed decisions without fear or regret of having failed to honor our legacy. 
I am blessed to lead a wonderful, culturally diverse team, and in the last 12 months, we've lost five parents, including my own father, and most recently, a former colleague who died at 41 from bowel cancer. 
We started having open and frank conversations about what we were experiencing. 
We talked about the practical stuff, the stuff no one prepares you for: dealing with government agencies, hospitals, nursing homes, advanced care directives, funeral directors and extended family members, (Laughter) making decisions about coffins, headstones, headstone wording, headstone font size, all while sleep-deprived. 
We also discussed some of the issues triggered by our various cultural backgrounds, and we realized there can be some significant differences in how we honor the passing of a loved one. 
A great example of this is "Sorry Business," practiced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 
During Sorry Business, family members will take on specific roles and responsibilities, protocols such as limiting the use of photographs, saying the name of the deceased, and holding a smoking ceremony are all a sign of respect and allow for a peaceful transition of the spirit. 
These customs can be a complete contrast to those we might practice in Western cultures, where we would honor the memory of a loved one by talking about them and sharing photographs. 
So my lesson from this last year is, life would be a lot easier to live if we talked about death now, while we're healthy. 
For most of us, we wait until we are too emotional, too ill or too physically exhausted -- and then it's too late. 
Isn't it time we started taking ownership of our finale on this earth? 
So let's get going. 
Do you know what you want when you die? 
Do you know how you want to be remembered? 
Is location important? 
Do you want to be near the ocean or in the ocean? 
(Laughter) Do you want a religious service or an informal party, or do you want to go out with a bang, literally, in a firework? 
(Laughter) When it comes to death, there's so much to discuss, but I want to focus on two aspects: why talking about and planning your death can help you experience a good death, and then reduce the stress on your loved ones; and how talking about death can help us support those who are grieving. 
So let's start with planning. 
How many of you have a will? 
Put your hand up. 
Oh, this is fantastic. 
In Australia, 45 percent of adults over the age of 18 do not have a legal will. 
You're a little bit above average. 
This is a startling statistic given that writing a will can actually be quite simple and inexpensive. 
So I started asking my friends and neighbors and was really surprised to learn many of them don't have a will, and some couples don't realize they need individual wills. 
The usual explanation was, well, it's all going to go to my partner anyway. 
So keep in mind that laws vary from state to state and country to country, but this is what happens in New South Wales if you die without leaving a legal will. 
Firstly, a suitable administrator must be appointed by the Supreme Court of New South Wales. 
Chances are this is someone who would never have met the deceased. 
That person is then responsible for arranging your funeral, collecting assets and distributing them after paying debts and taxes. 
And one of those debts will be the bill for their services. 
This is not someone who would have known you want the four-foot wooden giraffe in your living room to go to the person who helped you carry it halfway across the world, and yes, that's in my will. 
(Laughter) If you die leaving a spouse or a domestic partner, then chances are they will receive your estate, but if you are single, it's far more complicated, as parents, siblings, half-siblings and dependents all come into play. 
And did you know that if you make a regular donation to charity, that charity may have grounds to make a claim on your estate? 
The most important thing to know is the bigger your estate, the more complicated that will will be, and the more expensive that bill. 
So if you don't have a will, I ask you ... 
when else in your life have you willingly given money to the government when you didn't have to? 
(Laughter) I lost my father in February to a progressive lung disease. 
When dad knew his death was imminent, he had three clear wishes. 
He wanted to die at home; he wanted to die surrounded by family; and he wanted to die peacefully, not choking or gasping for air. 
And I'm pleased to say that my family were able to support dad's wishes, and he achieved his goals, and in that sense, he had a good death. 
He had the death he planned for. 
Because dad wanted to die at home, we had to have some pretty tough conversations and fill out a lot of paperwork. 
The questions on the forms cover everything from resuscitation to organ donation. 
Dad said, "Take whatever organs you can use." 
This was upsetting to my mum, as my dad's health was deteriorating rapidly, and it was no longer the right time to talk about organ donation. 
I believe we need to discuss these issues when we are fit and healthy, so we can take the emotion out of it, and then we can learn not just what is important, but why it's important. 
So as part of my journey, I started engaging my family and friends to find out their thoughts on death, and how they wanted to be remembered. 
I discovered you can host a "Death Over Dinner," or a "Death Cafe," which is a great, casual way to introduce the topic ... 
(Laughter) and gain some wonderful insight. 
(Laughter) Did you know that your body has to be legally disposed of, and you can't just be shoved off a cliff or set fire to in the backyard? 
(Laughter) In Australia, you have three options. 
The two most common are burial and cremation, but you can also donate your body to science. 
And I am pleased to report that innovation has touched the world of corpse disposal. 
(Laughter) You can now opt for an eco-funeral. 
You can be buried at the base of a tree in recycled cardboard or a wicker basket, and for those who love the ocean, there are eco-friendly urns that will dissolve at sea. 
Personally, I plan to be cremated, but given that I get seasick, I can think of nothing worse than having my ashes flung into a huge ocean swell. 
I've actually bought a plot in the rose garden next to my dad. 
I call it my investment property. 
(Laughter) But sadly, there's no tax deduction. 
(Laughter) So if you plan for your death, then your survivors will know how to experience a healthy bereavement without fear or guilt of having failed to honor your legacy. 
As part of my research, I've been to seminars, read books and talked to palliative care nurses. 
And I've come to understand as a consequence of not talking about death, we don't know how to be around grief. 
And on the flip side, if we talk about death more, we will become more comfortable with the emotions we experience around grief. 
I discovered, this year, it's actually a privilege to help someone exit this life, and although my heart is heavy with loss and sadness, it is not heavy with regret. 
I knew what dad wanted, and I feel at peace knowing I could support his wishes. 
My dad's last 24 hours were in a peaceful coma, and after days of around-the-clock care, we had time to sit, hold his hand, and say goodbye. 
He passed away on a Monday morning just before breakfast, and after the doctor came and we waited for the funeral home, I went into the kitchen, and I ate a big bowl of porridge. 
When I told some of my friends this, they were really shocked. 
"How could you eat at a time like that?" 
Well, I was hungry. 
(Laughter) You see, grief impacted my sleep and my ability to concentrate, but it never impacted my stomach. I was always hungry. 
(Laughter) It's different for all of us, and it's really important that we acknowledge that. 
So if we don't talk about our death and the death of loved ones, how can we possibly support a friend, a colleague, a neighbor who is grieving? 
How do we support someone who has lost someone suddenly, like an accident or suicide? 
We tend to avoid them ... 
not because we don't care, because we don't know what to say. 
We know as a friend we can't fix it, we can't take away that pain, so we say things to fill that awkward silence, sometimes things we regret saying. 
Examples would be: "At least he isn't suffering anymore." 
"At least you've got your memories." 
"At least you don't have to pay for hospital parking anymore." 
(Laughter) Really, we don't need to say anything. 
We just need to be. 
Be patient, be understanding, and be a listener. 
And if you can't be any of those things, then please, be the person who makes the lasagna, the curry or the casserole, because your offerings will be greatly appreciated. 
(Laughter) I've been to 10 funerals in the last year, one of which I helped arrange. 
They ran the full gamut: a very solemn Greek Orthodox service, four Catholic requiem masses and a garden party where I made a toast while scattering my friend's ashes around her garden with a soup ladle. 
(Laughter) I have carried, kissed, written on and toasted coffins with a shot of ouzo. 
I have worn all black, all color and a party dress. 
Despite the vast differences in sendoff, despite me being at times out of my comfort zone doing something I've never done before, I drew comfort from one thing -- knowing that this is what each person would have wanted. 
So what do I want? 
Well, I like to be organized, so I have the will, I'm a registered organ donor, and I have my investment property. 
All that is left is planning my sendoff, a big party, lots of champagne, color, laughter, and of course, music to remember me by. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to introduce you to my badass friends. 
Meet Thelma and Louise. 
(Laughter) I'm passionate about cows. 
And although they've been getting a lot of crap lately due to methane emissions and climate change, I hope that I can redeem their reputation in part by showing you how incredibly important they are in solving one of the world's biggest problems: food security. 
But more importantly, for Africa -- it's resultant childhood stunting. 
Nutritional stunting manifests itself in a reduction of growth rate in human development. 
And according to UNICEF, stunting doesn't come easy. 
It doesn't come quickly. 
It happens over a long period of time during which a child endures painful and debilitating cycles of illness, depressed appetite, insufficient nutrition and inadequate care. 
And most kids simply can't endure such rigors. 
But those that do survive, they carry forward long-term cognitive problems as well as losses of stature. 
The numbers of stunted children under the age of five, in most regions of the world, has been declining. 
And I really hate to say this, but the only place where they haven't been declining is here, in Africa. 
Here, 59 million children, three in 10 in that age group, struggle to meet their genetic potential -- their full genetic potential. 
Protein is one of our most important dietary requirements, and evidence shows that lack of essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in young children's diets, can result in stunting. 
Essential amino acids are called essential because we can't synthesize them in our bodies. 
We have to get them from our foods and the best sources are animal-derived: milk, meat and eggs. 
Most protein consumed on the African continent is crop-based. 
And although we have millions of smallholder farmers rearing animals, livestock production is not as easy as we think. 
The big livestock gaps between rich countries and poor countries are due to poor animal health. 
Endemic livestock diseases, some of them transmissible to humans, threaten not only livestock producers in those poor countries, but all human health across all countries. 
This is a global pathogens network. 
It shows the pathogens found across the world according to the Enhanced Infectious Diseases database. 
And it shows those pathogens that share hosts. 
In a nutshell, we share pathogens, and thus diseases, with the species we live closest to: our livestock. 
And we call these zoonotic diseases. 
Recent reports show that the deadly dozen zoonotic diseases kill 2.2 million people and sicken 2.4 billion people annually. 
And Jimmy says, "The greatest burden of zoonoses falls on one billion poor livestock keepers." 
We totally underestimate the importance of our smallholder farmers. 
We're beginning to recognize how important they are and how they influence our medical health, our biosafety and more recently, our cognitive and our physical health. 
They stand at the frontline of zoonotic epidemics. 
They pretty much underpin our existence. 
And they need to know so much, yet most lack knowledge on livestock disease prevention and treatment. 
So how do they learn? 
Apart from shared experiences, trial and error, conventional farming extension services are boots on the ground and radio -- expensive and hard to scale in the face of population growth. 
Sounds pretty gloomy, doesn't it? 
But we're at an interesting point in Africa. 
We're changing that narrative using innovative solutions, riding across scalable technologies. 
Knowledge doesn't have to be expensive. 
My company developed an agricultural platform called iCow. 
We teach farmers best livestock practices using SMS over simple, low-end phones. 
Farmers receive three SMSs a week on best livestock practices, and those that execute the messages go on to see increases in productivity within as short a time as three months. 
The first increases in productivity, of course, are improved animal health. 
We use SMS because it is retentive. 
Farmers store their messages, they write them down in books, and in effect, we're drip-feeding agricultural manuals into the fields. 
We recognize that we are all part of the global food network: producers and consumers, you and me, and every farmer. 
We're focusing now on trying to bring together producers and consumers to take action and take responsibility for not only food security, but for food safety. 
This beautiful animal is an African-Asian Sahiwal crossed with a Dutch Fleckvieh. 
She's milkier than her Sahiwal mom, and she's sturdier and more resistant to disease than her Fleckvieh father. 
In Ethiopia and Tanzania, the African Dairy Genetic Gains program is using SMS and cutting-edge genomics and pioneering Africa's first tropically adapted dairy breeding centers and dairy performance recording centers. 
Farmers contribute their production data -- milking records, breeding records and feeding records -- to the ADGG platform. 
This stage is synthesized through algorithms from some of the top livestock institutions in the world before it lands back in the farmers' hands in actionable SMSs. 
Customized data, customized responses all aimed at increasing productivity based on the potential on the ground. 
We're at a very interesting place in agriculture in Africa. 
By the end of this year, we'll have almost one billion mobile phone subscriptions. 
We have the power in our hands to ensure that livestock production systems are not only healthy, productive and profitable, but that farmers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, that our farmers are safe. 
Working with smallholder farmers is one of the best ways to guarantee food security. 
Working with smallholder farmers is one of the best ways to guarantee each and every child their full opportunity and ability to reach their full genetic potential. 
And harnessing the power of millions of smallholder farmers and their badass cows like mine, we should be able to bring a halt to stunting in Africa. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal. 
For real -- you can take a second. You've got to feel this to learn it. 
Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay? 
Imagine deciding right now that you're going to do it. 
Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you're going to do. 
Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you. 
Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? 
Don't you feel one step closer already, like it's already becoming part of your identity? 
Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it. 
The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. 
Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. 
Ideally you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. 
But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a "social reality." 
The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. 
And then because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. 
(Laughter) So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? 
So they hold us to it. 
So, let's look at the proof. 
1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "substitution." 
1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 
1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. 
It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests. 
Everyone wrote down their personal goal. 
Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room, and half didn't. 
Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. 
Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. 
But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. 
So if this is true, what can we do? 
Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. 
You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. 
But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, "I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don't, okay?" 
So audience, next time you're tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say? 
(Silence) Exactly! Well done. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

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

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

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

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

I'm a visual artist, and I'm also one of the co-founders of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 
I've been working with plastic bags, which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years. 
I turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations. 
Upon working with the plastic, after about the first eight years, some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic. 
And I thought, "Great. 
It's ephemeral just like us." 
Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing. 
It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic. 
And what we're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment. 
I then, in the last few years, learned about the Pacific garbage patch and the gyre. 
And my initial reaction -- and I think this is a lot of people's first reaction to learning about it -- is, "Oh my God! 
We've got to go out there and clean this thing up." 
So I actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers, a crane, a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine. 
And my intention was to go out to the gyre, raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic, chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities. 
I began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so, I realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world, and that actually I needed to back up and look at the bigger picture. 
And the bigger picture is: we need to find a way to turn off the faucet. 
We need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics, which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale. 
So in looking at that, I also realized that I was really angry. 
I wasn't just concerned about plastic that you're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres, potentially, of plastic in five major oceans in the world. 
It's not just that gyre of plastic that I'm concerned about -- it's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket. 
I'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic. 
All of my beverages are packaged in plastic, even at the health food market. 
I'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator, and I'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies. 
So I came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue, and we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 
We have many initiatives that we're working on, but some of them are very basic. 
One is: if 80 to 90 percent of what we're finding in the ocean -- of the marine debris that we're finding in the ocean -- is plastic, then why don't we call it what it is. 
It's plastic pollution. 
Recycling -- everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling. 
You put something in a bin and you don't have to think about it again. 
What is the reality of that? 
In the United States, less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled. 
And if you really look into it, particularly when it comes to plastic bottles, most of it is only down-cycled, or incinerated, or shipped to China. 
It is down-cycled and turned into lesser things, while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again -- a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again. 
So this is a big issue for us. 
Another thing that we're looking at and asking people to think about is we've added a fourth R onto the front of the "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," three R's, and that is refuse. 
Whenever possible, refuse single-use and disposable plastics. 
Alternatives exist; some of them are very old-school. 
I myself am now collecting these cool Pyrex containers and using those instead of Glad and Tupperware containers to store food in. 
And I know that I am doing a service to myself and my family. 
It's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle, if you're traveling and you've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water, versus purchasing plastic bottled water. 
I guess what I want to say to everybody here -- and I know that you guys know a lot about this issue -- is that this is a huge problem in the oceans, but this is a problem that we've created as consumers and we can solve. 
We can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives. 
So whenever possible, to choose alternatives to single-use plastics. 
We can cut the stem -- tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so, save our oceans, save our planet, save ourselves. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

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

(Music) Sun shining up above down here it's 10 below I'm moving on to a place now where the streets are paved with gold There'll be two trains running -- running side by side Some trains are going out Two trains running -- running side by side I'm going to catch that fast express train to my reward in the sky Many rooms in my father's house now -- Oh Lord there's one for you and me Many rooms in my father's house now -- Oh there's one for you and me No blues and no trouble Oh my Lord sweet Jesus victory There's one glory from the moon -- Lord another, oh another from the sun Oh one glory from the moon and another from the sun Behind I'll leave this earthly body when my Lord king Jesus comes Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. 
My patient Kathy planned her wedding when she was in middle school. 
She would meet her future husband by age 27, get engaged a year later and get married a year after that. 
But when Kathy turned 27, she didn't find a husband. 
She found a lump in her breast. 
She went through many months of harsh chemotherapy and painful surgeries, and then just as she was ready to jump back into the dating world, she found a lump in her other breast and had to do it all over again. 
Kathy recovered, though, and she was eager to resume her search for a husband as soon as her eyebrows grew back in. 
When you're going on first dates in New York City, you need to be able to express a wide range of emotions. 
(Laughter) Soon afterwards, she met Rich and fell in love. 
The relationship was everything she hoped it would be. 
Six months later, after a lovely weekend in New England, Rich made reservations at their favorite romantic restaurant. 
Kathy knew he was going to propose, and she could barely contain her excitement. 
But Rich did not propose to Kathy that night. 
He broke up with her. 
As deeply as he cared for Kathy -- and he did -- he simply wasn't in love. 
Kathy was shattered. 
Her heart was truly broken, and she now faced yet another recovery. 
But five months after the breakup, Kathy still couldn't stop thinking about Rich. 
Her heart was still very much broken. 
The question is: Why? 
Why was this incredibly strong and determined woman unable to marshal the same emotional resources that got her through four years of cancer treatments? 
Why do so many of us flounder when we're trying to recover from heartbreak? 
Why do the same coping mechanisms that get us through all kinds of life challenges fail us so miserably when our heart gets broken? 
In over 20 years of private practice, I have seen people of every age and background face every manner of heartbreak, and what I've learned is this: when your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on will time and again lead you down the wrong path. 
You simply cannot trust what your mind is telling you. 
For example, we know from studies of heartbroken people that having a clear understanding of why the relationship ended is really important for our ability to move on. 
Yet time and again, when we are offered a simple and honest explanation like the one Rich offered Kathy, we reject it. 
Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain, our mind tells us the cause must be equally dramatic. 
And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come up with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. 
Kathy became convinced something must have happened during her romantic getaway with Rich that soured him on the relationship, and she became obsessed with figuring out what that was. 
And so she spent countless hours going through every minute of that weekend in her mind, searching her memory for clues that were not there. 
Kathy's mind tricked her into initiating this wild goose chase. 
But what compelled her to commit to it for so many months? 
Heartbreak is far more insidious than we realize. 
There is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know it's going to make us feel worse. 
Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids. 
Kathy was going through withdrawal. 
And since she could not have the heroin of actually being with Rich, her unconscious mind chose the methadone of her memories with him. 
Her instincts told her she was trying to solve a mystery, but what she was actually doing was getting her fix. 
This is what makes heartbreak so difficult to heal. 
Addicts know they're addicted. 
They know when they're shooting up. 
But heartbroken people do not. 
But you do now. 
And if your heart is broken, you cannot ignore that. 
You have to recognize that, as compelling as the urge is, with every trip down memory lane, every text you send, every second you spend stalking your ex on social media, you are just feeding your addiction, deepening your emotional pain and complicating your recovery. 
Getting over heartbreak is not a journey. 
It's a fight, and your reason is your strongest weapon. 
There is no breakup explanation that's going to feel satisfying. 
No rationale can take away the pain you feel. 
So don't search for one, don't wait for one, just accept the one you were offered or make up one yourself and then put the question to rest, because you need that closure to resist the addiction. 
And you need something else as well: you have to be willing to let go, to accept that it's over. 
Otherwise, your mind will feed on your hope and set you back. 
Hope can be incredibly destructive when your heart is broken. 
Heartbreak is a master manipulator. 
The ease with which it gets our mind to do the absolute opposite of what we need in order to recover is remarkable. 
One of the most common tendencies we have when our heart is broken is to idealize the person who broke it. 
We spend hours remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain and made love under the stars. 
All that does is make our loss feel more painful. 
We know that. 
Yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive-aggressive Spotify playlist. 
(Laughter) Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind. 
And so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out by remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argued like crazy and didn't speak for two days. 
What I tell my patients is to compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad qualities, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone. 
(Laughter) And once you have your list, you have to use it. 
When I hear even a hint of idealizing or the faintest whiff of nostalgia in a session, I go, "Phone, please." 
(Laughter) Your mind will try to tell you they were perfect. 
But they were not, and neither was the relationship. 
And if you want to get over them, you have to remind yourself of that, frequently. 
None of us is immune to heartbreak. 
My patient Miguel was a 56-year-old senior executive in a software company. 
Five years after his wife died, he finally felt ready to start dating again. 
He soon met Sharon, and a whirlwind romance ensued. 
They introduced each other to their adult children after one month, and they moved in together after two. 
When middle-aged people date, they don't mess around. 
It's like "Love, Actually" meets "The Fast and the Furious." 
(Laughter) Miguel was happier than he had been in years. 
But the night before their first anniversary, Sharon left him. 
She had decided to move to the West Coast to be closer to her children, and she didn't want a long-distance relationship. 
Miguel was totally blindsided and utterly devastated. 
He barely functioned at work for many, many months, and he almost lost his job as a result. 
Another consequence of heartbreak is that feeling alone and in pain can significantly impair our intellectual functioning, especially when performing complex tasks involving logic and reasoning. 
It temporarily lowers our IQ. 
But it wasn't just the intensity of Miguel's grief that confused his employers; it was the duration. 
Miguel was confused by this as well and really quite embarrassed by it. 
"What's wrong with me?" he asked me in our session. 
"What adult spends almost a year getting over a one-year relationship?" 
Actually, many do. 
Heartbreak shares all the hallmarks of traditional loss and grief: insomnia, intrusive thoughts, immune system dysfunction. 
Forty percent of people experience clinically measurable depression. 
Heartbreak is a complex psychological injury. 
It impacts us in a multitude of ways. 
For example, Sharon was both very social and very active. 
She had dinners at the house every week. 
She and Miguel went on camping trips with other couples. 
Although Miguel was not religious, he accompanied Sharon to church every Sunday, where he was welcomed into the congregation. 
Miguel didn't just lose his girlfriend; he lost his entire social life, the supportive community of Sharon's church. 
He lost his identity as a couple. 
Now, Miguel recognized the breakup had left this huge void in his life, but what he failed to recognize is that it left far more than just one. 
And that is crucial, not just because it explains why heartbreak could be so devastating, but because it tells us how to heal. 
To fix your broken heart, you have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. 
The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. 
The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang. 
But none of that will do any good unless you prevent the mistakes that can set you back, the unnecessary searches for explanations, idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a starring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldn't be an extra. 
Getting over heartbreak is hard, but if you refuse to be misled by your mind and you take steps to heal, you can significantly minimize your suffering. 
And it won't just be you who benefit from that. 
You'll be more present with your friends, more engaged with your family, not to mention the billions of dollars of compromised productivity in the workplace that could be avoided. 
So if you know someone who is heartbroken, have compassion, because social support has been found to be important for their recovery. 
And have patience, because it's going to take them longer to move on than you think it should. 
And if you're hurting, know this: it's difficult, it is a battle within your own mind, and you have to be diligent to win. 
But you do have weapons. 
You can fight. 
And you will heal. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It is often said that the stories of history are written by its victors, but if this is true, what becomes of the downtrodden, and how can they ever hope to aspire for something greater if they are never told the stories of their own glorious pasts? 
Ostensibly, I stand before you as a mere maker of clothing, but within the folds of ancient fabrics and modern textiles, I have found a higher calling. 
Through my work as a designer, I've discovered the importance of providing representation for the marginalized members of our society, and the importance of telling the most vulnerable among us that they no longer have to compromise themselves just so they can fit in with an uncompromising majority. 
It turns out that fashion, a discipline many of us consider to be trivial, can actually be a powerful tool for dismantling bias and bolstering the self-images of underrepresented populations. 
My interest in using design as a vehicle for social change happens to be a personal one. 
As a Nigerian American, I know how easily the term "African" can slip from being an ordinary geographic descriptor to becoming a pejorative. 
For those of us from this beautiful continent, to be African is to be inspired by culture and to be filled with undying hope for the future. 
So in an attempt to shift the misguided perceptions that many have about the place of my birth, I use design as a means to tell stories, stories about joy, stories about triumph, stories about perseverance all throughout the African diaspora. 
I tell these stories as a concerted effort to correct the historical record, because, no matter where any of us is from, each of us has been touched by the complicated histories that brought our families to a foreign land. 
These histories shape the way we view the world, and they mold the biases we carry around with us. 
To combat these biases, my work draws aesthetics from different parts of the globe and crafts a narrative about the importance of fighting for inclusivity. 
By refashioning images from classic European art and marrying them with African aesthetics, I am able to recast people of color in roles of prominence, providing them with a degree of dignity they didn't have in earlier times. 
This approach subverts the historically accepted narrative of African inferiority, and it serves as inspiration for people of color who have grown wary of seeing themselves depicted without sophistication and without grace. 
Each of these culture-bending tapestries becomes a tailored garment or a silk scarf, like the one I am very coincidentally wearing right now. 
(Laughter) And even when surrounded in a structure of European classicism, these narratives boldly extoll the merits of African empowerment. 
In this way, the tools of the masters become masterworks to celebrate those who were once subservient. 
This metaphor extends beyond the realm of art and out into the real world. 
Whether worn by refugees or world-changing entrepreneurs, when people are allowed the freedom to present themselves in a manner that celebrates their own unique identities, a magical thing happens. 
We stand taller. 
We're more proud and self-aware because we're presenting our true, authentic selves. 
And those of us who are around them in turn become more educated, more open and more tolerant of their different points of view. 
In this way, the clothes that we wear can be a great illustration of diplomatic soft power. 
The clothes that we wear can serve as bridges between our seemingly disparate cultures. 
And so, yeah, ostensibly I stand before you as a mere maker of clothing. 
But my work has always been about more than fashion. 
It has become my purpose to rewrite the cultural narratives so that people of color can be seen in a new and nuanced light, and so that we, the proud children of sub-Saharan Africa, can traverse the globe while carrying ourselves with pride. 
It was indeed true that the stories of history were told by its old victors, but I am of a new generation. 
My work speaks for those who will no longer let their futures be dictated by a troubled past. 
Today, we stand ready to tell our own stories without compromise, without apologies. 
But the question still remains: are you prepared for what you are about to hear? 
I hope you are, because we are coming regardless. 
(Applause)