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

So, I'll start with this: a couple years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. 
And she called, and she said, "I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer." 
And I thought, "Well, what's the struggle?" 
And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant." 
(Laughter) And I was like, "Okay." 
And she said, "But the thing I liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. 
So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller." 
And of course, the academic, insecure part of me was like, "You're going to call me a what?" 
And I was like, "Why not 'magic pixie'?" 
(Laughter) I was like, "Let me think about this for a second." 
I tried to call deep on my courage. 
And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller. 
I'm a qualitative researcher. 
I collect stories; that's what I do. 
And maybe stories are just data with a soul. 
And maybe I'm just a storyteller. 
And so I said, "You know what? 
Why don't you just say I'm a researcher-storyteller." 
And she went, "Ha ha. There's no such thing." 
(Laughter) So I'm a researcher-storyteller, and I'm going to talk to you today -- we're talking about expanding perception -- and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent. 
And this is where my story starts. 
When I was a young researcher, doctoral student, my first year, I had a research professor who said to us, "Here's the thing, if you cannot measure it, it does not exist." 
And I thought he was just sweet-talking me. 
I was like, "Really?" and he was like, "Absolutely." 
And so you have to understand that I have a bachelor's and a master's in social work, and I was getting my Ph.D. in social work, so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the "life's messy, love it." 
And I'm more of the, "life's messy, clean it up, organize it and put it into a bento box." 
(Laughter) And so to think that I had found my way, to found a career that takes me -- really, one of the big sayings in social work is, "Lean into the discomfort of the work." 
And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's. 
That was my mantra. 
So I was very excited about this. 
And so I thought, you know what, this is the career for me, because I am interested in some messy topics. 
But I want to be able to make them not messy. 
I want to hack into these things that I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see. 
So where I started was with connection. 
Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. 
It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. 
This is what it's all about. 
It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is -- neurobiologically that's how we're wired -- it's why we're here. 
So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. 
Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things that you do really awesome, and one "opportunity for growth?" 
(Laughter) And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? 
Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. 
When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. 
And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection. 
So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. 
And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. 
And it turned out to be shame. 
And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection? 
The things I can tell you about it: It's universal; we all have it. 
The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. 
No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it. 
What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which, we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." 
The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability. 
This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen. 
And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability. 
And so I thought, this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick. 
I'm going in, I'm going to figure this stuff out, I'm going to spend a year, I'm going to totally deconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerability works, and I'm going to outsmart it. 
So I was ready, and I was really excited. 
As you know, it's not going to turn out well. 
(Laughter) You know this. 
So, I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time. 
But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to -- and this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doing this research. 
My one year turned into six years: Thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups. 
At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories -- thousands of pieces of data in six years. 
And I kind of got a handle on it. 
I kind of understood, this is what shame is, this is how it works. 
I wrote a book, I published a theory, but something was not okay -- and what it was is that, if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness -- that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness -- they have a strong sense of love and belonging -- and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough. 
There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. 
And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. 
That's it. 
They believe they're worthy. 
And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. 
So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those. 
What do these people have in common? 
I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. 
So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? 
And the first words that came to my mind were "whole-hearted." 
These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. 
So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. 
In fact, I did it first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled the interviews, the stories, pulled the incidents. 
What's the theme? What's the pattern? 
My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just writing and in my researcher mode. 
And so here's what I found. 
What they had in common was a sense of courage. 
And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. 
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. 
And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. 
They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. 
And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection. 
The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. 
They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. 
They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. 
They talked about the willingness to say, "I love you" first ... 
the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees ... 
the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. 
They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. 
They thought this was fundamental. 
I personally thought it was betrayal. 
I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job -- you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena for the explicit reason to control and predict. 
And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. 
This led to a little breakdown -- (Laughter) -- which actually looked more like this. 
(Laughter) And it did. 
I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening. 
(Laughter) A spiritual awakening sounds better than breakdown, but I assure you, it was a breakdown. 
And I had to put my data away and go find a therapist. 
Let me tell you something: you know who you are when you call your friends and say, "I think I need to see somebody. 
Because about five of my friends were like, "Wooo, I wouldn't want to be your therapist." 
(Laughter) I was like, "What does that mean?" 
And they're like, "I'm just saying, you know. 
Don't bring your measuring stick." 
(Laughter) I was like, "Okay." 
So I found a therapist. 
My first meeting with her, Diana -- I brought in my list of the way the whole-hearted live, and I sat down. 
And she said, "How are you?" 
And I said, "I'm great. I'm okay." 
She said, "What's going on?" 
And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good. 
(Laughter) And so I said, "Here's the thing, I'm struggling." 
And she said, "What's the struggle?" 
And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. 
And I think I have a problem, and I need some help." 
And I said, "But here's the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit." 
(Laughter) "I just need some strategies." 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 
So she goes like this. 
(Laughter) And then I said, "It's bad, right?" 
And she said, "It's neither good nor bad." 
(Laughter) "It just is what it is." 
And I said, "Oh my God, this is going to suck." 
(Laughter) And it did, and it didn't. 
And it took about a year. 
And you know how there are people that, when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, that they surrender and walk into it. 
A: that's not me, and B: I don't even hang out with people like that. 
(Laughter) For me, it was a yearlong street fight. 
It was a slugfest. 
Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. 
I lost the fight, but probably won my life back. 
And so then I went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they, the whole-hearted, what choices they were making, and what we are doing with vulnerability. 
Why do we struggle with it so much? 
Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? 
No. 
So this is what I learned. 
We numb vulnerability -- when we're waiting for the call. 
It was funny, I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says, "How would you define vulnerability? 
What makes you feel vulnerable?" 
Because I wanted to know what's out there. 
Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick, and we're newly married; initiating sex with my husband; initiating sex with my wife; being turned down; asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying off people. 
This is the world we live in. 
We live in a vulnerable world. 
And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. 
And I think there's evidence -- and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause -- We are the most in-debt ... 
obese ... 
addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. 
The problem is -- and I learned this from the research -- that you cannot selectively numb emotion. 
You can't say, here's the bad stuff. 
Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. 
I don't want to feel these. 
I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. 
(Laughter) I don't want to feel these. 
And I know that's knowing laughter. 
I hack into your lives for a living. 
God. 
(Laughter) You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. 
You cannot selectively numb. 
So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. 
And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. 
And it becomes this dangerous cycle. 
One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb. 
And it doesn't just have to be addiction. 
The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. 
Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. 
"I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up." 
That's it. 
Just certain. 
The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. 
This is what politics looks like today. 
There's no conversation. 
There's just blame. 
You know how blame is described in the research? 
A way to discharge pain and discomfort. 
We perfect. 
If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work. 
Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks. 
(Laughter) Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, "Wow." 
(Laughter) And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. 
Let me tell you what we think about children. 
They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. 
And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, "Look at her, she's perfect. 
My job is just to keep her perfect -- make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh." 
That's not our job. 
Our job is to look and say, "You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging." 
That's our job. 
Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems, I think, that we see today. 
We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. 
We do that in our personal lives. 
We do that corporate -- whether it's a bailout, an oil spill ... 
a recall. 
We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. 
I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo, people. 
We just need you to be authentic and real and say ... 
"We're sorry. We'll fix it." 
But there's another way, and I'll leave you with this. 
This is what I have found: To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen ... 
to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee -- and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? 
Can I believe in this this passionately? 
just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." 
And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. 
Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough" ... 
then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves. 
That's all I have. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada. 
My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. 
My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar, India. 
And they got here in the late 1960s. 
They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto, and they settled into a new life. 
They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids. 
My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods. 
We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. 
We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn't take for granted when they grew up -- things like power always on in our houses, things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard. 
We grew up, and we grew older. 
I went to high school. 
I graduated. 
I moved out of the house, I got a job, I found a girl, I settled down -- and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens' song -- (Laughter) but life was pretty good. 
Life was pretty good. 
2006 was a great year. 
Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded by 150 family and friends. 
2007 was a great year. 
I graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends. 
Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. 
We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads. 
(Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe me. 
(Laughter) 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. 
I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me. 
First of all, the news was so heavy. 
It's still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flipped open a newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs, or our retirements, or our livelihoods. 
2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason, too. 
I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. 
My marriage wasn't going well, and we just were growing further and further apart. 
One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation. 
And she said, "I don't love you anymore," and it was one of the most painful things I'd ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever heard, until only a month later, when I heard something even more heartbreaking. 
My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time. 
And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be. 
I spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m. 
on a Sunday night. 
We talked about the TV show we watched that evening. 
And Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared. 
Very sadly, he took his own life. 
And it was a really heavy time. 
And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. 
So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com. 
I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough -- things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line -- even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there. 
(Laughter) And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. 
I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000. 
And nobody read it except for my mom. 
Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad. 
(Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions. 
It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. 
And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, "You've just won the Best Blog In the World award." 
I was like, that sounds totally fake. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to? 
(Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart. 
And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog. 
And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book. 
Flash-forward to the next year and "The Book of Awesome" has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks. 
(Applause) But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today. 
I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you the three As of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought. 
So let's talk about those three As. 
Over the last few years, I haven't had that much time to really think. 
But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: "What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself?" 
And I've summarized those things, for me personally, as three As. 
They are Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. 
I'd love to just talk about each one briefly. 
So Attitude: Look, we're all going to get lumps, and we're all going to get bumps. 
None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that's that it ain't gonna go according to plan. 
We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too. 
It's sad, and it's not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend could cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog could get hit by a car on the street. 
It's not a happy thought, but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes. 
Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean. 
And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well, too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart, and when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges and soaks in, I just really hope you feel like you've always got two choices. 
One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever, or two, you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes. 
Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choosing, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future. 
The second "A" is Awareness. 
I love hanging out with three year-olds. 
I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. 
I love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk. 
I love the way that they'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs. 
I love the way that they'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner. 
I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. 
Having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old. 
Because you all used to be three years old. 
That three-year-old boy is still part of you. 
That three-year-old girl is still part of you. 
They're in there. 
And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too. 
So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work. 
There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, "Found money." 
The last "A" is Authenticity. 
And for this one, I want to tell you a quick story. 
Let's go all the way back to 1932 when, on a peanut farm in Georgia, a little baby boy named Roosevelt Grier was born. 
Roosevelt Grier, or Rosey Grier, as people used to call him, grew up and grew into a 300-pound, six-foot-five linebacker in the NFL. 
He's number 76 in the picture. 
Here he is pictured with the "fearsome foursome." 
These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against. 
They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field. 
But Rosey Grier also had another passion. 
In his deeply authentic self, he also loved needlepoint. (Laughter) He loved knitting. 
He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks. 
That's what he said. 
I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining clubs. 
And he even put out a book called "Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men." 
(Laughter) (Applause) It's a great cover. 
If you notice, he's actually needlepointing his own face. 
(Laughter) And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authentic person, and that's what authenticity is all about. 
It's just about being you and being cool with that. 
And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. 
You meet people that you like talking to. 
You go places you've dreamt about. 
And you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled. 
So those are the three A's. 
For the closing thought, I want to take you all the way back to my parents coming to Canada. 
I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you're in your mid-20s. 
I don't know, because I never did it, but I would imagine that it would take a great attitude. 
I would imagine that you'd have to be pretty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you're starting to see in your new world. 
And I think you'd have to be really authentic, you'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you're being exposed to. 
I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't get many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitting in the front row. 
So I wanted to ask them to, if they don't mind, stand up. 
And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys. 
(Applause) When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada. 
And it's a great story, because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport, and he was welcomed by a non-profit group, which I'm sure someone in this room runs. 
(Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada. 
And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread. 
There was bread, there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little white onions. 
There was rolled up turkey cold cuts, rolled up ham cold cuts, rolled up roast beef cold cuts and little cubes of cheese. 
There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches. 
There was lasagna, there was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pies, lots and lots of pies. 
And when my dad tells the story, he says, "The craziest thing was, I'd never seen any of that before, except bread. 
(Laughter) I didn't know what was meat, what was vegetarian. 
I was eating olives with pie. 
(Laughter) I just couldn't believe how many things you can get here." 
(Laughter) When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping, and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables. 
He would say, "Look, can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico? 
They've got an apple here from South Africa. 
Can you believe they've got a date from Morocco?" 
He's like, "Do you know where Morocco even is?" 
And I'd say, "I'm five. I don't even know where I am. 
Is this A&P?" 
And he'd say, "I don't know where Morocco is either, but let's find out." 
And so we'd buy the date, and we'd go home. 
And we'd actually take an atlas off the shelf, and we'd flip through until we found this mysterious country. 
And when we did, my dad would say, "Can you believe someone climbed a tree over there, picked this thing off it, put it in a truck, drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house, so they could sell it to us for 25 cents?" 
And I'd say, "I don't believe that." 
And he's like, "I don't believe it either. 
Things are amazing. There's just so many things to be happy about." 
When I stop to think about it, he's absolutely right. 
There are so many things to be happy about. 
We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we've ever seen, capable of experiencing so many of these things. 
I mean, we're the only ones with architecture and agriculture. 
We're the only ones with jewelry and democracy. 
We've got airplanes, highway lanes, interior design and horoscope signs. 
We've got fashion magazines, house party scenes. 
You can watch a horror movie with monsters. 
You can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming. 
We've got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and rollercoaster rides. 
You can sleep in clean sheets. 
You can go to the movies and get good seats. 
You can smell bakery air, walk around with rain hair, pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap. 
We've got all that, but we've only got 100 years to enjoy it. 
And that's the sad part. 
The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgating you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every teacher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your family, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years. 
Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet. 
And that moment is right now, and those moments are counting down, and those moments are always, always, always fleeting. 
You will never be as young as you are right now. 
And that's why I believe that if you live your life with a great attitude, choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow, living with a sense of awareness of the world around you, embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself, being you and being cool with that, letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you, then I think you'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying, and I think you'll live a life that is truly awesome. 
Thank you. 

Hawa Abdi: Many people -- 20 years for Somalia -- [were] fighting. 
So there was no job, no food. 
Children, most of them, became very malnourished, like this. 
Deqo Mohamed: So as you know, always in a civil war, the ones affected most [are] the women and children. 
So our patients are women and children. 
And they are in our backyard. 
It's our home. We welcome them. 
That's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people, where 75 percent of them are women and children. 
Pat Mitchell: And this is your hospital. This is the inside. 
HA: We are doing C-sections and different operations because people need some help. 
There is no government to protect them. 
DM: Every morning we have about 400 patients, maybe more or less. 
But sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses, and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them. 
But we take the severe ones, and we reschedule the other ones the next day. 
It is very tough. 
And as you can see, it's the women who are carrying the children; it's the women who come into the hospitals; it's the women [are] building the houses. 
That's their house. 
And we have a school. This is our bright -- we opened [in the] last two years [an] elementary school where we have 850 children, and the majority are women and girls. 
(Applause) PM: And the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic. 
Would you explain the rules for admission? 
HA: The people who are coming to us, we are welcoming. 
We are sharing with them whatever we have. 
But there are only two rules. 
First rule: there is no clan distinguished and political division in Somali society. 
[Whomever] makes those things we throw out. 
The second: no man can beat his wife. 
If he beat, we will put [him] in jail, and we will call the eldest people. 
Until they identify this case, we'll never release him. 
That's our two rules. 
(Applause) The other thing that I have realized, that the woman is the most strong person all over the world. 
Because the last 20 years, the Somali woman has stood up. 
They were the leaders, and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations. 
We are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war. 
We can reconcile. 
We can do everything. 
(Applause) DM: As my mother said, we are the future hope, and the men are only killing in Somalia. 
So we came up with these two rules. 
In a camp with 90,000 people, you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights. 
So there is no clan division, and no man can beat his wife. 
And we have a little storage room where we converted a jail. 
So if you beat your wife, you're going to be there. 
(Applause) So empowering the women and giving the opportunity -- we are there for them. They are not alone for this. 
PM: You're running a medical clinic. 
It brought much, much needed medical care to people who wouldn't get it. 
You're also running a civil society. 
You've created your own rules, in which women and children are getting a different sense of security. 
Talk to me about your decision, Dr. Abdi, and your decision, Dr. Mohamed, to work together -- for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances. 
HA: My age -- because I was born in 1947 -- we were having, at that time, government, law and order. 
But one day, I went to the hospital -- my mother was sick -- and I saw the hospital, how they [were] treating the doctors, how they [are] committed to help the sick people. 
I admired them, and I decided to become a doctor. 
My mother died, unfortunately, when I was 12 years [old]. 
Then my father allowed me to proceed [with] my hope. 
My mother died in [a] gynecology complication, so I decided to become a gynecology specialist. 
That's why I became a doctor. 
So Dr. Deqo has to explain. 
DM: For me, my mother was preparing [me] when I was a child to become a doctor, but I really didn't want to. 
Maybe I should become an historian, or maybe a reporter. 
I loved it, but it didn't work. 
When the war broke out -- civil war -- I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children. 
And I thought, maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist. 
(Laughter) So I went to Russia, and my mother also, [during the] time of [the] Soviet Union. 
So some of our character, maybe we will come with a strong Soviet background of training. 
So that's how I decided [to do] the same. 
My sister was different. 
She's here. She's also a doctor. 
She graduated in Russia also. 
(Applause) And to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war -- when I was 16, and my sister was 11, when the civil war broke out. 
So it was the need and the people we saw in the early '90s -- that's what made us go back and work for them. 
PM: So what is the biggest challenge working, mother and daughter, in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations? 
HA: Yes, I was working in a tough situation, very dangerous. 
And when I saw the people who needed me, I was staying with them to help, because I [could] do something for them. 
Most people fled abroad. 
But I remained with those people, and I was trying to do something -- [any] little thing I [could] do. 
I succeeded in my place. 
Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other, who are not fighting. 
But we try to stand on our feet, to do something, little things, we can for our people. 
And I'm thankful for my daughters. 
When they come to me, they help me to treat the people, to help. 
They do everything for them. 
They have done what I desire to do for them. 
PM: What's the best part of working with your mother, and the most challenging part for you? 
DM: She's very tough; it's most challenging. 
She always expects us to do more. 
And really when you think [you] cannot do it, she will push you, and I can do it. 
That's the best part. 
She shows us, trains us how to do and how to be better [people] and how to do long hours in surgery -- 300 patients per day, 10, 20 surgeries, and still you have to manage the camp -- that's how she trains us. 
It is not like beautiful offices here, 20 patients, you're tired. 
You see 300 patients, 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage. 
PM: But you do it for good reasons. 
(Applause) Wait. Wait. 
HA: Thank you. 
DM: Thank you. 
(Applause) HA: Thank you very much. DM: Thank you very much. 

Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. 
(Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five. 
This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America -- a nice clean band here -- and this part of Africa. 
We can integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capital sigma. 
National Assembly: They create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. 
Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol. 
Start differentiating into effector and memory cells. 
A galaxy. Hey! There's another galaxy. Oh, look! There's another galaxy. 
And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. 
If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. 
We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. 
But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. 
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. 
And some of you all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely. 
And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just as a kind of nice-to-have, just kind of a supplement for my cousins, something that might give them a refresher or something. 
And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened. 
Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened. 
The first was the feedback from my cousins. 
They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. 
(Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. 
They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. 
At first it's very unintuitive, but when you think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. 
You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. 
If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. 
They can just watch those videos; if they're bored, they can go ahead. 
They can watch at their own time and pace. 
Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" 
And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. 
The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. 
These are just a few. 
This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. 
Someone wrote it on YouTube, it was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." 
(Laughter) Let's pause here. 
This person did a derivative, and then they smiled. 
(Laughter) In response to that same comment -- this is on the thread, you can go on YouTube and look at the comments -- someone else wrote: "Same thing here. 
I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines. 
This clearly was helping people. 
But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have. 
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. 
We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. 
We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. 
Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. 
Again, he got it. 
He is so excited." 
And so you can imagine, here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund -- it was very strange for me to do something of social value. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. 
And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. 
If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to. 
(Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. 
(Laughter) The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "OK, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. 
It's good for maybe home-schoolers." 
But I didn't think it would somehow penetrate the classroom. 
Then I started getting letters from teachers, and the teachers would write, saying, "We've used your videos to flip the classroom. 
You've given the lectures, so now what we do --" And this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow -- "what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom." 
And I want to pause here -- (Applause) I want to pause here, because there's a couple of interesting things. 
One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. 
But the more interesting thing -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. 
They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. 
A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience, now they're actually interacting with each other. 
So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? 
How do we take what those teachers were doing to its natural conclusion? 
And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. 
The ones I started were much more primitive. 
This is a more competent version of it. 
But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need, until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. 
And the Khan Academy videos are there. 
You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. 
The paradigm here seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. 
But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now. 
In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. 
And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. 
And even that 95 percent student -- what was the five percent they didn't know? 
Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power. 
Then you build on that in the next concept. 
That's analogous to -- imagine learning to ride a bicycle. 
Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you a bicycle for two weeks, then I come back after two weeks, and say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. 
You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." 
So I put a big "C" stamp on your forehead -- (Laughter) and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." 
(Laughter) But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. 
And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. 
So our model is: learn math the way you'd learn anything, like riding a bicycle. 
Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. 
Do it as long as necessary, until you have mastery. 
The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. 
We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to fail. 
But we do expect mastery. 
This is just another one of the modules. 
This is shifting and reflecting functions. 
And they all fit together. 
We have about 90 of these right now. 
You can go to the site right now, it's all free, not trying to sell anything. 
But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. 
That top node right there, that's literally single-digit addition, it's like one plus one is equal to two. 
The paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. 
Further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. 
Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. 
Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. 
And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. 
So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- from this knowledge map, you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. 
Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. 
It'll change what happens at the dinner table. 
But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. 
And so what I'm showing you here, this is data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted their old math curriculum. 
These kids aren't using textbooks, or getting one-size-fits-all lectures. 
They're doing Khan Academy, that software, for roughly half of their math class. 
I want to be clear: we don't view this as a complete math education. 
What it does is -- this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time -- it's the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot-building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow. 
And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. 
Every row is a student. 
Every column is one of those concepts. 
Green means the student's already proficient. 
Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. 
Red means they're stuck. 
And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." 
Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer." 
(Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "What don't you understand? What do you understand?" and all the rest. 
So our paradigm is to arm teachers with as much data as possible -- data that, in any other field, is expected, in finance, marketing, manufacturing -- so the teachers can diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. 
Now teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they've spent each day, what videos they've watched, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they focused on? 
The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. 
The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on. 
The data gets pretty granular, so you can see the exact problems the student got right or wrong. 
Red is wrong, blue is right. 
The leftmost question is the first one the student attempted. 
They watched the video over there. 
It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. 
They also got faster -- the height is how long it took them. 
When you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, "differentiated learning" -- but it's kind of crazy, what happens when you see it in a classroom. 
Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and a group who are a little bit slower. 
In a traditional model, in a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. 
Maybe they should be tracked differently. 
Maybe we should put them in different classes." 
But when you let students work at their own pace -- we see it over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. 
And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. 
And we're seeing it over and over again. 
It makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time. 
Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. 
And that brings up an interesting point. 
A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. 
In our mind, the relevant metric is: student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. 
So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot. 
Maybe five percent of their time is sitting next to students and working with them. 
Now, 100 percent of their time is. 
So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10. 
As valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what it does to the adult learner, who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff they should have known before going back to college. 
Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta, who has to help his family during the day, and that's the reason he or she can't go to school. 
Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate, or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know. 
Now imagine what happens where -- we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom. 
There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. 
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. 
And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. 
And that's essentially what we're trying to build. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bill Gates: I'll ask about two or three questions. 
(Applause continues) (Applause ends) BG: I've seen some things you're doing in the system, that have to do with motivation and feedback -- energy points, merit badges. 
Tell me what you're thinking there. 
SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. 
I have to be clear, it's not just me anymore. 
I'm still doing all the videos, but we have a rock-star team doing the software. 
We've put a bunch of game mechanics in there, where you get badges, we're going to start having leader boards by area, you get points. 
It's actually been pretty interesting. 
Just the wording of the badging, or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth-graders or sixth-graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them. 
(Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? 
SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. 
Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" 
I said, "Well, every student would work at their own pace, on something like this, we'd give a dashboard." 
They said, "This is kind of radical. We have to think about it." 
Me and the rest of the team were like, "They're never going to want to do this." 
But literally the next day they were like, "Can you start in two weeks?" 
(Laughter) BG: So fifth-grade math is where that's going on right now? 
SK: It's two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes. 
They're doing it at the district level. 
I think what they're excited about is they can follow these kids, not only in school; on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. 
We can track everything, track them as they go through the entire district. 
Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see. 
BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. 
So you're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they need? 
SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. 
We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. 
And they're saying, "Hey, this is nice, but --" Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, "I have a feeling a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic." 
So we made that focus diagram. 
So it's all been teacher-driven. It's been pretty crazy. 
BG: Is this ready for prime time? 
Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out? 
SK: Yeah, it's ready. 
We've got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more. 
(Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. 
BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing. 
The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? 
SK: Absolutely. And this is something I recommend everyone in this audience do. 
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. 
And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. 
But yeah, it's all there. 
BG: Well, it's amazing. 
I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education. 
BG: Thank you. SK: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. 
Imagine a plane full of smoke. 
Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. 
It sounds scary. 
Well, I had a unique seat that day. 
I was sitting in 1D. 
So I looked at them right away, and they said, "No problem. We probably hit some birds." 
The pilot had already turned the plane around, and we weren't that far. 
You could see Manhattan. 
Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time. 
The pilot lines up the plane with the Hudson River. 
That's usually not the route. 
(Laughter) He turns off the engines. 
Now, imagine being in a plane with no sound. 
And then he says three words. 
He says, "Brace for impact." 
I didn't have to talk to the flight attendant anymore. 
(Laughter) I could see in her eyes, it was terror. 
Life was over. 
Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. 
I learned that it all changes in an instant. 
We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn't, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did. 
As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "I collect bad wines." 
Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. 
I no longer want to postpone anything in life. 
And that urgency, that purpose, has really changed my life. 
The second thing I learned that day -- and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot -- (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. 
I've lived a good life. 
In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. 
But in my humanity, I also allow my ego to get in. 
And I regretted the time I wasted on things that did not matter with people that matter. 
And I thought about my relationship with my wife, with my friends, with people. 
And after, as I reflected on that, I decided to eliminate negative energy from my life. 
It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. 
I've not had a fight with my wife in two years. 
It feels great. 
I no longer try to be right; I choose to be happy. 
The third thing I learned -- and this is as your mental clock starts going, "15, 14, 13." 
You can see the water coming. 
I'm saying, "Please blow up." 
I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. 
And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. 
It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. 
But it was very sad. 
I didn't want to go; I love my life. 
And that sadness really framed in one thought, which is, I only wish for one thing. 
I only wish I could see my kids grow up. 
About a month later, I was at a performance by my daughter -- first-grader, not much artistic talent -- (Laughter) Yet! 
(Laughter) And I'm bawling, I'm crying, like a little kid. 
And it made all the sense in the world to me. 
I realized at that point, by connecting those two dots, that the only thing that matters in my life is being a great dad. 
Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad. 
I was given the gift of a miracle, of not dying that day. 
I was given another gift, which was to be able to see into the future and come back and live differently. 
I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane -- and please don't -- but imagine, and how would you change? 
What would you get done that you're waiting to get done because you think you'll be here forever? 
How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in them? 
And more than anything, are you being the best parent you can? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I spent the best part of last year working on a documentary about my own happiness -- trying to see if I can actually train my mind in a particular way, like I can train my body, so I can end up with an improved feeling of overall well-being. 
Then this January, my mother died, and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me. 
So in a very typical, silly designer fashion, after years worth of work, pretty much all I have to show for it are the titles for the film. 
(Music) They were still done when I was on sabbatical with my company in Indonesia. 
We can see the first part here was designed here by pigs. 
It was a little bit too funky, and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way -- fashion. 
My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest, and monkeys, of course, are supposed to be the happiest of all animals. 
So we trained them to be able to do three separate words, to lay out them properly. 
You can see, there still is a little bit of a legibility problem there. 
The serif is not really in place. 
So of course, what you don't do properly yourself is never deemed done really. 
So this is us climbing onto the trees and putting it up over the Sayan Valley in Indonesia. 
In that year, what I did do a lot was look at all sorts of surveys, looking at a lot of data on this subject. 
And it turns out that men and women report very, very similar levels of happiness. 
This is a very quick overview of all the studies that I looked at. 
That climate plays no role. 
That if you live in the best climate, in San Diego in the United States, or in the shittiest climate, in Buffalo, New York, you are going to be just as happy in either place. 
If you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the U.S., any salary increase you're going to experience will have only a tiny, tiny influence on your overall well-being. 
Black people are just as happy as white people are. 
If you're old or young it doesn't really make a difference. 
If you're ugly or if you're really, really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever. 
You will adapt to it and get used to it. 
If you have manageable health problems it doesn't really matter. 
Now this does matter. 
So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left -- meaning that, if you have a lot of friends, and you have meaningful friendships, that does make a lot of difference. 
As well as being married -- you are likely to be much happier than if you are single. 
A fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt, came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind. 
He says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant, the unconscious. 
And the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do, but the elephant really has his own ideas. 
If I look at my own life, I'm born in 1962 in Austria. 
If I would have been born a hundred years earlier, the big decisions in my life would have been made for me -- meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected. 
I, of course, and all of us, are very much in charge of these big decisions in our lives. 
We live where we want to be -- at least in the West. 
We become what we really are interested in. 
We choose our own profession, and we choose our own partners. 
And so it's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of. 
If you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called George, when he decides on where he wants to live -- is it Florida or North Dakota? -- he goes and lives in Georgia. 
And if you look at a guy called Dennis, when he decides what to become -- is it a lawyer, or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher? -- best chance is that he wants to become a dentist. 
And if Paula decides should she marry Joe or Jack, somehow Paul sounds the most interesting. 
And so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons, it remains statistically true that there are more Georges living in Georgia and there are more Dennises becoming dentists and there are more Paulas who are married to Paul than statistically viable. 
(Laughter) Now I, of course, thought, "Well this is American data," and I thought, "Well, those silly Americans. 
They get influenced by things that they're not aware of. 
This is just completely ridiculous." 
Then, of course, I looked at my mom and my dad -- (Laughter) Karolina and Karl, and grandmom and granddad, Josefine and Josef. 
So I am looking still for a Stephanie. 
I'll figure something out. 
If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer, the easiest answer, of course, is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don't like to do -- for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do. 
I'm a big list maker, so I came up with a list. 
One of them is to think without pressure. 
This is a project we're working on right now with a very healthy deadline. 
It's a book on culture, and, as you can see, culture is rapidly drifting around. 
Doing things like I'm doing right now -- traveling to Cannes. 
The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali -- clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture, not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there. 
Quite consciously, design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques, just basically to fight straightforward adaptation. 
Being close to the content -- that's the content really is close to my heart. 
This is a bus, or vehicle, for a charity, for an NGO that wants to double the education budget in the United States -- carefully designed, so, by two inches, it still clears highway overpasses. 
Having end results -- things that come back from the printer well, like this little business card for an animation company called Sideshow on lenticular foils. 
Working on projects that actually have visible impacts, like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous. 
It just came out six months ago, and it's getting unbelievable traction right now in Germany. 
And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest. 
And lately, to be involved in projects where I know about 50 percent of the project technique-wise and the other 50 percent would be new. 
So in this case, it's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens. 
And I of course knew stuff, as a designer, about typography, even though we worked with those animals not so successfully. 
But I didn't quite know all that much about movement or film. 
And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project. 
But also because the content was very close. 
In this case, "Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development" -- I've been keeping a diary since I was 12. 
And I've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way. 
In this case also because it's part of one of the many sentiments that we build the whole series on -- that all the sentiments originally had come out of the diary. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

This story is about taking imagination seriously. 
Fourteen years ago, I first encountered this ordinary material, fishnet, used the same way for centuries. 
Today, I'm using it to create permanent, billowing, voluptuous forms the scale of hard-edged buildings in cities around the world. 
I was an unlikely person to be doing this. 
I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. 
In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven. 
I went off on my own to become an artist, and I painted for 10 years, when I was offered a Fulbright to India. 
Promising to give exhibitions of paintings, I shipped my paints and arrived in Mahabalipuram. 
The deadline for the show arrived -- my paints didn't. 
I had to do something. 
This fishing village was famous for sculpture. 
So I tried bronze casting. 
But to make large forms was too heavy and expensive. 
I went for a walk on the beach, watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand. 
I'd seen it every day, but this time I saw it differently -- a new approach to sculpture, a way to make volumetric form without heavy solid materials. 
My first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen. 
It's a self-portrait titled "Wide Hips." 
(Laughter) We hoisted them on poles to photograph. 
I discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns. 
I was mesmerized. 
I continued studying craft traditions and collaborating with artisans, next in Lithuania with lace makers. 
I liked the fine detail it gave my work, but I wanted to make them larger -- to shift from being an object you look at to something you could get lost in. 
Returning to India to work with those fishermen, we made a net of a million and a half hand-tied knots -- installed briefly in Madrid. 
Thousands of people saw it, and one of them was the urbanist Manual Sola-Morales who was redesigning the waterfront in Porto, Portugal. 
He asked if I could build this as a permanent piece for the city. 
I didn't know if I could do that and preserve my art. 
Durable, engineered, permanent -- those are in opposition to idiosyncratic, delicate and ephemeral. 
For two years, I searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays, salt, air, pollution, and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind. 
We needed something to hold the net up out there in the middle of the traffic circle. 
So we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring. 
We had to engineer it to move gracefully in an average breeze and survive in hurricane winds. 
But there was no engineering software to model something porous and moving. 
I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for America's Cup racing yachts named Peter Heppel. 
He helped me tackle the twin challenges of precise shape and gentle movement. 
I couldn't build this the way I knew because hand-tied knots weren't going to withstand a hurricane. 
So I developed a relationship with an industrial fishnet factory, learned the variables of their machines, and figured out a way to make lace with them. 
There was no language to translate this ancient, idiosyncratic handcraft into something machine operators could produce. 
So we had to create one. 
Three years and two children later, we raised this 50,000-square-foot lace net. 
It was hard to believe that what I had imagined was now built, permanent and had lost nothing in translation. 
(Applause) This intersection had been bland and anonymous. 
Now it had a sense of place. 
I walked underneath it for the first time. 
As I watched the wind's choreography unfold, I felt sheltered and, at the same time, connected to limitless sky. 
My life was not going to be the same. 
I want to create these oases of sculpture in spaces of cities around the world. 
I'm going to share two directions that are new in my work. 
Historic Philadelphia City Hall: its plaza, I felt, needed a material for sculpture that was lighter than netting. 
So we experimented with tiny atomized water particles to create a dry mist that is shaped by the wind and in testing, discovered that it can be shaped by people who can interact and move through it without getting wet. 
I'm using this sculpture material to trace the paths of subway trains above ground in real time -- like an X-ray of the city's circulatory system unfolding. 
Next challenge, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver asked, could I represent the 35 nations of the Western hemisphere and their interconnectedness in a sculpture? 
(Laughter) I didn't know where to begin, but I said yes. 
I read about the recent earthquake in Chile and the tsunami that rippled across the entire Pacific Ocean. 
It shifted the Earth's tectonic plates, sped up the planet's rotation and literally shortened the length of the day. 
So I contacted NOAA, and I asked if they'd share their data on the tsunami, and translated it into this. 
Its title: "1.26" refers to the number of microseconds that the Earth's day was shortened. 
I couldn't build this with a steel ring, the way I knew. 
Its shape was too complex now. 
So I replaced the metal armature with a soft, fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel. 
The sculpture could now be entirely soft, which made it so light it could tie in to existing buildings -- literally becoming part of the fabric of the city. 
There was no software that could extrude these complex net forms and model them with gravity. 
So we had to create it. 
Then I got a call from New York City asking if I could adapt these concepts to Times Square or the High Line. 
This new soft structural method enables me to model these and build these sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers. 
They don't have funding yet, but I dream now of bringing these to cities around the world where they're most needed. 
Fourteen years ago, I searched for beauty in the traditional things, in craft forms. 
Now I combine them with hi-tech materials and engineering to create voluptuous, billowing forms the scale of buildings. 
My artistic horizons continue to grow. 
I'll leave you with this story. 
I got a call from a friend in Phoenix. 
An attorney in the office who'd never been interested in art, never visited the local art museum, dragged everyone she could from the building and got them outside to lie down underneath the sculpture. 
There they were in their business suits, laying in the grass, noticing the changing patterns of wind beside people they didn't know, sharing the rediscovery of wonder. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 
Thank you. 
Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. 
It's a rare condition. 
And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. 
Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me, there's a certain kind of awkwardness. 
I can see it in their eyes. 
They want to ask me something. 
And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: "If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?" 
(Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. 
I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. 
I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots -- a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work. 
I want to talk to you briefly about perception. 
When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss. 
Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. 
In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding. 
Here are three questions drawn from my work. 
Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. 
For example, the calculation: can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? 
Or look at the foreign word and the sounds: can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? 
And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? 
I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. 
Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. 
I'm an extreme example of this. 
My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. 
As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. 
Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them -- every number with its own shape and character. 
One is a flash of white light. 
Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. 
The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. 
Three is green. 
Four is blue. 
Five is yellow. 
I paint as well. 
And here is one of my paintings. 
It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. 
Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. 
What about bigger numbers? 
Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. 
It's an infinite number -- literally goes on forever. 
In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape. 
But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. 
Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. 
And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita." 
And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. 
And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. 
Another example: a little bit more mathematical. 
And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from "The Great Gatsby." 
There is a procession of syllables -- wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three -- one, two, three. 
And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right. 
Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 
64 multiplied by 75. 
If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. 
So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. 
What about 75? 
Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. 
So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind -- something like this. 
64 becomes 6,400. 
And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. 
Four across, four up and down -- it's 16. 
So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. 
That's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. 
It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 -- 4,800, the answer to the sum. 
Easy when you know how. 
(Laughter) The second question was an Icelandic word. 
I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. 
So let me narrow the choices down to two. 
Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? 
What do you say? 
Okay. 
Some people say it's happy. 
Most people, a majority of people, say sad. 
And it actually means sad. 
(Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? 
In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener. 
Let's have a look at the third question. 
It's a line from a poem by John Keats. 
Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. 
It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. 
And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. 
In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. 
It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. 
And if we think of that -- let me put the picture up -- the fibers represent vulnerability. 
They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. 
So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. 
The hare itself, the animal -- not a cat, not a dog, a hare -- why a hare? 
Because think of the picture -- not the word, the picture. 
The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble. 
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. 
The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. 
I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

We are losing our listening. 
We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. 
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear. 
Now -- not you, not this talk, but that is generally true. 
(Laughter) Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. 
It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. 
We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. 
One of them is pattern recognition. 
(Crowd noises) So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention" -- some of you just sat up. 
We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name. 
Differencing is another technique we use. 
If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, (Pink noise) you would literally cease to hear it. 
We listen to differences; we discount sounds that remain the same. 
And then there is a whole range of filters. 
These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to. 
Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters. 
But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now. 
I'll give you one example of that. 
Intention is very important in sound, in listening. 
When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. 
(Laughter) But it's a great intention to have in a relationship. 
(Laughter) But that's not all. 
If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces; you're aware of how many people are around you, because of the micro-noises you're receiving. 
And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it. 
In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future. 
So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote. 
I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening. 
Why did I say that? 
First of all, we invented ways of recording -- first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well. 
The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared. 
Secondly, the world is now so noisy, (Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen. 
Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles. 
In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody. 
We're becoming impatient. 
We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites. 
And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously, I think -- by personal broadcasting. 
I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the UK. 
We're becoming desensitized. 
Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention. 
And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated. 
This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening. 
This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding. 
Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen. 
A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed. 
So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening. 
Audience: Yes! 
Good. The first one is silence. 
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again. 
If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine. 
Second, I call this "the mixer." 
(Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this -- and we all spend a lot of time in places like this -- listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear? 
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to? 
You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake. 
How many birds am I hearing? 
Where are they? Where are those ripples? 
It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening. 
Third, this exercise I call "savoring," and this is a beautiful exercise. 
It's about enjoying mundane sounds. 
This, for example, is my tumble dryer. 
(Dryer) It's a waltz -- one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three. 
I love it! 
Or just try this one on for size. 
(Coffee grinder) Wow! 
So, mundane sounds can be really interesting -- if you pay attention. 
I call that the "hidden choir" -- it's around us all the time. 
The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these, if you just take one thing away. 
This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to. 
This is playing with those filters. 
Remember I gave you those filters? 
It's starting to play with them as levers, to get conscious about them and to move to different places. 
These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use. 
There are many. 
Have fun with that. It's very exciting. 
And finally, an acronym. 
You can use this in listening, in communication. 
If you're in any one of those roles -- and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk -- the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for "juice" or "essence." 
And RASA stands for "Receive," which means pay attention to the person; "Appreciate," making little noises like "hmm," "oh," "OK"; "Summarize" -- the word "so" is very important in communication; and "Ask," ask questions afterwards. 
Now sound is my passion, it's my life. 
I wrote a whole book about it. So I live to listen. 
That's too much to ask for most people. 
But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully -- connected in space and in time to the physical world around us, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart. 
That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill. 
Why is it not taught? It's crazy. 
And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time, or at least capable of doing it. 
Now, I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything. 
So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other, take this mission out. 
And let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious, listening world -- a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace. 
Thank you for listening to me today. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we can't walk. 
By studying those twinkling lights though, we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life. 
In this image of the Tokyo skyline, I've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block, the Kepler Mission. 
Can you see it? 
There we go. 
This is just a tiny part of the sky the Kepler stares at, where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars, all at once, every half hour, and very precisely. 
And what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us. 
In just over two years of operations, we've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars. 
To give you some perspective, in the previous two decades of searching, we had only known about 400 prior to Kepler. 
When we see these little dips in the light, we can determine a number of things. 
For one thing, we can determine that there's a planet there, but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star. 
That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall. 
And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire: You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you're warm, but not so close that you're too toasty and you get burned. 
However, there's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall. 
And I'll tell you why. 
This is our star. This is our Sun. 
It's shown here in visible light. 
That's the light that you can see with your own human eyes. 
You'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball -- that Sun that we all draw when we're children. 
But you'll notice something else, and that's that the face of the Sun has freckles. 
These freckles are called sunspots, and they are just one of the manifestations of the Sun's magnetic field. 
They also cause the light from the star to vary. 
And we can measure this very, very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects. 
However, these are just the tip of the iceberg. 
If we had UV eyes or X-ray eyes, we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our Sun's magnetic activity -- the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well. 
Just think, even when it's cloudy outside, these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time. 
So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable, whether it might be amenable to life, we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is, but we want to know about its space weather -- this high-energy radiation, the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation. 
And so, we can't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system. 
I'm showing here Venus, Earth and Mars -- three planets in our own solar system that are roughly the same size, but only one of which is really a good place to live. 
But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe. 
Kepler won't find a planet around every single star it looks at. 
But really, every measurement it makes is precious, because it's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets, and how it's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe. 
While it's Kepler the telescope, the instrument that stares, it's we, life, who are searching. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So the type of magic I like, and I'm a magician, is magic that uses technology to create illusions. 
So I would like to show you something I've been working on. 
It's an application that I think will be useful for artists -- multimedia artists in particular. 
It synchronizes videos across multiple screens of mobile devices. 
I borrowed these three iPods from people here in the audience to show you what I mean. 
And I'm going to use them to tell you a little bit about my favorite subject: deception. 
(Music) One of my favorite magicians is Karl Germain. 
He had this wonderful trick where a rosebush would bloom right in front of your eyes. 
But it was his production of a butterfly that was the most beautiful. 
(Recording) Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the creation of life. 
(Applause) (Music) Marco Tempest: When asked about deception, he said this: Announcer: Magic is the only honest profession. 
A magician promises to deceive you -- and he does. 
MT: I like to think of myself as an honest magician. 
I use a lot of tricks, which means that sometimes I have to lie to you. 
Now I feel bad about that. 
But people lie every day. 
(Ringing) Hold on. 
Phone: Hey, where are you? 
MT: Stuck in traffic. I'll be there soon. 
You've all done it. 
(Laughter) (Music) Right: I'll be ready in just a minute, darling. 
Center: It's just what I've always wanted. 
Left: You were great. 
MT: Deception, it's a fundamental part of life. 
Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women -- assuming the women they asked told the truth. 
(Laughing) We deceive to gain advantage and to hide our weaknesses. 
The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. 
Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance. 
Some people deceive for money. 
Let's play a game. 
Three cards, three chances. 
Announcer: One five will get you 10, 10 will get you 20. 
Now, where's the lady? 
Where is the queen? 
MT: This one? 
Sorry. You lose. 
Well, I didn't deceive you. 
You deceived yourself. 
Self-deception. 
That's when we convince ourselves that a lie is the truth. 
Sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart. 
Compulsive gamblers are experts at self-deception. 
(Slot machine) They believe they can win. 
They forget the times they lose. 
The brain is very good at forgetting. 
Bad experiences are quickly forgotten. 
Bad experiences quickly disappear. 
Which is why in this vast and lonely cosmos, we are so wonderfully optimistic. 
Our self-deception becomes a positive illusion -- why movies are able to take us onto extraordinary adventures; why we believe Romeo when he says he loves Juliet; and why single notes of music, when played together, become a sonata and conjure up meaning. 
That's "Clair De lune." 
Its composer, called Debussy, said that art was the greatest deception of all. 
Art is a deception that creates real emotions -- a lie that creates a truth. 
And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic. 
[MAGIC] (Music fades slowly) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain. 
We chart it, we've described it, we've drawn it, we've mapped it. 
Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology -- think Google Maps, think GPS -- the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation. 
So let's take a look at the brain. 
Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, "It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain." 
Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray. 
And this outer layer, this is the vasculature, which is incredible, around a human brain. 
This is the blood vessels. 
20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ. 
That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists. 
Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain. 
So for example, they can see in the back part of the brain, which is just turning around there. 
There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now. 
It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement. 
On the side here, this is temporal cortex. 
This is the area where primary auditory processing -- so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers. 
Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making -- it's the last to mature in late adulthood. 
This is where all your decision-making processes are going on. 
It's the place where you're deciding right now you probably aren't going to order the steak for dinner. 
So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there. 
But there's actually a lot of structure there. 
It's cells and it's wires all wired together. 
So about a hundred years ago, some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells. 
And that's shown here in the the very light blue. 
You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained. 
And what you can see is it's very non-uniform. You see a lot more structure there. 
So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex. 
It's one continuous processing unit, if you will. 
But you can also see things underneath there as well. 
And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through. 
They're probably less cell dense. 
So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain. 
And as you can see, they're very non-uniformly distributed. 
And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function. 
And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells. 
So let's take a deeper look. 
Let's look at neurons. 
So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons. 
There are also these smaller cells as you'll see. 
These are support cells -- astrocytes glia. 
And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input. 
They're storing it, they're processing it. 
Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain. 
And each neuron itself is largely unique. 
The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry. 
These are proteins. 
They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement. 
They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with. 
And they're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do. 
So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes. 
We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. 
We get one from mom, one from dad. 
And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes. 
They're encoded in the DNA. 
And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on. 
And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on. 
So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains. 
So we sent our lab technician out. 
We were seeking normal human brains. 
What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office. 
This a place where the dead are brought in. 
We are seeking normal human brains. 
There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains. 
We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board -- we do a toxicology workup. 
And we're very careful about the brains that we do take. 
We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death. 
Because what we're trying to measure, the RNA -- which is the readout from our genes -- is very labile, and so we have to move very quickly. 
One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains. 
Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life. 
And men are much more likely to have their significant other, spouse, give consent than the other way around. 
(Laughter) So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what's called an MR. 
This is magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI. 
It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data. 
So we collect this MR. 
And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map. 
The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging. 
This maps the large cabling in the brain. 
And again, you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways, if you will. 
The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices. 
And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle. 
And in Seattle, we take these -- this is a whole human hemisphere -- and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer. 
There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide. 
We're going to then apply one of those stains to it, and we scan it. 
And then what we get is our first mapping. 
So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments. 
You could consider this state boundaries, if you will, those pretty broad outlines. 
From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat. 
And this is just showing this here -- this frozen tissue, and it's being cut. 
This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width. 
And remember, it's frozen. 
And so you can see here, old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied. 
We take a microscope slide. 
Then we very carefully melt onto the slide. 
This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it. 
And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this. 
So again this is what they can see under the microscope. 
You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places. 
And from there it's routine. They understand where to make these assignments. 
And they can make basically what's a reference atlas. 
This is a more detailed map. 
Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection. 
So the technician takes the instructions. 
They scribe along a place there. 
And then the laser actually cuts. 
You can see that blue dot there cutting. And that tissue falls off. 
You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time. 
There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue. 
We take that tissue, we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology, and then we put a florescent tag on it. 
We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray. 
Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass. 
This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome. 
And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample. 
Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain. 
We're taking over a thousand samples for each brain. 
This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus. 
It's involved in learning and memory. 
And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples. 
So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples. 
So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain. 
We've done right now two human brains-worth of data. 
We've put all of that together into one thing, and I'll show you what that synthesis looks like. 
It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world. 
They don't even have to log in to come use this tool, mine this data, find interesting things out with this. 
So here's the modalities that we put together. 
You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before. 
Here's the MR. It provides the framework. 
There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures. 
But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on. 
So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree. 
Green is the sort of cool areas where it's not turned on. 
And each gene gives us a fingerprint. 
And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available. 
So what can scientists learn about this data? 
We're just starting to look at this data ourselves. 
There's some basic things that you would want to understand. 
Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin. 
These are commonly prescribed antidepressants. 
Now remember, we're assaying genes. 
Genes send the instructions to make proteins. 
Proteins are targets for drugs. 
So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off, etc. 
So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to. 
In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on. 
And for the first time, we can actually do that. 
We can do that in multiple individuals that we've assayed too. 
So now we can look throughout the brain. 
We can see this unique fingerprint. 
And we get confirmation. 
We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on -- for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected -- but we also get to see the whole thing. 
We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there. 
It's as interesting a side effect as it could be. 
One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint. 
So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize. 
Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X." 
And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations. 
They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes. 
But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes. 
It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where. 
And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource. 
Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity. 
They can start to look at common pathways -- other things that they simply haven't been able to do before. 
So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality. 
And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. 
But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar. 
We're similar at the genetic level. 
And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar. 
And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated. 
And then we find some outliers, some things that lie beyond the cloud. 
And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle. 
So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level. 
Now what do those differences look like? 
This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were -- and they're quite subtle. 
These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type. 
These are two genes that we found as good examples. 
One is called RELN -- it's involved in early developmental cues. 
DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia. 
These aren't schizophrenic individuals, but they do show some population variation. 
And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells. 
It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there. 
Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know. 
Those kinds of studies require much larger populations. 
So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go. 
I think these resources are incredibly valuable. 
They give researchers a handle on where to go. 
But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point. 
We're certainly going to be looking at more. 
I'll just close by saying that the tools are there, and this is truly an unexplored, undiscovered continent. 
This is the new frontier, if you will. 
And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

My travels to Afghanistan began many, many years ago on the eastern border of my country, my homeland, Poland. 
I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales. 
A land where every field hides a grave, where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century. 
Behind the destruction, I found a soul of places. 
I met humble people. 
I heard their prayer and ate their bread. 
Then I have been walking East for 20 years -- from Eastern Europe to Central Asia -- through the Caucasus Mountains, Middle East, North Africa, Russia. 
And I ever met more humble people. 
And I shared their bread and their prayer. 
This is why I went to Afghanistan. 
One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River. 
I was alone on foot. 
And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport. 
But he gave me a cup of tea. 
And I understood that his surprise was my protection. 
So I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran's border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor. 
And in this way I could find noor, the hidden light of Afghanistan. 
My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica. 
I heard prayers of the Sufi -- humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban. 
Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India. 
The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears, and welcomed as a gift. 
What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect, about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium? 
These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war. 
These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen. 
What do we know about the women 10 years after the war? 
Clothed in this nylon bag, made in China, with the name of burqa. 
I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school. 
13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions. 
And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried. 
What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh? 
The region is not secure, but full of the Taliban, and they did it. 
My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

In the 1980s, in communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. 
You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. 
And this was done so the government could track where the text was coming from. 
If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought, they could track down who created that thought. 
And we in the West couldn't understand how anybody would do this, how much this would restrict freedom of speech. 
We would never do that in our own countries. 
But today, in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page, in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer. 
This is happening to us today. 
And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it. 
And this is an example of the ways our own governments are using technology against us, the citizens. 
And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today. 
If we look at what's really happening in the online world, we can group the attacks based on the attackers. 
We have three main groups. 
We have online criminals. 
Like here, we have Mr. Dmitry Golubov, from the city of Kiev in Ukraine. 
And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand. 
These guys make money. 
They use online attacks to make lots of money -- and lots and lots of it. 
We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires, who made money with their attacks. 
Here's Vladimir Tsastsin, from Tartu in Estonia. 
This is [Albert] Gonzalez. 
This is Stephen Watt. 
This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so on. 
These guys make their fortunes online, but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking Trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking, or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer. 
The US Secret Service, two months ago, froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here, and that bank account had 14.9 million US dollars in it when it was frozen. 
Mr. Jain himself is on the loose; nobody knows where he is. 
And I claim it's already today that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world. 
And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse. 
In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online. 
The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money. 
They're motivated by something else -- motivated by protests, motivated by an opinion, motivated by the laughs. 
Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks. 
So those are the three main attackers: criminals who do it for the money, hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest, but then the last group are nation states -- governments doing the attacks. 
And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar. 
This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens. 
DigiNotar is a certificate authority from the Netherlands -- or actually, it was. 
It was running into bankruptcy last fall, because they were hacked into. 
Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly. 
And I asked last week, in a meeting with Dutch government representatives, I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack. 
And his answer was: yes. 
So how do people die as the result of a hack like this? 
Well, DigiNotar is a CA. 
They sell certificates. 
What do you do with certificates? 
Well, you need a certificate if you have a website that has https, SSL encrypted services, services like Gmail. 
Now we all, or a big part of us, use Gmail or one of their competitors, but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran, where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections, so the local government can't snoop on their discussions. 
Except they can, if they hack into a foreign CA and issue rogue certificates. 
And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar. 
What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt? 
Well, in Egypt, the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police in April 2011, and when they were looting the building, they found lots of papers. 
Among those papers was this binder entitled, "FinFisher." 
And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany, which had sold to the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting, at a very large scale, all the communication of the citizens of the country. 
They had sold this tool for 280,000 euros to the Egyptian government. 
The company headquarters are right here. 
So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens. 
But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well. 
For example, in Germany, just a couple of weeks ago, the so-called "State Trojan" was found, which was a Trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens. 
If you are a suspect in a criminal case, well, it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped. 
But today, it goes beyond that. 
They will tap your Internet connection. 
They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a Trojan, which enables them to watch all your communication, to listen to your online discussions, to collect your passwords. 
Now, when we think deeper about things like these, the obvious response from people should be, "OK, well, that sounds bad, but that doesn't really affect me, because I'm a legal citizen. 
Why should I worry? Because I have nothing to hide." 
And this is an argument which doesn't make sense. 
Privacy is implied. 
Privacy is not up for discussion. 
This is not a question between privacy against security. 
It's a question of freedom against control. 
And while we might trust our governments right now, right here in 2011, any rights we give away will be given away for good. 
And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now? 
And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years. 

The things we make have one supreme quality -- they live longer than us. 
We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. 
Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many. 
I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography -- or rather the biographies -- of one particular object, one remarkable thing. 
It doesn't, I agree, look very much. 
It's about the size of a rugby ball. 
It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. 
And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. 
But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. 
And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet. 
The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. 
And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast -- because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. 
And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. 
What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. 
And you all know roughly the story. 
Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. 
Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. 
He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. 
And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. 
Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. 
And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. 
He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia. 
And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians." 
And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. 
It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. 
It's a great story. It's story we all know. 
"The writing on the wall" is part of our everyday language. 
What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story. 
Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight -- the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. 
And Cyrus makes a declaration. 
And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. 
In ringing Babylonian -- it was written in Babylonian -- he says, "I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world." 
They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. 
This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. 
And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. 
So the hyperbole is not actually surprising. 
And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? 
He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians -- Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar -- have captured and enslaved go free. 
He'll let them return to their countries. 
And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. 
All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. 
And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. 
This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. 
They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. 
It's a central document in Jewish history. 
And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. 
This is the Jewish version of the same story. 
"Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. 
Who is there among you of his people? 
The Lord God be with him, and let him go up.'" "Go up" -- aaleh. 
The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. 
As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. 
And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay. 
Two great texts, what about the politics? 
What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. 
The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. 
Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. 
And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. 
This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. 
It was the largest empire the world had known until then. 
Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. 
And it had to be run in a quite new way. 
It had to be run in different languages. 
The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. 
And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. 
All of those are respected by Cyrus. 
Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. 
And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. 
It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. 
The Greek invasions ended that. 
And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. 
But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central. 
The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "Cyropaedia" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. 
And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. 
This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. 
And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. 
Jefferson was a great admirer -- the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state. 
Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. 
After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost -- until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. 
And it enters now another story. 
It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? 
We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. 
No other evidence. 
Suddenly, this appeared. 
And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. 
It's a great 19th century moment. 
But -- and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated -- the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. 
Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. 
The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. 
And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. 
"Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name." 
Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. 
Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. 
And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk. 
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. 
For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. 
It can only be Jehovah. 
And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel -- the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. 
It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact. 
God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. 
The question is, which god was it? 
And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. 
And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. 
And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me." 
I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. 
And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. 
Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts. 
(Laughter) That's 1879. 
40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. 
This time, the real politics of the contemporary world -- the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. 
And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. 
And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side -- the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. 
And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. 
You all know what happened. 
The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. 
And another story of the cylinder begins. 
The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. 
And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. 
When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. 
Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah. 
10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. 
Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran -- until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. 
Then another Iran-Iraq war. 
And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. 
It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians -- Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. 
And the obvious emblem is Cyrus. 
So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. 
It's the only object they want. 
They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. 
And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. 
It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. 
It was a huge event. 
This is the other side of that same picture. 
It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. 
This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. 
And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder -- Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. 
And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of. 
To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. 
It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. 
Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? 
Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? 
This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. 
Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. 
It was a narrative presented by the president himself. 
And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. 
It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. 
It stands with the American constitution. 
It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. 
It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region. 
A replica of this is at the United Nations. 
In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. 
And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. 
It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. 
And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? 
The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely -- a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate. 
In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. 
But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. 
I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. 
I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there's a great deal of hopelessness. 
And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. 
And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity. 
And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world. 
And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't. 
And I mention that because I think identity is really important. 
And we've had some fantastic presentations. 
And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful. 
If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things. 
And so I want to talk about the power of identity. 
And I didn't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do. 
I actually learned about this from my grandmother. 
I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. 
She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. 
She was the end of every argument in our family. 
She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. 
She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. 
Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's. 
She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world. 
And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving. 
When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs. 
And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go. 
And an hour or two later, if I saw her, she'd come over to me and she'd say, "Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?" 
And if I said, "No," she'd assault me again, and if I said, "Yes," she'd leave me alone. 
And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her. 
And the only challenge was that she had 10 children. 
My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids. 
And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention. 
My cousins would be running around everywhere. 
And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around. 
And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me. 
And at first I thought we were playing a game. 
And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious. 
And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this, she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said, "Come on, Bryan. You and I are going to have a talk." 
And I remember this just like it happened yesterday. 
I never will forget it. 
She took me out back and she said, "Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you don't tell anybody what I tell you." 
I said, "Okay, Mama." 
She said, "Now you make sure you don't do that." I said, "Sure." 
Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, "I want you to know I've been watching you." 
And she said, "I think you're special." 
She said, "I think you can do anything you want to do." 
I will never forget it. 
And then she said, "I just need you to promise me three things, Bryan." 
I said, "Okay, Mama." 
She said, "The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom." 
She said, "That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her." 
Well I adored my mom, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." 
Then she said, "The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing." 
And I thought about it and I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." 
Then finally she said, "The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol." 
(Laughter) Well I was nine years old, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." 
I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger. 
When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer -- I don't know where he got it -- and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. 
And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. 
And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. 
I said, "No, no, no. That's okay. You all go ahead. I'm not going to have any beer." 
My brother said, "Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do. 
I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer." 
I said, "No, I don't feel right about that. Y'all go ahead. Y'all go ahead." 
And then my brother started staring at me. 
He said, "What's wrong with you? Have some beer." 
Then he looked at me real hard and he said, "Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you." 
(Laughter) I said, "Well, what are you talking about?" 
He said, "Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special." 
(Laughter) I was devastated. 
(Laughter) And I'm going to admit something to you. 
I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. 
I know this might be broadcast broadly. 
But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol. 
(Applause) I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity. 
When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. 
We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do. 
When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special. 
My grandfather was in prison during prohibition. 
My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases. 
And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to. 
Well I've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. 
This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. 
In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. 
Today, there are 2.3 million. 
The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. 
We have seven million people on probation and parole. 
And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world. 
In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes. 
One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. 
In urban communities across this country -- Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole. 
Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty. 
We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. 
Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes. 
And yet, we seem to be very comfortable. 
The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems. 
We've been disconnected. 
It's interesting to me. 
We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work. 
My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction. 
Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. 
We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. 
And there is this stunning silence. 
I represent children. 
A lot of my clients are very young. 
The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. 
We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. 
And we're actually doing some litigation. 
The only country in the world. 
I represent people on death row. 
It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. 
In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? 
And that's a very sensible question. 
But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. 
The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill? 
I mean, it's fascinating. 
Death penalty in America is defined by error. 
For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. 
A kind of astonishing error rate -- one out of nine people innocent. 
I mean, it's fascinating. 
In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. 
But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. 
It's not our problem. 
It's not our burden. 
It's not our struggle. 
I talk a lot about these issues. 
I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. 
And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery. 
I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. 
We don't really know very much about it. 
But for African-Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. 
In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. 
They had to worry about being bombed. 
It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. 
And these older people come up to me now and they say, "Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11." 
They tell me to say, "No, tell them that we grew up with that." 
And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid. 
And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. 
We don't like to talk about our history. 
And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. 
We're constantly running into each other. 
We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. 
We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. 
In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. 
In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that. 
I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. 
It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, "Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about." 
He said, "We don't have the death penalty in Germany. 
And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany." 
And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. 
It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people." 
And I thought about that. 
What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? 
I couldn't bear it. 
It would be unconscionable. 
And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people -- where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. 
And yet, there is this disconnect. 
Well I believe that our identity is at risk. 
That when we actually don't care about these difficult things, the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated. 
We love innovation. 
We love technology. We love creativity. 
We love entertainment. 
But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization. 
And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two. 
Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world. 
And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED. 
But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives. 
You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen. 
We do. As rational as we are, as committed to intellect as we are. 
Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone. 
They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart. 
And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things. 
Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this. 
He said, "When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness." 
Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in. 
There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, to exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. 
Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this. 
It will get to you. 
I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. 
And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott -- amazing African-American woman -- and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. 
And these women would get together and just talk. 
And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she'd say, "Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We're going to get together and talk. 
Do you want to come over and listen?" 
And I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am, I do." 
And she'd say, "Well what are you going to do when you get here?" 
I said, "I'm going to listen." 
And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen. 
It would be so energizing and so empowering. 
And one time I was over there listening to these women talk, and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, "Now Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. 
Tell me what you're trying to do." 
And I began giving her my rap. 
I said, "Well we're trying to challenge injustice. 
We're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted. 
We're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice. 
We're trying to end life without parole sentences for children. 
We're trying to do something about the death penalty. 
We're trying to reduce the prison population. 
We're trying to end mass incarceration." 
I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished she looked at me and she said, "Mmm mmm mmm." 
She said, "That's going to make you tired, tired, tired." 
(Laughter) And that's when Ms. Carr leaned forward, she put her finger in my face, she said, "That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave." 
And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. 
We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. 
Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. 
I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. 
It's just taught me very simple things. 
I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. 
I believe that for every person on the planet. 
I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. 
I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. 
I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. 
And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. 
I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. 
I don't believe that. 
I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. 
And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. 
Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. 
Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are. 
I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story. 
I sometimes push too hard. 
I do get tired, as we all do. 
Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important. 
And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences. 
And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult. 
I start thinking, well, how did that happen? 
How can a judge turn you into something that you're not? 
And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid. 
And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. 
Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. 
You should ask for some of that. 
And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. 
And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. 
And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive." 
(Applause) And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct. 
There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct. 
And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it? 
And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court. 
(Applause) A couple months went by, and I had just forgotten all about it. 
And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case. 
And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed -- overwhelmed. 
And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse. 
And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful. 
And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse. 
And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse. 
When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, "Who are you?" 
I said, "I'm a lawyer." He said, "You're a lawyer?" I said, "Yes, sir." 
And this man came over to me and he hugged me. 
And he whispered in my ear. 
He said, "I'm so proud of you." 
And I have to tell you, it was energizing. 
It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful. 
Well I went into the courtroom. 
And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in. 
He said, "Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?" 
I said, "Yes, sir. I did." And we started arguing. 
And people started coming in because they were just outraged. 
I had written these crazy things. 
And police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers. 
And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality. 
And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth. 
And he kept looking through the window, and he could hear all of this holler. 
He kept pacing back and forth. 
And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table. 
About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break. 
And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court. 
And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. 
He said, "Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?" 
And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, "I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on." 
I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 
That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. 
That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. 
That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. 
And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue. 
Other than writing a check, what could we do? 
BS: Well there are opportunities all around us. 
If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment. 
For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years -- one billion dollars. 
And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest. 
56 percent of all rape cases don't result. 
So there's an opportunity to change that. 
And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety. 
And I think that opportunity exists all around us. 
CA: There's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades. 
And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates. 
What would you say to someone who believed that? 
BS: Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable. 
The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories. 
It was this misguided war on drugs. 
That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population. 
And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment. 
And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized. 
I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less. 
And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one. 
And I think that's the orientation that we have to change. 
(Applause) CA: Bryan, you've struck a massive chord here. 
You're an inspiring person. 
Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I am an immigrant from Uganda living in the United States while waiting for my asylum application to go through. 
Migrants do not enjoy much freedom of movement in our world today. 
This certainly applies to those who are desperate enough to navigate choppy and stormy seas in boats. 
These are the risks my cousins from West Africa and North Africa face while trying to cross over to Europe. 
Indeed, it is a rare but fortunate opportunity for a migrant to address a gathering like this. 
But this also signifies what often is missing in the global debate over refugees, migrants and immigrants, voices of the disenfranchised. 
Citizens of many host countries, even those that previously welcomed newcomers, are uneasy about the rising numbers of individuals coming into their countries. 
The immediate criticism is that the newcomers upend the stability of social welfare and employment in their countries. 
Uncertain and skeptical citizens look towards politicians who are competing against each other to see who can claim the prize of the loudest voice of populism and nationalism. 
It is a contest of who is the toughest on migrants, the most willing to impose travel bans and the most eager to propose projects in building walls. 
All these restrictions simply address symptoms of the problem, not the causes. 
Why are they coming? 
Migrants can share perspectives, if only politicians would be willing to listen. 
In Dubai, I chronicled injustices and inequalities inflicted regularly on the migrant labor force. 
As a result, pressures from the governments of the respective countries led to me being forced out of my career as a journalist in the Middle East. 
I was deported to Uganda, where economic deprivation puts everyone at the risk of starvation. 
I fled Uganda to come to the United States in the hope of sustaining a voice for my brothers and sisters who experience a more serious plight as migrants. 
My father told me he was not happy about me writing a book that risked deportation and unemployment. 
He had been diabetic for many years when I still worked in Dubai, and my salary was always sufficient to pay for his treatments. 
After I was expelled, I could not afford to sustain his treatment, and even in the last days of his life, I could not afford to take him to a hospital. 
As I carried his body in my hands to lay it in the ground in June of last year, I realized I had paid a profound price for amplifying my voice. 
The act of speaking up against injustices that are multilayered is never easy, because the problems require more than just rhetoric. 
So long as gold mines, oilfields and large farms in Africa continue to be owned by foreign investors and those vital resources are shipped to the West, the stream of African migrants will flow continuously. 
There are no restrictions that could ever be so rigorous to stop the wave of migration that has determined our human history. 
Before border controls can be tightened and new visa restrictions imposed, countries that have long received migrants should engage in a more open discussion. 
That is the only practical start for reconciling, finally, a legacy of exploitation, slavery, colonialism and imperialism, so that together, we can move forward in creating a more just global economy in the 21st century -- one that benefits all. 

My talk today is about something maybe a couple of you have already heard about. 
It's called the Arab Spring. 
Anyone heard of it? 
(Applause) So in 2011, power shifted, from the few to the many, from oval offices to central squares, from carefully guarded airwaves to open-source networks. 
But before Tahrir was a global symbol of liberation, there were representative surveys already giving people a voice in quieter but still powerful ways. 
I study Muslim societies around the world at Gallup. 
Since 2001, we've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people -- young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate. 
My talk today draws on this research to reveal why Arabs rose up and what they want now. 
Now this region's very diverse, and every country is unique. 
But those who revolted shared a common set of grievances and have similar demands today. 
I'm going to focus a lot of my talk on Egypt. 
It has nothing to do with the fact that I was born there, of course. 
But it's the largest Arab country and it's also one with a great deal of influence. 
But I'm going to end by widening the lens to the entire region to look at the mundane topics of Arab views of religion and politics and how this impacts women, revealing some surprises along the way. 
So after analyzing mounds of data, what we discovered was this: Unemployment and poverty alone did not lead to the Arab revolts of 2011. 
If an act of desperation by a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions, it was the difference between what Arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel. 
To tell you what I mean, consider this trend in Egypt. 
On paper the country was doing great. 
In fact, it attracted accolades from multinational organizations because of its economic growth. 
But under the surface was a very different reality. 
In 2010, right before the revolution, even though GDP per capita had been growing at five percent for several years, Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives. 
Now this is very unusual, because globally we find that, not surprisingly, people feel better as their country gets richer. 
And that's because they have better job opportunities and their state offers better social services. 
But it was exactly the opposite in Egypt. 
As the country got more well-off, unemployment actually rose and people's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted. 
But it wasn't just anger at economic injustice. 
It was also people's deep longing for freedom. 
Contrary to the clash of civilizations theory, Arabs didn't despise Western liberty, they desired it. 
As early as 2001, we asked Arabs, and Muslims in general around the world, what they admired most about the West. 
Among the most frequent responses was liberty and justice. 
In their own words to an open-ended question we heard, "Their political system is transparent and it's following democracy in its true sense." 
Another said it was "liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other." 
Majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in Egypt, Indonesia and Iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right, especially in Egypt. 
Eighty-eight percent said moving toward greater democracy would help Muslims progress -- the highest percentage of any country we surveyed. 
But pressed up against these democratic aspirations was a very different day-to-day experience, especially in Egypt. 
While aspiring to democracy the most, they were the least likely population in the world to say that they had actually voiced their opinion to a public official in the last month -- at only four percent. 
So while economic development made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. 
As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for. 
So rather than viewing their former regimes as generous if overprotective fathers, they viewed them as essentially prison wardens. 
So now that Egyptians have ended Mubarak's 30-year rule, they potentially could be an example for the region. 
If Egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law, it could be a model. 
If, however, the core issues that propelled the revolution aren't addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic -- not just for Egypt, but for the entire region. 
The signs don't look good, some have said. 
Islamists, not the young liberals that sparked the revolution, won the majority in Parliament. 
The military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country's economy continues to suffer. 
Evaluating Egypt on this basis alone, however, ignores the real revolution. 
Because Egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years, far less divided on religious-secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy. 
Whether they support Islamists or liberals, Egyptians' priorities for this government are identical, and they are jobs, stability and education, not moral policing. 
But most of all, for the first time in decades, they expect to be active participants, not spectators, in the affairs of their country. 
I was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from Egypt and Tunisia a couple of weeks ago. 
And what really struck me about them was that they weren't only optimistic, but they kind of struck me as nervous, for lack of a better word. 
One said to me, "Our people used to gather in cafes to watch football" -- or soccer, as we say in America -- "and now they gather to watch Parliament." 
(Laughter) "They're really watching us, and we can't help but worry that we're not going to live up to their expectations." 
And what really struck me is that less than 24 months ago, it was the people that were nervous about being watched by their government. 
And the reason that they're expecting a lot is because they have a new-found hope for the future. 
So right before the revolution we said that Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives, but not only that, they thought their future would be no better. 
What really changed after the ouster of Mubarak wasn't that life got easier. 
It actually got harder. 
But people's expectations for their future went up significantly. 
And this hope, this optimism, endured a year of turbulent transition. 
One reason that there's this optimism is because, contrary to what many people have said, most Egyptians think things really have changed in many ways. 
So while Egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution, the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout -- men and women. 
Where scarcely a quarter believed in the honesty of elections in 2010 -- I'm surprised it was a quarter -- 90 percent thought that this last election was honest. 
Now why this matters is because we discovered a link between people's faith in their democratic process and their faith that oppressed people can change their situation through peaceful means alone. 
(Applause) Now I know what some of you are thinking. 
The Egyptian people, and many other Arabs who've revolted and are in transition, have very high expectations of the government. 
They're just victims of a long-time autocracy, expecting a paternal state to solve all their problems. 
But this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in Egypt far from the cameras in Tahrir Square. 
And that is Egyptians' elevated expectations are placed first on themselves. 
In the country once known for its passive resignation, where, as bad as things got, only four percent expressed their opinion to a public official, today 90 percent tell us that if there's a problem in their community, it's up to them to fix it. 
(Applause) And three-fourths believe they not only have the responsibility, but the power to make change. 
And this empowerment also applies to women, whose role in the revolts cannot be underestimated. 
They were doctors and dissidents, artists and organizers. 
A full third of those who braved tanks and tear gas to ask or to demand liberty and justice in Egypt were women. 
(Applause) Now people have raised some real concerns about what the rise of Islamist parties means for women. 
What we've found about the role of religion in law and the role of religion in society is that there's no female consensus. 
We found that women in one country look more like the men in that country than their female counterparts across the border. 
Now what this suggests is that how women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women. 
Where women agree, however, is on their own role, and that it must be central and active. 
And here is where we see the greatest gender difference within a country -- on the issue of women's rights. 
Now how men feel about women's rights matters to the future of this region. 
Because we discovered a link between men's support for women's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country. 
So the question becomes, What drives men's support for women's rights? 
What about men's views of religion and law? 
[Does] a man's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women's rights? 
The answer is no. 
We found absolutely no correlation, no impact whatsoever, between these two variables. 
What drives men's support for women's employment is men's employment, their level of education as well as a high score on their country's U.N. Human Development Index. 
What this means is that human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East. 
And the transformation continues. 
From Wall Street to Mohammed Mahmoud Street, it has never been more important to understand the aspirations of ordinary people. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I collaborate with bacteria. 
And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour. 
So what you're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing, and as they do so they create an electrical charge. 
And this attracts metals from their local environment. 
And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria. 
One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water. 
And the desalination process is one where we take out salts. 
We can use it for drinking and agriculture. 
Removing the salts from water -- particularly seawater -- through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe. 
So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology. 
We take the water from the sea and we apply pressure. 
And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane. 
This takes energy, producing clean water. 
But we're also left with a concentrated salt solution, or brine. 
But the process is very expensive and it's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe. 
And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea. 
And this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it's pumped back out into. 
So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology. 
And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [900] million liters per day of desalinated water. 
But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine. 
And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play. 
So what we're doing at the moment is we're accumulating metals like calcium, potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine. 
And this, in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned, equates to a $4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore -- a place that doesn't have any natural resources. 
So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before; imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine. 
And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube, a mining industry that is in harmony with nature. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was going to talk about today. 
We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln. 
He was sitting at the same table, doing his math homework. 
And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine. 
My client was a guy named Will. 
He was from North Texas. 
He never knew his father very well, because his father left his mom while she was pregnant with him. 
And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old, she tried to kill him with a butcher knife. 
She was taken away by authorities and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Will lived with his older brother, until he committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart. 
And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own. 
That morning that I was sitting with Katya and Lincoln, I looked at my son, and I realized that when my client, Will, was his age, he'd been living by himself for two years. 
Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder. 
And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime. 
But I don't want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment. 
I certainly think that my client shouldn't have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way I've never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial. 
I think that's possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate -- maybe the most important corner -- where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous abolitionists are on exactly the same page. 
That's the corner I want to explore. 
Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way. 
You can think of a death penalty case as a story that has four chapters. 
The first chapter of every case is exactly the same, and it is tragic. 
It begins with the murder of an innocent human being, and it's followed by a trial where the murderer is convicted and sent to death row, and that death sentence is ultimately upheld by the state appellate court. 
The second chapter consists of a complicated legal proceeding known as a state habeas corpus appeal. 
The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding. 
And the fourth chapter is one where a variety of things can happen. 
The lawyers might file a clemency petition, they might initiate even more complex litigation, or they might not do anything at all. 
But that fourth chapter always ends with an execution. 
When I started representing death row inmates more than 20 years ago, people on death row did not have a right to a lawyer in either the second or the fourth chapter of this story. 
They were on their own. 
In fact, it wasn't until the late 1980s that they acquired a right to a lawyer during the third chapter of the story. 
So what all of these death row inmates had to do was rely on volunteer lawyers to handle their legal proceedings. 
The problem is that there were way more guys on death row than there were lawyers who had both the interest and the expertise to work on these cases. 
And so inevitably, lawyers drifted to cases that were already in chapter four -- that makes sense, of course. 
Those are the cases that are most urgent; those are the guys who are closest to being executed. 
Some of these lawyers were successful; they managed to get new trials for their clients. 
Others of them managed to extend the lives of their clients, sometimes by years, sometimes by months. 
But the one thing that didn't happen was that there was never a serious and sustained decline in the number of annual executions in Texas. 
In fact, as you can see from this graph, from the time that the Texas execution apparatus got efficient in the mid- to late 1990s, there have only been a couple of years where the number of annual executions dipped below 20. 
In a typical year in Texas, we're averaging about two people a month. 
In some years in Texas, we've executed close to 40 people, and this number has never significantly declined over the last 15 years. 
And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply. 
So we have this paradox, which is that the number of annual executions has remained high but the number of new death sentences has gone down. 
Why is that? 
It can't be attributed to a decline in the murder rate, because the murder rate has not declined nearly so steeply as the red line on that graph has gone down. 
What has happened instead is that juries have started to sentence more and more people to prison for the rest of their lives without the possibility of parole, rather than sending them to the execution chamber. 
Why has that happened? 
It hasn't happened because of a dissolution of popular support for the death penalty. 
Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low. 
Do you know what all-time low in Texas means? 
It means that it's in the low 60 percent. 
Now, that's really good compared to the mid-1980s, when it was in excess of 80 percent, but we can't explain the decline in death sentences and the affinity for life without the possibility of parole by an erosion of support for the death penalty, because people still support the death penalty. 
What's happened to cause this phenomenon? 
What's happened is that lawyers who represent death row inmates have shifted their focus to earlier and earlier chapters of the death penalty story. 
So 25 years ago, they focused on chapter four. 
And they went from chapter four 25 years ago to chapter three in the late 1980s. 
And they went from chapter three in the late 1980s to chapter two in the mid-1990s. 
And beginning in the mid- to late 1990s, they began to focus on chapter one of the story. 
Now, you might think that this decline in death sentences and the increase in the number of life sentences is a good thing or a bad thing. 
I don't want to have a conversation about that today. 
All that I want to tell you is that the reason that this has happened is because death penalty lawyers have understood that the earlier you intervene in a case, the greater the likelihood that you're going to save your client's life. 
That's the first thing I've learned. 
Here's the second thing I learned: My client Will was not the exception to the rule; he was the rule. 
I sometimes say, if you tell me the name of a death row inmate -- doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before -- I'll write his biography for you. 
And eight out of 10 times, the details of that biography will be more or less accurate. 
And the reason for that is that 80 percent of the people on death row are people who came from the same sort of dysfunctional family that Will did. 
Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system. 
That's the second lesson that I've learned. 
Now we're right on the cusp of that corner where everybody's going to agree. 
People in this room might disagree about whether Will should have been executed, but I think everybody would agree that the best possible version of his story would be a story where no murder ever occurs. 
How do we do that? 
When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem. 
And he was learning how, when you have a big old gnarly problem, sometimes the solution is to slice it into smaller problems. 
That's what we do for most problems -- in math, in physics, even in social policy -- we slice them into smaller, more manageable problems. 
But every once in a while, as Dwight Eisenhower said, the way you solve a problem is to make it bigger. 
The way we solve this problem is to make the issue of the death penalty bigger. 
We have to say, all right. 
We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins? 
How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer? 
What options do we have to nudge that person off of the path that is going to lead to a result that everybody -- death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents -- still think is a bad result: the murder of an innocent human being? 
You know, sometimes people say that something isn't rocket science. 
And by that, what they mean is rocket science is really complicated and this problem that we're talking about now is really simple. 
Well that's rocket science; that's the mathematical expression for the thrust created by a rocket. 
What we're talking about today is just as complicated. 
What we're talking about today is also rocket science. 
My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story. 
I think of these five chapters as points of intervention, places in their lives when our society could've intervened in their lives and nudged them off of the path that they were on that created a consequence that we all -- death penalty supporters or death penalty opponents -- say was a bad result. 
Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system -- during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done. 
In fact, if we just imagine that there are five different modes of intervention, the way that society could intervene in each of those five chapters, and we could mix and match them any way we want, there are 3,000 -- more than 3,000 -- possible strategies that we could embrace in order to nudge kids like Will off of the path that they're on. 
So I'm not standing here today with the solution. 
But the fact that we still have a lot to learn, that doesn't mean that we don't know a lot already. 
We know from experience in other states that there are a wide variety of modes of intervention that we could be using in Texas, and in every other state that isn't using them, in order to prevent a consequence that we all agree is bad. 
I'll just mention a few. 
I won't talk today about reforming the legal system. 
That's probably a topic that is best reserved for a room full of lawyers and judges. 
Instead, let me talk about a couple of modes of intervention that we can all help accomplish, because they are modes of intervention that will come about when legislators and policymakers, when taxpayers and citizens, agree that that's what we ought to be doing and that's how we ought to be spending our money. 
We could be providing early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free. 
And we could be nudging kids like Will off of the path that we're on. 
There are other states that do that, but we don't. 
We could be providing special schools, at both the high school level and the middle school level, but even in K-5, that target economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids, and particularly kids who have had exposure to the juvenile justice system. 
There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't. 
There's one other thing we can be doing -- well, there are a bunch of other things -- there's one other thing that I'm going to mention, and this is going to be the only controversial thing that I say today. 
We could be intervening much more aggressively into dangerously dysfunctional homes, and getting kids out of them before their moms pick up butcher knives and threaten to kill them. 
If we're going to do that, we need a place to put them. 
Even if we do all of those things, some kids are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to end up in that last chapter before the murder story begins, they're going to end up in the juvenile justice system. 
And even if that happens, it's not yet too late. 
There's still time to nudge them, if we think about nudging them rather than just punishing them. 
There are two professors in the Northeast -- one at Yale and one at Maryland -- they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison. 
And the kids are in prison, but they go to school from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. 
Now, it was logistically difficult. 
They had to recruit teachers who wanted to teach inside a prison, they had to establish strict separation between the people who work at the school and the prison authorities, and most dauntingly of all, they needed to invent a new curriculum because you know what? 
People don't come into and out of prison on a semester basis. 
(Laughter) But they did all those things. 
Now, what do all of these things have in common? 
What all of these things have in common is that they cost money. 
Some of the people in the room might be old enough to remember the guy on the old oil filter commercial. 
He used to say, "Well, you can pay me now or you can pay me later." 
What we're doing in the death penalty system is we're paying later. 
But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. 
Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense. 
I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. 
It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. 
There was nothing left to do in his case. 
And we were talking about his life. 
And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive. 
And I said to him, "I know the story. 
I've read the records. 
I know that she tried to kill you." 
I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." 
I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. 
Maybe you just remember somebody telling you." 
And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. 
He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." 
I hope there's one thing you all won't forget: In between the time you arrived here this morning and the time we break for lunch, there are going to be four homicides in the United States. 
We're going to devote enormous social resources to punishing the people who commit those crimes, and that's appropriate because we should punish people who do bad things. 
But three of those crimes are preventable. 
If we make the picture bigger and devote our attention to the earlier chapters, then we're never going to write the first sentence that begins the death penalty story. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. 
And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s. 
And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. 
She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work. 
And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease. 
But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it. 
The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. 
Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families. 
So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly? 
Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. 
In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize. 
And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data. 
Now, she had no idea what to look for. 
This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of. 
Had the children eaten boiled sweets? 
Had they consumed colored drinks? 
Did they eat fish and chips? 
Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing? 
What time of life had they started school? 
And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. 
By a rate of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant. 
Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom. 
Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold. 
It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. 
And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them. 
Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. 
People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared. 
In fact, she need not have hurried. 
It was fully 25 years before the British and medical -- British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women. 
The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. 
A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. 
Openness alone can't drive change. 
So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands. 
So, how did she know that she was right? 
Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking. 
She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't. 
So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. 
Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. 
George frankly preferred numbers to people. 
But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. 
He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong." 
He actively sought disconfirmation. 
Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her. 
He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. 
Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right. 
It's a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who aren't echo chambers. 
I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. 
Alice and George were very good at conflict. 
They saw it as thinking. 
So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? 
Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. 
That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. 
That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy. 
And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. 
Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care. 
And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. 
Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again. 
"My mother," she said, "My mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them." 
So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship. 
But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals, they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives. 
So how do organizations think? 
Well, for the most part, they don't. 
And that isn't because they don't want to, it's really because they can't. 
And they can't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict. 
In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise. 
Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage, and felt that they were bound to lose. 
Eighty-five percent is a really big number. 
It means that organizations mostly can't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did. 
They can't think together. 
And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them. 
So how do we develop the skills that we need? 
Because it does take skill and practice, too. 
If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it. 
So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company. 
And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on. 
He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people. 
He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help. 
But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried. 
So, he didn't really want to say anything. 
After all, maybe they knew something he didn't. 
Maybe he'd look stupid. 
But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved. 
In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns. 
And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation. 
It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts. 
So now Joe had allies. They could think together. 
And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device. 
Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower, except that like almost all whistle-blowers, he wasn't a crank at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served. 
But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence. 
And when he dared to speak, he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined. 
And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank. 
They think of him as a leader. 
So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often? 
Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend. 
It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority. 
I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life. 
I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society. 
The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. 
It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. 
But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking. 
Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. 
But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. 
Openness isn't the end. 
It's the beginning. 
(Applause) 

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

Today I have just one request. 
Please don't tell me I'm normal. 
Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers. 
Remi is 22, tall and very handsome. 
He's speechless, but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot. 
Remi knows what love is. 
He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless. 
He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color. 
He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie. 
When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be. 
Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome. 
He has the most impeccable memory. 
He has a selective one, though. 
He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday. 
Don't they sound incredible? 
But most people don't agree. 
And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood. 
But what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case, although they were not seen as ordinary, this could only mean one thing: that they were extraordinary -- autistic and extraordinary. 
Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism," it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills. 
It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam. 
And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure. 
And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it. 
I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life. 
And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different. 
He screamed a lot. 
He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever. 
Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between. 
And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious. 
Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied. 
Extraordinary. 
Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me. 
But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality. 
Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong. 
It just means that there's a different kind of right. 
And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal. 
You can be extraordinary. 
Because autistic or not, the differences that we have -- We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. 
The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else. 
Please -- don't tell me I'm normal. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 

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

Salaam alaikum. 
Welcome to Doha. 
I am in charge of making this country's food secure. 
That is my job for the next two years, to design an entire master plan, and then for the next 10 years to implement it -- of course, with so many other people. 
But first, I need to talk to you about a story, which is my story, about the story of this country that you're all here in today. 
And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event. 
So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s? 
We were about 11,000 people living here. 
There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that. 
Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water. 
None of the glamour that you see today existed. 
No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh. 
It wasn't that they couldn't develop cities. 
Resources weren't there to develop them. 
And you can see that life expectancy was also short. 
Most people died around the age of 50. 
So let's move to chapter two: the oil era. 
1939, that's when they discovered oil. 
But unfortunately, it wasn't really fully exploited commercially until after the Second World War. 
What did it do? 
It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness. 
It also made all those people who roamed around the desert -- looking for water, looking for food, trying to take care of their livestock -- urbanize. 
You might find this strange, but in my family we have different accents. 
My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country. 
There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak. 
Someone says, "How so? How could this happen?" 
Because we lived scattered. 
We couldn't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources. 
And when the resources came, be it oil, we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration. 
People started to get to know each other. 
And we realized that there are some differences in accents. 
So that is the chapter two: the oil era. 
Let's look at today. 
This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha. 
So what's the population today? 
It's 1.7 million people. 
That is in less than 60 years. 
The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years. 
Lifespan has increased to 78. 
Water consumption has increased to 430 liters. 
And this is amongst the highest worldwide. 
From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation. 
I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water. 
But what is interesting about the story that I've just said? 
The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water. 
Now that is historic. It's never happened before in history. 
Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water. 
This is history being made in this region. 
Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors. 
Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house. 
These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't. 
But of course, with the use of technology. 
So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain. 
Qatar has 74, and we have that growth rate. 
The question is how. 
How could we survive that? 
We have no water whatsoever. 
Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination. 
Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything. 
It is that thing that we pump out of the ground, we burn tons of, probably most of you used it coming to Doha. 
So that is our lake, if you can see it. 
That is our river. 
That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water. 
This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination. 
So what are the risks? 
Do you worry much? 
I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts, you will realize, of course I have to worry. 
There is growing demand, growing population. 
We've turned seven billion only a few months ago. 
And so that number also demands food. 
And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050. 
So a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders. 
There's also changing diets. 
By elevating to a higher socio-economic level, they also change their diet. 
They start eating more meat and so on and so forth. 
On the other hand, there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors. 
And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen. 
This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know. 
We only have two days of water reserve. 
We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land. 
The limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions, etc., etc. 
So we also face risks. 
These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity. 
The question is, is there a solution? 
Is there a sustainable solution? 
Indeed there is. 
This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we've been working on over the past two years. 
Let's start with the water. 
So we know very well -- I showed you earlier -- that we need this energy. 
So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy? 
A depletable energy? Fossil fuel? 
Or should we use something else? 
Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy? 
I guess most of you by now realize that we do: 300 days of sun. 
And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need. 
And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water. 
And that is a lot of water. 
That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food. 
But in order to sustain the horizontal line -- because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver -- we need to also develop the vertical line: system sustenance, high-level education, research and development, industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets. 
But what gels all of it, what enables it, is legislation, policies, regulations. 
Without it we can't do anything. 
So that's what we are planning to do. 
Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation. 
Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around: Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo. 
We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was born and raised in North Korea. 
Although my family constantly struggled against poverty, I was always loved and cared for first, because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family. 
But then the great famine began in 1994. 
I was four years old. 
My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight. 
I would wander the streets searching for food, and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother's back eating chips, and wanting to steal them from him. 
Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness. 
For a hungry child, politics and freedom are not even thought of. 
On my ninth birthday, my parents couldn't give me any food to eat. 
But even as a child, I could feel the heaviness in their hearts. 
Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time, and in 2003, when I was 13 years old, my father became one of them. 
I saw my father wither away and die. 
In the same year, my mother disappeared one day, and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money, but that she would return with money and food soon. 
Since we had never been separated, and I thought we would be together forever, I didn't even give her a hug when she left. 
It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. 
But again, I didn't know it was going to be a long goodbye. 
I have not seen my mom or my sister since then. 
Suddenly, I became an orphan and homeless. 
My daily life became very hard, but very simple. 
My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash. 
But that is no way to survive. 
I started to realize, begging would not be the solution. 
So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets. 
Sometimes, I found small jobs in exchange for food. 
Once, I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine, 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day. 
I was not uncommon. 
Many other orphans survived this way, or worse. 
When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped that, the next morning, my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food. 
That hope kept me alive. 
I don't mean big, grand hope. 
I mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread, even though it usually didn't. 
But if I didn't believe it, I wouldn't even try, and then I would die. 
Hope kept me alive. 
Every day, I told myself, no matter how hard things got, still I must live. 
After three years of waiting for my sister's return, I decided to go to China to look for her myself. 
I realized I couldn't survive much longer this way. 
I knew the journey would be risky, but I would be risking my life either way. 
I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea, or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China. 
I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen. 
North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission. 
Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans, where they face severe punishment. 
I decided to cross during the day, first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark, second because I knew I was already taking a risk, and since not many people tried to cross during the day, I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone. 
I made it to China on February 15, 2006. 
I was 16 years old. 
I thought things in China would be easier, since there was more food. 
I thought more people would help me. 
But it was harder than living in North Korea, because I was not free. 
I was always worried about being caught and sent back. 
By a miracle, some months later, I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans, and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years. 
Later that year, an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee. 
I went to America without knowing a word of English, yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school. 
Even in North Korea, I was an F student. 
(Laughter) And I barely finished elementary school. 
And I remember I fought in school more than once a day. 
Textbooks and the library were not my playground. 
My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying, but it didn't work. 
At one point, my father gave up on me. 
He said, "You're not my son anymore." 
I was only 11 or 12, but it hurt me deeply. 
But nevertheless, my level of motivation still didn't change before he died. 
So in America, it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school. 
I didn't even go to middle school. 
I decided to go, just because they told me to, without trying much. 
But one day, I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner. 
And during dinner, I wanted to have one more wing, but I realized there were not enough for everyone, so I decided against it. 
When I looked down at my plate, I saw the last chicken wing, that my foster father had given me his. 
I was so happy. 
I looked at him sitting next to me. 
He just looked back at me very warmly, but said no words. 
Suddenly I remembered my biological father. 
My foster father's small act of love reminded me of my father, who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry, even if he was starving. 
I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America, yet my father died of starvation. 
My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him, and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him. 
And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice. 
I took school seriously, and for the first time ever in my life, I received an academic award for excellence, and made dean's list from the first semester in high school. 
(Applause) That chicken wing changed my life. 
(Laughter) Hope is personal. Hope is something that no one can give to you. 
You have to choose to believe in hope. 
You have to make it yourself. 
In North Korea, I made it myself. 
Hope brought me to America. 
But in America, I didn't know what to do, because I had this overwhelming freedom. 
My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction, and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America. 
I did not come here by myself. 
I had hope, but hope by itself is not enough. 
Many people helped me along the way to get here. 
North Koreans are fighting hard to survive. 
They have to force themselves to survive, have hope to survive, but they cannot make it without help. 
This is my message to you. 
Have hope for yourself, but also help each other. 
Life can be hard for everyone, wherever you live. 
My foster father didn't intend to change my life. 
In the same way, you may also change someone's life with even the smallest act of love. 
A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger, and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive. 
But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Adrian Hong: Joseph, thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us. 
I know you haven't seen your sister for, you said, it was almost exactly a decade, and in the off chance that she may be able to see this, we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message. 
Joseph Kim: In Korean? 
AH: You can do English, then Korean as well. 
(Laughter) JK: Okay, I'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don't think I can make it without tearing up. 
Nuna, it has been already 10 years that I haven’t seen you. 
I just wanted to say that I miss you, and I love you, and please come back to me and stay alive. 
And I -- oh, gosh. 
I still haven't given up my hope to see you. 
I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you, and I promise I will not cry again. 
(Laughter) Yes, I'm just looking forward to seeing you, and if you can't find me, I will also look for you, and I hope to see you one day. 
And can I also make a small message to my mom? 
AH: Sure, please. 
JK: I haven't spent much time with you, but I know that you still love me, and you probably still pray for me and think about me. 
I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and I believe this is true, especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success. 
Well, I can tell you that, in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system, also known as pressure cooker, not everyone can do well in that environment. 
While many people responded in different ways about our education system, my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building. 
Why bows? 
I'm not quite sure. 
Perhaps, in the face of constant pressure, my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows. 
If you think about it, the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times. 
The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty, where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves. 
In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact, the government has planted mulberry trees. 
The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 Olympics. 
The area near these walls, which nobody bothers to pay attention to, had been left free from major intervention, and this is where I first found my treasures. 
As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood. 
When I went on school field trips, family vacations, or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes, I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag. 
And they would be somethings like saws, knives, sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel. 
I would bring the branches home, riding buses and subways, barely holding them in my hands. 
And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach. 
Airport security. 
(Laughter) In the privacy of my room, covered in sawdust, I would saw, trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape. 
One day, I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire. 
Where? The rooftop of my apartment building, a place where 96 families call home. 
A customer from a department store across from my building called 911, and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned. 
I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom, in the audience today: Mom, I was really sorry, and I will be more careful with open fire from now on. 
My mother had to do a lot of explaining, telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson. 
I also researched extensively on bows around the world. 
In that process, I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow. 
I also worked with many different types of wood, such as maple, yew and mulberry, and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before. 
The most effective bow for me would be like this. 
One: Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow. 
Two: Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight, which means more power. 
Three: Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage. 
And four: Horn used to store energy in compression. 
After fixing, breaking, redesigning, mending, bending and amending, my ideal bow began to take shape, and when it was finally done, it looked like this. 
I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own. 
This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum, and see how my bow resembles them. 
Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention. (Laughter) Through bowmaking, I came in contact with part of my heritage. 
Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me. 
You see, I searched far and wide, but never bothered to look close and near. 
From this realization, I began to take interest in Korean history, which had never inspired me before. 
In the end, the grass is often greener on my side of the fence, although we don't realize it. 
Now, I am going to show you how my bow works. 
And let's see how this one works. 
This is a bamboo bow, with 45-pound draw weights. 
(Noise of shooting arrow) (Applause) A bow may function in a simple mechanism, but in order to make a good bow, a great amount of sensitivity is required. 
You need to console and communicate with the wood material. 
Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being, and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow. 
I may be an [odd] student with unconventional interests, but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you. 
My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind, where everyone is needed exactly where they are, like the fibers and the tendons in a bow, a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient. 
The bow resembles me, and I resemble the bow. 
Now, I am shooting a part of myself to you. 
No, better yet, a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind. 
Did it strike you? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

This is an ambucycle. 
This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. 
It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. 
You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. 
We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston. 
When I was looking at these pictures, it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child. 
I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem. 
When I was six years old, I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother. 
We were passing by a bus stop. 
We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes. 
The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed. 
I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up. 
He just needed someone helping him. 
We were so scared and we just ran away. 
Growing up, I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives. 
Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child. 
When I was 15, I took an EMT course, and I went to volunteer on an ambulance. 
For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem. 
I helped many people, but whenever someone really needed help, I never got there in time. We never got there. 
The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything. 
We never got there when somebody really needed us. 
One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog. 
Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. 
When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. 
A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. 
That second he declared this child dead. 
At that moment, I understood that this child died for nothing. 
If this doctor, who lived one block away from there, would have come 20 minutes earlier, not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance, if he would have heard about it way before, he would have saved this child. 
He could have run from a block away. 
He could have saved this child. 
I said to myself, there must be a better way. 
Together with 15 of my friends -- we were all EMTs — we decided, let's protect our neighborhood, so when something like that happens again, we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance. 
So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him, "Please, whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood, we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives. 
Just alert us by beeper. 
We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives." 
Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid. 
And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy, but he said to me, "Kid, go to school, or go open a falafel stand. 
We're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures. 
We're not interested in your help." And he threw me out of the room. 
"I don't need your help," he said. 
I was a very stubborn kid. 
As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you've probably all heard of, chutzpah. (Laughter) And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners, and I said, "The hell with you, if you don't want to give me information, I'll get the information myself." 
And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners. 
The next day, while I was listening to the scanners, I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood. 
I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment. 
When I got there, the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck. 
He was on Coumadin. 
I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die. 
I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment, and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding. 
He was bleeding from his neck. 
When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, I gave them over a patient who was alive. 
(Applause) When I went to visit him two days later, he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life. 
At that moment, when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance, I knew this is my life's mission. 
So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah. 
(Applause) "Hatzalah" means "rescue," for all of you who don't know Hebrew. 
I forgot I'm not in Israel. 
So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives, and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in, they just stop everything and go and run and save a life. 
Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel. 
(Applause) I'm talking about heart attacks, I'm talking about car accidents, God forbid bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is, even a woman 3 o'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her. 
Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up. 
The reasons why we're so successful are because of three things. 
Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don't even know. 
We're not there to replace ambulances. 
We're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive. 
And we save people that otherwise would not be saved. 
The second reason is because of our technology. 
You know, Israelis are good in technology. 
Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone, a GPS technology done by NowForce, and whenever a call comes in, the closest five volunteers get the call, and they actually get there really quick, and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time. 
And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time. 
And the third thing are these ambucycles. 
These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels. 
We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them, and we save their lives. 
They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk. 
They never, literally, get stuck in traffic. 
That's why we get there so fast. 
A few years after I started this organization, in a Jewish community, two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up. 
They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me. 
Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan. 
When Muhammad told me his personal story, how his father, 55 years old, collapsed at home, had a cardiac arrest, and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive, and he saw his father die in front of his eyes, he asked me, "Please start this in east Jerusalem." 
I said to myself, I saw so much tragedy, so much hate, and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims. 
It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people. 
So I went ahead, full force -- (Applause) — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem, and that's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well. 
We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs. 
Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs. 
Something special happened. 
Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together, but here in this situation, the communities, literally, it's an unbelievable situation that happened, the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest: Let's save lives together. 
Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers. 
It's an unbelievable concept that could work only when you have such a great cause. 
And these are all volunteers. 
No one is getting money. 
They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives. 
When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest, one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah. 
And he saved my father. 
Could you imagine how I felt in that moment? 
When I started this organization, I was 17 years old. 
I never imagined that one day I'd be speaking at TEDMED. 
I never even knew what TEDMED was then. 
I don't think it existed, but I never imagined, I never imagined that it's going to go all around, it's going to spread around, and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil. 
All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me, passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it. 
And I'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back. 
Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg, and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York, even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities. 
But it could spread everywhere. 
It's very easy to adopt. 
You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center. 
Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people. 
Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations. 
And we made a difference. 
I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob, and it works. 
When I look all around here, I see lots of people who would go an extra mile, run an extra mile to save other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion, no matter who, where they come from. 
We all want to be heroes. 
We just need a good idea, motivation and lots of chutzpah, and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Motor racing is a funny old business. 
We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. 
And then the next year, we start again. 
Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. 
The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. 
So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. 
So motor racing is very much about attention to detail. 
The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. 
We're always trying to make it faster. 
So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. 
Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year. 
So how do we do that? 
Well, we start our life with the racing car. 
We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. 
On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. 
It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. 
That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. 
So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. 
That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. 
It's a huge amount of data. 
But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. 
You need to be able to do something with it. 
So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? 
So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon. 
Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. 
Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. 
This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. 
It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. 
This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. 
But when we look at the information there, we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. 
We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. 
These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. 
So the question is, why couldn't we see it? 
Was this a predictable event? 
Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better? 
So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. 
It's a patient with a heart problem. 
Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? 
Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference. 
So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. 
We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. 
And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change. 
Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. 
Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? 
And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care. 
And then we started looking at the data. 
So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor -- heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. 
The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. 
The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children's Hospital were already running. 
They'd been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. 
The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. 
It's telling us that something is going wrong. 
The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. 
The green is us learning what is normal for that child. 
We call it the cloud of normality. 
And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. 
There's no rocket science here. 
It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. 
In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong. 
So we have a very ambitious program. 
We think that the race is on to do something differently. 
We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. 
We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. 
It can go beyond the walls. 
With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. 
And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

In an age of global strife and climate change, I'm here to answer the all important question: Why is sex so damn good? 
If you're laughing, you know what I mean. 
Now, before we get to that answer, let me tell you about Chris Hosmer. 
Chris is a great friend of mine from my university days, but secretly, I hate him. 
Here's why. Back in university, we had a quick project to design some solar-powered clocks. 
Here's my clock. 
It uses something called the dwarf sunflower, which grows to about 12 inches in height. 
Now, as you know, sunflowers track the sun during the course of the day. 
So in the morning, you see which direction the sunflower is facing, and you mark it on the blank area in the base. 
At noon, you mark the changed position of the sunflower, and in the evening again, and that's your clock. 
Now, I know my clock doesn't tell you the exact time, but it does give you a general idea using a flower. 
So, in my completely unbiased, subjective opinion, it's brilliant. 
However, here's Chris's clock. 
It's five magnifying glasses with a shot glass under each one. 
In each shot glass is a different scented oil. 
In the morning, the sunlight will shine down on the first magnifying glass, focusing a beam of light on the shot glass underneath. 
This will warm up the scented oil inside, and a particular smell will be emitted. 
A couple of hours later, the sun will shine on the next magnifying glass, and a different smell will be emitted. 
So during the course of the day, five different smells are dispersed throughout that environment. 
Anyone living in that house can tell the time just by the smell. 
You can see why I hate Chris. 
I thought my idea was pretty good, but his idea is genius, and at the time, I knew his idea was better than mine, but I just couldn't explain why. 
One thing you have to know about me is I hate to lose. 
This problem's been bugging me for well over a decade. 
All right, let's get back to the question of why sex is so good. 
Many years after the solar powered clocks project, a young lady I knew suggested maybe sex is so good because of the five senses. 
And when she said this, I had an epiphany. 
So I decided to evaluate different experiences I had in my life from the point of view of the five senses. 
To do this, I devised something called the five senses graph. 
Along the y-axis, you have a scale from zero to 10, and along the x-axis, you have, of course, the five senses. 
Anytime I had a memorable experience in my life, I would record it on this graph like a five senses diary. 
Here's a quick video to show you how it works. 
(Video) Jinsop Lee: Hey, my name's Jinsop, and today, I'm going to show you what riding motorbikes is like from the point of view of the five senses. Hey! 
Bike designer: This is [unclear], custom bike designer. 
(Motorcyle revving) [Sound] [Touch] [Sight] [Smell] [Taste] JL: And that's how the five senses graph works. 
Now, for a period of three years, I gathered data, not just me but also some of my friends, and I used to teach in university, so I forced my -- I mean, I asked my students to do this as well. 
So here are some other results. 
The first is for instant noodles. 
Now obviously, taste and smell are quite high, but notice sound is at three. 
Many people told me a big part of the noodle-eating experience is the slurping noise. 
You know. (Slurps) Needless to say, I no longer dine with these people. 
OK, next, clubbing. 
OK, here what I found interesting was that taste is at four, and many respondents told me it's because of the taste of drinks, but also, in some cases, kissing is a big part of the clubbing experience. 
These people I still do hang out with. 
All right, and smoking. 
Here I found touch is at [six], and one of the reasons is that smokers told me the sensation of holding a cigarette and bringing it up to your lips is a big part of the smoking experience, which shows, it's kind of scary to think how well cigarettes are designed by the manufacturers. 
OK. Now, what would the perfect experience look like on the five senses graph? 
It would, of course, be a horizontal line along the top. 
Now you can see, not even as intense an experience as riding a motorbike comes close. 
In fact, in the years that I gathered data, only one experience came close to being the perfect one. 
That is, of course, sex. Great sex. 
Respondents said that great sex hits all of the five senses at an extreme level. 
Here I'll quote one of my students who said, "Sex is so good, it's good even when it's bad." 
So the five senses theory does help explain why sex is so good. 
Now in the middle of all this five senses work, I suddenly remembered the solar-powered clocks project from my youth. 
And I realized this theory also explains why Chris's clock is so much better than mine. 
You see, my clock only focuses on sight, and a little bit of touch. 
Here's Chris's clock. 
It's the first clock ever that uses smell to tell the time. 
In fact, in terms of the five senses, Chris's clock is a revolution. 
And that's what this theory taught me about my field. 
You see, up till now, us designers, we've mainly focused on making things look very pretty, and a little bit of touch, which means we've ignored the other three senses. 
Chris's clock shows us that even raising just one of those other senses can make for a brilliant product. 
So what if we started using the five senses theory in all of our designs? 
Here's three quick ideas I came up with. 
This is an iron, you know, for your clothes, to which I added a spraying mechanism, so you fill up the vial with your favorite scent, and your clothes will smell nicer, but hopefully it should also make the ironing experience more enjoyable. 
We could call this "the perfumator." 
All right, next. 
So I brush my teeth twice a day, and what if we had a toothbrush that tastes like candy, and when the taste of candy ran out, you'd know it's time to change your toothbrush? 
Finally, I have a thing for the keys on a flute or a clarinet. 
It's not just the way they look, but I love the way they feel when you press down on them. 
Now, I don't play the flute or the clarinet, so I decided to combine these keys with an instrument I do play: the television remote control. 
Now, when we look at these three ideas together, you'll notice that the five senses theory doesn't only change the way we use these products but also the way they look. 
So in conclusion, I've found the five senses theory to be a very useful tool in evaluating different experiences in my life, and then taking those best experiences and hopefully incorporating them into my designs. 
Now, I realize the five senses isn't the only thing that makes life interesting. 
There's also the six emotions and that elusive x-factor. 
Maybe that could be the topic of my next talk. 
Until then, please have fun using the five senses in your own lives and your own designs. 
Oh, one last thing before I leave. 
Here's the experience you all had while listening to the TED Talks. 
However, it would be better if we could boost up a couple of the other senses like smell and taste. 
And the best way to do that is with free candy. 
You guys ready? 
All right. 
(Applause) 

I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. 
And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. 
And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. 
The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. 
We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. 
And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. 
Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme "Education is a right." 
Some logos designed by my students. 
Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book "Afrikan Alphabets" to address that. 
The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. 
So it's a special-interest writing system. 
The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. 
It's called Sankofa. 
It means, "Return and get it." Learn from the past. 
This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. 
At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. 
All the paths lead to and from God. 
These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. 
In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing -- a sort of a musical score, if you may. 
In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces. 
Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. 
and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. 
King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. 
Shü-mom is a writing system. 
It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. 
And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. 
The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. 
It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. 
Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. 
Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. 
The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. 
This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. 
Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. 
Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. 
That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. 
Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions -- research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. 
Over here, you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, "ālep," at the top, and "bêt," in the middle, and so forth. 
It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery. 
The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. 
It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. 
They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I am an architect. 
I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes. 
1986, much, much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues, I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure. 
It's very complicated to test the new material for the building, but this is much stronger than I expected, and also it's very easy to waterproof, and also, because it's industrial material, it's also possible to fireproof. 
Then I built the temporary structure, 1990. 
This is the first temporary building made out of paper. 
There are 330 tubes, diameter 55 [centimeters], there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters, or four feet, wide. 
As you see it in the photo, inside is the toilet. 
In case you're finished with toilet paper, you can tear off the inside of the wall. (Laughter) So it's very useful. 
Year 2000, there was a big expo in Germany. 
I was asked to design the building, because the theme of the expo was environmental issues. 
So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes, recyclable paper. 
My goal of the design is not when it's completed. 
My goal was when the building was demolished, because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year, we create a lot of industrial waste, so my building has to be reused or recycled. 
After, the building was recycled. 
So that was the goal of my design. 
Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz. 
Because I was so poor, I wanted to rent an office in Paris, but I couldn't afford it, so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves. 
So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office. 
We stayed there for six years without paying any rent. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. I had one big problem. 
Because we were part of the exhibition, even if my friend wanted to see me, they had to buy a ticket to see me. 
That was the problem. 
Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz. 
It's a very popular museum now, and I created a big monument for the government. 
But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers. 
They have money and power. 
Those are invisible. 
So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. 
That is our profession, even historically it's the same, even now we are doing the same. 
So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society, even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters. 
But I must say they are no longer natural disasters. 
For example, earthquakes never kill people, but collapse of the buildings kill people. 
That's the responsibility of architects. 
Then people need some temporary housing, but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people. 
So I thought, even as architects, we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing. 
We can make it better. 
So that is why I started working in disaster areas. 
1994, there was a big disaster in Rwanda, Africa. 
Two tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, fought each other. 
Over two million people became refugees. 
But I was so surprised to see the shelter, refugee camp organized by the U.N. 
They're so poor, and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season, In the shelters built by the U.N., they were just providing a plastic sheet, and the refugees had to cut the trees, and just like this. 
But over two million people cut trees. 
It just became big, heavy deforestation and an environmental problem. 
That is why they started providing aluminum pipes, aluminum barracks. 
Very expensive, they throw them out for money, then cutting trees again. 
So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong, but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit. 
We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites, so on. 
And then, year afterward, 1995, in Kobe, Japan, we had a big earthquake. 
Nearly 7,000 people were killed, and the city like this Nagata district, all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake. 
And also I found out there's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church -- all the building was totally destroyed. 
So I went there and also I proposed to the priests, "Why don't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes?" 
And he said, "Oh God, are you crazy? 
After a fire, what are you proposing?" 
So he never trusted me, but I didn't give up. 
I started commuting to Kobe, and I met the society of Vietnamese people. 
They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park. 
So I proposed to rebuild. I raised -- did fundraising. 
I made a paper tube shelter for them, and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish, I used beer crates as a foundation. 
I asked the Kirin beer company to propose, because at that time, the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red, which doesn't go with the color of the paper tubes. 
The color coordination is very important. 
And also I still remember, we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate, but it came empty. (Laughter) So I remember it was so disappointing. 
So during the summer with my students, we built over 50 units of the shelters. 
Finally the priest, finally he trusted me to rebuild. 
He said, "As long as you collect money by yourself, bring your students to build, you can do it." 
So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church. 
It was meant to stay there for three years, but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it. 
Then, in Taiwan, they had a big earthquake, and we proposed to donate this church, so we dismantled them, we sent them over to be built by volunteer people. 
It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now. 
So this building became a permanent building. 
Then I wonder, what is a permanent and what is a temporary building? 
Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it. 
Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money. 
In 1999, in Turkey, the big earthquake, I went there to use the local material to build a shelter. 
2001, in West India, I built also a shelter. 
In 2004, in Sri Lanka, after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, I rebuilt Islamic fishermen's villages. 
And in 2008, in Chengdu, Sichuan area in China, nearly 70,000 people were killed, and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor. 
I was asked to rebuild the temporary church. 
I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students. 
In one month, we completed nine classrooms, over 500 square meters. 
It's still used, even after the current earthquake in China. 
In 2009, in Italy, L'Aquila, also they had a big earthquake. 
And this is a very interesting photo: former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso -- you know, because we have to change the prime minister ever year. 
And they are very kind, affording my model. 
I proposed a big rebuilding, a temporary music hall, because L'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed, so musicians were moving out. 
So I proposed to the mayor, I'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium. 
He said, "As long as you bring your money, you can do it." 
And I was very lucky. 
Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium. 
Year 2010 in Haiti, there was a big earthquake, but it's impossible to fly over, so I went to Santo Domingo, next-door country, to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes. 
This is what happened in Japan two years ago, in northern Japan. 
After the earthquake and tsunami, people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium. 
But look at this. There's no privacy. 
People suffer mentally and physically. 
So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes, just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain. 
However, some of the facility authority doesn't want us to do it, because, they said, simply, it's become more difficult to control them. 
But it's really necessary to do it. 
They don't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one. 
Look at this. Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing, so dense and so messy because there is no storage, nothing, water is leaking, so I thought, we have to make multi-story building because there's no land and also it's not very comfortable. 
So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions. 
Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi. 
He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [fields]. 
I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable, within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same, but much more comfortable. 
Many of the people want to stay here forever. 
I was very happy to hear that. 
Now I am working in New Zealand, Christchurch. 
About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened, also they had a big earthquake, and many Japanese students were also killed, and the most important cathedral of the city, the symbol of Christchurch, was totally destroyed. 
And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral. 
So this is under construction. 
And I'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

I come from Lebanon, and I believe that running can change the world. 
I know what I have just said is simply not obvious. 
You know, Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war. 
Honestly, I don't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it. 
With Syria to the north, Israel and Palestine to the south, and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable. 
For years, the country has been divided between politics and religion. 
However, for one day a year, we truly stand united, and that's when the marathon takes place. 
I used to be a marathon runner. 
Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big. 
So the longer distances I ran, the bigger my dreams became. 
Until one fateful morning, and while training, I was hit by a bus. 
I nearly died, was in a coma, stayed at the hospital for two years, and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again. 
As soon as I came out of my coma, I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be, so I decided, if I couldn't run myself, I wanted to make sure that others could. 
So out of my hospital bed, I asked my husband to start taking notes, and a few months later, the marathon was born. 
Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange, but at that time, even during my most vulnerable condition, I needed to dream big. 
I needed something to take me out of my pain, an objective to look forward to. 
I didn't want to pity myself, nor to be pitied, and I thought by organizing such a marathon, I'll be able to pay back to my community, build bridges with the outside world, and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace. 
Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York. 
How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war? 
How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other? 
More than that, how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word "marathon"? 
So we had to start from scratch. 
For almost two years, we went all over the country and even visited remote villages. 
I personally met with people from all walks of life -- mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives. 
I learned one thing: When you walk the talk, people believe you. 
Many were touched by my personal story, and they shared their stories in return. 
It was honesty and transparency that brought us together. 
We spoke one common language to each other, and that was from one human to another. 
Once that trust was built, everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony. 
In October 2003, over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line, all determined, and when the gunfire went off, this time it was a signal to run in harmony, for a change. 
The marathon grew. 
So did our political problems. 
But for every disaster we had, the marathon found ways to bring people together. 
In 2005, our prime minister was assassinated, and the country came to a complete standstill, so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign. 
Over 60,000 people came to the start line, all wearing white T-shirts with no political slogans. 
That was a turning point for the marathon, where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity. 
Between 2006 up to 2009, our country, Lebanon, went through unstable years, invasions, and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war. 
The country was divided again, so much that our parliament resigned, we had no president for a year, and no prime minister. 
But we did have a marathon. 
(Applause) So through the marathon, we learned that political problems can be overcome. 
When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center, we negotiated alternative routes. 
Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders. 
They even hosted juice stations. 
(Laughter) You know, the marathon has really become one of its kind. 
It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community. 
Last November 2012, over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line, but this time, they challenged a very stormy and rainy weather. 
The streets were flooded, but people didn't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day. 
BMA has expanded. 
We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies. 
Themes have included runs for the environment, breast cancer, for the love of Lebanon, for peace, or just simply to run. 
The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment, which is one of its kind in the region, has just taken place only a few weeks ago, with 4,512 women, including the first lady, and this is only the beginning. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon, raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give. 
The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious. 
Stereotypes have been broken. 
Change-makers and future leaders have been created. 
I believe these are the building blocks for future peace. 
BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region, like Iraq, Egypt and Syria, have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event. 
We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East, but most importantly, it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world. 
From Boston to Beirut, we stand as one. 
(Applause) After 10 years in Lebanon, from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races, we've seen that people want to run for a better future. 
After all, peacemaking is not a sprint. 
It is more of a marathon. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing. 
And my mum said, "Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page." 
And I thought to myself, "But that's what I want to do. 
I love stories. I want to read." 
Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true. 
I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. 
The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. 
Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution. 
There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. 
Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. 
And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. 
It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. 
But let me tell you a bit about it today. 
When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. 
It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. 
In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. 
I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. 
(Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. 
(Laughter) When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. 
Look for it. Have you noticed it? 
I do. I look for it all the time. 
(Laughter) When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. 
When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. 
I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. 
And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. 
For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. 
I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. 
As one of them said to me, "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." 
(Laughter) But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help. 
Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. 
In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. 
Students, family and friends all read me material. 
Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. 
One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. 
But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. 
But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. 
(Applause) I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." 
How very wrong I was. 
In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. 
See it up there? 
And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. 
(Laughter) It's a blind computer. 
(Laughter) It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. 
(Laughter) Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch. 
It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. 
Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, but his memory lives on in my heart. 
It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. 
It had a speech synthesizer. 
I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. 
This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory. 
In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. 
Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. 
And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. 
I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989, and it blew me away, and in September 1989, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. 
For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. 
I didn't have to be nice to people! 
(Laughter) I no longer would be censored. 
For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. 
(Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. 
That's what it's shrunk to. 
And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. 
I can keep up with my friends. 
There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. 
One is another American inventor Ted Henter. 
Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. 
He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. 
But in 1989, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. 
It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this. 
(JAWS speaking) Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow? 
(Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. 
I slowed it down for you. 
I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. 
Can we play that one? 
(JAWS speaking) (Laughter) RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly. 
(Laughter) (Applause) This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. 
But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. 
I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. 
Do you love being read to? 
And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." 
Isn't that a great book? 
I still love being close to someone reading to me. 
But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life. 
Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. 
After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. 
But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice. 
Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. 
Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. 
Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. 
And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. 
There are other barriers brought about by our laws. 
For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. 
But those books can't travel across borders. 
For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. 
In Argentina, there are 50,000. 
In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. 
But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. 
There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. 
And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. 
Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter. 
And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. 
It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. 
I want that to happen. 
(Applause) My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. 
I've indeed been a very fortunate human being. 
I wonder what the future will hold. 
The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers." 
I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world. 
I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. 
I want to thank her too. 
I think I have to say goodbye now. 
Bless you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause) 

When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs, some people initially thought we were a little crazy. 
But since then, much progress has been made, both in our lab and other labs around the world. 
And given this, we started getting questions like, "If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather?" 
When someone first suggested this to me, quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy, but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all. 
What's crazy is what we do today. 
I'm convinced that in 30 years, when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags, we'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy. 
Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods? 
And over the next few decades, as the world's population expands to 10 billion, this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals. 
But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet. 
Animals are not just raw materials. 
They're living beings, and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land, fresh water, and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change. 
On top of this, when you get so many animals so close together, it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse. 
Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment, public health, and food security at risk. 
There is another way, because essentially, animal products are just collections of tissues, and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues. 
What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life, the cell? 
This is biofabrication, where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs. 
Already in medicine, biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts, like ears, windpipes, skin, blood vessels and bone, that have been successfully implanted into patients. 
And beyond medicine, biofabrication can be a humane, sustainable and scalable new industry. 
And we should begin by reimagining leather. 
I emphasize leather because it is so widely used. 
It is beautiful, and it has long been a part of our history. 
Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat. 
It mainly uses one cell type, and it is largely two-dimensional. 
It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators. 
Until biofabrication is better understood, it is clear that, initially at least, more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods, no matter how delicious. 
In this sense, leather is a gateway material, a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry. 
If we can succeed here, it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon. 
Now how do we do it? 
To grow leather, we begin by taking cells from an animal, through a simple biopsy. 
The animal could be a cow, lamb, or even something more exotic. 
This process does no harm, and Daisy the cow can live a happy life. 
We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium. 
This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions. 
And we then coax these cells to produce collagen, as they would naturally. 
This collagen is the stuff between cells. 
It's natural connective tissue. 
It's the extracellular matrix, but in leather, it's the main building block. 
And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets, and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another, like phyllo pastry, to form thicker sheets, which we then let mature. 
And finally, we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process, we create leather. 
And so I'm very excited to show you, for the first time, the first batch of our cultured leather, fresh from the lab. 
This is real, genuine leather, without the animal sacrifice. 
It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells, and better yet, there is no hair to remove, no scars or insect's bites, and no waste. 
This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet, a handbag or a car seat. 
It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator. 
And because we make this material, we grow this leather from the ground up, we can control its properties in very interesting ways. 
This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick, and as you can see, it is nearly transparent. 
And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque. 
You don't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather. 
And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities, like softness, breathability, durability, elasticity and even things like pattern. 
We can mimic nature, but in some ways also improve upon it. 
This type of leather can do what today's leather does, but with imagination, probably much more. 
What could the future of animal products look like? 
It need not look like this, which is actually the state of the art today. 
Rather, it could be much more like this. 
Already, we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years, beginning with products like wine, beer and yogurt. 
And speaking of food, our cultured food has evolved, and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful, sterile facilities like this. 
A brewery is essentially a bioreactor. 
It is where cell culture takes place. 
Imagine that in this facility, instead of brewing beer, we were brewing leather or meat. 
Imagine touring this facility, learning about how the leather or meat is cultured, seeing the process from beginning to end, and even trying some. 
It's clean, open and educational, and this is in contrast to the hidden, guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today. 
Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind. 
It's environmentally responsible, efficient and humane. 
It allows us to be creative. 
We can design new materials, new products, and new facilities. 
We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. 
Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Nine years ago, I worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure. 
And I was there, and I worked in that job because I believe that technology can improve people's lives. 
One afternoon, I had tea with a storekeeper at the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, and he said to me, "You Americans, you can put a man on the moon, but when I get home tonight, I won't be able to turn on my lights." 
At the time, the U.S. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction. 
How do you ensure technology reaches users? 
How do you put it in their hands so that it is useful? 
So those are the questions that my colleagues and I at D-Rev ask ourselves. 
And D-Rev is short for Design Revolution. 
And I took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users, and not just any users, but customers who live on less than four dollars a day. 
One of the key areas we've been working on recently is medical devices, and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with Iraq's electricity grid then, there are some commonalities. 
Despite the advanced technology, it's not reaching the people who need it most. 
So I'm going to tell you about one of the projects we've been working on, the ReMotion Knee, and it's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees. 
And this project started when the Jaipur Foot Organization, the largest fitter of prosthetic limbs in the world, came to the Bay Area and they said, "We need a better knee." 
Chances are, if you're living on less than four dollars a day, and you're an amputee, you've lost your limb in a vehicle accident. 
Most people think it's land mines, but it's a vehicle accident. 
You're walking by the side of the road and you're hit by a truck, or you're trying to to jump on a moving train, you're late for work, and your pant leg gets caught. 
And the reality is that if you don't have much money, like this young named Kamal right here, the option you really have is a bamboo staff to get around. 
And how big a problem is this? 
There's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee. 
And what are their options? 
This is a high-end. This is what we'd call a "smart knee." 
It's got a microprocessor inside. 
It can pretty much do anything, but it's 20,000 dollars, and to give you a sense of who wears this, veterans, American veterans coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq would be fit with something like this. 
This is a low-end titanium knee. 
It's a polycentric knee, and all that that means is the mechanism, is a four-bar mechanism, that mimics a natural human knee. 
But at 1,400 dollars, it's still too expensive for people like Kamal. 
And lastly, here you see a low-end knee. 
This is a knee that's been designed specifically for poor people. 
And while you have affordability, you've lost on functionality. 
The mechanism here is a single axis, and a single axis is like a door hinge. 
So you can think about how unstable that would be. 
And this is the type of mechanism that the Jaipur Foot Organization was using when they were looking for a better knee, and I just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like, because I'm showing you all these knees and I imagine it's hard to think how it all fits together. 
So at the top you have a socket, and this fits over someone's residual limb, and everyone's residual limb is a little bit different. 
And then you have the knee, and here I've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates, and then a pylon, and then a foot. 
And we've been able to develop a knee, a polycentric knee, so that type of knee that acts like a human knee, mimics human gait, for 80 dollars retail. 
(Applause) But the key is, you can have this great invention, you can have this great design, but how do you get it to the people who most need it? 
How do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives? 
So at D-Rev, we've done some other projects, and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers, to users, to people who need it. 
And the first thing is that the product needs to be world class. 
It needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market. 
Regardless of your income level, you want the most beautiful, the best product that there is. 
I'm going to show you a video now of a man named Ash. You can see him walking. 
He's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee. 
And he's doing a 10-meter walk test. 
And you'll notice that he's struggling with stability as he's walking. 
And something that's not obvious, that you can't see, is that it's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling. 
Now this is a video of Kamal. 
You remember Kamal earlier, holding the bamboo staff. 
He's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee, and he's doing that same 10-meter walk test. 
And you can see his stability is much better. 
So world class isn't just about technical performance. 
It's also about human performance. 
And most medical devices, we've learned, as we've dug in, are really designed for Westerners, for wealthier economies. 
But the reality is our users, our customers, they do different things. They sit cross-legged more. 
We see that they squat. They kneel in prayer. 
And we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market. 
So the second thing we learned, and this leads into my second point, which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric. 
And at D-Rev, we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed. 
So it's not just the end user that you're thinking about, but everyone who interacts with the product, so, for example, the prosthetist who fits the knee, but also the context in which the knee is being fit. 
What is the local market like? 
How do all these components get to the clinic? 
Do they all get there on time? The supply chain. 
Everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user, and it goes in as part of the system, and it's used. 
So I wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version, the Jaipur Knee, so this is it right here. 
(Clicking) Notice anything about it? 
It clicks. 
We'd seen that users had actually modified it. 
So do you see that black strip right there? 
That's a homemade noise dampener. 
We also saw that our users had modified it in other ways. 
You can see there that that particular amputee, he had wrapped bandages around the knee. 
He'd made a cosmesis. 
And if you look at the knee, it's got those pointy edges, right? 
So if you're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari, it's really obvious that you're wearing a prosthetic limb, and in societies where there's social stigma around being disabled, people are particularly acute about this. 
So I'm going to show you some of the modifications we did. 
We did a lot of iterations, not just around this, but some other things. 
But here we have the version three, the ReMotion Knee, but if you look in here, you can see the noise dampener. It's quieter. 
The other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile. 
We made it thinner. 
And something that's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production. 
And this goes into my last point. 
We really, truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it's needed, it needs to be market-driven, and market-driven means that products are sold. 
They're not donated. They're not heavily subsidized. 
Our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user. 
It also has to be designed to be very affordable. 
But a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer, and use is what creates impact. 
And we believe that as designers, it holds us accountable to our customers. 
And with centralized manufacturing, you can control the quality control, and you can hit that $80 price point with profit margins built in. 
And now, those profit margins are critical, because if you want to scale, if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee, it needs to be economically sustainable. 
So I want to give you a sense of where we are at. 
We have fit over 5,000 amputees, and one of the big indicators we're looking at, of course, is, does it improve lives? 
Well, the standard is, is someone still wearing their knee six months later? 
The industry average is about 65 percent. 
Ours is 79 percent, and we're hoping to get that higher. 
Right now, our knees are worn in 12 countries. 
This is where we want to get, though, in the next three years. 
We'll double the impact in 2015, and we'll double it each of the following years after that. 
But then we hit a new challenge, and that's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees. 
So I want to end with a story of Pournima. 
Pournima was 18 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg, and she traveled 12 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee, and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers, she's particularly meaningful to me as an engineer and as a woman, because she was in school, she had just started school to study engineering. 
And she said, "Well, now that I can walk again, I can go back and complete my studies." 
And to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users. 
So thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello, TEDWomen, what's up. 
(Cheering) Not good enough. 
Hello, TEDWomen, what is up? 
(Loud cheering) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. 
He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. 
As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. 
Look. 
It's exhausting. 
I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali. 
(Laughter) CP is not genetic. 
It's not a birth defect. You can't catch it. 
No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are. 
(Laughter) It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day. 
Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational. 
(Laughter) And I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled. 
Come on a journey with me. 
It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? 
Sixteen empty handicapped spaces. 
(Laughter) And you're like, "God, can't I just be a little disabled?" 
(Laughter) Also, I've got to tell you, I've got 99 problems, and palsy is just one. 
(Laughter) If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. 
I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey. 
(Laughter) (Applause) If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should. 
(Laughter) Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown. 
I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. 
I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could. 
A lot of people with CP don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in "can't." 
My father's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can." 
(Laughter) So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping. 
If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper. 
(Laughter) My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. 
Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it. 
(Laughter) My inner stripper was very strong. 
(Laughter) Yeah. 
No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times. 
(Laughter) Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family. 
(Laughter) Now there are 20 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family. 
(Laughter) I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian. 
(Laughter) (Applause) This was before 9/11 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use "I hate Muslims" as a campaign slogan. 
The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith. 
They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan. 
I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake. 
(Laughter) I have tap-danced on Broadway. 
Yeah, on Broadway. It's crazy. 
(Applause) My parents couldn't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school. 
I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. 
And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I. 
And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. 
I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna. 
(Laughter) Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "It's working! It's working!" 
(Laughter) But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. 
I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. 
And now I can stand on my head. 
My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "General Hospital." 
(Laughter) I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota. 
(Laughter) I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. 
Everybody loved me. 
I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes. 
(Laughter) Every time I did a scene from "The Glass Menagerie," my professors would weep. 
But I never got cast. 
Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "They Dance Real Slow in Jackson." 
It's a play about a girl with CP. 
I was a girl with CP. 
So I start shouting from the rooftops, "I'm finally going to get a part! 
I have cerebral palsy! 
Free at last! Free at last! 
Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!" 
I didn't get the part. 
(Laughter) Sherry Brown got the part. 
I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. 
I said, "Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character." 
(Laughter) (Applause) This was a part that I was literally born to play they gave it to a non-palsy actress. 
College was imitating life. 
Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen. 
Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera. 
My dream was coming true. 
And I knew that I would be promoted from "Diner Diner" to "Wacky Best Friend" in no time. 
(Laughter) But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. 
They only hired perfect people. 
But there were exceptions to the rule. 
I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. 
So I became a comic. 
(Laughter) (Applause) My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with CP driving him. 
(Laughter) I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered. 
(Laughter) Some people say I'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world. 
I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical. 
(Laughter) In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. 
Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous. 
(Laughter) Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability. 
My big break came in 2010. 
I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." 
I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair. 
(Laughter) So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, "Excuse me, can I have another chair?" 
And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two ..." 
And we were live, right? 
So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. 
I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. 
But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair. 
(Laughter) (Applause) One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. 
(Laughter) People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. 
Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. 
I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why's she tweakin'?" 
"Yo, is she retarded?" 
And my favorite, "Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. 
What does she suffer from? 
We should really pray for her." 
One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy. 
Disability is as visual as race. 
If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. 
The disabled are the largest — Yeah, clap for that, man. Come on. 
(Applause) People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment. 
The doctors said that I wouldn't walk, but I am here in front of you. 
However, if I grew up with social media, I don't think I would be. 
I hope that together, we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. 
Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet. 
Or maybe not. 
Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well. 
My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. 
I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Loreen Arbus. 
I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. 
I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. 
I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. 
And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. 
But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got -- before this moment -- (Laughter) (Applause) But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory. 
(Arabic) Allah yerhamak yaba. 
(English) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can. 
(Cheering) (Applause) 

Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. 
As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. 
Now I eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds. 
This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. 
I look at that picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. 
(Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. 
And for the next three decades, I was on and off various diets. 
No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. 
I'm sure many of you know the feeling. 
As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? 
Obviously, how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. 
What most people don't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. 
Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind -- how do we put this politely? -- it's easily distracted. 
It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. 
You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for dinner. 
Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously believe. 
This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 10 or 15 pounds. 
You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. 
The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as conditions change. 
That's what a thermostat does, right? 
It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. 
Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up. 
Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal. 
If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. 
We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't. 
If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. 
Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. 
That's a lot of food. 
This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin. 
From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. 
When food was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. 
Over the course of human history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. 
This may explain a very sad fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. 
Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. 
(Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your set point. 
Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. 
If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response. 
In our modern world of drive-thru burgers, it's not working out so well for many of us. 
That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity. 
Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. 
If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal. 
Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. 
Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters. 
The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about food. 
Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. 
And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. 
Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. 
Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders. 
The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members about their weight. 
So don't do that. 
(Laughter) I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. 
(Laughter) This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. 
Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. 
The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. 
And as you'd expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. 
Now let's look at what happens in overweight people. 
The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death. 
Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. 
For obese people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study. 
But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. 
In fact, if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. 
You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off. 
Diets don't have very much reliability. 
Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight. 
Forty percent of them have gained even more. 
If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it. 
If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it? 
And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. 
I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga. 
I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. 
How do you do it? 
Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. 
Sit down to regular meals without distractions. 
Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. 
It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been worth it. 
I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. 
I often don't think about it. 
I forget we have chocolate in the house. 
It's like aliens have taken over my brain. 
It's just completely different. 
I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. 
Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin already. 
(Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? 
Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. 
At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. 
In the U.S., we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. 
Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale. 
Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. 
It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else. 
Let me leave you with one last thought. 
What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? 
What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? 
I think most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be thinner. 
I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother, Mamar, in our four-family home in Brooklyn, New York. 
Her apartment was an oasis. 
It was a place where I could sneak a cup of coffee, which was really warm milk with just a touch of caffeine. 
She loved life. 
And although she worked in a factory, she saved her pennies and she traveled to Europe. 
And I remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music. 
And then, when I was eight and she was 60, something changed. 
She no longer worked or traveled. 
She no longer danced. 
There were no more coffee times. 
My mother missed work and took her to doctors who couldn't make a diagnosis. 
And my father, who worked at night, would spend every afternoon with her, just to make sure she ate. 
Her care became all-consuming for our family. 
And by the time a diagnosis was made, she was in a deep spiral. 
Now many of you will recognize her symptoms. 
My grandmother had depression. 
A deep, life-altering depression, from which she never recovered. 
And back then, so little was known about depression. 
But even today, 50 years later, there's still so much more to learn. 
Today, we know that women are 70 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men. 
And even with this high prevalence, women are misdiagnosed between 30 and 50 percent of the time. 
Now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms of fatigue, sleep disturbance, pain and anxiety compared with men. 
And these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression. 
And it isn't only depression in which these sex differences occur, but they occur across so many diseases. 
So it's my grandmother's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest. 
And today, I lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women. 
Today, we know that every cell has a sex. 
Now, that's a term coined by the Institute of Medicine. 
And what it means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels. 
It means that we're different across all of our organs. 
From our brains to our hearts, our lungs, our joints. 
Now, it was only 20 years ago that we hardly had any data on women's health beyond our reproductive functions. 
But then in 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law. 
And what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical trials that were funded by the National Institutes of Health. 
And in many ways, the law has worked. 
Women are now routinely included in clinical studies, and we've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease. 
But remarkably, what we have learned about these differences is often overlooked. 
So, we have to ask ourselves the question: Why leave women's health to chance? 
And we're leaving it to chance in two ways. 
The first is that there is so much more to learn and we're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent of these sex differences. 
And the second is that we aren't taking what we have learned, and routinely applying it in clinical care. 
We are just not doing enough. 
So, I'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have impacted the health of women, and where we need to do more. 
Let's start with heart disease. 
It's the number one killer of women in the United States today. 
This is the face of heart disease. 
Linda is a middle-aged woman, who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart. 
When she had recurring symptoms she went back to her doctor. 
Her doctor did the gold standard test: a cardiac catheterization. 
It showed no blockages. 
Linda's symptoms continued. 
She had to stop working. 
And that's when she found us. 
When Linda came to us, we did another cardiac catheterization and this time, we found clues. 
But we needed another test to make the diagnosis. 
So we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound, where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out. 
And what we found was that Linda's disease didn't look like the typical male disease. 
The typical male disease looks like this. 
There's a discrete blockage or stenosis. 
Linda's disease, like the disease of so many women, looks like this. 
The plaque is laid down more evenly, more diffusely along the artery, and it's harder to see. 
So for Linda, and for so many women, the gold standard test wasn't gold. 
Now, Linda received the right treatment. 
She went back to her life and, fortunately, today she is doing well. 
But Linda was lucky. 
She found us, we found her disease. 
But for too many women, that's not the case. 
We have the tools. 
We have the technology to make the diagnosis. 
But it's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked. 
So what about treatment? 
A landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question: What are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? 
The authors looked at papers written over a 10-year period, and hundreds had to be thrown out. 
And what they found out was that of those that were tossed out, 65 percent were excluded because even though women were included in the studies, the analysis didn't differentiate between women and men. 
What a lost opportunity. 
The money had been spent and we didn't learn how women fared. 
And these studies could not contribute one iota to the very, very important question, what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? 
I want to introduce you to Hortense, my godmother, Hung Wei, a relative of a colleague, and somebody you may recognize -- Dana, Christopher Reeve's wife. 
All three women have something very important in common. 
All three were diagnosed with lung cancer, the number one cancer killer of women in the United States today. 
All three were nonsmokers. 
Sadly, Dana and Hung Wei died of their disease. 
Today, what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers. 
Now interestingly, when women are diagnosed with lung cancer, their survival tends to be better than that of men. 
Now, here are some clues. 
Our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor cells of both women and men. 
And these genes are activated mainly by estrogen. 
And when these genes are over-expressed, it's associated with improved survival only in young women. 
Now this is a very early finding and we don't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care. 
But it's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men. 
Now, let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences, it can drive the science. 
Several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated, and when the authors looked at whose tumors shrank, they found that 82 percent were women. 
This led them to ask the question: Well, why? 
And what they found was that the genetic mutations that the drug targeted were far more common in women. 
And what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer that also includes sex. 
This is what we can accomplish when we don't leave women's health to chance. 
We know that when you invest in research, you get results. 
Take a look at the death rate from breast cancer over time. 
And now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time. 
Now let's look at the dollars invested in breast cancer -- these are the dollars invested per death -- and the dollars invested in lung cancer. 
Now, it's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results. 
They may not be fast enough, but it has produced results. 
We can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease. 
So let's go back to depression. 
Depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today. 
Our investigators have found that there are differences in the brains of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood. 
And when you put men and women in a functional MRI scanner -- that's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it's activated -- so you put them in the scanner and you expose them to stress. 
You can actually see the difference. 
And it's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression. 
But even though we know that these differences occur, 66 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified. 
So, I think we have to ask again the question: Why leave women's health to chance? 
And this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge of being able to dramatically improve the health of women. 
We know that every cell has a sex. 
We know that these differences are often overlooked. 
And therefore we know that women are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today. 
We have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum. 
Women's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay. 
And it's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine. 
(Applause) So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research. 
Or if we analyzed our data by sex. 
So, people often ask me: What can I do? 
And here's what I suggest: First, I suggest that you think about women's health in the same way that you think and care about other causes that are important to you. 
And second, and equally as important, that as a woman, you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring for those who you love: Is this disease or treatment different in women? 
Now, this is a profound question because the answer is likely yes, but your doctor may not know the answer, at least not yet. 
But if you ask the question, your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer. 
And this is so important, not only for ourselves, but for all of those whom we love. 
Whether it be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend or a grandmother. 
It was my grandmother's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women. 
That's her legacy. 
Our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Here are some images of clusters of galaxies. 
They're exactly what they sound like. 
They are these huge collections of galaxies, bound together by their mutual gravity. 
So most of the points that you see on the screen are not individual stars, but collections of stars, or galaxies. 
Now, by showing you some of these images, I hope that you will quickly see that galaxy clusters are these beautiful objects, but more than that, I think galaxy clusters are mysterious, they are surprising, and they're useful. 
Useful as the universe's most massive laboratories. 
And as laboratories, to describe galaxy clusters is to describe the experiments that you can do with them. 
And I think there are four major types, and the first type that I want to describe is probing the very big. 
So, how big? 
Well, here is an image of a particular galaxy cluster. 
It is so massive that the light passing through it is being bent, it's being distorted by the extreme gravity of this cluster. 
And, in fact, if you look very carefully you'll be able to see rings around this cluster. 
Now, to give you a number, this particular galaxy cluster has a mass of over one million billion suns. 
It's just mind-boggling how massive these systems can get. 
But more than their mass, they have this additional feature. 
They are essentially isolated systems, so if we like, we can think of them as a scaled-down version of the entire universe. 
And many of the questions that we might have about the universe at large scales, such as, how does gravity work? 
might be answered by studying these systems. 
So that was very big. 
The second things is very hot. 
Okay, if I take an image of a galaxy cluster, and I subtract away all of the starlight, what I'm left with is this big, blue blob. 
This is in false color. 
It's actually X-ray light that we're seeing. 
And the question is, if it's not galaxies, what is emitting this light? 
The answer is hot gas, million-degree gas -- in fact, it's plasma. 
And the reason why it's so hot goes back to the previous slide. 
The extreme gravity of these systems is accelerating particles of gas to great speeds, and great speeds means great temperatures. 
So this is the main idea, but science is a rough draft. 
There are many basic properties about this plasma that still confuse us, still puzzle us, and still push our understanding of the physics of the very hot. 
Third thing: probing the very small. 
Now, to explain this, I need to tell you a very disturbing fact. 
Most of the universe's matter is not made up of atoms. 
You were lied to. 
Most of it is made up of something very, very mysterious, which we call dark matter. 
Dark matter is something that doesn't like to interact very much, except through gravity, and of course we would like to learn more about it. 
If you're a particle physicist, you want to know what happens when we smash things together. 
And dark matter is no exception. 
Well, how do we do this? 
To answer that question, I'm going to have to ask another one, which is, what happens when galaxy clusters collide? 
Here is an image. 
Since galaxy clusters are representative slices of the universe, scaled-down versions. 
They are mostly made up of dark matter, and that's what you see in this bluish purple. 
The red represents the hot gas, and, of course, you can see many galaxies. 
What's happened is a particle accelerator at a huge, huge scale. 
And this is very important, because what it means is that very, very small effects that might be difficult to detect in the lab, might be compounded and compounded into something that we could possibly observe in nature. 
So, it's very funny. 
The reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about dark matter, the reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about the physics of the very small, is precisely because they are so very big. 
Fourth thing: the physics of the very strange. 
Certainly what I've said so far is crazy. 
Okay, if there's anything stranger I think it has to be dark energy. 
If I throw a ball into the air, I expect it to go up. 
What I don't expect is that it go up at an ever-increasing rate. 
Similarly, cosmologists understand why the universe is expanding. 
They don't understand why it's expanding at an ever-increasing rate. 
They give the cause of this accelerated expansion a name, and they call it dark energy. 
And, again, we want to learn more about it. 
So, one particular question that we have is, how does dark energy affect the universe at the largest scales? 
Depending on how strong it is, maybe structure forms faster or slower. 
Well, the problem with the large-scale structure of the universe is that it's horribly complicated. 
Here is a computer simulation. 
And we need a way to simplify it. 
Well, I like to think about this using an analogy. 
If I want to understand the sinking of the Titanic, the most important thing to do is not to model the little positions of every single little piece of the boat that broke off. 
The most important thing to do is to track the two biggest parts. 
Similarly, I can learn a lot about the universe at the largest scales by tracking its biggest pieces and those biggest pieces are clusters of galaxies. 
So, as I come to a close, you might feel slightly cheated. 
I mean, I began by talking about how galaxy clusters are useful, and I've given some reasons, but what is their use really? 
Well, to answer this, I want to give you a quote by Henry Ford when he was asked about cars. 
He had this to say: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." 
Today, we as a society are faced with many, many difficult problems. 
And the solutions to these problems are not obvious. 
They are not faster horses. 
They will require an enormous amount of scientific ingenuity. 
So, yes, we need to focus, yes, we need to concentrate, but we also need to remember that innovation, ingenuity, inspiration -- these things come when we broaden our field of vision when we step back when we zoom out. 
And I can't think of a better way to do this than by studying the universe around us. Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

"Why?" 
"Why?" is a question that parents ask me all the time. 
"Why did my child develop autism?" 
As a pediatrician, as a geneticist, as a researcher, we try and address that question. 
But autism is not a single condition. 
It's actually a spectrum of disorders, a spectrum that ranges, for instance, from Justin, a 13-year-old boy who's not verbal, who can't speak, who communicates by using an iPad to touch pictures to communicate his thoughts and his concerns, a little boy who, when he gets upset, will start rocking, and eventually, when he's disturbed enough, will bang his head to the point that he can actually cut it open and require stitches. 
That same diagnosis of autism, though, also applies to Gabriel, another 13-year-old boy who has quite a different set of challenges. 
He's actually quite remarkably gifted in mathematics. 
He can multiple three numbers by three numbers in his head with ease, yet when it comes to trying to have a conversation, he has great difficulty. 
He doesn't make eye contact. 
He has difficulty starting a conversation, feels awkward, and when he gets nervous, he actually shuts down. 
Yet both of these boys have the same diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. 
One of the things that concerns us is whether or not there really is an epidemic of autism. 
These days, one in 88 children will be diagnosed with autism, and the question is, why does this graph look this way? 
Has that number been increasing dramatically over time? 
Or is it because we have now started labeling individuals with autism, simply giving them a diagnosis when they were still present there before yet simply didn't have that label? 
And in fact, in the late 1980s, the early 1990s, legislation was passed that actually provided individuals with autism with resources, with access to educational materials that would help them. 
With that increased awareness, more parents, more pediatricians, more educators learned to recognize the features of autism. 
As a result of that, more individuals were diagnosed and got access to the resources they needed. 
In addition, we've changed our definition over time, so in fact we've widened the definition of autism, and that accounts for some of the increased prevalence that we see. 
The next question everyone wonders is, what caused autism? 
And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism. 
But let me be very clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. 
(Applause) In fact, the original research study that suggested that was the case was completely fraudulent. 
It was actually retracted from the journal Lancet, in which it was published, and that author, a physician, had his medical license taken away from him. 
(Applause) The Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. 
Furthermore, one of the ingredients in vaccines, something called thimerosal, was thought to be what the cause of autism was. 
That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992, and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism. 
So again, there is no evidence that this is the answer. 
So the question remains, what does cause autism? 
In fact, there's probably not one single answer. 
Just as autism is a spectrum, there's a spectrum of etiologies, a spectrum of causes. 
Based on epidemiological data, we know that one of the causes, or one of the associations, I should say, is advanced paternal age, that is, increasing age of the father at the time of conception. 
In addition, another vulnerable and critical period in terms of development is when the mother is pregnant. 
During that period, while the fetal brain is developing, we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism. 
In particular, there's a medication, valproic acid, which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take, we know can increase that risk of autism. 
In addition, there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism. 
And one of the things I'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism. 
I'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism, but it's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene. 
One of the genetic factors that we don't understand, however, is the difference that we see in terms of males and females. 
Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism, and we really don't understand what that cause is. 
One of the ways that we can understand that genetics is a factor is by looking at something called the concordance rate. 
In other words, if one sibling has autism, what's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism? 
And we can look in particular at three types of siblings: identical twins, twins that actually share 100 percent of their genetic information and shared the same intrauterine environment, versus fraternal twins, twins that actually share 50 percent of their genetic information, versus regular siblings, brother-sister, sister-sister, also sharing 50 percent of their genetic information, yet not sharing the same intrauterine environment. 
And when you look at those concordance ratios, one of the striking things that you will see is that in identical twins, that concordance rate is 77 percent. 
Remarkably, though, it's not 100 percent. 
It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism, but yet they account for a lot of that risk, because when you look at fraternal twins, that concordance rate is only 31 percent. 
On the other hand, there is a difference between those fraternal twins and the siblings, suggesting that there are common exposures for those fraternal twins that may not be shared as commonly with siblings alone. 
So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic. 
Well, how genetic is it? 
When we compare it to other conditions that we're familiar with, things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, in fact, genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions. 
But with this, that doesn't tell us what the genes are. 
It doesn't even tell us in any one child, is it one gene or potentially a combination of genes? 
And so in fact, in some individuals with autism, it is genetic! 
That is, that it is one single, powerful, deterministic gene that causes the autism. 
However, in other individuals, it's genetic, that is, that it's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism. 
We don't know in any one person, necessarily, which of those two answers it is until we start digging deeper. 
So the question becomes, how can we start to identify what exactly those genes are. 
And let me pose something that might not be intuitive. 
In certain individuals, they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family. 
And the reason is because in certain individuals, they can actually have genetic changes or mutations that are not passed down from the mother or from the father, but actually start brand new in them, mutations that are present in the egg or the sperm at the time of conception but have not been passed down generation through generation within the family. 
And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals. 
So in fact, at the Simons Foundation, we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism, and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases? 
To do that, we actually had to comprehensively be able to look at all that genetic information and determine what those differences were between the mother, the father and the child. 
In doing so, I apologize, I'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia, but I'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory, we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information. 
Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes, and when we did that, we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes, because in some cases with autism, there's actually a single volume that's missing. 
We had to get more granular than that, though, and so we had to start opening those books, and in some cases, the genetic change was more subtle. 
It might have been a single paragraph that was missing, or yet, even more subtle than that, a single letter, one out of three billion letters that was changed, that was altered, yet had profound effects in terms of how the brain functions and affects behavior. 
In doing this within these families, we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families. 
On the other hand, there's 75 percent that we still haven't figured out. 
As we did this, though, it was really quite humbling, because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism. 
In fact, the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism. 
And that explains, in part, why we see such a broad spectrum in terms of its effects. 
Although there are that many genes, there is some method to the madness. 
It's not simply random 200, 400 different genes, but in fact they fit together. 
They fit together in a pathway. 
They fit together in a network that's starting to make sense now in terms of how the brain functions. 
We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition. 
But early diagnosis is a key for us. 
Being able to make that diagnosis of someone who's susceptible at a time in a window where we have the ability to transform, to be able to impact that growing, developing brain is critical. 
And so folks like Ami Klin have developed methods to be able to take infants, small babies, and be able to use biomarkers, in this case eye contact and eye tracking, to identify an infant at risk. 
This particular infant, you can see, making very good eye contact with this woman as she's singing "Itsy, Bitsy Spider," in fact is not going to develop autism. 
This baby we know is going to be in the clear. 
On the other hand, this other baby is going to go on to develop autism. 
In this particular child, you can see, it's not making good eye contact. 
Instead of the eyes focusing in and having that social connection, looking at the mouth, looking at the nose, looking off in another direction, but not again socially connecting, and being able to do this on a very large scale, screen infants, screen children for autism, through something very robust, very reliable, is going to be very helpful to us in terms of being able to intervene at an early stage when we can have the greatest impact. 
How are we going to intervene? 
It's probably going to be a combination of factors. 
In part, in some individuals, we're going to try and use medications. 
And so in fact, identifying the genes for autism is important for us to identify drug targets, to identify things that we might be able to impact and can be certain that that's really what we need to do in autism. 
But that's not going to be the only answer. 
Beyond just drugs, we're going to use educational strategies. 
Individuals with autism, some of them are wired a little bit differently. 
They learn in a different way. 
They absorb their surroundings in a different way, and we need to be able to educate them in a way that serves them best. 
Beyond that, there are a lot of individuals in this room who have great ideas in terms of new technologies we can use, everything from devices we can use to train the brain to be able to make it more efficient and to compensate for areas in which it has a little bit of trouble, to even things like Google Glass. 
You could imagine, for instance, Gabriel, with his social awkwardness, might be able to wear Google Glass with an earpiece in his ear, and have a coach be able to help him, be able to help think about conversations, conversation-starters, being able to even perhaps one day invite a girl out on a date. 
All of these new technologies just offer tremendous opportunities for us to be able to impact the individuals with autism, but yet we have a long way to go. 
As much as we know, there is so much more that we don't know, and so I invite all of you to be able to help us think about how to do this better, to use as a community our collective wisdom to be able to make a difference, and in particular, for the individuals in families with autism, I invite you to join the interactive autism network, to be part of the solution to this, because it's going to take really a lot of us to think about what's important, what's going to be a meaningful difference. 
As we think about something that's potentially a solution, how well does it work? 
Is it something that's really going to make a difference in your lives, as an individual, as a family with autism? 
We're going to need individuals of all ages, from the young to the old, and with all different shapes and sizes of the autism spectrum disorder to make sure that we can have an impact. 
So I invite all of you to join the mission and to help to be able to make the lives of individuals with autism so much better and so much richer. 
Thank you. 

On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League. 
Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters. 
Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant. 
Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not. 
Nosair would eventually be convicted for his involvement in the plot. 
El-Sayyid Nosair is my father. 
I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for me. 
It wasn't until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. 
My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. 
It's been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn't take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life. 
However, in every religion, in every population, you'll find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do. 
A few months prior to his arrest, he sat me down and explained that for the past few weekends, he and some friends had been going to a shooting range on Long Island for target practice. 
He told me I'd be going with him the next morning. 
We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI. 
When it was my turn to shoot, my father helped me hold the rifle to my shoulder and explained how to aim at the target about 30 yards off. 
That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames. 
My uncle turned to the other men, and in Arabic said, "Ibn abuh." 
Like father, like son. 
They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny. 
They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. 
Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000 others. 
These were the men I looked up to. 
These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle. 
By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life, and that instability during my childhood didn't really provide an opportunity to make many friends. 
Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town. 
Being the perpetual new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies. 
I kept my identity a secret from my classmates to avoid being targeted, but as it turns out, being the quiet, chubby new kid in class was more than enough ammunition. 
So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games. 
For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn't prepared for the real world. 
I'd been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion. 
So what opened my eyes? 
One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections. 
Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia. 
My particular group's focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate. 
The members of our group came from many different walks of life. 
One day toward the end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. 
Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. 
I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable. 
Another major turning point came when I found a summer job at Busch Gardens, an amusement park. 
There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures, and that experience proved to be fundamental to the development of my character. 
Most of my life, I'd been taught that homosexuality was a sin, and by extension, that all gay people were a negative influence. 
As chance would have it, I had the opportunity to work with some of the gay performers at a show there, and soon found that many were the kindest, least judgmental people I had ever met. 
Being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in me toward the suffering of others, and it comes very unnaturally to me to treat people who are kind in any other way than how I would want to be treated. 
Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I'd been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction. 
I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I'm well acquainted with being judged for something that's beyond my control. 
Then there was "The Daily Show." 
On a nightly basis, Jon Stewart forced me to be intellectually honest with myself about my own bigotry and helped me to realize that a person's race, religion or sexual orientation had nothing to do with the quality of one's character. 
He was in many ways a father figure to me when I was in desperate need of one. 
Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me. 
One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live. 
She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, "I'm tired of hating people." 
In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you. 
Zak Ebrahim is not my real name. 
I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life. 
So why would I out myself and potentially put myself in danger? 
Well, that's simple. 
I do it in the hopes that perhaps someone someday who is compelled to use violence may hear my story and realize that there is a better way, that although I had been subjected to this violent, intolerant ideology, that I did not become fanaticized. 
Instead, I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry. 
I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. 
For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father's actions. 
And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn't inherent in one's religion or race, and the son does not have to follow the ways of his father. 
I am not my father. 
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, everybody. (Applause) Thank you all. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause) 

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

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

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

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

It’s another sweltering morning in Memphis, Egypt. 
As the sunlight brightens the Nile, Peseshet checks her supplies. 
Honey, garlic, cumin, acacia leaves, cedar oil. 
She’s well stocked with the essentials she needs to treat her patients. 
Peseshet is a swnw, or a doctor. 
In order to become one, she had to train as a scribe and study the medical papyri stored at the Per Ankh, the House of Life. 
Now, she teaches her own students there. 
Before teaching, Peseshet has a patient to see. 
One of the workers at the temple construction site has injured his arm. 
When Peseshet arrives, the laborer’s arm is clearly broken, and worse, the fracture is a sed, with multiple bone fragments. 
Peseshet binds and immobilizes the injury. 
Her next stop is the House of Life. 
On her way, a woman intercepts Peseshet in the street. 
The woman’s son has been stung by a scorpion. 
Peseshet has seen many similar stings and knows exactly what to do. 
She must say an incantation to cast the poison out. 
She begins to recite the spell, invoking Serqet, patron of physicians and goddess of venomous creatures. 
Peseshet recites the spell as if she is Serqet. 
This commanding approach has the greatest chance at success. 
After she utters the last line, she tries to cut the poison out with a knife for good measure. 
Peseshet packs up to leave, but the woman has another question. 
She wants to find out if she is pregnant. 
Peseshet explains her fail-safe pregnancy test: plant two seeds: one barley, one emmer. 
Then, urinate on the seeds every day. 
If the plants grow, she’s pregnant. 
A barley seedling predicts a baby boy, while emmer foretells a girl. 
Peseshet also recommends a prayer to Hathor, goddess of fertility. 
When Peseshet finally arrives at the House of Life, she runs into the doctor-priest Isesi. 
She greets Isesi politely, but she thinks priests are very full of themselves. 
She doesn’t envy Isesi’s role as neru pehut, which directly translates to herdsman of the anus to the royal family, or, guardian of the royal anus. 
Inside, the House of Life is bustling as usual with scribes, priests, doctors, and students. 
Papyri containing all kinds of records, not just medical information, are stored here. 
Peseshet’s son Akhethetep is hard at work copying documents as part of his training to become a scribe. 
He’s a particularly promising student, but he was admitted to study because Peseshet is a scribe, as was her father before her. 
Without family in the profession, it’s very difficult for boys, and impossible for girls, to pursue this education. 
Peseshet oversees all the female swnws and swnws-in-training in Memphis. 
The men have their own overseer, as the male doctors won’t answer to a woman. 
Today, Peseshet teaches anatomy. 
She quizzes her students on the metu, the body’s vessels that transport blood, air, urine, and even bad spirits. 
Peseshet is preparing to leave when a pale, thin woman accosts her at the door and begs to be examined. 
The woman has a huge, sore lump under her arm. 
Peseshet probes the growth and finds it cool to the touch and hard like an unripe hemat fruit. 
She has read about ailments like this, but never seen one. 
For this tumor there is no treatment, medicine or spell. 
All the texts give the same advice: do nothing. 
After delivering the bad news, Peseshet goes outside. 
She lingers on the steps of the House of Life, admiring the city at dusk. 
In spite of all her hard work, there will always be patients she can’t help, like the woman with the tumor. 
They linger with her, but Peseshet has no time to dwell. 
In a few short weeks, the Nile’s annual flooding will begin, bringing life to the soil for the next year’s harvest and a whole new crop of patients. 

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

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

Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love. 
Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love. 
(Laughter) But it's not just because of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases. 
It's also because we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the perfect partner. 
Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend" -- (Laughter) Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. 
Now, Peter's not a very greedy man. 
Of all of the available women in the UK, all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. 
(Laughter) And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. 
(Laughter) It's not looking very good, is it Peter? 
Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. 
And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. 
I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore. 
The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view. 
Because I know, just as well as all of you do, that love doesn't really work like that. 
Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable. 
But I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us, because, love, as with most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is, ultimately, all about the study of patterns. 
Patterns from predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of cities. 
And if we're being honest, none of those things are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either. 
Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything. 
Even something as mysterious as love. 
And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love. 
(Laughter) OK, so Top Tip #1: How to win at online dating. 
So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians. 
Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. 
And they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each other on an online dating website. 
But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. 
(Laughter) Let me show you how this works. 
In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between one and five. 
Now, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a selection of people receive, you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website. 
This is the graph the OkCupid guys have come up with. 
And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally true that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get. 
But the question arises then of what is it about people up here who are so much more popular than people down here, even though they have the same score of attractiveness? 
And the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks that are important. 
So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. 
So if you take someone like Portia de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi is a very beautiful woman. 
Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but she's not a supermodel, either. 
If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. 
But some other people, i.e., most of the Internet ... 
(Laughter) seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse. 
(Laughter) Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive they thought Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were, and you ask them to give them a score between one and five I reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score. 
But the way that people would vote would be very different. 
So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the four because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion. 
And actually it's this spread that counts. 
It's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. 
So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. 
That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door. 
Now, I think this begins to make a bit more sense when you think in terms of the people who are sending these messages. 
So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested. 
That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. 
Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive. 
Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be honest? 
But here's where the really interesting part comes. 
Because when people choose the pictures that they use on an online dating website, they often try to minimize the things that they think some people will find unattractive. 
The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, (Laughter) or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. 
But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful. 
You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive. 
Because the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage. 
OK, Top Tip #2: How to pick the perfect partner. 
So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. 
But the question arises of how do you then convert that success into longer-term happiness, and in particular, how do you decide when is the right time to settle down? 
Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. 
But, equally, you don't really want to leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of long-term happiness. 
As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again." 
(Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. 
What do you know about love? 
(Laughter) So the question is then, how do you know when is the right time to settle down, given all the people that you can date in your lifetime? 
Thankfully, there's a rather delicious bit of mathematics that we can use to help us out here, called optimal stopping theory. 
So let's imagine, then, that you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be married by the time that you're 35. 
And there's a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness. 
Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. 
In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me. 
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. 
(Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. 
So here's the example. 
Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. 
Now unfortunately, I have to tell you that this method does come with some risks. 
For instance, imagine if your perfect partner appeared during your first 37 percent. 
Now, unfortunately, you'd have to reject them. 
(Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. 
(Laughter) Probably surrounded by cats ... 
(Laughter) nibbling at your remains. 
OK, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. 
That's OK, because you're in your rejection phase, so that's fine, you can reject them. 
But then imagine the next person to come along is just marginally less boring, dull and terrible ... 
(Laughter) than everybody that you've seen before. 
Now, if you are following the maths, I'm afraid you have to marry them ... 
(Laughter) and end up in a relationship which is, frankly, suboptimal. 
Sorry about that. 
But I do think that there's an opportunity here for Hallmark to cash in on and really cater for this market. 
A Valentine's Day card like this. 
(Laughter) "My darling husband, you are marginally less terrible than the first 37 percent of people I dated." 
(Laughter) It's actually more romantic than I normally manage. 
(Laughter) OK, so this method doesn't give you a 100 percent success rate, but there's no other possible strategy that can do any better. 
And actually, in the wild, there are certain types of fish which follow and employ this exact strategy. 
So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. 
I also think that subconsciously, humans, we do sort of do this anyway. 
We give ourselves a little bit of time to play the field, get a feel for the marketplace or whatever when we're young. 
And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. 
I think this is conclusive proof, if ever it were needed, that everybody's brains are prewired to be just a little bit mathematical. 
OK, so that was Top Tip #2. 
Now, Top Tip #3: How to avoid divorce. 
OK, so let's imagine then that you picked your perfect partner and you're settling into a lifelong relationship with them. 
Now, I like to think that everybody would ideally like to avoid divorce, apart from, I don't know, Piers Morgan's wife, maybe? 
(Laughter) But it's a sad fact of modern life that one in two marriages in the States ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind. 
Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. 
For one thing, it's very hard to know what you should be measuring or what you should be quantifying. 
But this didn't stop a psychologist, John Gottman, who did exactly that. 
Gottman observed hundreds of couples having a conversation and recorded, well, everything you can think of. 
So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. 
But what Gottman and his team found was that one of the most important predictors for whether or not a couple is going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation. 
Now, couples that were very low-risk scored a lot more positive points on Gottman's scale than negative. 
Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. 
Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. 
But it wasn't until he teamed up with a mathematician, James Murray, that they really started to understand what causes these negativity spirals and how they occur. 
And the results that they found, I think, are just incredibly impressively simple and interesting. 
So these equations predict how the wife or husband is going to respond in their next turn of the conversation, how positive or negative they're going to be. 
And these equations depend on the mood of the person when they're on their own, the mood of the person when they're with their partner, but most importantly, they depend on how much the husband and wife influence one another. 
Now, I think it's important to point out at this stage, that these exact equations have also been shown to be perfectly able at describing what happens between two countries in an arms race. 
(Laughter) So that an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war. 
(Laughter) But the really important term in this equation is the influence that people have on one another, and in particular, something called "the negativity threshold." 
Now, the negativity threshold, you can think of as how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really pissed off, and vice versa. 
Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. 
So I would have thought that perhaps the most successful relationships were ones where there was a really high negativity threshold. 
Where couples let things go and only brought things up if they really were a big deal. 
But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. 
The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. 
These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. 
These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. 
Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal. 
Now of course, it takes a bit more than just a low negativity threshold and not compromising to have a successful relationship. 
But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger. 
So those are my top three tips of how maths can help you with love and relationships. 
But I hope, that aside from their use as tips, they also give you a little bit of insight into the power of mathematics. 
Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. 
They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. 
So I hope that perhaps, for just a couple of you, a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love can persuade you to have a little bit more love for mathematics. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history. 
That's a lot to pack into 18 minutes. 
It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey. 
Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom. 
Around the corner from my bedroom was the bathroom that I used to share with my sister. 
And in between my bedroom and the bathroom was a balcony that overlooked the family room. 
And that's where everyone would hang out and watch TV, so that every time that I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom, everyone would see me, and every time I took a shower and would come back in a towel, everyone would see me. 
And I looked like this. 
I was awkward, insecure, and I hated it. 
I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house. 
And that's architecture. 
(Laughter) Done. 
That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy. 
And it's no surprise that we feel that way, because according to the EPA, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors. 
That's 90 percent of our time surrounded by architecture. 
That's huge. 
That means that architecture is shaping us in ways that we didn't even realize. 
That makes us a little bit gullible and very, very predictable. 
It means that when I show you a building like this, I know what you think: You think "power" and "stability" and "democracy." 
And I know you think that because it's based on a building that was build 2,500 years ago by the Greeks. 
This is a trick. 
This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. 
It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time. 
We used it [200] years ago to build banks. 
We used it in the 19th century to build art museums. 
And in the 20th century in America, we used it to build houses. 
And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements. 
This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying. 
It's expensive, it takes a long time, and it's very complicated. 
And the people that build things -- developers and governments -- they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to. 
That's how we end up with buildings like this. 
This is a nice building. 
This is the Livingston Public Library that was completed in 2004 in my hometown, and, you know, it's got a dome and it's got this round thing and columns, red brick, and you can kind of guess what Livingston is trying to say with this building: children, property values and history. 
But it doesn't have much to do with what a library actually does today. 
That same year, in 2004, on the other side of the country, another library was completed, and it looks like this. 
It's in Seattle. 
This library is about how we consume media in a digital age. 
It's about a new kind of public amenity for the city, a place to gather and read and share. 
So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different? 
And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. 
On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing, pushing for new technologies, new typologies, new solutions for the way that we live today. 
And we push and we push and we push until we completely alienate all of you. 
We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we're dead inside because we've got no choice. 
We have to go to the other side and reengage those symbols that we know you love. 
So we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sellouts, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years. 
Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s. 
Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism. 
It's about concrete. 
(Laughter) You can guess this. 
Small windows, dehumanizing scale. 
This is really tough stuff. 
So as we get closer to the '80s, we start to reengage those symbols. 
We push the pendulum back into the other direction. 
We take these forms that we know you love and we update them. 
We add neon and we add pastels and we use new materials. 
And you love it. 
And we can't give you enough of it. 
We take Chippendale armoires and we turned those into skyscrapers, and skyscrapers can be medieval castles made out of glass. 
Forms got big, forms got bold and colorful. 
Dwarves became columns. 
(Laughter) Swans grew to the size of buildings. 
It was crazy. 
But it's the '80s, it's cool. 
(Laughter) We're all hanging out in malls and we're all moving to the suburbs, and out there, out in the suburbs, we can create our own architectural fantasies. 
And those fantasies, they can be Mediterranean or French or Italian. 
(Laughter) Possibly with endless breadsticks. 
This is the thing about postmodernism. 
This is the thing about symbols. 
They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. 
Because I know, and I know all of you know, this isn't Tuscany. 
This is Ohio. 
(Laughter) So architects get frustrated, and we start pushing the pendulum back into the other direction. 
In the late '80s and early '90s, we start experimenting with something called deconstructivism. 
We throw out historical symbols, we rely on new, computer-aided design techniques, and we come up with new compositions, forms crashing into forms. 
This is academic and heady stuff, it's super unpopular, we totally alienate you. 
Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction. 
And then, something amazing happened. 
In 1997, this building opened. 
This is the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. 
And this building fundamentally changes the world's relationship to architecture. 
Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building. 
The New York Times called this building a miracle. 
Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed. 
So all of a sudden, everybody wants one of these buildings: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Springfield. 
(Laughter) Everybody wants one, and Gehry is everywhere. 
He is our very first starchitect. 
Now, how is it possible that these forms -- they're wild and radical -- how is it possible that they become so ubiquitous throughout the world? 
And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism. 
We created an emotional reaction to these forms. 
So did every mayor in the world. 
So every mayor knew that if they had these forms, they had culture and tourism. 
This phenomenon at the turn of the new millennium happened to a few other starchitects. 
It happened to Zaha and it happened to Libeskind, and what happened to these elite few architects at the turn of the new millennium could actually start to happen to the entire field of architecture, as digital media starts to increase the speed with which we consume information. 
Because think about how you consume architecture. 
A thousand years ago, you would have had to have walked to the village next door to see a building. 
Transportation speeds up: You can take a boat, you can take a plane, you can be a tourist. 
Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site. 
Architecture is everywhere now, and that means that the speed of communication has finally caught up to the speed of architecture. 
Because architecture actually moves quite quickly. 
It doesn't take long to think about a building. 
It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not. 
That's because there's never been a good feedback loop in architecture. 
That's how we end up with buildings like this. 
Brutalism wasn't a two-year movement, it was a 20-year movement. 
For 20 years, we were producing buildings like this because we had no idea how much you hated it. 
It's never going to happen again, I think, because we are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, of steel, or of the elevator, and it's a media revolution. 
So my theory is that when you apply media to this pendulum, it starts swinging faster and faster, until it's at both extremes nearly simultaneously, and that effectively blurs the difference between innovation and symbol, between us, the architects, and you, the public. 
Now we can make nearly instantaneous, emotionally charged symbols out of something that's brand new. 
Let me show you how this plays out in a project that my firm recently completed. 
We were hired to replace this building, which burned down. 
This is the center of a town called the Pines in Fire Island in New York State. 
It's a vacation community. 
We proposed a building that was audacious, that was different than any of the forms that the community was used to, and we were scared and our client was scared and the community was scared, so we created a series of photorealistic renderings that we put onto Facebook and we put onto Instagram, and we let people start to do what they do: share it, comment, like it, hate it. 
But that meant that two years before the building was complete, it was already a part of the community, so that when the renderings looked exactly like the finished product, there were no surprises. 
This building was already a part of this community, and then that first summer, when people started arriving and sharing the building on social media, the building ceased to be just an edifice and it became media, because these, these are not just pictures of a building, they're your pictures of a building. 
And as you use them to tell your story, they become part of your personal narrative, and what you're doing is you're short-circuiting all of our collective memory, and you're making these charged symbols for us to understand. 
That means we don't need the Greeks anymore to tell us what to think about architecture. 
We can tell each other what we think about architecture, because digital media hasn't just changed the relationship between all of us, it's changed the relationship between us and buildings. 
Think for a second about those librarians back in Livingston. 
If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search "new libraries." 
They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be. 
That's ammunition. 
That's ammunition that they can take with them to the mayor of Livingston, to the people of Livingston, and say, there's no one answer to what a library is today. 
Let's be a part of this. 
This abundance of experimentation gives them the freedom to run their own experiment. 
Everything is different now. 
Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore. 
Architects can hear you, and you're not intimidated by architecture. 
That means that that pendulum swinging back and forth from style to style, from movement to movement, is irrelevant. 
We can actually move forward and find relevant solutions to the problems that our society faces. 
This is the end of architectural history, and it means that the buildings of tomorrow are going to look a lot different than the buildings of today. 
It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works. 
It means that a stadium in Brooklyn can be a stadium in Brooklyn, not some red-brick historical pastiche of what we think a stadium ought to be. 
It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce. 
And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. 
It means that a parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida, can also be a place for sports and for yoga and you can even get married there late at night. 
(Laughter) It means that three architects can dream about swimming in the East River of New York, and then raise nearly half a million dollars from a community that gathered around their cause, no one client anymore. 
It means that no building is too small for innovation, like this little reindeer pavilion that's as muscly and sinewy as the animals it's designed to observe. 
And it means that a building doesn't have to be beautiful to be lovable, like this ugly little building in Spain, where the architects dug a hole, packed it with hay, and then poured concrete around it, and when the concrete dried, they invited someone to come and clean that hay out so that all that's left when it's done is this hideous little room that's filled with the imprints and scratches of how that place was made, and that becomes the most sublime place to watch a Spanish sunset. 
Because it doesn't matter if a cow builds our buildings or a robot builds our buildings. 
It doesn't matter how we build, it matters what we build. 
Architects already know how to make buildings that are greener and smarter and friendlier. 
We've just been waiting for all of you to want them. 
And finally, we're not on opposite sides anymore. 
Find an architect, hire an architect, work with us to design better buildings, better cities, and a better world, because the stakes are high. 
Buildings don't just reflect our society, they shape our society down to the smallest spaces: the local libraries, the homes where we raise our children, and the walk that they take from the bedroom to the bathroom. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello. 
I'm a toy developer. 
With a dream of creating new toys that have never been seen before, I began working at a toy company nine years ago. 
When I first started working there, I proposed many new ideas to my boss every day. 
However, my boss always asked if I had the data to prove it would sell, and asked me to think of product development after analyzing market data. 
Data, data, data. 
So I analyzed the market data before thinking of a product. 
However, I was unable to think of anything new at that moment. 
(Laughter) My ideas were unoriginal. 
I wasn't getting any new ideas and I grew tired of thinking. 
It was so hard that I became this skinny. 
(Laughter) It's true. (Applause) You've all probably had similar experiences and felt this way too. 
Your boss was being difficult. The data was difficult. 
Now, I throw out the data. 
It's my dream to create new toys. 
And now, instead of data, I'm using a game called Shiritori to come up with new ideas. 
I would like to introduce this method today. 
What is Shiritori? 
Take apple, elephant and trumpet, for example. 
It's a game where you take turns saying words that start with the last letter of the previous word. 
It's the same in Japanese and English. 
You can play Shiritori as you like: "neko, kora, raibu, burashi," etc, etc. [Cat, cola, concert, brush] Many random words will come out. 
You force those words to connect to what you want to think of and form ideas. 
In my case, for example, since I want to think of toys, what could a toy cat be? 
A cat that lands after doing a somersault from a high place? 
How about a toy with cola? 
A toy gun where you shoot cola and get someone soaking wet? 
(Laughter) Ridiculous ideas are okay. The key is to keep them flowing. 
The more ideas you produce, you're sure to come up with some good ones, too. 
A brush, for example. Can we make a toothbrush into a toy? 
We could combine a toothbrush with a guitar and -- (Music noises) -- you've got a toy you can play with while brushing your teeth. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Kids who don't like to brush their teeth might begin to like it. 
Can we make a hat into a toy? 
How about something like a roulette game, where you try the hat on one by one, and then, when someone puts it on, a scary alien breaks through the top screaming, "Ahh!" 
I wonder if there would be a demand for this at parties? 
Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. 
Actually, this bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop Pop, a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. 
It was a big hit when it reached stores. 
Data had nothing to do with its success. 
Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time, so please pass this around amongst yourselves today and play with it. 
(Applause) Anyway, you continue to come up with useless ideas. 
Think up many trivial ideas, everyone. 
If you base your ideas on data analysis and know what you're aiming for, you'll end up trying too hard, and you can't produce new ideas. 
Even if you know what your aim is, think of ideas as freely as if you were throwing darts with your eyes closed. 
If you do this, you surely will hit somewhere near the center. 
At least one will. 
That's the one you should choose. 
If you do so, that idea will be in demand and, moreover, it will be brand new. 
That is how I think of new ideas. 
It doesn't have to be Shiritori; there are many different methods. 
You just have to choose words at random. 
You can flip through a dictionary and choose words at random. 
For example, you could look up two random letters and gather the results or go to the store and connect product names with what you want to think of. 
The point is to gather random words, not information from the category you're thinking for. 
If you do this, the ingredients for the association of ideas are collected and form connections that will produce many ideas. 
The greatest advantage to this method is the continuous flow of images. 
Because you're thinking of one word after another, the image of the previous word is still with you. 
That image will automatically be related with future words. 
Unconsciously, a concert will be connected to a brush and a roulette game will be connected to a hat. 
You wouldn't even realize it. 
This method is, of course, not just for toys. 
You can collect ideas for books, apps, events, and many other projects. 
I hope you all try this method. 
There are futures that are born from data. 
However, using this silly game called Shiritori, I look forward to the exciting future you will create, a future you couldn't even imagine. 
Thank you very much. 

This is a kindergarten we designed in 2007. 
We made this kindergarten to be a circle. 
It's a kind of endless circulation on top of the roof. 
If you are a parent, you know that kids love to keep making circles. 
This is how the rooftop looks. 
And why did we design this? 
The principal of this kindergarten said, "No, I don't want a handrail." 
I said, "It's impossible." 
But he insisted: "How about having a net sticking out from the edge of the roof? 
So that it can catch the children falling off?" 
(Laughter) I said, "It's impossible." 
And of course, the government official said, "Of course you have to have a handrail." 
But we could keep that idea around the trees. 
There are three trees popping through. 
And we were allowed to call this rope as a handrail. 
But of course, rope has nothing to do with them. 
They fall into the net. 
And you get more, and more, more. 
(Laughter) Sometimes 40 children are around a tree. 
The boy on the branch, he loves the tree so he is eating the tree. 
(Laughter) And at the time of an event, they sit on the edge. 
It looks so nice from underneath. 
Monkeys in the zoo. 
(Laughter) Feeding time. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And we made the roof as low as possible, because we wanted to see children on top of the roof, not only underneath the roof. 
And if the roof is too high, you see only the ceiling. 
And the leg washing place -- there are many kinds of water taps. 
You see with the flexible tubes, you want to spray water to your friends, and the shower, and the one in front is quite normal. 
But if you look at this, the boy is not washing his boots, he's putting water into his boots. 
(Laughter) This kindergarten is completely open, most of the year. 
And there is no boundary between inside and outside. 
So it means basically this architecture is a roof. 
And also there is no boundary between classrooms. 
So there is no acoustic barrier at all. 
When you put many children in a quiet box, some of them get really nervous. 
But in this kindergarten, there is no reason they get nervous. 
Because there is no boundary. 
And the principal says if the boy in the corner doesn't want to stay in the room, we let him go. 
He will come back eventually, because it's a circle, it comes back. 
(Laughter) But the point is, in that kind of occasion, usually children try to hide somewhere. 
But here, just they leave and come back. 
It's a natural process. 
And secondly, we consider noise very important. 
You know that children sleep better in noise. 
They don't sleep in a quiet space. 
And in this kindergarten, these children show amazing concentration in class. 
And you know, our kind grew up in the jungle with noise. 
They need noise. 
And you know, you can talk to your friends in a noisy bar. 
You are not supposed to be in silence. 
And you know, these days we are trying to make everything under control. 
You know, it's completely open. 
And you should know that we can go skiing in -20 degrees in winter. 
In summer you go swimming. 
The sand is 50 degrees. 
And also, you should know that you are waterproof. 
You never melt in rain. 
So, children are supposed to be outside. 
So that is how we should treat them. 
This is how they divide classrooms. 
They are supposed to help teachers. 
They don't. 
(Laughter) I didn't put him in. 
A classroom. 
And a washbasin. 
They talk to each other around the well. 
And there are always some trees in the classroom. 
A monkey trying to fish another monkey from above. 
(Laughter) Monkeys. 
(Laughter) And each classroom has at least one skylight. 
And this is where Santa Claus comes down at the time of Christmas. 
This is the annex building, right next to that oval-shaped kindergarten. 
The building is only five meters tall with seven floors. 
And of course, the ceiling height is very low. 
So you have to consider safety. 
So, we put our children, a daughter and a son. 
They tried to go in. 
He hit his head. 
He's okay. His skull is quite strong. 
He is resilient. It's my son. 
(Laughter) And he is trying to see if it is safe to jump off. 
And then we put other children. 
The traffic jam is awful in Tokyo, as you know. 
(Laughter) The driver in front, she needs to learn how to drive. 
Now these days, kids need a small dosage of danger. 
And in this kind of occasion, they learn to help each other. 
This is society. This is the kind of opportunity we are losing these days. 
Now, this drawing is showing the movement of a boy between 9:10 and 9:30. 
And the circumference of this building is 183 meters. 
So it's not exactly small at all. 
And this boy did 6,000 meters in the morning. 
But the surprise is yet to come. 
The children in this kindergarten do 4,000 meters on average. 
And these children have the highest athletic abilities among many kindergartens. 
The principal says, "I don't train them. We leave them on top of the roof. 
Just like sheep." 
(Laughter) They keep running. 
(Laughter) My point is don't control them, don't protect them too much, and they need to tumble sometimes. 
They need to get some injury. 
And that makes them learn how to live in this world. 
I think architecture is capable of changing this world, and people's lives. 
And this is one of the attempts to change the lives of children. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

The first time I uttered a prayer was in a glass-stained cathedral. 
I was kneeling long after the congregation was on its feet, dip both hands into holy water, trace the trinity across my chest, my tiny body drooping like a question mark all over the wooden pew. 
I asked Jesus to fix me, and when he did not answer I befriended silence in the hopes that my sin would burn and salve my mouth would dissolve like sugar on tongue, but shame lingered as an aftertaste. 
And in an attempt to reintroduce me to sanctity, my mother told me of the miracle I was, said I could grow up to be anything I want. 
I decided to be a boy. 
It was cute. 
I had snapback, toothless grin, used skinned knees as street cred, played hide and seek with what was left of my goal. 
I was it. 
The winner to a game the other kids couldn't play, I was the mystery of an anatomy, a question asked but not answered, tightroping between awkward boy and apologetic girl, and when I turned 12, the boy phase wasn't deemed cute anymore. 
It was met with nostalgic aunts who missed seeing my knees in the shadow of skirts, who reminded me that my kind of attitude would never bring a husband home, that I exist for heterosexual marriage and child-bearing. 
And I swallowed their insults along with their slurs. 
Naturally, I did not come out of the closet. 
The kids at my school opened it without my permission. 
Called me by a name I did not recognize, said "lesbian," but I was more boy than girl, more Ken than Barbie. 
It had nothing to do with hating my body, I just love it enough to let it go, I treat it like a house, and when your house is falling apart, you do not evacuate, you make it comfortable enough to house all your insides, you make it pretty enough to invite guests over, you make the floorboards strong enough to stand on. 
My mother fears I have named myself after fading things. 
As she counts the echoes left behind by Mya Hall, Leelah Alcorn, Blake Brockington. 
She fears that I'll die without a whisper, that I'll turn into "what a shame" conversations at the bus stop. 
She claims I have turned myself into a mausoleum, that I am a walking casket, news headlines have turned my identity into a spectacle, Bruce Jenner on everyone's lips while the brutality of living in this body becomes an asterisk at the bottom of equality pages. 
No one ever thinks of us as human because we are more ghost than flesh, because people fear that my gender expression is a trick, that it exists to be perverse, that it ensnares them without their consent, that my body is a feast for their eyes and hands and once they have fed off my queer, they'll regurgitate all the parts they did not like. 
They'll put me back into the closet, hang me with all the other skeletons. 
I will be the best attraction. 
Can you see how easy it is to talk people into coffins, to misspell their names on gravestones. 
And people still wonder why there are boys rotting, they go away in high school hallways they are afraid of becoming another hashtag in a second afraid of classroom discussions becoming like judgment day and now oncoming traffic is embracing more transgender children than parents. 
I wonder how long it will be before the trans suicide notes start to feel redundant, before we realize that our bodies become lessons about sin way before we learn how to love them. 
Like God didn't save all this breath and mercy, like my blood is not the wine that washed over Jesus' feet. 
My prayers are now getting stuck in my throat. 
Maybe I am finally fixed, maybe I just don't care, maybe God finally listened to my prayers. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. 
And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? 
What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion? 
So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. 
And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. 
And in the lab, we were asking the question, "What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?" 
So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? 
So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day, but then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. 
But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. 
A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. 
And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. 
On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. 
I essentially became an infant in a woman's body. 
If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. 
And I have brought for you a real human brain. 
(Groaning, laughter) So this is a real human brain. 
This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. 
And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. 
For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. 
The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. 
But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. 
Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities. 
Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. 
Assistant: It has been. 
(Laughter) Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. 
It's all about "right here, right now." 
Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. 
Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. 
I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. 
We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. 
And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. 
And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful. 
My left hemisphere, our left hemisphere, is a very different place. 
Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. 
Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. 
Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, and more details about those details. 
It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. 
And our left hemisphere thinks in language. 
It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. 
It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you've got to remember to pick up bananas on your way home. 
I need them in the morning." 
It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. 
But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." 
And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. 
I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. 
And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke. 
On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. 
And it was the kind of caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. 
And it just gripped me -- and then it released me. 
And then it just gripped me -- and then it released me. 
And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "OK, I'll just start my normal routine." 
So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. 
And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. 
And I thought, "That's very peculiar." 
And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." 
And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience. 
And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. 
So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. 
And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. 
There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perception, so I'm just focused on internal systems. 
And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. 
I heard a little voice saying, "OK. You muscles, you've got to contract. 
You muscles, you relax." 
And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. 
And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. 
I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. 
And all I could detect was this energy -- energy. 
And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? 
What is going on?" 
And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. 
Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. 
Total silence. 
And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. 
But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. 
And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. 
I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. 
Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, "Hey! We've got a problem! 
We've got to get some help." 
And I'm going, "Ahh! I've got a problem!" 
(Laughter) So it's like, "OK, I've got a problem." 
But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness -- and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. 
But it was beautiful there. 
Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. 
So here I am in this space, and my job, and any stress related to my job -- it was gone. 
And I felt lighter in my body. 
And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those -- they were gone. 
And I felt this sense of peacefulness. 
And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! 
(Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria -- euphoria. 
It was beautiful. 
And again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, "Hey! You've got to pay attention. 
We've got to get help." 
And I'm thinking, "I've got to get help. I've got to focus." 
So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I've got to get to work. Can I drive?" 
And in that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. 
Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke!" 
And the next thing my brain says to me is, Wow! This is so cool! 
(Laughter) This is so cool! 
How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" 
(Laughter) And then it crosses my mind, "But I'm a very busy woman!" 
(Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!" 
So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. 
So I've got to call help. I've got to call work." 
I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number. 
So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. 
And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. 
And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. 
And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. 
And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card... that's not the card. 
It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. 
In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. 
I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. 
So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. 
I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. 
But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. 
So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number." 
Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!" 
(Laughter) And so I say to him -- clear in my mind, I say to him: "This is Jill! I need help!" 
And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo." 
I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever." 
So I couldn't know -- I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. 
So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help. 
And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. 
And I curl up into a little fetal ball. 
And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just I felt my spirit surrender. 
And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. 
And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition. 
When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. 
When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. 
And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. 
Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. 
Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. 
Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. 
And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. 
Nirvana. 
I found Nirvana. 
And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. 
But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! 
I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. 
And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." 
And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. 
And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres -- and find this peace. 
And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. 
And it motivated me to recover. 
Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in, and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. 
Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. 
It took me eight years to completely recover. 
So who are we? 
We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. 
And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. 
Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. 
I am the life-force power of the universe. 
I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. 
Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. 
Separate from the flow, separate from you. 
I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. 
These are the "we" inside of me. 
Which would you choose? 
Which do you choose? 
And when? 
I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. 

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

So on my way here, the passenger next to me and I had a very interesting conversation during my flight. 
He told me, "It seems like the United States has run out of jobs, because they're just making some up: cat psychologist, dog whisperer, tornado chaser." 
A couple of seconds later, he asked me, "So what do you do?" 
And I was like, "Peacebuilder?" 
(Laughter) Every day, I work to amplify the voices of women and to highlight their experiences and their participation in peace processes and conflict resolution, and because of my work, I recognize that the only way to ensure the full participation of women globally is by reclaiming religion. 
Now, this matter is vitally important to me. 
As a young Muslim woman, I am very proud of my faith. 
It gives me the strength and conviction to do my work every day. 
It's the reason I can be here in front of you. 
But I can't overlook the damage that has been done in the name of religion, not just my own, but all of the world's major faiths. 
The misrepresentation and misuse and manipulation of religious scripture has influenced our social and cultural norms, our laws, our daily lives, to a point where we sometimes don't recognize it. 
My parents moved from Libya, North Africa, to Canada in the early 1980s, and I am the middle child of 11 children. 
Yes, 11. 
But growing up, I saw my parents, both religiously devout and spiritual people, pray and praise God for their blessings, namely me of course, but among others. (Laughter) They were kind and funny and patient, limitlessly patient, the kind of patience that having 11 kids forces you to have. 
And they were fair. 
I was never subjected to religion through a cultural lens. 
I was treated the same, the same was expected of me. 
I was never taught that God judged differently based on gender. 
And my parents' understanding of God as a merciful and beneficial friend and provider shaped the way I looked at the world. 
Now, of course, my upbringing had additional benefits. 
Being one of 11 children is Diplomacy 101. (Laughter) To this day, I am asked where I went to school, like, "Did you go to Kennedy School of Government?" 
and I look at them and I'm like, "No, I went to the Murabit School of International Affairs." 
It's extremely exclusive. You would have to talk to my mom to get in. 
Lucky for you, she's here. 
But being one of 11 children and having 10 siblings teaches you a lot about power structures and alliances. 
It teaches you focus; you have to talk fast or say less, because you will always get cut off. 
It teaches you the importance of messaging. 
You have to ask questions in the right way to get the answers you know you want, and you have to say no in the right way to keep the peace. 
But the most important lesson I learned growing up was the importance of being at the table. 
When my mom's favorite lamp broke, I had to be there when she was trying to find out how and by who, because I had to defend myself, because if you're not, then the finger is pointed at you, and before you know it, you will be grounded. 
I am not speaking from experience, of course. 
When I was 15 in 2005, I completed high school and I moved from Canada -- Saskatoon -- to Zawiya, my parents' hometown in Libya, a very traditional city. 
Mind you, I had only ever been to Libya before on vacation, and as a seven-year-old girl, it was magic. 
It was ice cream and trips to the beach and really excited relatives. 
Turns out it's not the same as a 15-year-old young lady. 
I very quickly became introduced to the cultural aspect of religion. 
The words "haram" -- meaning religiously prohibited -- and "aib" -- meaning culturally inappropriate -- were exchanged carelessly, as if they meant the same thing and had the same consequences. 
And I found myself in conversation after conversation with classmates and colleagues, professors, friends, even relatives, beginning to question my own role and my own aspirations. 
And even with the foundation my parents had provided for me, I found myself questioning the role of women in my faith. 
So at the Murabit School of International Affairs, we go very heavy on the debate, and rule number one is do your research, so that's what I did, and it surprised me how easy it was to find women in my faith who were leaders, who were innovative, who were strong -- politically, economically, even militarily. 
Khadija financed the Islamic movement in its infancy. 
We wouldn't be here if it weren't for her. 
So why weren't we learning about her? 
Why weren't we learning about these women? 
Why were women being relegated to positions which predated the teachings of our faith? 
And why, if we are equal in the eyes of God, are we not equal in the eyes of men? 
To me, it all came back to the lessons I had learned as a child. 
The decision maker, the person who gets to control the message, is sitting at the table, and unfortunately, in every single world faith, they are not women. 
Religious institutions are dominated by men and driven by male leadership, and they create policies in their likeness, and until we can change the system entirely, then we can't realistically expect to have full economic and political participation of women. 
Our foundation is broken. 
My mom actually says, you can't build a straight house on a crooked foundation. 
In 2011, the Libyan revolution broke out, and my family was on the front lines. 
And there's this amazing thing that happens in war, a cultural shift almost, very temporary. 
And it was the first time that I felt it was not only acceptable for me to be involved, but it was encouraged. 
It was demanded. 
Myself and other women had a seat at the table. 
We weren't holding hands or a medium. 
We were part of decision making. 
We were information sharing. We were crucial. 
And I wanted and needed for that change to be permanent. 
Turns out, that's not that easy. 
It only took a few weeks before the women that I had previously worked with were returning back to their previous roles, and most of them were driven by words of encouragement from religious and political leaders, most of whom cited religious scripture as their defense. 
It's how they gained popular support for their opinions. 
So initially, I focused on the economic and political empowerment of women. 
I thought that would lead to cultural and social change. 
It turns out, it does a little, but not a lot. 
I decided to use their defense as my offense, and I began to cite and highlight Islamic scripture as well. 
In 2012 and 2013, my organization led the single largest and most widespread campaign in Libya. 
We entered homes and schools and universities, even mosques. 
We spoke to 50,000 people directly, and hundreds of thousands more through billboards and television commercials, radio commercials and posters. 
And you're probably wondering how a women's rights organization was able to do this in communities which had previously opposed our sheer existence. 
I used scripture. 
I used verses from the Quran and sayings of the Prophet, Hadiths, his sayings which are, for example, "The best of you is the best to their family." 
"Do not let your brother oppress another." 
For the first time, Friday sermons led by local community imams promoted the rights of women. 
They discussed taboo issues, like domestic violence. 
Policies were changed. 
In certain communities, we actually had to go as far as saying the International Human Rights Declaration, which you opposed because it wasn't written by religious scholars, well, those same principles are in our book. 
So really, the United Nations just copied us. 
By changing the message, we were able to provide an alternative narrative which promoted the rights of women in Libya. 
It's something that has now been replicated internationally, and while I am not saying it's easy -- believe me, it's not. 
Liberals will say you're using religion and call you a bad conservative. 
Conservatives will call you a lot of colorful things. 
I've heard everything from, "Your parents must be extremely ashamed of you" -- false; they're my biggest fans -- to "You will not make it to your next birthday" -- again wrong, because I did. 
And I remain a very strong believer that women's rights and religion are not mutually exclusive. 
But we have to be at the table. 
We have to stop giving up our position, because by remaining silent, we allow for the continued persecution and abuse of women worldwide. 
By saying that we're going to fight for women's rights and fight extremism with bombs and warfare, we completely cripple local societies which need to address these issues so that they're sustainable. 
It is not easy, challenging distorted religious messaging. 
You will have your fair share of insults and ridicule and threats. 
But we have to do it. 
We have no other option than to reclaim the message of human rights, the principles of our faith, not for us, not for the women in your families, not for the women in this room, not even for the women out there, but for societies that would be transformed with the participation of women. 
And the only way we can do that, our only option, is to be, and remain, at the table. 
Thank you. 

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

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

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

A hundred years ago this month, a 36-year-old Albert Einstein stood up in front of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to present a radical new theory of space, time and gravity: the general theory of relativity. 
General relativity is unquestionably Einstein's masterpiece, a theory which reveals the workings of the universe at the grandest scales, capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees to the beginning of time and space. 
1915 must have been an exciting year to be a physicist. 
Two new ideas were turning the subject on its head. 
One was Einstein's theory of relativity, the other was arguably even more revolutionary: quantum mechanics, a mind-meltingly strange yet stunningly successful new way of understanding the microworld, the world of atoms and particles. 
Over the last century, these two ideas have utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. 
It's thanks to relativity and quantum mechanics that we've learned what the universe is made from, how it began and how it continues to evolve. 
A hundred years on, we now find ourselves at another turning point in physics, but what's at stake now is rather different. 
The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature, or whether maybe for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don't have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it. 
This is the essential problem: the universe is far, far too interesting. 
Relativity and quantum mechanics appear to suggest that the universe should be a boring place. 
It should be dark, lethal and lifeless. 
But when we look around us, we see we live in a universe full of interesting stuff, full of stars, planets, trees, squirrels. 
The question is, ultimately, why does all this interesting stuff exist? 
Why is there something rather than nothing? 
This contradiction is the most pressing problem in fundamental physics, and in the next few years, we may find out whether we'll ever be able to solve it. 
At the heart of this problem are two numbers, two extremely dangerous numbers. 
These are properties of the universe that we can measure, and they're extremely dangerous because if they were different, even by a tiny bit, then the universe as we know it would not exist. 
The first of these numbers is associated with the discovery that was made a few kilometers from this hall, at CERN, home of this machine, the largest scientific device ever built by the human race, the Large Hadron Collider. 
The LHC whizzes subatomic particles around a 27-kilometer ring, getting them closer and closer to the speed of light before smashing them into each other inside gigantic particle detectors. 
On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced to the world that they'd spotted a new fundamental particle being created at the violent collisions at the LHC: the Higgs boson. 
Now, if you followed the news at the time, you'll have seen a lot of physicists getting very excited indeed, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we get that way every time we discover a new particle. 
Well, that is kind of true, but the Higgs boson is particularly special. 
We all got so excited because finding the Higgs proves the existence of a cosmic energy field. 
Now, you may have trouble imagining an energy field, but we've all experienced one. 
If you've ever held a magnet close to a piece of metal and felt a force pulling across that gap, then you've felt the effect of a field. 
And the Higgs field is a little bit like a magnetic field, except it has a constant value everywhere. 
It's all around us right now. 
We can't see it or touch it, but if it wasn't there, we would not exist. 
The Higgs field gives mass to the fundamental particles that we're made from. 
If it wasn't there, those particles would have no mass, and no atoms could form and there would be no us. 
But there is something deeply mysterious about the Higgs field. 
Relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that it has two natural settings, a bit like a light switch. 
It should either be off, so that it has a zero value everywhere in space, or it should be on so it has an absolutely enormous value. 
In both of these scenarios, atoms could not exist, and therefore all the other interesting stuff that we see around us in the universe would not exist. 
In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on, not zero but 10,000 trillion times weaker than its fully on value, a bit like a light switch that's got stuck just before the off position. 
And this value is crucial. 
If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe. 
So this is the first of our dangerous numbers, the strength of the Higgs field. 
Theorists have spent decades trying to understand why it has this very peculiarly fine-tuned number, and they've come up with a number of possible explanations. 
They have sexy-sounding names like "supersymmetry" or "large extra dimensions." 
I'm not going to go into the details of these ideas now, but the key point is this: if any of them explained this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field, then we should see new particles being created at the LHC along with the Higgs boson. 
So far, though, we've not seen any sign of them. 
But there's actually an even worse example of this kind of fine-tuning of a dangerous number, and this time it comes from the other end of the scale, from studying the universe at vast distances. 
One of the most important consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity was the discovery that the universe began as a rapid expansion of space and time 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang. 
Now, according to early versions of the Big Bang theory, the universe has been expanding ever since with gravity gradually putting the brakes on that expansion. 
But in 1998, astronomers made the stunning discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. 
The universe is getting bigger and bigger faster and faster driven by a mysterious repulsive force called dark energy. 
Now, whenever you hear the word "dark" in physics, you should get very suspicious because it probably means we don't know what we're talking about. 
(Laughter) We don't know what dark energy is, but the best idea is that it's the energy of empty space itself, the energy of the vacuum. 
Now, if you use good old quantum mechanics to work out how strong dark energy should be, you get an absolutely astonishing result. 
You find that dark energy should be 10 to the power of 120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy. 
That's one with 120 zeroes after it. 
This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it's impossible to get your head around. 
We often use the word "astronomical" when we're talking about big numbers. 
Well, even that one won't do here. 
This number is bigger than any number in astronomy. 
It's a thousand trillion trillion trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the entire universe. 
So that's a pretty bad prediction. 
In fact, it's been called the worst prediction in physics, and this is more than just a theoretical curiosity. 
If dark energy were anywhere near this strong, then the universe would have been torn apart, stars and galaxies could not form, and we would not be here. 
So this is the second of those dangerous numbers, the strength of dark energy, and explaining it requires an even more fantastic level of fine-tuning than we saw for the Higgs field. 
But unlike the Higgs field, this number has no known explanation. 
The hope was that a complete combination of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the theory of the universe at grand scales, with quantum mechanics, the theory of the universe at small scales, might provide a solution. 
Einstein himself spent most of his later years on a futile search for a unified theory of physics, and physicists have kept at it ever since. 
One of the most promising candidates for a unified theory is string theory, and the essential idea is, if you could zoom in on the fundamental particles that make up our world, you'd see actually that they're not particles at all, but tiny vibrating strings of energy, with each frequency of vibration corresponding to a different particle, a bit like musical notes on a guitar string. 
So it's a rather elegant, almost poetic way of looking at the world, but it has one catastrophic problem. 
It turns out that string theory isn't one theory at all, but a whole collection of theories. 
It's been estimated, in fact, that there are 10 to the 500 different versions of string theory. 
Each one would describe a different universe with different laws of physics. 
Now, critics say this makes string theory unscientific. 
You can't disprove the theory. 
But others actually turned this on its head and said, well, maybe this apparent failure is string theory's greatest triumph. 
What if all of these 10 to the 500 different possible universes actually exist out there somewhere in some grand multiverse? 
Suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers. 
In most of the multiverse, dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form. 
We live in one of the places in the multiverse where the two numbers are just right. 
We live in a Goldilocks universe. 
Now, this idea is extremely controversial, and it's easy to see why. 
If we follow this line of thinking, then we will never be able to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" 
In most of the multiverse, there is nothing, and we live in one of the few places where the laws of physics allow there to be something. 
Even worse, we can't test the idea of the multiverse. 
We can't access these other universes, so there's no way of knowing whether they're there or not. 
So we're in an extremely frustrating position. 
That doesn't mean the multiverse doesn't exist. 
There are other planets, other stars, other galaxies, so why not other universes? 
The problem is, it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure. 
Now, the idea of the multiverse has been around for a while, but in the last few years, we've started to get the first solid hints that this line of reasoning may get born out. 
Despite high hopes for the first run of the LHC, what we were looking for there -- we were looking for new theories of physics: supersymmetry or large extra dimensions that could explain this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field. 
But despite high hopes, the LHC revealed a barren subatomic wilderness populated only by a lonely Higgs boson. 
My experiment published paper after paper where we glumly had to conclude that we saw no signs of new physics. 
The stakes now could not be higher. 
This summer, the LHC began its second phase of operation with an energy almost double what we achieved in the first run. 
What particle physicists are all desperately hoping for are signs of new particles, micro black holes, or maybe something totally unexpected emerging from the violent collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. 
If so, then we can continue this long journey that began 100 years ago with Albert Einstein towards an ever deeper understanding of the laws of nature. 
But if, in two or three years' time, when the LHC switches off again for a second long shutdown, we've found nothing but the Higgs boson, then we may be entering a new era in physics: an era where there are weird features of the universe that we cannot explain; an era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly forever beyond our reach; an era where we will never be able to answer the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Harry, even if you just said the science may not have some answers, I would like to ask you a couple of questions, and the first is: building something like the LHC is a generational project. 
I just mentioned, introducing you, that we live in a short-term world. 
How do you think so long term, projecting yourself out a generation when building something like this? 
Harry Cliff: I was very lucky that I joined the experiment I work on at the LHC in 2008, just as we were switching on, and there are people in my research group who have been working on it for three decades, their entire careers on one machine. 
So I think the first conversations about the LHC were in 1976, and you start planning the machine without the technology that you know you're going to need to be able to build it. 
So the computing power did not exist in the early '90s when design work began in earnest. 
One of the big detectors which record these collisions, they didn't think there was technology that could withstand the radiation that would be created in the LHC, so there was basically a lump of lead in the middle of this object with some detectors around the outside, but subsequently we have developed technology. 
So you have to rely on people's ingenuity, that they will solve the problems, but it may be a decade or more down the line. 
BG: China just announced two or three weeks ago that they intend to build a supercollider twice the size of the LHC. 
I was wondering how you and your colleagues welcome the news. 
HC: Size isn't everything, Bruno. BG: I'm sure. I'm sure. 
(Laughter) It sounds funny for a particle physicist to say that. 
But I mean, seriously, it's great news. 
So building a machine like the LHC requires countries from all over the world to pool their resources. 
No one nation can afford to build a machine this large, apart from maybe China, because they can mobilize huge amounts of resources, manpower and money to build machines like this. 
So it's only a good thing. 
What they're really planning to do is to build a machine that will study the Higgs boson in detail and could give us some clues as to whether these new ideas, like supersymmetry, are really out there, so it's great news for physics, I think. 
BG: Harry, thank you. HC: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. 
The auditorium was empty. 
It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. 
This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. 
She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett. 
1,400 people were coming. 
And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play. 
But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. 
Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. 
Then the producer came over to Vera and said ... 
"If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play." 
There'd been a mistake. 
The opera house had provided the wrong instrument. 
This one had this harsh, tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away. 
The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. 
It wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large space such as the Cologne Opera House. 
So Keith Jarrett left. 
He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano. 
Now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano. 
And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert. 
And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget ... only for you." 
And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began. 
(Music) Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. 
Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. 
But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. 
And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row. 
It's an electrifying performance. 
It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. 
And the audience loved it. 
Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history. 
Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. 
He had embraced that mess, and it soared. 
But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct. 
He didn't want to play. 
Of course, I think any of us, in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way, we'd have the same instinct. 
We don't want to be asked to do good work with bad tools. 
We don't want to have to overcome unnecessary hurdles. 
But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. 
And I think our instinct is also wrong. 
I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess. 
So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll. 
So cognitive psychology first. 
We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance. 
For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers. 
And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes. 
So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman. 
But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized. 
Now, these are really ugly fonts, and they're difficult fonts to read. 
But at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been asked to read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams, in a variety of subjects. 
And the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down, forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit more about what they were reading, to interpret it ... 
and so they learned more. 
Another example. 
The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters. 
What do I mean by that? 
What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you. 
Can you do that? 
If you can, you have good, strong attentional filters. 
But some people really struggle with that. 
Some of Carson's undergraduate subjects struggled with that. 
They had weak filters, they had porous filters -- let a lot of external information in. 
And so what that meant is they were constantly being interrupted by the sights and the sounds of the world around them. 
If there was a television on while they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out. 
Now, you would think that that was a disadvantage ... 
but no. 
When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters were vastly more likely to have some real creative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album. 
These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill. 
They were able to think outside the box because their box was full of holes. 
Let's talk about complexity science. 
So how do you solve a really complex -- the world's full of complicated problems -- how do you solve a really complicated problem? 
For example, you try to make a jet engine. 
There are lots and lots of different variables, the operating temperature, the materials, all the different dimensions, the shape. 
You can't solve that kind of problem all in one go, it's too hard. 
So what do you do? 
Well, one thing you can do is try to solve it step-by-step. 
So you have some kind of prototype and you tweak it, you test it, you improve it. 
You tweak it, you test it, you improve it. 
Now, this idea of marginal gains will eventually get you a good jet engine. 
And it's been quite widely implemented in the world. 
So you'll hear about it, for example, in high performance cycling, web designers will talk about trying to optimize their web pages, they're looking for these step-by-step gains. 
That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. 
But you know what would make it a better way? 
A dash of mess. 
You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. 
And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end. 
And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust. 
Let's talk about social psychology. 
So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime -- alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects. 
And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime. 
And there were two treatments in this experiment. 
In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. 
In other cases, three friends and a stranger. 
And you can see where I'm going with this. 
Obviously I'm going to say that the groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively, which is true, they did. 
Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively. 
So the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chance of getting the answer right. 
Which is actually not that great -- in multiple choice, for three answers? 50-50's not good. 
(Laughter) The three friends and the stranger, even though the stranger didn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversation to accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chance of finding the right answer. 
That's quite a big leap in performance. 
But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it. 
So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job. 
They were complacent. 
When she spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time -- it's actually rather difficult, it's rather awkward ... 
and they were full of doubt. 
They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had. 
And I think that really exemplifies the challenge that we're dealing with here. 
Because, yeah -- the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move ... 
these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. 
But we don't feel that they're helping us. 
We feel that they're getting in the way ... 
and so we resist. 
And that's why the last example is really important. 
So I want to talk about somebody from the background of the world of rock 'n' roll. 
And you may know him, he's actually a TED-ster. 
His name is Brian Eno. 
He is an ambient composer -- rather brilliant. 
He's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the great rock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years. 
He's worked with David Bowie on "Heroes," he worked with U2 on "Achtung Baby" and "The Joshua Tree," he's worked with DEVO, he's worked with Coldplay, he's worked with everybody. 
And what does he do to make these great rock bands better? 
Well, he makes a mess. 
He disrupts their creative processes. 
It's his role to be the awkward stranger. 
It's his role to tell them that they have to play the unplayable piano. 
And one of the ways in which he creates this disruption is through this remarkable deck of cards -- I have my signed copy here -- thank you, Brian. 
They're called The Oblique Strategies, he developed them with a friend of his. 
And when they're stuck in the studio, Brian Eno will reach for one of the cards. 
He'll draw one at random, and he'll make the band follow the instructions on the card. 
So this one ... 
"Change instrument roles." 
Yeah, everyone swap instruments -- Drummer on the piano -- Brilliant, brilliant idea. 
"Look closely at the most embarrassing details. Amplify them." 
"Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate." 
These cards are disruptive. 
Now, they've proved their worth in album after album. 
The musicians hate them. 
(Laughter) So Phil Collins was playing drums on an early Brian Eno album. 
He got so frustrated he started throwing beer cans across the studio. 
Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's "Lodger" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, "Brian, this experiment is stupid." 
But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies. 
And he tells his students to use The Oblique Strategies because he's realized something. 
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you. 
The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list -- list on the recording studio wall. 
A checklist of things you might try if you got stuck. 
The list didn't work. 
Know why? 
Not messy enough. 
Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely. 
And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. 
These things help us. 
They help us solve problems, they help us be more creative. 
But also ... 
we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this. 
So however we do it ... 
whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. 
And it managed to get through my spam filter. 
I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh. 
(Laughter) I know. 
(Laughter) It went like this: it said, "Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon." 
Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? 
I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. 
Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do. 
(Laughter) And I said, "Solomon, Your email intrigues me." 
(Laughter) (Applause) And the game was afoot. 
He said, "Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you." 
(Laughter) "You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes." 
(Laughter) So I knew I was dealing with a professional. 
(Laughter) I said, "How much is it worth?" 
He said, "We will start with smaller quantity," -- I was like, aww -- and then he said, "of 25 kgs. 
(Laughter) The worth should be about $2.5 million." 
I said, "Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big. 
(Applause) I can handle it. How much gold do you have?" 
(Laughter) He said, "It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. 
We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment." 
I said, "50 kgs? 
There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton." 
(Laughter) (Applause) He said, "What do you do for a living?" 
(Laughter) I said, "I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager." 
(Laughter) This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no. 
Then I started to panic. 
I was like, "Where are you based?" 
I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. 
That's a lot of gold." 
He said, "It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment." 
I said, "Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. 
I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. 
Hold tight." 
(Laughter) This is what I sent Solomon. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on. 
(Laughter) I said, "Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. 
I've had one of my assistants run the numbers. 
(Laughter) We're ready for shipping as much gold as possible." 
There's always a moment where they try to tug your heartstrings, and this was it for Solomon. 
He said, "I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well." 
And I said, "That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on?" 
And he said, "On RealEstate, what about you?" 
I thought about it for a long time. 
And I said, "One word; Hummus." 
(Laughter) "It's going places. 
(Laughter) I was in Sainsbury's the other day and there were like 30 different varieties. 
Also you can cut up carrots, and you can dip them. 
Have you ever done that, Solomon?" 
(Laughter) He said, "I have to go bed now." 
(Laughter) (Applause) "Till morrow. 
Have sweet dream." 
I didn't know what to say! 
I said, "Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir." 
(Laughter) Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. 
It was getting a bit out of hand. 
Friends were saying, "James, do you want to come for a drink?" 
I was like, "I can't, I'm expecting an email about some gold." 
So I figured I had to knock it on the head. 
I had to take it to a ridiculous conclusion. 
So I concocted a plan. 
When we email each other, we need to use a code." 
And he agreed. 
(Laughter) I said, "Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence: Lawyer: Gummy Bear. 
Bank: Cream Egg. 
Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M&Ms. 
Documents: Jelly Beans. 
Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard." 
(Laughter) I knew these were all words they use, right? 
I said, "Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence." 
(Laughter) I didn't hear back. I thought, I've gone too far. 
I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. 
I said, "Solomon, Is the deal still on? 
KitKat." 
(Laughter) Because you have to be consistent. 
Then I did get an email back from him. 
He said, "The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah ..." 
I said, "Dude, you have to use the code!" 
What followed is the greatest email I've ever received. 
(Laughter) I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. 
This was a good day. 
"The business is on. 
I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear -- (Laughter) so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M&Ms process to start. 
(Laughter) Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard." 
(Applause) And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? 
And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. 
It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. 
I don't think what I'm doing is mean. 
There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. 
All I'm doing is wasting their time. 
And I think any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right? 
And if you're going to do this -- and I highly recommend you do -- get yourself a pseudonymous email address. 
Don't use your own email address. 
That's what I was doing at the start and it was a nightmare. 
I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response -- (Laughter) to a medical question I had. 
But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this: (Laughter) "I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT." 
I was like, oh! -- that Winnie Mandela. 
(Laughter) I know so many. 
"I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION." 
Let that sink in. 
She sent me this, which is hysterical. 
(Laughter) And this. 
And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. 
But to be honest, if there's nothing written on it, it's just a shape! 
(Laughter) I said, "Winnie, I'm really sorry to hear of this. 
Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious." 
(Laughter) That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive. 
She said, "KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. 
ONE LOVE." 
(Laughter) I said, "Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY." 
(Laughter) (Applause) She said, "MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE." 
(Laughter) I said, "no problemo. 
I SHOT THE SHERIFF." 
[ (BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY) ] (Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

If you can't imagine life without chocolate, you're lucky you weren't born before the 16th century. 
Until then, chocolate only existed in Mesoamerica in a form quite different from what we know. 
As far back as 1900 BCE, the people of that region had learned to prepare the beans of the native cacao tree. 
The earliest records tell us the beans were ground and mixed with cornmeal and chili peppers to create a drink - not a relaxing cup of hot cocoa, but a bitter, invigorating concoction frothing with foam. 
And if you thought we make a big deal about chocolate today, the Mesoamericans had us beat. 
They believed that cacao was a heavenly food gifted to humans by a feathered serpent god, known to the Maya as Kukulkan and to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. 
Aztecs used cacao beans as currency and drank chocolate at royal feasts, gave it to soldiers as a reward for success in battle, and used it in rituals. 
The first transatlantic chocolate encounter occurred in 1519 when Hernán Cortés visited the court of Moctezuma at Tenochtitlan. 
As recorded by Cortés's lieutenant, the king had 50 jugs of the drink brought out and poured into golden cups. 
When the colonists returned with shipments of the strange new bean, missionaries' salacious accounts of native customs gave it a reputation as an aphrodisiac. 
At first, its bitter taste made it suitable as a medicine for ailments, like upset stomachs, but sweetening it with honey, sugar, or vanilla quickly made chocolate a popular delicacy in the Spanish court. 
And soon, no aristocratic home was complete without dedicated chocolate ware. 
The fashionable drink was difficult and time consuming to produce on a large scale. 
That involved using plantations and imported slave labor in the Caribbean and on islands off the coast of Africa. 
The world of chocolate would change forever in 1828 with the introduction of the cocoa press by Coenraad van Houten of Amsterdam. 
Van Houten's invention could separate the cocoa's natural fat, or cocoa butter. 
This left a powder that could be mixed into a drinkable solution or recombined with the cocoa butter to create the solid chocolate we know today. 
Not long after, a Swiss chocolatier named Daniel Peter added powdered milk to the mix, thus inventing milk chocolate. 
By the 20th century, chocolate was no longer an elite luxury but had become a treat for the public. 
Meeting the massive demand required more cultivation of cocoa, which can only grow near the equator. 
Now, instead of African slaves being shipped to South American cocoa plantations, cocoa production itself would shift to West Africa with Cote d'Ivoire providing two-fifths of the world's cocoa as of 2015. 
Yet along with the growth of the industry, there have been horrific abuses of human rights. 
Many of the plantations throughout West Africa, which supply Western companies, use slave and child labor, with an estimation of more than 2 million children affected. 
This is a complex problem that persists despite efforts from major chocolate companies to partner with African nations to reduce child and indentured labor practices. 
Today, chocolate has established itself in the rituals of our modern culture. 
Due to its colonial association with native cultures, combined with the power of advertising, chocolate retains an aura of something sensual, decadent, and forbidden. 
Yet knowing more about its fascinating and often cruel history, as well as its production today, tells us where these associations originate and what they hide. 
So as you unwrap your next bar of chocolate, take a moment to consider that not everything about chocolate is sweet. 

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

When I was six years old, I received my gifts. 
My first grade teacher had this brilliant idea. 
She wanted us to experience receiving gifts but also learning the virtue of complimenting each other. 
So she had all of us come to the front of the classroom, and she bought all of us gifts and stacked them in the corner. 
And she said, "Why don't we just stand here and compliment each other? 
If you hear your name called, go and pick up your gift and sit down." 
What a wonderful idea, right? 
What could go wrong? 
(Laughter) Well, there were 40 of us to start with, and every time I heard someone's name called, I would give out the heartiest cheer. 
And then there were 20 people left, and 10 people left, and five left ... 
and three left. 
And I was one of them. 
And the compliments stopped. 
Well, at that moment, I was crying. 
And the teacher was freaking out. 
She was like, "Hey, would anyone say anything nice about these people?" 
(Laughter) "No one? OK, why don't you go get your gift and sit down. 
So behave next year -- someone might say something nice about you." 
(Laughter) Well, as I'm describing this you, you probably know I remember this really well. 
(Laughter) But I don't know who felt worse that day. 
Was it me or the teacher? 
She must have realized that she turned a team-building event into a public roast for three six-year-olds. 
And without the humor. 
You know, when you see people get roasted on TV, it was funny. 
There was nothing funny about that day. 
So that was one version of me, and I would die to avoid being in that situation again -- to get rejected in public again. 
That's one version. 
Then fast-forward eight years. 
Bill Gates came to my hometown -- Beijing, China -- to speak, and I saw his message. 
I fell in love with that guy. 
I thought, wow, I know what I want to do now. 
That night I wrote a letter to my family telling them: "By age 25, I will build the biggest company in the world, and that company will buy Microsoft." 
(Laughter) I totally embraced this idea of conquering the world -- domination, right? 
And I didn't make this up, I did write that letter. 
And here it is -- (Laughter) You don't have to read this through -- (Laughter) This is also bad handwriting, but I did highlight some key words. 
You get the idea. 
(Laughter) So ... 
that was another version of me: one who will conquer the world. 
Well, then two years later, I was presented with the opportunity to come to the United States. 
I jumped on it, because that was where Bill Gates lived, right? 
(Laughter) I thought that was the start of my entrepreneur journey. 
Then, fast-forward another 14 years. 
I was 30. 
Nope, I didn't build that company. 
I didn't even start. 
I was actually a marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company. 
And I felt I was stuck; I was stagnant. 
Why is that? 
Where is that 14-year-old who wrote that letter? 
It's not because he didn't try. 
It's because every time I had a new idea, every time I wanted to try something new, even at work -- I wanted to make a proposal, I wanted to speak up in front of people in a group -- I felt there was this constant battle between the 14-year-old and the six-year-old. 
One wanted to conquer the world -- make a difference -- another was afraid of rejection. 
And every time that six-year-old won. 
And this fear even persisted after I started my own company. 
I mean, I started my own company when I was 30 -- if you want to be Bill Gates, you've got to start sooner or later, right? 
When I was an entrepreneur, I was presented with an investment opportunity, and then I was turned down. 
And that rejection hurt me. 
It hurt me so bad that I wanted to quit right there. 
But then I thought, hey, would Bill Gates quit after a simple investment rejection? 
Would any successful entrepreneur quit like that? 
No way. 
And this is where it clicked for me. 
OK, I can build a better company. 
I can build a better team or better product, but one thing for sure: I've got to be a better leader. 
I've got to be a better person. 
I cannot let that six-year-old keep dictating my life anymore. 
I have to put him back in his place. 
So this is where I went online and looked for help. 
Google was my friend. 
(Laughter) I searched, "How do I overcome the fear of rejection?" 
I came up with a bunch of psychology articles about where the fear and pain are coming from. 
Then I came up with a bunch of "rah-rah" inspirational articles about "Don't take it personally, just overcome it." 
Who doesn't know that? 
(Laughter) But why was I still so scared? 
Then I found this website by luck. 
It's called rejectiontherapy.com. 
(Laughter) "Rejection Therapy" was this game invented by this Canadian entrepreneur. 
His name is Jason Comely. 
And basically the idea is for 30 days you go out and look for rejection, and every day get rejected at something, and then by the end, you desensitize yourself from the pain. 
And I loved that idea. 
(Laughter) I said, "You know what? I'm going to do this. 
And I'll feel myself getting rejected 100 days." 
And I came up with my own rejection ideas, and I made a video blog out of it. 
And so here's what I did. 
This is what the blog looked like. 
Day One ... 
(Laughter) Borrow 100 dollars from a stranger. 
So this is where I went to where I was working. 
I came downstairs and I saw this big guy sitting behind a desk. 
He looked like a security guard. 
So I just approached him. 
And I was just walking and that was the longest walk of my life -- hair on the back of my neck standing up, I was sweating and my heart was pounding. 
And I got there and said, "Hey, sir, can I borrow 100 dollars from you?" 
(Laughter) And he looked up, he's like, "No." 
"Why?" 
And I just said, "No? I'm sorry." 
Then I turned around, and I just ran. 
(Laughter) I felt so embarrassed. 
But because I filmed myself -- so that night I was watching myself getting rejected, I just saw how scared I was. 
I looked like this kid in "The Sixth Sense." 
I saw dead people. 
(Laughter) But then I saw this guy. 
You know, he wasn't that menacing. 
He was a chubby, loveable guy, and he even asked me, "Why?" 
In fact, he invited me to explain myself. 
And I could've said many things. 
I could've explained, I could've negotiated. 
I didn't do any of that. 
All I did was run. 
I felt, wow, this is like a microcosm of my life. 
Every time I felt the slightest rejection, I would just run as fast as I could. 
And you know what? 
The next day, no matter what happens, I'm not going to run. 
I'll stay engaged. 
Day Two: Request a "burger refill." 
(Laughter) It's when I went to a burger joint, I finished lunch, and I went to the cashier and said, "Hi, can I get a burger refill?" 
(Laughter) He was all confused, like, "What's a burger refill?" 
(Laughter) I said, "Well, it's just like a drink refill but with a burger." 
And he said, "Sorry, we don't do burger refill, man." 
(Laughter) So this is where rejection happened and I could have run, but I stayed. 
I said, "Well, I love your burgers, I love your joint, and if you guys do a burger refill, I will love you guys more." 
(Laughter) And he said, "Well, OK, I'll tell my manager about it, and maybe we'll do it, but sorry, we can't do this today." 
Then I left. 
And by the way, I don't think they've ever done burger refill. 
(Laughter) I think they're still there. 
But the life and death feeling I was feeling the first time was no longer there, just because I stayed engaged -- because I didn't run. 
I said, "Wow, great, I'm already learning things. 
Great." 
And then Day Three: Getting Olympic Doughnuts. 
This is where my life was turned upside down. 
I went to a Krispy Kreme. 
It's a doughnut shop in mainly the Southeastern part of the United States. 
I'm sure they have some here, too. 
And I went in, I said, "Can you make me doughnuts that look like Olympic symbols? 
Basically, you interlink five doughnuts together ... " I mean there's no way they could say yes, right? 
The doughnut maker took me so seriously. 
(Laughter) So she put out paper, started jotting down the colors and the rings, and is like, "How can I make this?" 
And then 15 minutes later, she came out with a box that looked like Olympic rings. 
And I was so touched. 
I just couldn't believe it. 
And that video got over five million views on Youtube. 
The world couldn't believe that either. 
(Laughter) You know, because of that I was in newspapers, in talk shows, in everything. 
And I became famous. 
A lot of people started writing emails to me and saying, "What you're doing is awesome." 
But you know, fame and notoriety did not do anything to me. 
What I really wanted to do was learn, and to change myself. 
So I turned the rest of my 100 days of rejection into this playground -- into this research project. 
I wanted to see what I could learn. 
And then I learned a lot of things. 
I discovered so many secrets. 
For example, I found if I just don't run, if I got rejected, I could actually turn a "no" into a "yes," and the magic word is, "why." 
So one day I went to a stranger's house, I had this flower in my hand, knocked on the door and said, "Hey, can I plant this flower in your backyard?" 
(Laughter) And he said, "No." 
But before he could leave I said, "Hey, can I know why?" 
And he said, "Well, I have this dog that would dig up anything I put in the backyard. 
I don't want to waste your flower. 
If you want to do this, go across the street and talk to Connie. 
She loves flowers." 
So that's what I did. 
I went across and knocked on Connie's door. 
And she was so happy to see me. 
(Laughter) And then half an hour later, there was this flower in Connie's backyard. 
I'm sure it looks better now. 
(Laughter) But had I left after the initial rejection, I would've thought, well, it's because the guy didn't trust me, it's because I was crazy, because I didn't dress up well, I didn't look good. 
It was none of those. 
It was because what I offered did not fit what he wanted. 
And he trusted me enough to offer me a referral, using a sales term. 
I converted a referral. 
Then one day -- and I also learned that I can actually say certain things and maximize my chance to get a yes. 
So for example, one day I went to a Starbucks, and asked the manager, "Hey, can I be a Starbucks greeter?" 
He was like, "What's a Starbucks greeter?" 
I said, "Do you know those Walmart greeters? 
You know, those people who say 'hi' to you before you walk in the store, and make sure you don't steal stuff, basically? 
I want to give a Walmart experience to Starbucks customers." 
(Laughter) Well, I'm not sure that's a good thing, actually -- Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a bad thing. 
And he was like, "Oh" -- yeah, this is how he looked, his name is Eric -- and he was like, "I'm not sure." 
This is how he was hearing me. "Not sure." 
Then I ask him, "Is that weird?" 
He's like, "Yeah, it's really weird, man." 
But as soon as he said that, his whole demeanor changed. 
It's as if he's putting all the doubt on the floor. 
And he said, "Yeah, you can do this, just don't get too weird." 
(Laughter) So for the next hour I was the Starbucks greeter. 
I said "hi" to every customer that walked in, and gave them holiday cheers. 
By the way, I don't know what your career trajectory is, don't be a greeter. 
(Laughter) It was really boring. 
But then I found I could do this because I mentioned, "Is that weird?" 
I mentioned the doubt that he was having. 
And because I mentioned, "Is that weird?", that means I wasn't weird. 
That means I was actually thinking just like him, seeing this as a weird thing. 
And again, and again, I learned that if I mention some doubt people might have before I ask the question, I gained their trust. 
People were more likely to say yes to me. 
And then I learned I could fulfill my life dream ... 
by asking. 
You know, I came from four generations of teachers, and my grandma has always told me, "Hey Jia, you can do anything you want, but it'd be great if you became a teacher." 
(Laughter) But I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I didn't. 
But it has always been my dream to actually teach something. 
So I said, "What if I just ask and teach a college class?" 
I lived in Austin at the time, so I went to University of Texas at Austin and knocked on professors' doors and said, "Can I teach your class?" 
I didn't get anywhere the first couple of times. 
But because I didn't run -- I kept doing it -- and on the third try the professor was very impressed. 
He was like, "No one has done this before." 
And I came in prepared with powerpoints and my lesson. 
He said, "Wow, I can use this. 
Why don't you come back in two months? I'll fit you in my curriculum." 
And two months later I was teaching a class. 
This is me -- you probably can't see, this is a bad picture. 
You know, sometimes you get rejected by lighting, you know? 
(Laughter) But wow -- when I finished teaching that class, I walked out crying, because I thought I could fulfill my life dream just by simply asking. 
I used to think I have to accomplish all these things -- have to be a great entrepreneur, or get a PhD to teach -- but no, I just asked, and I could teach. 
And in that picture, which you can't see, I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. 
Why? Because in my research I found that people who really change the world, who change the way we live and the way we think, are the people who were met with initial and often violent rejections. 
People like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or even Jesus Christ. 
These people did not let rejection define them. 
They let their own reaction after rejection define themselves. 
And they embraced rejection. 
And we don't have to be those people to learn about rejection, and in my case, rejection was my curse, was my boogeyman. 
It has bothered me my whole life because I was running away from it. 
Then I started embracing it. 
I turned that into the biggest gift in my life. 
I started teaching people how to turn rejections into opportunities. 
I use my blog, I use my talk, I use the book I just published, and I'm even building technology to help people overcome their fear of rejection. 
When you get rejected in life, when you are facing the next obstacle or next failure, consider the possibilities. 
Don't run. 
If you just embrace them, they might become your gifts as well. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My inbox is full of hate mails and personal abuse and has been for years. 
In 2010, I started answering those mails and suggesting to the writer that we might meet for coffee and a chat. 
I have had hundreds of encounters. 
They have taught me something important that I want to share with you. 
I was born in Turkey from Kurdish parents and we moved to Denmark when I was a young child. 
In 2007, I ran for a seat in the Danish parliament as one of the first women with a minority background. 
I was elected, but I soon found out that not everyone was happy about it as I had to quickly get used to finding hate messages in my inbox. 
Those emails would begin with something like this: "What's a raghead like you doing in our parliament?" 
I never answered. 
I'd just delete the emails. 
I just thought that the senders and I had nothing in common. 
They didn't understand me, and I didn't understand them. 
Then one day, one of my colleagues in the parliament said that I should save the hate mails. 
"When something happens to you, it will give the police a lead." 
(Laughter) I noticed that she said, "When something happens" and not "if." 
(Laughter) Sometimes hateful letters were also sent to my home address. 
The more I became involved in public debate, the more hate mail and threats I received. 
After a while, I got a secret address and I had to take extra precautions to protect my family. 
Then in 2010, a Nazi began to harass me. 
It was a man who had attacked Muslim women on the street. 
Over time, it became much worse. 
I was at the zoo with my children, and the phone was ringing constantly. 
It was the Nazi. 
I had the impression that he was close. 
We headed home. 
When we got back, my son asked, "Why does he hate you so much, Mom, when he doesn't even know you?" 
"Some people are just stupid," I said. 
And at the time, I actually thought that was a pretty clever answer. 
And I suspect that that is the answer most of us would give. 
The others -- they are stupid, brainwashed, ignorant. 
We are the good guys and they are the bad guys, period. 
Several weeks later I was at a friend's house, and I was very upset and angry about all the hate and racism I had met. 
It was he who suggested that I should call them up and visit them. 
"They will kill me," I said. 
"They would never attack a member of the Danish Parliament," he said. 
"And anyway, if they killed you, you would become a martyr." 
(Laughter) "So it's pure win-win situation for you." 
(Laughter) His advice was so unexpected, when I got home, I turned on my computer and opened the folder where I had saved all the hate mail. 
There were literally hundreds of them. 
Emails that started with words like "terrorist," "raghead," "rat," "whore." 
I decided to contact the one who had sent me the most. 
His name was Ingolf. 
I decided to contact him just once so I could say at least I had tried. 
To my surprise and shock, he answered the phone. 
I blurted out, "Hello, my name is Özlem. You have sent me so many hate mails. 
You don't know me, I don't know you. 
I was wondering if I could come around and we can drink a coffee together and talk about it?" 
(Laughter) There was silence on the line. 
And then he said, "I have to ask my wife." 
(Laughter) What? 
The racist has a wife? 
(Laughter) A couple of days later, we met at his house. 
I will never forget when he opened his front door and reached out to shake my hand. 
I felt so disappointed. 
(Laughter) because he looked nothing like I'd imagined. 
I had expected a horrible person -- dirty, messy house. 
It was not. 
His house smelled of coffee which was served from a coffee set identical to the one my parents used. 
I ended up staying for two and a half hours. 
And we had so many things in common. 
Even our prejudices were alike. 
(Laughter) Ingolf told me that when he waits for the bus and the bus stops 10 meters away from him, it was because the driver was a "raghead." 
I recognized that feeling. 
When I was young and I waited for the bus and it stopped 10 meters away from me, I was sure that the driver was a racist. 
When I got home, I was very ambivalent about my experience. 
On the one hand, I really liked Ingolf. 
He was easy and pleasant to talk to, but on the other hand, I couldn't stand the idea of having so much in common with someone who had such clearly racist views. 
Gradually, and painfully, I came to realize that I had been just as judgmental of those who had sent me hate mails as they had been of me. 
This was the beginning of what I call #dialoguecoffee. 
Basically, I sit down for coffee with people who have said the most terrible things to me to try to understand why they hate people like me when they don't even know me. 
I have been doing this the last eight years. 
The vast majority of people I approach agree to meet me. 
Most of them are men, but I have also met women. 
I have made it a rule to always meet them in their house to convey from the outset that I trust them. 
I always bring food because when we eat together, it is easier to find what we have in common and make peace together. 
Along the way, I have learned some valuable lessons. 
The people who sent hate mails are workers, husbands, wives, parents like you and me. 
I'm not saying that their behavior is acceptable, but I have learned to distance myself from the hateful views without distancing myself from the person who's expressing those views. 
And I have discovered that the people I visit are just as afraid of people they don't know as I was afraid of them before I started inviting myself for coffee. 
During these meetings, a specific theme keeps coming up. 
It shows up regardless whether I'm talking to a humanist or a racist, a man, a woman, a Muslim or an atheist. 
They all seem to think that other people are to blame for the hate and for the generalization of groups. 
They all believe that other people have to stop demonizing. 
They point at politicians, the media, their neighbor or the bus driver who stops 10 meters away. 
But when I asked, "What about you? 
What can you do?", the reply is usually, "What can I do? 
I have no influence. 
I have no power." 
I know that feeling. 
For a large part of my life, I also thought that I didn't have any power or influence -- even when I was a member of the Danish parliament. 
But today I know the reality is different. 
We all have power and influence where we are, so we must never, never underestimate our own potential. 
The #dialoguecoffee meetings have taught me that people of all political convictions can be caught demonizing the others with different views. 
I know what I'm talking about. 
As a young child, I hated different population groups. 
And at the time, my religious views were very extreme. 
But my friendship with Turks, with Danes, with Jews and with racists has vaccinated me against my own prejudices. 
I grew up in a working-class family, and on my journey I have met many people who have insisted on speaking to me. 
They have changed my views. 
They have formed me as a democratic citizen and a bridge builder. 
If you want to prevent hate and violence, we have to talk to as many people as possible for as long as possible while being as open as possible. 
That can only be achieved through debate, critical conversation and insisting on dialogue that doesn't demonize people. 
I'm going to ask you a question. 
I invite you to think about it when you get home and in the coming days, but you have to be honest with yourself. 
It should be easy, no one else will know it. 
The question is this ... 
who do you demonize? 
Do you think supporters of American President Trump are deplorables? 
Or that those who voted for Turkish President Erdoğan are crazy Islamists? 
Or that those who voted for Le Pen in France are stupid fascists? 
Or perhaps you think that Americans who voted for Bernie Sanders are immature hippies. 
(Laughter) All those words have been used to vilify those groups. 
Maybe at this point, do you think I am an idealist? 
I want to give you a challenge. 
Before the end of this year, I challenge you to invite someone who you demonize -- someone who you disagree with politically and/or culturally and don't think you have anything in common with. 
I challenge you to invite someone like this to #dialoguecoffee. 
Remember Ingolf? 
Basically, I'm asking you to find an Ingolf in your life, contact him or her and suggest that you can meet for #dialoguecofee. 
When you start at #dialoguecoffee, you have to remember this: first, don't give up if the person refuses at first. 
Sometimes it's taken me nearly one year to arrange a #dialoguecoffee meeting. 
Two: acknowledge the other person's courage. 
It isn't just you who's brave. 
The one who's inviting you into their home is just as brave. 
Three: don't judge during the conversation. 
Make sure that most of the conversation focuses on what you have in common. 
As I said, bring food. 
And finally, remember to finish the conversation in a positive way because you are going to meet again. 
A bridge can't be built in one day. 
We are living in a world where many people hold definitive and often extreme opinions about the others without knowing much about them. 
We notice of course the prejudices on the other side than in our own bases. 
And we ban them from our lives. 
We delete the hate mails. 
We hang out only with people who think like us and talk about the others in a category of disdain. 
We unfriend people on Facebook, and when we meet people who are discriminating or dehumanizing people or groups, we don't insist on speaking with them to challenge their opinions. 
That's how healthy democratic societies break down -- when we don't check the personal responsibility for the democracy. 
We take the democracy for granted. 
It is not. 
Conversation is the most difficult thing in a democracy and also the most important. 
So here's my challenge. 
Find your Ingolf. 
(Laughter) Start a conversation. 
Trenches have been dug between people, yes, but we all have the ability to build the bridges that cross the trenches. 
And let me end by quoting my friend, Sergeot Uzan, who lost his son, Dan Uzan, in a terror attack on a Jewish synagogue in Copenhagen, 2015. 
Sergio rejected any suggestion of revenge and instead said this ... 
"Evil can only be defeated by kindness between people. 
Kindness demands courage." 
Dear friends, let's be courageous. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Worldwide, over 1.5 billion people experience armed conflict. 
In response, people are forced to flee their country, leaving over 15 million refugees. 
Children, without a doubt, are the most innocent and vulnerable victims ... 
but not just from the obvious physical dangers, but from the often unspoken effects that wars have on their families. 
The experiences of war leave children at a real high risk for the development of emotional and behavioral problems. 
Children, as we can only imagine, will feel worried, threatened and at risk. 
But there is good news. 
The quality of care that children receive in their families can have a more significant effect on their well-being than from the actual experiences of war that they have been exposed to. 
So actually, children can be protected by warm, secure parenting during and after conflict. 
In 2011, I was a first-year PhD student in the University of Manchester School of Psychological Sciences. 
Like many of you here, I watched the crisis in Syria unfold in front of me on the TV. 
My family is originally from Syria, and very early on, I lost several family members in really horrifying ways. 
I'd sit and I'd gather with my family and watch the TV. 
We've all seen those scenes: bombs destroying buildings, chaos, destruction and people screaming and running. 
It was always the people screaming and running that really got me the most, especially those terrified-looking children. 
I was a mother to two young, typically inquisitive children. 
They were five and six then, at an age where they typically asked lots and lots of questions, and expected real, convincing answers. 
So, I began to wonder what it might be like to parent my children in a war zone and a refugee camp. 
Would my children change? 
Would my daughter's bright, happy eyes lose their shine? 
Would my son's really relaxed and carefree nature become fearful and withdrawn? 
How would I cope? 
Would I change? 
As psychologists and parent trainers, we know that arming parents with skills in caring for their children can have a huge effect on their well-being, and we call this parent training. 
The question I had was, could parent training programs be useful for families while they were still in war zones or refugee camps? 
Could we reach them with advice or training that would help them through these struggles? 
So I approached my PhD supervisor, Professor Rachel Calam, with the idea of using my academic skills to make some change in the real world. 
I wasn't quite sure what exactly I wanted to do. 
She listened carefully and patiently, and then to my joy she said, "If that's what you want to do, and it means so much to you, then let's do it. 
Let's find ways to see if parent programs can be useful for families in these contexts." 
So for the past five years, myself and my colleagues -- Prof. Calam and Dr. Kim Cartwright -- have been working on ways to support families that have experienced war and displacement. 
Now, to know how to help families that have been through conflict support their children, the first step must obviously be to ask them what they're struggling with, right? 
I mean, it seems obvious. 
But it's often those that are the most vulnerable, that we're trying to support, that we actually don't ask. 
How many times have we just assumed we know exactly the right thing that's going to help someone or something without actually asking them first? 
So I travelled to refugee camps in Syria and in Turkey, and I sat with families, and I listened. 
I listened to their parenting challenges, I listened to their parenting struggles and I listened to their call for help. 
And sometimes that was just paused, as all I could do was hold hands with them and just join them in silent crying and prayer. 
They told me about their struggles, they told me about the rough, harsh refugee camp conditions that made it hard to focus on anything but practical chores like collecting clean water. 
They told me how they watched their children withdraw; the sadness, depression, anger, bed-wetting, thumb-sucking, fear of loud noises, fear of nightmares -- terrifying, terrifying nightmares. 
These families had been through what we had been watching on the TV. 
The mothers -- almost half of them were now widows of war, or didn't even know if their husbands were dead or alive -- described how they felt they were coping so badly. 
They watched their children change and they had no idea how to help them. 
They didn't know how to answer their children's questions. 
What I found incredibly astonishing and so motivational was that these families were so motivated to support their children. 
Despite all these challenges they faced, they were trying to help their children. 
They were making attempts at seeking support from NGO workers, from refugee camp teachers, professional medics, other parents. 
One mother I met had only been in a camp for four days, and had already made two attempts at seeking support for her eight-year-old daughter who was having terrifying nightmares. 
But sadly, these attempts are almost always useless. 
Refugee camp doctors, when available, are almost always too busy, or don't have the knowledge or the time for basic parenting supports. 
Refugee camp teachers and other parents are just like them -- part of a new refugee community who's struggling with new needs. 
So then we began to think. 
How could we help these families? 
The families were struggling with things much bigger than they could cope with. 
The Syrian crisis made it clear how incredibly impossible it would be to reach families on an individual level. 
How else could we help them? 
How would we reach families at a population level and low costs in these terrifying, terrifying times? 
After hours of speaking to NGO workers, one suggested a fantastic innovative idea of distributing parenting information leaflets via bread wrappers -- bread wrappers that were being delivered to families in a conflict zone in Syria by humanitarian workers. 
So that's what we did. 
The bread wrappers haven't changed at all in their appearance, except for the addition of two pieces of paper. 
One was a parenting information leaflet that had basic advice and information that normalized to the parent what they might be experiencing, and what their child might be experiencing. 
And information on how they could support themselves and their children, such as information like spending time talking to your child, showing them more affection, being more patient with your child, talking to your children. 
The other piece of paper was a feedback questionnaire, and of course, there was a pen. 
So is this simply leaflet distribution, or is this actually a possible means of delivering psychological first aid that provides warm, secure, loving parenting? 
We managed to distribute 3,000 of these in just one week. 
What was incredible was we had a 60 percent response rate. 
60 percent of the 3,000 families responded. 
I don't know how many researchers we have here today, but that kind of response rate is fantastic. 
To have that in Manchester would be a huge achievement, let alone in a conflict zone in Syria -- really highlighting how important these kinds of messages were to families. 
I remember how excited and eager we were for the return of the questionnaires. 
The families had left hundreds of messages -- most incredibly positive and encouraging. 
But my favorite has got to be, "Thank you for not forgetting about us and our children." 
This really illustrates the potential means of the delivery of psychological first aid to families, and the return of feedback, too. 
Just imagine replicating this using other means such as baby milk distribution, or female hygiene kits, or even food baskets. 
But let's bring this closer to home, because the refugee crisis is one that is having an effect on every single one of us. 
We're bombarded with images daily of statistics and of photos, and that's not surprising, because by last month, over one million refugees had reached Europe. 
One million. 
Refugees are joining our communities, they're becoming our neighbors, their children are attending our children's schools. 
So we've adapted the leaflet to meet the needs of European refugees, and we have them online, open-access, in areas with a really high refugee influx. 
For example, the Swedish healthcare uploaded it onto their website, and within the first 45 minutes, it was downloaded 343 times -- really highlighting how important it is for volunteers, practitioners and other parents to have open-access, psychological first-aid messages. 
In 2013, I was sitting on the cold, hard floor of a refugee camp tent with mothers sitting around me as I was conducting a focus group. 
Across from me stood an elderly lady with what seemed to be a 13-year-old girl lying beside her, with her head on the elderly lady's knees. 
The girl stayed quiet throughout the focus group, not talking at all, with her knees curled up against her chest. 
Towards the end of the focus group, and as I was thanking the mothers for their time, the elderly lady looked at me while pointing at the young girl, and said to me, "Can you help us with...?" 
Not quite sure what she expected me to do, I looked at the young girl and smiled, and in Arabic I said, "Salaam alaikum. Shu-ismak?" 
"What's your name?" 
She looked at me really confused and unengaged, but then said, "Halul." 
Halul is the pet's name for the Arabic female name, Hala, and is only really used to refer to really young girls. 
At that point I realized that actually Hala was probably much older than 13. 
It turns out Hala was a 25-year-old mother to three young children. 
Hala had been a confident, bright, bubbly, loving, caring mother to her children, but the war had changed all of that. 
She had lived through bombs being dropped in her town; she had lived through explosions. 
When fighter jets were flying around their building, dropping bombs, her children would be screaming, terrified from the noise. 
Hala would frantically grab pillows and cover her children's ears to block out the noise, all the while screaming herself. 
When they reached the refugee camp and she knew they were finally in some kind of safety, she completely withdrew to acting like her old childhood self. 
She completely rejected her family -- her children, her husband. 
Hala simply could no longer cope. 
This is a parenting struggle with a really tough ending, but sadly, it's not uncommon. 
Those who experience armed conflict and displacement will face serious emotional struggles. 
And that's something we can all relate to. 
If you have been through a devastating time in your life, if you have lost someone or something you really care about, how would you continue to cope? 
Could you still be able to care for yourself and for your family? 
Given that the first years of a child's life are crucial for healthy physical and emotional development, and that 1.5 billion people are experiencing armed conflict -- many of whom are now joining our communities -- we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the needs of those who are experiencing war and displacement. 
We must prioritize these families' needs -- both those who are internally displaced, and those who are refugees worldwide. 
These needs must be prioritized by NGO workers, policy makers, the WHO, the UNHCR and every single one of us in whatever capacity it is that we function in our society. 
When we begin to recognize the individual faces of the conflict, when we begin to notice those intricate emotions on their faces, we begin to see them as humans, too. 
We begin to see the needs of these families, and these are the real human needs. 
When these family needs are prioritized, interventions for children in humanitarian settings will prioritize and recognize the primary role of the family in supporting children. 
Family mental health will be shouting loud and clear in global, international agenda. 
And children will be less likely to enter social service systems in resettlement countries because their families would have had support earlier on. 
And we will be more open-minded, more welcoming, more caring and more trusting to those who are joining our communities. 
We need to stop wars. 
We need to build a world where children can dream of planes dropping gifts, and not bombs. 
Until we stop armed conflicts raging throughout the world, families will continue to be displaced, leaving children vulnerable. 
But by improving parenting and caregiver support, it may be possible to weaken the links between war and psychological difficulties in children and their families. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Picture warm, gooey cookies, crunchy candies, velvety cakes, waffle cones piled high with ice cream. 
Is your mouth watering? 
Are you craving dessert? 
Why? 
What happens in the brain that makes sugary foods so hard to resist? 
Sugar is a general term used to describe a class of molecules called carbohydrates, and it's found in a wide variety of food and drink. 
Just check the labels on sweet products you buy. 
Glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose, lactose, dextrose, and starch are all forms of sugar. 
So are high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice, raw sugar, and honey. 
And sugar isn't just in candies and desserts, it's also added to tomato sauce, yogurt, dried fruit, flavored waters, or granola bars. 
Since sugar is everywhere, it's important to understand how it affects the brain. 
What happens when sugar hits your tongue? 
And does eating a little bit of sugar make you crave more? 
You take a bite of cereal. 
The sugars it contains activate the sweet-taste receptors, part of the taste buds on the tongue. 
These receptors send a signal up to the brain stem, and from there, it forks off into many areas of the forebrain, one of which is the cerebral cortex. 
Different sections of the cerebral cortex process different tastes: bitter, salty, umami, and, in our case, sweet. 
From here, the signal activates the brain's reward system. 
This reward system is a series of electrical and chemical pathways across several different regions of the brain. 
It's a complicated network, but it helps answer a single, subconscious question: should I do that again? 
That warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you taste Grandma's chocolate cake? 
That's your reward system saying, "Mmm, yes!" 
And it's not just activated by food. 
Socializing, sexual behavior, and drugs are just a few examples of things and experiences that also activate the reward system. 
But overactivating this reward system kickstarts a series of unfortunate events: loss of control, craving, and increased tolerance to sugar. 
Let's get back to our bite of cereal. 
It travels down into your stomach and eventually into your gut. 
And guess what? 
There are sugar receptors here, too. 
They are not taste buds, but they do send signals telling your brain that you're full or that your body should produce more insulin to deal with the extra sugar you're eating. 
The major currency of our reward system is dopamine, an important chemical or neurotransmitter. 
There are many dopamine receptors in the forebrain, but they're not evenly distributed. 
Certain areas contain dense clusters of receptors, and these dopamine hot spots are a part of our reward system. 
Drugs like alcohol, nicotine, or heroin send dopamine into overdrive, leading some people to constantly seek that high, in other words, to be addicted. 
Sugar also causes dopamine to be released, though not as violently as drugs. 
And sugar is rare among dopamine-inducing foods. 
Broccoli, for example, has no effect, which probably explains why it's so hard to get kids to eat their veggies. 
Speaking of healthy foods, let's say you're hungry and decide to eat a balanced meal. 
You do, and dopamine levels spike in the reward system hot spots. 
But if you eat that same dish many days in a row, dopamine levels will spike less and less, eventually leveling out. 
That's because when it comes to food, the brain evolved to pay special attention to new or different tastes. 
Why? 
Two reasons: first, to detect food that's gone bad. 
And second, because the more variety we have in our diet, the more likely we are to get all the nutrients we need. 
To keep that variety up, we need to be able to recognize a new food, and more importantly, we need to want to keep eating new foods. 
And that's why the dopamine levels off when a food becomes boring. 
Now, back to that meal. 
What happens if in place of the healthy, balanced dish, you eat sugar-rich food instead? 
If you rarely eat sugar or don't eat much at a time, the effect is similar to that of the balanced meal. 
But if you eat too much, the dopamine response does not level out. 
In other words, eating lots of sugar will continue to feel rewarding. 
In this way, sugar behaves a little bit like a drug. 
It's one reason people seem to be hooked on sugary foods. 
So, think back to all those different kinds of sugar. 
Each one is unique, but every time any sugar is consumed, it kickstarts a domino effect in the brain that sparks a rewarding feeling. 
Too much, too often, and things can go into overdrive. 
So, yes, overconsumption of sugar can have addictive effects on the brain, but a wedge of cake once in a while won't hurt you. 

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

This is a work in process, based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine. 
(Video): [On this planet 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity refrigeration or stored fuels this is a problem it impacts: the spread of disease the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life. 
So here's the plan ... inexpensive refrigeration that doesn't use electricity, propane, gas, kerosene or consumables time for some thermodynamics And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator] Adam Grosser: So 29 years ago, I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration, one of those things that stuck in my head, a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. 
It was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carré, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools at the time. 
This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall, in 1928. 
It was a really neat idea, and I'll get to why it didn't work, but here's how it works. 
There's two spheres and they're separated in distance. 
One has a working fluid, water and ammonia, and the other is a condenser. 
The ammonia evaporates and it recondenses in the other side. 
You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia reevaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side, it creates a powerful cooling effect. 
So it was a great idea that didn't work at all. 
They blew up. 
(Laughter) Because you're using ammonia, you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong; it topped 400 psi. 
The ammonia was toxic, it sprayed everywhere. 
But it was kind of an interesting thought. 
So the great thing about 2006, there's a lot of really great computational work you can do. 
So we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved -- a lot of computational fluid dynamics. 
We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong. 
We found some nontoxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. 
We brought in a team from the UK -- a lot of great refrigeration people, it turns out, in the UK -- and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low-pressure, nontoxic refrigerator. 
So this is the way it works. 
You put it on a cooking fire. 
Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood. 
It heats up for about 30 minutes, cools for an hour. 
You put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours. 
It looks like this. 
This is the fifth prototype, it's not quite done. 
It weighs about eight pounds, and this is the way it works. 
You put it into a 15-liter vessel, about three gallons, and it'll cool it down to just above freezing -- three degrees above freezing -- for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment. 
It's really cheap. 
We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars, in low volumes for about 40 dollars. 
And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have. 
Thank you. 

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

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

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

We survey CEOs, police officers, truck drivers, cooks, engineers. 
If people are working, we've surveyed them. 
And what we know, in terms of their happiness: workers all want the same things. 
[The Way We Work] There's three billion working people in the world. 
And about 40 percent of them would say they're happy at work. 
That means about 1.8 billion, or almost two billion people, are not happy at work. 
What does that do, both to those people and the organizations that they work in? 
Well, let's talk about money. 
Organizations that have a lot of happy employees have three times the revenue growth, compared to organizations where that's not true. 
They outperform the stock market by a factor of three. 
And if you look at employee turnover, it's half that of organizations that have a lot of unhappy employees. 
The miracle thing is, you don't have to spend more money to make this happen. 
It's not about ping-pong tables and massages and pet walking. 
It's not about the perks. 
It's all about how they're treated by their leaders and by the people that they work with. 
So I'd like to share a few ideas that create happy employees. 
Idea number one: in organizations where employees are happy, what you find is two things are present: trust and respect. 
Leaders often say, "We trust our employees. 
We empower our employees." 
And then when an employee needs a laptop -- and this is a true example -- 15 people have to approve that laptop. 
So for the employee, all the words are right, but 15 levels of approval for a $1,500 laptop? 
You've actually spent more money than the laptop, on the approval. 
And the employee feels maybe they're really not trusted. 
So what can an organization do to have a high level of trust? 
The first organization that comes to mind is Four Seasons. 
They have magnificent properties all around the world. 
And their employees are told, "Do whatever you think is right when servicing the customer." 
To hand that trust to your employees to do whatever they think is right makes the employees feel great. 
And this is why they're known for delivering some of the best service in the world. 
Idea number two: fairness. 
The thing that erodes trust in an organization faster than anything else is when employees feel that they're being treated unfairly. 
Employees want to be treated the same, regardless of their rank or their tenure or their age or their experience or their job category, compared to anyone else. 
When I think about great organizations who get fairness right, the first organization that comes to mind is Salesforce. 
They found that men and women working in the same job with the same level of proficiency were making different amounts of money. 
So immediately, they calculated the difference, and they invested three million dollars to try and balance things out. 
Idea number three is listening. 
So, to be a listener who connects with all types of people, we have to unlearn a few things. 
We've all been taught about active listening and eye contact -- an intense stare and a compassionate look. 
That's not listening. 
Repeating what the person says -- that's not listening. 
Being humble and always hunting and searching for the best idea possible -- that's what listening is. 
And employees can feel whether you're doing that or not. 
They want to know, when they talk to you and share an idea, did you consider it when you made a decision? 
The one thing that everybody appreciates and wants when they're speaking is to know that what they say matters so much you might actually change your mind. 
Otherwise, what's the point of the conversation? 
We all know the things we need to change, the things that we need to do differently. 
The way you behave, the way you treat others, the way you respond, the way you support, defines the work experience for everyone around you. 
Changing to be a better person -- the world is littered with those failures. 
But changing because there's something you believe in, some purpose that you have, where you're willing to risk almost everything because it's so important to you -- that's the reason to change. 
If it's not, you should probably find a different place to work. 

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

Applying for jobs online is one of the worst digital experiences of our time. 
And applying for jobs in person really isn't much better. 
[The Way We Work] Hiring as we know it is broken on many fronts. 
It's a terrible experience for people. 
About 75 percent of people who applied to jobs using various methods in the past year said they never heard anything back from the employer. 
And at the company level it's not much better. 
46 percent of people get fired or quit within the first year of starting their jobs. 
It's pretty mind-blowing. 
It's also bad for the economy. 
For the first time in history, we have more open jobs than we have unemployed people, and to me that screams that we have a problem. 
I believe that at the crux of all of this is a single piece of paper: the résumé. 
A résumé definitely has some useful pieces in it: what roles people have had, computer skills, what languages they speak, but what it misses is what they have the potential to do that they might not have had the opportunity to do in the past. 
And with such a quickly changing economy where jobs are coming online that might require skills that nobody has, if we only look at what someone has done in the past, we're not going to be able to match people to the jobs of the future. 
So this is where I think technology can be really helpful. 
You've probably seen that algorithms have gotten pretty good at matching people to things, but what if we could use that same technology to actually help us find jobs that we're really well-suited for? 
But I know what you're thinking. 
Algorithms picking your next job sounds a little bit scary, but there is one thing that has been shown to be really predictive of someone's future success in a job, and that's what's called a multimeasure test. 
Multimeasure tests really aren't anything new, but they used to be really expensive and required a PhD sitting across from you and answering lots of questions and writing reports. 
Multimeasure tests are a way to understand someone's inherent traits -- your memory, your attentiveness. 
What if we could take multimeasure tests and make them scalable and accessible, and provide data to employers about really what the traits are of someone who can make them a good fit for a job? 
This all sounds abstract. 
Let's try one of the games together. 
You're about to see a flashing circle, and your job is going to be to clap when the circle is red and do nothing when it's green. 
[Ready?] [Begin!] [Green circle] [Green circle] [Red circle] [Green circle] [Red circle] Maybe you're the type of person who claps the millisecond after a red circle appears. 
Or maybe you're the type of person who takes just a little bit longer to be 100 percent sure. 
Or maybe you clap on green even though you're not supposed to. 
The cool thing here is that this isn't like a standardized test where some people are employable and some people aren't. 
Instead it's about understanding the fit between your characteristics and what would make you good a certain job. 
We found that if you clap late on red and you never clap on the green, you might be high in attentiveness and high in restraint. 
People in that quadrant tend to be great students, great test-takers, great at project management or accounting. 
But if you clap immediately on red and sometimes clap on green, that might mean that you're more impulsive and creative, and we've found that top-performing salespeople often embody these traits. 
The way we actually use this in hiring is we have top performers in a role go through neuroscience exercises like this one. 
Then we develop an algorithm that understands what makes those top performers unique. 
And then when people apply to the job, we're able to surface the candidates who might be best suited for that job. 
So you might be thinking there's a danger in this. 
The work world today is not the most diverse and if we're building algorithms based on current top performers, how do we make sure that we're not just perpetuating the biases that already exist? 
For example, if we were building an algorithm based on top performing CEOs and use the S&P 500 as a training set, you would actually find that you're more likely to hire a white man named John than any woman. 
And that's the reality of who's in those roles right now. 
But technology actually poses a really interesting opportunity. 
We can create algorithms that are more equitable and more fair than human beings have ever been. 
Every algorithm that we put into production has been pretested to ensure that it doesn't favor any gender or ethnicity. 
And if there's any population that's being overfavored, we can actually alter the algorithm until that's no longer true. 
When we focus on the inherent characteristics that can make somebody a good fit for a job, we can transcend racism, classism, sexism, ageism -- even good schoolism. 
Our best technology and algorithms shouldn't just be used for helping us find our next movie binge or new favorite Justin Bieber song. 
Imagine if we could harness the power of technology to get real guidance on what we should be doing based on who we are at a deeper level. 

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

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

I come from a family of five brothers, all scientists and engineers. 
A few years ago, I sent them the following email: "Dear brothers, I hope this message finds you well. 
I am emailing to let you know that I'm dropping out of my master's program in engineering to pursue a career as a full-time musician. 
All that I ask from you is not to worry about me." 
Brother number one replied. 
He was encouraging but a bit skeptical. 
He said, "I wish you the best of luck. 
You're going to need it." 
(Laughter) Brother number two was a little bit more skeptical. 
He said, "Don't do it! 
This will be the worst mistake of your life. 
Find a real career." 
(Laughter) Well, the rest of my brothers were so enthusiastic about my decision, they didn't even respond. 
(Laughter) I know that the skepticism coming from my brothers is out of care and concern for me. 
They were worried. 
They thought it would be difficult to make it as an artist, that it will be a challenge. 
And you know what? They were right. 
It is such a challenge to be a full-time artist. 
I have so many friends who need to have a second job as a plan B in order to pay for the bills, except that plan B sometimes becomes their plan A. 
And it's not just my friends and I who experience this. 
The US Census Bureau states that only 10 percent of art school graduates end up working as full-time artists. 
The other 90 percent, they change careers, they work in marketing, sales, education and other fields. 
But this is not news, right? 
We almost expect the artist to be a struggling artist. 
But why should we expect that? 
I read an article in the "Huffington Post" saying that four years ago, the European Union began the world's largest ever arts funding initiative. 
Creative Europe will give 2.4 billion dollars to over 300,000 artists. 
In contrast, the US budget for our National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single funder for the arts across the United States, is merely 146 million dollars. 
To put things into perspective, the US budget for the military marching bands alone is almost twice as much as the entire NEA. 
Another striking image comes from Brendan McMahon for the "Huffington Post," saying that out of the one trillion dollar budget for military and defense-related spending, if only 0.05 percent were allocated to the arts, we would be able to pay for 20 full-time symphony orchestras at 20 million dollars apiece, and give over 80,000 artists an annual salary of 50,000 dollars each. 
If that's only 0.05 percent, imagine what a full one percent could do. 
Now, I know we live in a capitalist society, and profits matter a lot. 
So let's look at it from a financial angle, shall we? 
The US nonprofit arts industry generates more than 166 billion dollars in economic activity, it employs 5.7 million people and it returns 12.6 billion dollars in tax revenue. 
But this is only a financial angle, right? 
We all know that the arts is way more than just an economic value. 
The arts brings meaning to life. 
It's the spirit of our culture. 
It brings people together and it supports creativity and social cohesion. 
But if the arts contributes this much to our economy, why then do we still invest so little in arts and artists? 
Why do more than 80 percent of our schools nationwide still experience budget cuts in arts education programs? 
What is it about the value of arts and artists that we still don't understand? 
I believe the system is flawed and far from being fair, and I want to help change that. 
I want to live in a society where artists are more valued and have more cultural and financial support so they can focus on creating arts instead of being forced to drive Ubers or take corporate jobs they'd rather not have. 
There are other sources of income for artists, however. 
There are private foundations, grants and patrons who give money, except a vast majority of artists don't know about these opportunities. 
On one side you have institutions and people with money. 
On the other side you have artists seeking funding, but the artists don't know about the people with the money, and the people with the money don't necessarily know about the artists out there. 
This is why I am very excited to share "Grantpa," an online platform that uses technology to match artists with grants and funding opportunities in a way that is easy, fast and less intimidating. 
Grantpa is only one step towards solving an existing problem of funding inequality, but we need to work collectively on multiple fronts to reevaluate how we view the artists in our society. 
Do we think of arts as a luxury or a necessity? 
Do we understand what goes on in the day-to-day life of an artist, or do we still believe that artists, no matter how struggling they are, are happy simply because they're following their passion? 
In a few years, I plan to send my brothers the following email: "Dear brothers, I hope this message finds you well. 
I am emailing to let you know that I am doing great and so are hundreds of thousands of artists who are being valued more culturally and financially and getting enough funding to focus on their crafts and create more art. 
I appreciate all of your support. 
Couldn't have done it without you." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. 
And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that -- being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, and making it kind of an annual thing. 
A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don't get worked on naturally. 
That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. 
And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to. 
So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. 
But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. 
Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. 
And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. 
Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. 
Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. 
As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. 
Five years ago, 135 million children were born -- so, more -- and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. 
So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. 
It's a phenomenal thing. 
Each one of those lives matters a lot. 
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. 
For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. 
So we really can make changes. 
The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. 
And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. 
Why? Well there's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. 
So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos? 
Well, what's the history of this disease? 
It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. 
In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. 
Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. 
So it was absolutely gigantic. 
And the disease was all over the world. 
A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. 
People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. 
So it was everywhere. 
And two tools helped bring the death rate down. 
One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. 
The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. 
And so that's why the death rate did come down. 
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 
So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. 
1945, it's still most places. 
1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 
1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. 
And more recently you can see it's just around the equator. 
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn't get much investment. 
For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. 
Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. 
(Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. 
And so that's why that priority has been set. 
But, malaria -- even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 
Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. 
It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. 
Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. 
I brought some here, just so you could experience this. 
We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. 
(Laughter) There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected. 
So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. 
And bed nets are a great tool. 
What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. 
And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. 
And that's happened now in a number of countries. 
It's great to see. 
But we have to be careful because malaria -- the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. 
So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. 
And so you end up with two choices. 
If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. 
And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. 
Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. 
And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention. 
Now we're on the upswing. 
Bed net funding is up. 
There's new drug discovery going on. 
Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. 
And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. 
So we're going to have these new tools. 
But that alone doesn't give us the road map. 
Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. 
It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. 
It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. 
We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. 
Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. 
We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. 
And so as these elements come together, I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria. 
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. 
And this is: How do you make a teacher great? 
It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. 
And the answer is, really, that we don't. 
Let's start with why this is important. 
Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. 
We all had a wonderful education. 
That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. 
I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. 
I had great teachers. 
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. 
There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. 
So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. 
And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. 
And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront. 
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. 
Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. 
And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. 
And we have to change this. 
We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. 
We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics. 
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 
Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. 
And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. 
Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. 
But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. 
They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. 
For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. 
And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. 
If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. 
And that doesn't seem entirely fair. 
So, how do you make education better? 
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. 
There's many people working on it. 
We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. 
A lot of these things had a good effect. 
But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. 
And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile. 
How much variation is there within a school or between schools? 
And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. 
A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. 
What does that mean? 
That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. 
Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away. 
So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. 
And so you'd say, "Wow, we should reward those people. 
We should retain those people. 
We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people." 
But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today. 
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? 
What do they look like? 
You might think these must be very senior teachers. 
And the answer is no. 
Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. 
The variation is very, very small. 
You might think these are people with master's degrees. 
They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. 
This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. 
That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree. 
Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. 
One is seniority. 
Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. 
The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. 
But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. 
Teach for America: slight effect. 
For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. 
But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. 
There are some people who are very good at this. 
And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability -- or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system. 
You might say, "Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?" 
The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. 
And it's a system with very high turnover. 
Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. 
A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. 
KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. 
It's an unbelievable thing. 
They have 66 schools -- mostly middle schools, some high schools -- and what goes on is great teaching. 
They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. 
And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. 
They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. 
They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "Hey, you caused this amount of increase." 
They're deeply engaged in making teaching better. 
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. 
I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" 
The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. 
I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. 
What's going on?" 
And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. 
It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years -- fifth through eighth grade -- keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. 
Everybody needs to be involved. 
And so KIPP is doing it. 
How does that compare to a normal school? 
Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. 
The data isn't gathered. 
In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year. 
And they need advanced notice to do that. 
So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment." 
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. 
They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. 
For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. 
And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. 
But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do. 
First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. 
And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. 
Of course, digital video is cheap now. 
Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. 
And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. 
Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. 
Advise me -- when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?" 
And they could all sit and work together on those problems. 
You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff. 
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. 
If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. 
And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 
And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better. 
Now there's a book actually, about KIPP -- the place that this is going on -- that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote -- called, "Work Hard, Be Nice." 
And I thought it was so fantastic. 
It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. 
I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. 
(Applause) Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. 
In fact we have in the stimulus bill -- it's interesting -- the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things. 
But I -- I'm optimistic. 
I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. 
I only had time to frame those two problems. 
There's a lot more problems like that -- AIDS, pneumonia -- I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. 
And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. 
You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. 
Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. 
The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things. 
So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved -- and you're helping to come up with solutions. 
And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids. 
And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or is foreign to them. 
They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. 
So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs." 
But, of course, that's the point. 
That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. 
So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own. 
The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. 
And I said, "Kids, really quickly -- I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house -- nothing too big, two or three stories -- but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?" 
And immediately a voice shouted, "Kangaroo!" 
"No, no, no! Should be a frog!" 
"No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" 
"No, no, no! It should be the Incredibles." 
And other things that I don't -- aren't familiar with. 
And then, one eight-year-old said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" 
And the whole room, including me, was like, "Yeah." 
(Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "disabled" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. 
Somebody that might even be super-abled. 
Interesting. 
So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago. 
And there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. 
TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life's exploration. 
At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. 
I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday. 
And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs. 
So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. 
So that we can stop compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. 
Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. 
And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee -- Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. 
She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a cover story. 
This started an incredible journey. 
Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. 
And people would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and women. 
And the conversation would go something like this, "You know Aimee, you're very attractive. 
You don't look disabled." 
(Laughter) I thought, "Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel disabled." 
And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. 
What does a beautiful woman have to look like? 
What is a sexy body? 
And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? 
I mean, people -- Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. 
Nobody calls her disabled. 
(Laughter) So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. 
So, three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover -- "Fashion-able"? 
Three months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. 
Nobody knew -- everyone thought they were wooden boots. 
Actually, I have them on stage with me: grapevines, magnolias -- truly stunning. 
Poetry matters. 
Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. 
It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand. 
I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. 
The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the "The Cremaster Cycle." 
This is where it really hit home for me -- that my legs could be wearable sculpture. 
And even at this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. 
So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. 
Heavy! 
Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. 
That's a good close-up of that one. 
Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah -- a little homage to my life as an athlete. 
14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. 
(Laughter) And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these -- look like jellyfish legs, also polyurethane. 
And the only purpose that these legs can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. 
So whimsy matters. 
Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet, and I can change my height -- I have a variable of five different heights. 
(Laughter) Today, I'm 6'1". 
And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. 
And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5'8". 
Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she went, "But you're so tall!" 
And I said, "I know. Isn't it fun?" 
I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. 
And I was having fun with it. 
And she looked at me, and she said, "But, Aimee, that's not fair." 
(Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she really meant it. 
It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it. 
And that's when I knew -- that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. 
It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. 
It's a conversation about augmentation. 
It's a conversation about potential. 
A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. 
It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. 
So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. 
And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology -- robotics, bionics -- with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. 
I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. 
I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: "If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh?" 
It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Time flies. 
It's actually almost 20 years ago when I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web. 
Now, 20 years on, at TED, I want to ask your help in a new reframing. 
So going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. 
Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. 
But 18 months later -- this is how innovation happens -- 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we'd got. 
And so he gave me the time to code it up. 
So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like: hypertext protocol, HTTP; the idea of URLs, these names for things which started with HTTP. 
I wrote the code and put it out there. 
Why did I do it? 
Well, it was basically frustration. 
I was frustrated -- I was working as a software engineer in this huge, very exciting lab, lots of people coming from all over the world. 
They brought all sorts of different computers with them. 
They had all sorts of different data formats, all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems. 
So that, in all that diversity, if I wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this, everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine, I had to learn to run some new program, I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. 
And these were all incompatible. 
It was just very frustrating. 
The frustration was all this unlocked potential. 
In fact, on all these discs there were documents. 
So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier. 
Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people don't read your memo -- actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy. 
He had written, "Vague, but exciting," in pencil, in the corner. 
(Laughter) But in general it was difficult -- it was really difficult to explain what the web was like. 
It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then. 
But then -- OK, when TED started, there was no web so things like "click" didn't have the same meaning. 
I can show somebody a piece of hypertext, a page which has got links, and we click on the link and bing -- there'll be another hypertext page. 
Not impressive. 
You know, we've seen that -- we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs. 
What was difficult was to get them to imagine: so, imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine. 
Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make. 
Well, some people did. 
So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement. 
And that is what has made it most fun. 
That has been the most exciting thing, not the technology, not the things people have done with it, but actually the community, the spirit of all these people getting together, sending the emails. 
That's what it was like then. 
Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again. 
I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents -- I said, "Could you put your documents on this web thing?" 
And you did. 
Thanks. 
It's been a blast, hasn't it? 
I mean, it has been quite interesting because we've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away. 
They're much more than we'd originally imagined when we put together the little, initial website that we started off with. 
Now, I want you to put your data on the web. 
Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential. 
There is still a huge frustration that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data. 
What do you mean, "data"? What's the difference -- documents, data? 
Well, documents you read, OK? 
More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it. 
Data -- you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer. 
Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk? 
One of the great -- yes a lot of people have seen it -- one of the great TED Talks. 
Hans put up this presentation in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors -- he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time. 
So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world. 
He put up a slide a little bit like this. 
It had underground all the data OK, data is brown and boxy and boring, and that's how we think of it, isn't it? 
Because data you can't naturally use by itself But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it. 
In this case, Hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things. 
He had put it together, combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he'd put it into this software, which I think his son developed, originally, and produces this wonderful presentation. 
And Hans made a point of saying, "Look, it's really important to have a lot of data." 
And I was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying, very forcibly, "It's really important to have a lot of data." 
So I want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did, but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data. 
The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple. 
If you want to put something on the web there are three rules: first thing is that those HTTP names -- those things that start with "http:" -- we're using them not just for documents now, we're using them for things that the documents are about. 
We're using them for people, we're using them for places, we're using them for your products, we're using them for events. 
All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP. 
Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data using the HTTP protocol from the web, I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event. 
Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person, where they were born, things like that. 
So the second rule is I get important information back. 
Third rule is that when I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. 
Data is relationships. 
Interestingly, data is relationships. 
This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany. 
And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts HTTP. 
So, I can go ahead and look that thing up. 
So I look up a person -- I can look up then the city where they were born; then I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in, and the population of it, and so on. 
So I can browse this stuff. 
So that's it, really. 
That is linked data. 
I wrote an article entitled "Linked Data" a couple of years ago and soon after that, things started to happen. 
The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that Hans had, and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting. 
It's not just a whole lot of other plants. 
It's not just a root supplying a plant, but for each of those plants, whatever it is -- a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data -- they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together, and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is. 
So, linked data. 
The meme went out there. 
And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up, he noticed that Wikipedia -- you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it. 
Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes. 
And in most information boxes, there's data. 
So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia, and put it into a blob of linked data on the web, which he called dbpedia. 
Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up Berlin, you'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together. 
So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin, you'll end up pulling up these other things as well. 
And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow. 
This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK? 
Let's think about data for a bit. 
Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms. 
Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there. 
So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data. 
We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important, there's scientific data, there's personal data, there's weather data, there's data about events, there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff. 
I'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it, so that you also see how much unlocked potential. 
Let's start with government data. 
Barack Obama said in a speech, that he -- American government data would be available on the Internet in accessible formats. 
And I hope that they will put it up as linked data. 
That's important. Why is it important? 
Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important, but that data -- this is the data from all the government departments Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America. 
It's actual useful. It's got value. 
I can use it in my company. 
I could use it as a kid to do my homework. 
So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better by making this data available. 
In fact if you're responsible -- if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it -- Hans calls it database hugging. 
You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. 
Well, I'd like to suggest that rather -- yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? 
Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. 
We want unadulterated data. 
OK, we have to ask for raw data now. 
And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? 
Can you say "raw"? 
Audience: Raw. 
Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"? 
Audience: Data. 
TBL: Can you say "now"? 
Audience: Now! 
TBL: Alright, "raw data now"! 
Audience: Raw data now! 
Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. 
And it's not just America. It's all over the world. 
And it's not just governments, of course -- it's enterprises as well. 
So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data. 
Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now -- curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. 
The people who are going to solve those -- the scientists -- they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. 
But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared. 
In fact, I'll just go into one area -- if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example, drug discovery -- there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos, because they had their genomics data in one database in one building, and they had their protein data in another. 
Now, they are sticking it onto -- linked data -- and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask, I wouldn't ask -- they would. 
What proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons? 
Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google. 
Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before. 
You get 223,000 hits -- no results you can use. 
You ask the linked data -- which they've now put together -- 32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at. 
The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist -- questions which actually bridge across different disciplines -- is really a complete sea change. 
It's very very important. 
Scientists are totally stymied at the moment -- the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems. 
Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you. 
But, that's not true. 
In fact, data is about our lives. 
You just -- you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, "This is my friend." 
Bing! Relationship. Data. 
You say, "This photograph, it's about -- it depicts this person. " Bing! That's data. Data, data, data. 
Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it -- re-purposing it -- and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site. 
But, when you go to another linked data site -- and let's say this is one about travel, and you say, "I want to send this photo to all the people in that group," you can't get over the walls. 
The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it -- tremendous frustration. 
The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. 
We need to do that with linked data. 
One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting. 
Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki. 
Zoom in and that square thing is a theater -- which we're in right now -- The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it. 
So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater, I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back. 
And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org, and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name. 
I did that. Me! 
I did that to the map. I just did that! 
I put that up on there. Hey, you know what? 
If I -- that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs. 
And that is what linked data is all about. 
It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. 
That's how linked data works. 
You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. 
You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it. 
And we've practiced that. 
So, linked data -- it's huge. 
I've only told you a very small number of things There are data in every aspect of our lives, every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. 
And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. 
You get this really huge power out of it. 
So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this -- the people who think it's a great idea. 
And all the people -- and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because -- even though there's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it -- they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them. 
OK, so it's called linked data. 
I want you to make it. 
I want you to demand it. 
And I think it's an idea worth spreading. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth. 
They've been here for billions of years, and what they are are single-celled microscopic organisms. 
So they're one cell and they have this special property that they only have one piece of DNA. 
So they have very few genes and genetic information to encode all of the traits that they carry out. 
And the way bacteria make a living is that they consume nutrients from the environment, they grow to twice their size, they cut themselves down in the middle, and one cell becomes two, and so on and so on. 
They just grow and divide and grow and divide -- so a kind of boring life, except that what I would argue is that you have an amazing interaction with these critters. 
I know you guys think of yourself as humans, and this is sort of how I think of you. 
This man is supposed to represent a generic human being, and all of the circles in that man are all the cells that make up your body. 
There's about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are and able to do all the things that we do. 
But you have 10 trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life. 
So, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being. 
And, of course, it's the DNA that counts, so here's all the A, T, Gs and Cs that make up your genetic code and give you all your charming characteristics. 
You have about 30,000 genes. 
Well, it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life. 
So at the best, you're 10 percent human; more likely, about one percent human, depending on which of these metrics you like. 
I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial. 
(Laughter) And these bacteria are not passive riders. 
These are incredibly important; they keep us alive. 
They cover us in an invisible body armor that keeps environmental insults out so that we stay healthy. 
They digest our food, they make our vitamins, they actually educate your immune system to keep bad microbes out. 
So they do all these amazing things that help us and are vital for keeping us alive, and they never get any press for that. 
But they get a lot of press because they do a lot of terrible things as well. 
So there's all kinds of bacteria on the earth that have no business being in you or on you at any time, and if they are, they make you incredibly sick. 
And so the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do or all the bad things that bacteria do. 
The question we had is: How could they do anything at all? 
I mean, they're incredibly small. 
You have to have a microscope to see one. 
They live this sort of boring life where they grow and divide, and they've always been considered to be these asocial, reclusive organisms. 
And so it seemed to us that they're just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals. 
So we wanted to think if there couldn't be a different way that bacteria live. 
And the clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called "Vibrio fischeri." 
What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless, beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri. 
And this bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence, like fireflies make light. 
We're not doing anything to the cells here, we just took the picture by turning the lights off in the room, and this is what we see. 
And what's actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light but when the bacteria made light. 
What we noticed is when the bacteria were alone, so when they were in dilute suspension, they made no light. 
But when they grew to a certain cell number, all the bacteria turned on light simultaneously. 
So the question that we had is: How can bacteria, these primitive organisms, tell the difference from times when they're alone and times when they're in a community, and then all do something together? 
And what we figured out is that the way they do that is they talk to each other, and they talk with a chemical language. 
When it's alone, it doesn't make any light. 
But what it does do is to make and secrete small molecules that you can think of like hormones, and these are the red triangles. 
And when the bacteria are alone, the molecules just float away, and so, no light. 
But when the bacteria grow and double and they're all participating in making these molecules, the molecule, the extracellular amount of that molecule, increases in proportion to cell number. 
And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony. 
And so that's how bioluminescence works -- they're talking with these chemical words. 
The reason Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology -- again, another plug for the animals in the ocean. 
Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid. 
What you're looking at is the Hawaiian bobtail squid. 
It's been turned on its back, and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes. 
These house the Vibrio fischeri cells. 
They live in there, at high cell number. 
That molecule is there, and they're making light. 
And the reason the squid is willing to put up with these shenanigans is because it wants that light. 
The way that this symbiosis works is that this little squid lives just off the coast of Hawaii, just in sort of shallow knee-deep water. 
And the squid is nocturnal, so during the day, it buries itself in the sand and sleeps. 
But then at night, it has to come out to hunt. 
So on bright nights when there's lots of starlight or moonlight, that light can penetrate the depth of the water the squid lives in, since it's just in those couple feet of water. 
What the squid has developed is a shutter that can open and close over the specialized light organ housing the bacteria. 
And then it has detectors on its back so it can sense how much starlight or moonlight is hitting its back. 
And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom, which is made by the bacterium, exactly matches how much light hits the squid's back, so the squid doesn't make a shadow. 
So it actually uses the light from the bacteria to counter-illuminate itself in an antipredation device, so predators can't see its shadow, calculate its trajectory and eat it. 
So this is like the stealth bomber of the ocean. 
(Laughter) But then if you think about it, this squid has this terrible problem, because it's got this dying, thick culture of bacteria, and it can't sustain that. 
And so what happens is, every morning when the sun comes up, the squid goes back to sleep, it buries itself in the sand, and it's got a pump that's attached to its circadian rhythm. 
And when the sun comes up, it pumps out, like, 95 percent of the bacteria. 
So now the bacteria are dilute, that little hormone molecule is gone, so they're not making light. 
But, of course, the squid doesn't care, it's asleep in the sand. 
And as the day goes by, the bacteria double, they release the molecule, and then light comes on at night, exactly when the squid wants it. 
So first, we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out, really, what's the mechanism. 
And what we found -- so this is now supposed to be my bacterial cell -- is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein. 
That's the red box -- it's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule, the red triangle. 
And then as the cells grow, they're all releasing that molecule into the environment, so there's lots of molecule there. 
And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule. 
These are just like the receptors on the surfaces of your cells. 
So when the molecule increases to a certain amount, which says something about the number of cells, it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light. 
Why this is interesting is because in the past decade, we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow-in-the-dark bacterium that lives in the ocean -- all bacteria have systems like this. 
So now what we understand is that all bacteria can talk to each other. 
They make chemical words, they recognize those words, and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison. 
So now we have a fancy name for this: we call it "quorum sensing." 
They vote with these chemical votes, the vote gets counted, and then everybody responds to the vote. 
What's important for today's talk is we know there are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in these collective fashions. 
But the one that's probably the most important to you is virulence. 
It's not like a couple bacteria get in you and start secreting some toxins -- you're enormous; that would have no effect on you, you're huge. 
But what they do, we now understand, is they get in you, they wait, they start growing, they count themselves with these little molecules, and they recognize when they have the right cell number that if all of the bacteria launch their virulence attack together, they're going to be successful at overcoming an enormous host. 
So bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. 
So that's how it works. 
These were the red triangles on my slides before. 
This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule. 
This is the word that it talks with. 
And then we started to look at other bacteria, and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we've discovered. 
What I hope you can see is that the molecules are related. 
The left-hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria. 
But the right-hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species. 
What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages. 
So each molecule fits into its partner receptor and no other. 
These conversations are for intraspecies communication. 
Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that's its language that allows it to count its own siblings. 
Once we got that far, we thought we were starting to understand that bacteria have these social behaviors. 
But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time, bacteria don't live by themselves, they live in incredible mixtures, with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria. 
And that's depicted on this slide. 
This is your skin. 
So this is just a picture -- a micrograph of your skin. 
Anywhere on your body, it looks pretty much like this. 
What I hope you can see is that there's all kinds of bacteria there. 
And so we started to think, if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species. 
There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population. 
So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria. 
And what we've found now is that, in fact, bacteria are multilingual. 
They all have a species-specific system, they have a molecule that says "me." 
But then running in parallel to that is a second system that we've discovered, that's generic. 
So they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal, and it has its own receptor, and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria. 
It's used by all different bacteria, and it's the language of interspecies communication. 
What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of "me" and how many of "you." 
And they take that information inside, and they decide what tasks to carry out depending on who's in the minority and who's in the majority of any given population. 
Then, again, we turned to chemistry, and we figured out what this generic molecule is -- that was the pink ovals on my last slide, this is it. 
It's a very small, five-carbon molecule. 
And what the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule. 
So they're all using this molecule for interspecies communication. 
This is the bacterial Esperanto. 
(Laughter) So once we got that far, we started to learn that bacteria can talk to each other with this chemical language. 
But we started to think that maybe there is something practical that we can do here as well. 
I've told you that bacteria have all these social behaviors, that they communicate with these molecules. 
Of course, I've also told you that one of the important things they do is to initiate pathogenicity using quorum sensing. 
So we thought: What if we made these bacteria so they can't talk or they can't hear? 
Couldn't these be new kinds of antibiotics? 
And of course, you've just heard and you already know that we're running out of antibiotics. 
Bacteria are incredibly multi-drug-resistant right now, and that's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria. 
They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA. 
We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics, and that selects for resistant mutants. 
And so now, of course, we have this global problem in infectious diseases. 
So we thought, what if we could sort of do behavior modifications, just make these bacteria so they can't talk, they can't count, and they don't know to launch virulence? 
So that's exactly what we've done, and we've sort of taken two strategies. 
The first one is, we've targeted the intraspecies communication system. 
So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules, which you saw, but they're a little bit different. 
And so they lock into those receptors, and they jam recognition of the real thing. 
So by targeting the red system, what we are able to do is make species-specific, or disease-specific, anti-quorum-sensing molecules. 
We've also done the same thing with the pink system. 
We've taken that universal molecule and turned it around a little bit so that we've made antagonists of the interspecies communication system. 
The hope is that these will be used as broad-spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria. 
And so to finish, I'll show you the strategy. 
In this one, I'm just using the interspecies molecule, but the logic is exactly the same. 
So what you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal -- in this case, a mouse -- it doesn't initiate virulence right away. 
It gets in, it starts growing, it starts secreting its quorum-sensing molecules. 
It recognizes when it has enough bacteria that now they're going to launch their attack, and the animal dies. 
And so what we've been able to do is to give these virulent infections, but we give them in conjunction with our anti-quorum-sensing molecules. 
So these are molecules that look kind of like the real thing, but they're a little different, which I've depicted on this slide. 
What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium -- a multi-drug-resistant pathogenic bacterium -- in the same time we give our anti-quorum-sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives. 
And so we think that this is the next generation of antibiotics, and it's going to get us around, at least initially, this big problem of resistance. 
What I hope you think is that bacteria can talk to each other, they use chemicals as their words, they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we're just now starting to learn about. 
Of course, what that allows bacteria to do is to be multicellular. 
So in the spirit of TED, they're doing things together because it makes a difference. 
What happens is that bacteria have these collective behaviors, and they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals. 
What I would hope that I could further argue to you is that this is the invention of multicellularity. 
Bacteria have been on the earth for billions of years; humans, couple hundred thousand. 
So we think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works. 
And we think by studying bacteria, we're going to be able to have insight about multicellularity in the human body. 
So we know that the principles and the rules, if we can figure them out in these sort of primitive organisms, the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well. 
I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other. 
So by using these two molecules, they can say "me" and they can say "you." 
And again, of course, that's what we do, both in a molecular way, and also in an outward way, but I think about the molecular stuff. 
This is exactly what happens in your body. 
It's not like your heart cells and kidney cells get all mixed up every day, and that's because there's all of this chemistry going on, these molecules that say who each of these groups of cells is and what their tasks should be. 
So again, we think bacteria invented that, and you've just evolved a few more bells and whistles, but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study. 
And the final thing is, just to reiterate that there's this practical part, and so we've made these anti-quorum-sensing molecules that are being developed as new kinds of therapeutics. 
But then, to finish with a plug for all the good and miraculous bacteria that live on the earth, we've also made pro-quorum-sensing molecules. 
So we've targeted those systems to make the molecules work better. 
So remember, you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you, keeping you healthy. 
What we're also trying to do is to beef up the conversation of the bacteria that live as mutualists with you, in the hopes of making you more healthy, making those conversations better, so bacteria can do things that we want them to do better than they would be on their own. 
Finally, I wanted to show you -- this is my gang at Princeton, New Jersey. 
Everything I told you about was discovered by someone in that picture. 
And I hope when you learn things, like about how the natural world works -- I just want to say that whenever you read something in the newspaper or you hear some talk about something ridiculous in the natural world, it was done by a child. 
So science is done by that demographic. 
All of those people are between 20 and 30 years old, and they are the engine that drives scientific discovery in this country. 
And it's a really lucky demographic to work with. 
(Applause) I keep getting older and older, and they're always the same age. 
And it's just a crazy, delightful job. 
And I want to thank you for inviting me here, it's a big treat for me to get to come to this conference. 
(Applause) Thanks. 

How did you discover your passion or find your career? 
Were you exposed to it? 
Or was it trial and error? 
As child rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman said, "You can't be what you can't see." 
Fortunately, we now live in a time when emerging technologies may help us to solve this problem. 
For the past two years, I've been developing an extended reality program that enables middle school students from across the country to take on the role of a marine biologist -- even if they've never seen the ocean. 
As one seventh grader who recently completed our program said, "I could see myself as a scientist, because I enjoyed this game." 
This feedback really excited me, because too few students do see themselves as scientists. 
A 2014 study showed that 57 percent of eighth- and ninth-grade students said, "Science isn't me." 
Coincidentally, also in 2014, I met Mandë Holford, a marine biochemist, and Lindsay Portnoy, an educational psychologist. 
The three of us shared a passion for getting students excited by and comfortable with science. 
We thought about how we could give children the most realistic experience of a scientific career. 
We discussed the research; it showed that students felt comfortable taking risks when playing games. 
So the three of us started an educational games company to bring science to life. 
Virtual reality seemed like a low-cost way of increasing access. 
In addition, academic research has shown that virtual reality may lead to increases in learning retention. 
This was perfect for us, as we wanted to be in schools so that we could reach the most number of students possible, particularly students who have been underrepresented in science. 
So, with funding from the National Science Foundation, we began developing our extended reality program that combined virtual reality with personalized digital journaling. 
We worked with teachers while developing it to ensure that it would fit seamlessly into existing curricula and empower teachers to use cutting-edge technology in their classroom. 
We designed the virtual reality for Google Cardboard, which requires only a smartphone and a 10 dollar VR viewer made of cardboard. 
With this inexpensive headset, students are transported to an underwater expedition. 
Students use their digital journal to write down their notes, to answer questions, to construct models and to develop hypotheses. 
Students then go to the virtual world to test their hypotheses and see if they're accurate, much as scientists go to the field in their careers. 
When students return to their digital journal, they share their observations, claims, reasoning and evidence. 
The students' written answers and virtual interactions are all updated live in an educator assessment dashboard, so that teachers can follow their progress and support them as needed. 
To give you a better sense, I'm going to show you a little bit of what students see. 
This is the virtual reality when they're underwater observing the flora and fauna. 
This is the digital journal where they're constructing their models based on this abiotic data to show what they expect to see. 
Here, they're supporting that with qualitative statements. 
And this is the educator dashboard that shows progress and enables [teachers] to see the students' answers as they go. 
When we were creating BioDive, again, we really wanted to focus on access, so we designed it to require only one phone for every four students. 
We also knew how collaborative science work is, so we constructed the experience to only be solved through collaborative teamwork, as each student is an expert in a different geographic location. 
Given that these children's brains are still developing, we limited each experience to last a maximum of two minutes. 
And finally, because we know the importance of repeated exposure for internalizing knowledge, we constructed BioDive to take place over five class periods. 
We started piloting BioDive in 2017 in 20 schools in New York and New Jersey. 
We wanted to see students as they were using this new technology. 
In 2019, now, we are now piloting in 26 states. 
What we have heard from teachers who have taught our program: "It was a nice way to show ocean dynamics without the luxury of actually being there since we are in Ohio." 
(Laughter) "It's pretty mind-blowing." 
"The students were totally engaged." 
But what really gives us hope is what we're hearing from students. 
"I liked how it felt like I was there." 
"It's interactive and a fun way to learn." 
"It really gave me realistic examples of how these organisms appear." 
"I could see myself as a scientist because it seems really fun." 
Our feedback wasn't always so positive. 
When we began developing, we started off by asking students what they liked, what they didn't like and what they found confusing. 
Eventually we began asking what they wished they could do. 
Their feedback gave us concrete items to build in to be sure that we were including student voices in what we were designing. 
Overall, what we have learned is that this is the beginning of a new platform for giving students both voice and ownership in deciding how they want to have impact in their careers. 
We focused on science, because we know we need scientists to help us solve our current and future challenges. 
But virtual reality could support students in any area. 
How could we support students in exploring all of their desires with these eye-opening experiences and chances to learn from primary sources? 
Could we create VR for inexpensive headsets that lets them be immersed in oral literature or in critical moments of human history? 
Extended reality has the potential to change the trajectory of our children's lives and lead them to careers they never imagined by giving them the chance to see what they can be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

When I was a teen, I had terrible periods. 
I had crippling cramps, I leaked blood onto my clothes and onto my bed sheets, and I had period diarrhea. 
And I had to miss school one to two days a month, and I remember sitting on the couch with my heating pads, thinking, "What's up with this?" 
When I ate food, I didn't leak saliva from my salivary glands. 
When I went for a walk, I didn't leak fluid from my knees, "joint fluid." 
Why was menstruation so different? 
I wanted answers to these questions but there was no one for me to ask. 
My mother knew nothing about menstruation except that it was dirty and shameful and I shouldn't talk about it. 
I asked girlfriends and everybody spoke in euphemisms. 
And finally, when I got the courage to go to the doctor and talk about my heavy periods, I was told to eat liver. 
(Laughter) And when I went to the drug store to buy my menstrual products, my 48-pack of super maxi pads, back in the day when they were the size of a tissue box, each pad -- (Laughter) You know what I'm talking about. 
You have no idea how far absorbent technology has come. 
(Laughter) I used to have to buy my menstrual products in the feminine hygiene aisle. 
And I remember standing there, thinking, "Well, why don't I buy toilet paper in the anal hygiene aisle?" 
(Laughter) Like, what's up with that? 
Why can't we talk about periods? 
And it's not about the blood, as Freud would have you say, because if it were, there would be an ear, nose and throat surgeon up here right now, talking about the taboos of nose bleeds, right? 
And it's not even about periods, because otherwise, when we got rid of our toxic, shameful periods when we became menopausal, we'd be elevated to a higher social status. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It's just a patriarchal society is invested in oppressing women, and at different points in our lives, different things are used. 
And menstruation is used during what we in medicine call the reproductive years. 
It's been around since pretty much the beginning of time, many cultures thought that women could spoil crops or milk, or wilt flowers. 
And then when religion came along, purity myths only made that worse. 
And medicine wasn't any help. 
In the 1920s and '30s there was the idea that women elaborated something called a menotoxin. 
We could wilt flowers just by walking by. 
(Laughter) And that's what happens when there's no diversity, right. 
Because there was no woman to put her hand up and go, "Well, actually, that doesn't happen." 
And when you can't talk about what's happening to your body, how do you break these myths? 
Because you don't even need to be a doctor to say that periods aren't toxic. 
If they were, why would an embryo implant in a toxic swill? 
And if we all had this secret menotoxin, we could be laying waste to crops and spoiling milk. 
(Laughter) Why would we have not used our X-Women powers to get the vote sooner? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Even now, when I tweet about period diarrhea, as one does, (Laughter) I mention that it affects 28 percent of women. 
And every single time, someone approaches me and says, "I thought I was the only one." 
That's how effective that culture of shame is, that women can't even share their experiences. 
So I began to think, "Well, what if everybody knew about periods like a gynecologist? 
Wouldn't that be great?" 
Then you would all know what I know, you'd know that menstruation is a pretty unique phenomenon among mammals. 
Most mammals have estrus. 
Humans, some primates, some bats, the elephant shrew and the spiny mouse menstruate. 
And with menstruation what happens is the brain triggers the ovary to start producing an egg. 
Estrogen is released and it starts to build up the lining of the uterus, cell upon cell, like bricks. 
And what happens if you build a brick wall too high without mortar? 
Well, it's unstable. 
So what happens when you ovulate? 
You release a hormone called progesterone, which is progestational, it gets the uterus ready. 
It acts like a mortar and it holds those bricks together. 
It also causes some changes to make the lining more hospitable for implantation. 
If there's no pregnancy, (Whoosh) lining comes out, there's bleeding from the blood vessels and that's the period. 
And I always find this point really interesting. 
Because with estrus, the final signaling to get the lining of the uterus ready actually comes from the embryo. 
But with menstruation, that choice comes from the ovary. 
It's as if choice is coded in to our reproductive tracts. 
(Cheering and applause) OK, so now we know why the blood is there. 
And it's a pretty significant amount. 
It's 30 to 90 milliliters of blood, which is one to three ounces, and it can be more, and I know it seems like it's more a lot of the times. 
I know. 
So why do we have so much blood? 
And why doesn't it just stay there till the next cycle, right? 
Like, you didn't get pregnant, so why can't it hang around? 
Well imagine if each month it got thicker and thicker and thicker, right, like, imagine what tsunami period that would be. 
(Laughter) We can't reabsorb it, because it's too much. 
And it's too much because we need a thick uterine lining for a very specific reason. 
Pregnancy exerts a significant biological toll on our bodies. 
There is maternal mortality, there is the toll of breastfeeding and there is the toll of raising a child until it is independent. 
And evolution -- (Laughter) That goes on longer for some of us than others. 
(Laughter) But evolution knows about risk-benefit ratio. 
And so evolution wants to maximize the chance of a beneficial outcome. 
And how do you maximize the chance of a beneficial outcome? 
You try to get the highest quality embryos. 
And how do you get the highest quality embryos? 
You make them work for it. 
You give them an obstacle course. 
So over the millennia that we have evolved, it's been a little bit like an arms race in the uterus, the lining getting thicker and thicker and thicker, and the embryo getting more invasive until we reach this détente with the lining of the uterus that we have. 
So we have this thick uterine lining and now it's got to come out, and how do you stop bleeding? 
Well, you stop a nose bleed by pinching it, if you cut your leg, you put pressure on it. 
We stop bleeding with pressure. 
When we menstruate, the lining of the uterus releases substances that are made into chemicals called prostaglandins and other inflammatory mediators. 
And they make the uterus cramp down, they make it squeeze on those blood vessels to stop the bleeding. 
They might also change blood flow to the uterus and also cause inflammation and that makes pain worse. 
And so you say, "OK, how much pressure is generated?" 
And from studies where some incredible women have volunteered to have pressure catheters put in their uterus that they wear their whole menstrual cycle -- God bless them, because we wouldn't have this knowledge without, and it's very important knowledge, because the pressure that's generated in the uterus during menstruation is 120 millimeters of mercury. 
"Well what's that," you say. 
Well, it's the amount of pressure that's generated during the second stage of labor when you're pushing. 
(Audience gasps) Right. 
Which, for those of you who haven't had an unmedicated delivery, that's what it's like when the blood pressure cuff is not quite as tight as it was at the beginning, but it's still pretty tight, and you wish it would stop. 
So that kind of makes it different, right? 
If you start thinking about the pain of menstruation, we wouldn't say if someone needed to miss school because they were in the second stage of labor and pushing, we wouldn't call them weak. 
We'd be like, "Oh my God, you made it that far," right? 
(Laughter) And we wouldn't deny pain control to women who have typical pain of labor, right? 
So it's important for us to call this pain "typical" instead of "normal," because when we say it's normal, it's easier to dismiss. 
As opposed to saying it's typical, and we should address it. 
And we do have some ways to address menstrual pain. 
One way is with something called a TENS unit, which you can wear under your clothes and it sends an electrical impulse to the nerves and muscles and no one really knows how it works, but we think it might be the gate theory of pain, which is counterirritation. 
It's the same reason why, if you hurt yourself, you rub it. 
Vibration travels faster to your brain than pain does. 
We also have medications called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications. 
And what they do is they block the release of prostaglandins. 
They can reduce menstrual pain for 80 percent of women. 
They also reduce the volume of blood by 30 to 40 percent and they can help with period diarrhea. 
And we also have hormonal contraception, which gives us a thinner lining of the uterus, so there's less prostaglandins produced and with less blood, there's less need for cramping. 
Now, if those treatments fail you -- and it's important to use that word choice, because we never fail the treatment, the treatment fails us. 
If that treatment fails you, you could be amongst the people who have a resistance to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories. 
We don't quite understand, but there are some complex mechanisms why those medications just don't work for some women. 
It's also possible that you could have another reason for painful periods. 
You could have a condition called endometriosis, where the lining of the uterus is growing in the pelvic cavity, causing inflammation and scar tissue and adhesions. 
And there may be other mechanisms we don't quite understand yet, because it's a possibility that pain thresholds could be different due to very complex biological mechanisms. 
But we're only going to find that out by talking about it. 
It shouldn't be an act of feminism to know how your body works. 
It shouldn't -- (Applause) It shouldn't be an act of feminism to ask for help when you're suffering. 
The era of menstrual taboos is over. 
(Cheers and applause) The only curse here is the ability to convince half the population that the very biological machinery that perpetuates the species, that gives everything that we have, is somehow dirty or toxic. 
And I'm not going to stand for it. 
(Applause) And the way we break that curse? 
It's knowledge. 
Thank you. 
(Cheers and applause) 

If you happened to be in the town of Lubec, Maine in July of 2016, you may have seen something a little curious on the horizon when you looked out across the bay. 
In the distance, on an otherwise uninhabited island, loomed large black letters that spelled the word "FOREVER." 
The sign was 15 feet tall and 50 feet wide, large enough so that on a clear day, you really could see "FOREVER," the word perfectly visible and legible in the distance. 
But on some days, a thick white fog would roll in off the ocean, erasing the word and the view altogether. 
And sometimes, like in this video, you could barely see "FOREVER" peeking out of the shifting fog, accompanied only by the rhythmic warning sounds of fog horns. 
(Sound of fog horn) (Sound of fog horn) It started out as a fairly simple idea, albeit a little strange, to put the word "FOREVER" in the landscape so it could appear and disappear in the fog. 
But it took over a year to plan and execute, and it required the help of so many people, like the lobster boat captain, who helped transport all of the materials to the island. 
And the volunteers, who helped carry thousands of pounds of wood and steel to the top of the hill through waist-high shrubs. 
And in the end, "FOREVER" only lasted for three weeks. 
(Laughter) So if you're wondering why I did it at all, as I often did during that process, it might help for you to know a little bit more about me and my upbringing. 
I grew up in an evangelical Christian family. 
And although I'm an atheist today, I've realized that my religious upbringing has played a really important role in shaping the person that I've become. 
In 1986, when I was five years old, my parents became missionaries to South Africa. 
And that was during the last few years of the apartheid, so we lived in an all-white neighborhood, and I attended an all-white public school, while my parents helped found a multiracial church in downtown Cape Town. 
Because I was so young, it was impossible for me to understand the magnitude of what was happening in South Africa at that time. 
I witnessed the racism and oppression of people of color I knew and loved on a daily basis, but because of my own skin color, there was no way I could fully comprehend it. 
But I had the privilege to experience, firsthand, one of the most influential social movements of the 20th century. 
And the thing that left a long-lasting impression on me was how the people I met in South Africa could envision a better future for themselves and their country. 
A future they really believed was possible. 
And then they worked together, relentlessly, for decades, until they achieved that extraordinary historic change. 
I was there to see Nelson Mandela released from prison, and I watched an entire country begin a major transformation. 
And that transformed me as a person. 
It instilled in me a sense of wonder and optimism and possibility that permeates everything I create. 
I make sculptures like "FOREVER" as a way of giving physical, tangible forms to language and time. 
Those powerful but invisible forces that shape the way we perceive and experience our realities. 
And in doing so, I try to give other people the opportunity to reflect on their own perception of reality and inspire them to wonder and imagine what else might be possible. 
I often use signs to do this, because of how simply and effectively they're able to grab our attention and communicate information. 
They often point out things we would otherwise overlook, like this sign on the side of the highway in Texas. 
[TEMPTATIONS] They can often signify things that we can't see at all, like the distance to our destination. 
Signs often help to orient us in the world [You are on an island] by telling us where we are now and what's happening in the present moment, but they can also help us zoom out, shift our perspective and get a glimpse of the bigger picture. 
Imagine, for example, you're walking down the street in Philadelphia. 
A city in the US that contains so much history, the birthplace of our constitution. 
But imagine you're walking down the street in an area that's undergoing a huge transformation due to gentrification. 
And as you walk down that street, you notice something flashing up above you. 
So you look up and you see this. 
A flashing neon sign that says "All the light you see is from the past," and then "All you see is past," before turning off completely for a brief moment. 
It asks you to stop and notice the history embedded in everything that you see. 
And it reminds you that because light takes time to travel across space, even from just across the street or across the room, everything you're seeing in the present moment is technically an image of the past. 
Signs influence the way we all navigate the world, which means they have the ability to create a collective experience or understanding. 
My time in South Africa taught me that when people are able to find common ground and work together towards a mutual goal, powerful things can happen and so much more becomes possible. 
And I want to create more opportunities for people to find that kind of common ground. 
I want people to feel the power of collaboration, sometimes quite literally. 
A few years ago, a friend of mine showed me how our bodies can safely conduct small amounts of electricity. 
And if you hold hands with another person, a small electrical current can pass through your held hands and become like a switch that can trigger something else to happen. 
So last year, I used that form of human connection to activate an inflatable sculpture. 
I put two sensors on a platform far enough apart so that one person can't make it work on their own. 
But when two or more people work together to complete that electrical circuit, the inflatable comes to life. 
And it begins to fill with air, and the longer people hold hands, the larger it becomes, expanding into the words "You are magic." 
(Music, birds chirping) I always love to see how each group of people finds a different way to bridge that physical and metaphorical divide. 
But as soon as they release their hands and break that connection, the words immediately begin to slouch and fall over and eventually return to a lifeless pile of fabric on the ground. 
(Applause) At this moment in time, I think we could all agree that the future feels pretty bleak and uncertain. 
But maybe the hope for a brighter, more sustainable, more equitable future depends first on our ability to imagine it. 
But after we imagine it, we actually have to believe it's possible. 
And then we have to find common ground with people we would maybe otherwise disagree with and work together towards that mutual goal. 
And if we do that, I believe we have the capacity for magic. 
So if you can humor me for one more minute, I'm going to ask everyone in this theater to hold hands. 
When was the last time you held hands with a stranger? 
(Laughter) And if you feel comfortable, go ahead and make that metaphorical gesture of reaching across the aisle. 
And after you've held hands with people on either side of you, if you feel comfortable, please close your eyes. 
Now take a minute to imagine what you want, what you want the future to look like. 
And give yourself permission to be at least a little bit idealistic. 
What do you want to see change or happen in your own life as an individual? 
What do you want to see change or happen for everyone, for the planet? 
Can you picture it? 
And can you start to see how, if we all worked together, it might actually be possible? 
Now open your eyes, and let's make it real. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I never thought that I would be giving my TED Talk somewhere like this. 
But, like half of humanity, I've spent the last four weeks under lockdown due to the global pandemic created by COVID-19. 
I am extremely fortunate that during this time I've been able to come here to these woods near my home in southern England. 
These woods have always inspired me, and as humanity now tries to think about how we can find the inspiration to retake control of our actions so that terrible things don't come down the road without us taking action to avert them, I thought this is a good place for us to talk. 
And I'd like to begin that story six years ago, when I had first joined the United Nations. 
Now, I firmly believe that the UN is of unparalleled importance in the world right now to promote collaboration and cooperation. 
But what they don't tell you when you join is that this essential work is delivered mainly in the form of extremely boring meetings -- extremely long, boring meetings. 
Now, you may feel that you have attended some long, boring meetings in your life, and I'm sure you have. 
But these UN meetings are next-level, and everyone who works there approaches them with a level of calm normally only achieved by Zen masters. 
But myself, I wasn't ready for that. 
I joined expecting drama and tension and breakthrough. 
What I wasn't ready for was a process that seemed to move at the speed of a glacier, at the speed that a glacier used to move at. 
Now, in the middle of one of these long meetings, I was handed a note. 
And it was handed to me by my friend and colleague and coauthor, Christiana Figueres. 
Christiana was the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and as such, had overall responsibility for the UN reaching what would become the Paris Agreement. 
I was running political strategy for her. 
So when she handed me this note, I assumed that it would contain detailed political instructions about how we were going to get out of this nightmare quagmire that we seemed to be trapped in. 
I took the note and looked at it. 
It said, "Painful. 
But let's approach with love!" 
Now, I love this note for lots of reasons. 
I love the way the little tendrils are coming out from the word "painful." 
It was a really good visual depiction of how I felt at that moment. 
But I particularly love it because as I looked at it, I realized that it was a political instruction, and that if we were going to be successful, this was how we were going to do it. 
So let me explain that. 
What I'd been feeling in those meetings was actually about control. 
I had moved my life from Brooklyn in New York to Bonn in Germany with the extremely reluctant support of my wife. 
My children were now in a school where they couldn't speak the language, and I thought the deal for all this disruption to my world was that I would have some degree of control over what was going to happen. 
I felt for years that the climate crisis is the defining challenge of our generation, and here I was, ready to play my part and do something for humanity. 
But I put my hands on the levers of control that I'd been given and pulled them, and nothing happened. 
I realized the things I could control were menial day-to-day things. 
"Do I ride my bike to work?" and "Where do I have lunch?", whereas the things that were going to determine whether we were going to be successful were issues like, "Will Russia wreck the negotiations?" 
"Will China take responsibility for their emissions?" 
"Will the US help poorer countries deal with their burden of climate change?" 
The differential felt so huge, I could see no way I could bridge the two. 
It felt futile. 
I began to feel that I'd made a mistake. 
I began to get depressed. 
But even in that moment, I realized that what I was feeling had a lot of similarities to what I'd felt when I first found out about the climate crisis years before. 
I'd spent many of my most formative years as a Buddhist monk in my early 20s, but I left the monastic life, because even then, 20 years ago, I felt that the climate crisis was already a quickly unfolding emergency and I wanted to do my part. 
But once I'd left and I rejoined the world, I looked at what I could control. 
It was the few tons of my own emissions and that of my immediate family, which political party I voted for every few years, whether I went on a march or two. 
And then I looked at the issues that would determine the outcome, and they were big geopolitical negotiations, massive infrastructure spending plans, what everybody else did. 
The differential again felt so huge that I couldn't see any way that I could bridge it. 
I kept trying to take action, but it didn't really stick. 
It felt futile. 
Now, we know that this can be a common experience for many people, and maybe you have had this experience. 
When faced with an enormous challenge that we don't feel we have any agency or control over, our mind can do a little trick to protect us. 
We don't like to feel like we're out of control facing big forces, so our mind will tell us, "Maybe it's not that important. 
Maybe it's not happening in the way that people say, anyway." 
Or, it plays down our own role. 
"There's nothing that you individually can do, so why try?" 
But there's something odd going on here. 
Is it really true that humans will only take sustained and dedicated action on an issue of paramount importance when they feel they have a high degree of control? 
Look at these pictures. 
These people are caregivers and nurses who have been helping humanity face the coronavirus COVID-19 as it has swept around the world as a pandemic in the last few months. 
Are these people able to prevent the spread of the disease? 
No. 
Are they able to prevent their patients from dying? 
Some, they will have been able to prevent, but others, it will have been beyond their control. 
Does that make their contribution futile and meaningless? 
Actually, it's offensive even to suggest that. 
What they are doing is caring for their fellow human beings at their moment of greatest vulnerability. 
And that work has huge meaning, to the point where I only have to show you those pictures for it to become evident that the courage and humanity those people are demonstrating makes their work some of the most meaningful things that can be done as human beings, even though they can't control the outcome. 
Now, that's interesting, because it shows us that humans are capable of taking dedicated and sustained action, even when they can't control the outcome. 
But it leaves us with another challenge. 
With the climate crisis, the action that we take is separated from the impact of it, whereas what is happening with these images is these nurses are being sustained not by the lofty goal of changing the world but by the day-to-day satisfaction of caring for another human being through their moments of weakness. 
With the climate crisis, we have this huge separation. 
It used to be that we were separated by time. 
The impacts of the climate crisis were supposed to be way off in the future. 
But right now, the future has come to meet us. 
Continents are on fire. 
Cities are going underwater. 
Countries are going underwater. 
Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move as a result of climate change. 
But even if those impacts are no longer separated from us by time, they're still separated from us in a way that makes it difficult to feel that direct connection. 
They happen somewhere else to somebody else or to us in a different way than we're used to experiencing it. 
So even though that story of the nurse demonstrates something to us about human nature, we're going to have find a different way of dealing with the climate crisis in a sustained manner. 
There is a way that we can do this, a powerful combination of a deep and supporting attitude that when combined with consistent action can enable whole societies to take dedicated action in a sustained way towards a shared goal. 
It's been used to great effect throughout history. 
So let me give you a historical story to explain it. 
Right now, I am standing in the woods near my home in southern England. 
And these particular woods are not far from London. 
Eighty years ago, that city was under attack. 
In the late 1930s, the people of Britain would do anything to avoid facing the reality that Hitler would stop at nothing to conquer Europe. 
Fresh with memories from the First World War, they were terrified of Nazi aggression and would do anything to avoid facing that reality. 
In the end, the reality broke through. 
Churchill is remembered for many things, and not all of them positive, but what he did in those early days of the war was he changed the story the people of Britain told themselves about what they were doing and what was to come. 
Where previously there had been trepidation and nervousness and fear, there came a calm resolve, an island alone, a greatest hour, a greatest generation, a country that would fight them on the beaches and in the hills and in the streets, a country that would never surrender. 
That change from fear and trepidation to facing the reality, whatever it was and however dark it was, had nothing to do with the likelihood of winning the war. 
There was no news from the front that battles were going better or even at that point that a powerful new ally had joined the fight and changed the odds in their favor. 
It was simply a choice. 
A deep, determined, stubborn form of optimism emerged, not avoiding or denying the darkness that was pressing in but refusing to be cowed by it. 
That stubborn optimism is powerful. 
It is not dependent on assuming that the outcome is going to be good or having a form of wishful thinking about the future. 
However, what it does is it animates action and infuses it with meaning. 
We know that from that time, despite the risk and despite the challenge, it was a meaningful time full of purpose, and multiple accounts have confirmed that actions that ranged from pilots in the Battle of Britain to the simple act of pulling potatoes from the soil became infused with meaning. 
They were animated towards a shared purpose and a shared outcome. 
We have seen that throughout history. 
This coupling of a deep and determined stubborn optimism with action, when the optimism leads to a determined action, then they can become self-sustaining: without the stubborn optimism, the action doesn't sustain itself; without the action, the stubborn optimism is just an attitude. 
The two together can transform an entire issue and change the world. 
We saw this at multiple other times. 
We saw it when Rosa Parks refused to get up from the bus. 
We saw it in Gandhi's long salt marches to the beach. 
We saw it when the suffragettes said that "Courage calls to courage everywhere." 
And we saw it when Kennedy said that within 10 years, he would put a man on the moon. 
That electrified a generation and focused them on a shared goal against a dark and frightening adversary, even though they didn't know how they would achieve it. 
In each of these cases, a realistic and gritty but determined, stubborn optimism was not the result of success. 
It was the cause of it. 
That is also how the transformation happened on the road to the Paris Agreement. 
Those challenging, difficult, pessimistic meetings transformed as more and more people decided that this was our moment to dig in and determine that we would not drop the ball on our watch, and we would deliver the outcome that we knew was possible. 
More and more people transformed themselves to that perspective and began to work, and in the end, that worked its way up into a wave of momentum that crashed over us and delivered many of those challenging issues with a better outcome than we could possibly have imagined. 
And even now, years later and with a climate denier in the White House, much that was put in motion in those days is still unfolding, and we have everything to play for in the coming months and years on dealing with the climate crisis. 
So right now, we are coming through one of the most challenging periods in the lives of most of us. 
The global pandemic has been frightening, whether personal tragedy has been involved or not. 
But it has also shaken our belief that we are powerless in the face of great change. 
In the space of a few weeks, we mobilized to the point where half of humanity took drastic action to protect the most vulnerable. 
If we're capable of that, maybe we have not yet tested the limits of what humanity can do when it rises to meet a shared challenge. 
We now need to move beyond this narrative of powerlessness, because make no mistake -- the climate crisis will be orders of magnitude worse than the pandemic if we do not take the action that we can still take to avert the tragedy that we see coming towards us. 
We can no longer afford the luxury of feeling powerless. 
The truth is that future generations will look back at this precise moment with awe as we stand at the crossroads between a regenerative future and one where we have thrown it all away. 
And the truth is that a lot is going pretty well for us in this transition. 
Costs for clean energy are coming down. 
Cities are transforming. Land is being regenerated. 
People are on the streets calling for change with a verve and tenacity we have not seen for a generation. 
Genuine success is possible in this transition, and genuine failure is possible, too, which makes this the most exciting time to be alive. 
We can take a decision right now that we will approach this challenge with a stubborn form of gritty, realistic and determined optimism and do everything within our power to ensure that we shape the path as we come out of this pandemic towards a regenerative future. 
We can all decide that we will be hopeful beacons for humanity even if there are dark days ahead, and we can decide that we will be responsible, we will reduce our own emissions by at least 50 percent in the next 10 years, and we will take action to engage with governments and corporations to ensure they do what is necessary coming out of the pandemic to rebuild the world that we want them to. 
Right now, all of these things are possible. 
So let's go back to that boring meeting room where I'm looking at that note from Christiana. 
And looking at it took me back to some of the most transformative experiences of my life. 
One of the many things I learned as a monk is that a bright mind and a joyful heart is both the path and the goal in life. 
This stubborn optimism is a form of applied love. 
It is both the world we want to create and the way in which we can create that world. 
And it is a choice for all of us. 
Choosing to face this moment with stubborn optimism can fill our lives with meaning and purpose, and in doing so, we can put a hand on the arc of history and bend it towards the future that we choose. 
Yes, living now feels out of control. 
It feels frightening and scary and new. 
But let's not falter at this most crucial of transitions that is coming at us right now. 
Let's face it with stubborn and determined optimism. 
Yes, seeing the changes in the world right now can be painful. 
But let's approach it with love. 
Thank you. 

For years I've been feeling frustrated, because as a religious historian, I've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. 
Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what's been called the Golden Rule. 
Sometimes it comes in a positive version -- "Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself." 
And equally important is the negative version -- "Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you." 
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. 
And people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. 
People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, "all day and every day," not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism, but to do it all day and every day, you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself. 
And it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao. 
Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence. 
But you know you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. 
Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort. 
Often people don't really want to be compassionate. 
I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. 
And that of course defeats the object of the exercise. 
Now why was I so grateful to TED? 
Because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century, enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than I could have ever conceived. 
Because I feel an urgency about this. 
If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. 
The task of our time, one of the great tasks of our time, is to build a global society, as I said, where people can live together in peace. 
And the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem. 
And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule. 
This is the source of all morality, this imaginative act of empathy, putting yourself in the place of another. 
And so we have a choice, it seems to me. 
We can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith, or we can go back to the rabbis. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, who, when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. 
That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary." 
And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate. 
And we need to revive that spirit. 
And it's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down. 
We have to make this happen, and we can do it with the modern communications that TED has introduced. 
Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners. 
In Singapore, we have a group going to use the Charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in Singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. 
In Malaysia, there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people, young people, and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. 
Throughout Europe, the Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, are discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths. 
But it can't stop there. It can't stop with the launch. 
Religious teaching, this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines. 
Religious teaching must always lead to action. 
And I intend to work on this till my dying day. 
And I want to continue with our partners to do two things -- educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. 
Education because we've so dropped out of compassion. 
People often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody. 
But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it. 
You also have to do it. 
I want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another. 
The same applies to educators. 
I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. 
And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling. 
I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions. 
And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking, so that because people have this Charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech, disdainful remarks from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry. 
Because we can change the world, we have the ability. 
I would never have thought of putting the Charter online. 
I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. 
And TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas. 
Because that is what is so wonderful about TED. 
In this room, all this expertise, if we joined it all together, we could change the world. 
And of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable. 
But I'd just like to quote, finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author whom I don't quote very often, C.S. Lewis. 
But he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a schoolgirl. 
It's in his book "The Four Loves." 
He said that he distinguished between erotic love, when two people gaze, spellbound, into each other's eyes. 
And then he compared that to friendship, when two people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal. 
We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. 
And I am convinced. 
I felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at Vevey, that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences melt away. 
And we learn amity. 
And we learn to live together and to get to know one another. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. 
And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. 
And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
She said, "What leads to success?" 
And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer. 
So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. 
And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? 
So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick. 
And the first thing is passion. 
Freeman Thomas says, "I'm driven by my passion." 
TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money. 
Carol Coletta says, "I would pay someone to do what I do." 
And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway. 
Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, "It's all hard work. 
Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun." 
Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
(Laughter) TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. 
I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics. 
(Laughter) Good! 
(Applause) Alex Garden says, "To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it." 
And it's focus. 
Norman Jewison said to me, "I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing." 
And push! 
Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push." 
You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt. 
Goldie Hawn says, "I always had self-doubts. 
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
I didn't think I'd make it." 
Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." 
(Laughter) Serve! 
A lot of kids want to be millionaires. 
The first thing I say is: "OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. 
Because that's the way people really get rich." 
Ideas! 
TEDster Bill Gates says, "I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company." 
I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas -- it's just doing some very simple things. 
And I give lots of evidence. 
Persist! 
Joe Kraus says, "Persistence is the number one reason for our success." 
You've got to persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! 
Which of course means "Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure." 
(Laughter) So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED. 
(Laughter) Or failing that, do the eight things -- and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success. 
Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews! 

In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. 
Millions of people were in severe need of help. 
The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. 
But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims. 
When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail. 
The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps. 
But help was coming. 
At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. 
And it took them four days. 
The new software they used? Google Mapmaker. 
Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. 
People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store. 
Maps matter. 
Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. 
For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone. 
In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable. 
And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere. 
Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now. 
So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries. 
You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal. 
And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore. 
This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning. 
This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time. 
This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet. 
Welcome to the new world. 
(Applause) 

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

So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says, "Excuse me, what is the name of this block?" 
And you say, "I'm sorry, well, this is Oak Street, that's Elm Street. 
This is 26th, that's 27th." 
He says, "OK, but what is the name of that block?" 
You say, "Well, blocks don't have names. 
Streets have names; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets." 
He leaves, a little confused and disappointed. 
So, now imagine you're standing on a street, anywhere in Japan, you turn to a person next to you and say, "Excuse me, what is the name of this street?" 
They say, "Oh, well that's Block 17 and this is Block 16." 
And you say, "OK, but what is the name of this street?" 
And they say, "Well, streets don't have names. 
Blocks have names. 
Just look at Google Maps here. There's Block 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. 
All of these blocks have names, and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks. 
And you say then, "OK, then how do you know your home address?" 
He said, "Well, easy, this is District Eight. 
There's Block 17, house number one." 
You say, "OK, but walking around the neighborhood, I noticed that the house numbers don't go in order." 
He says, "Of course they do. They go in the order in which they were built. 
The first house ever built on a block is house number one. 
The second house ever built is house number two. 
Third is house number three. It's easy. It's obvious." 
So, I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn't even know we had, and realize that the opposite of them may also be true. 
So, for example, there are doctors in China who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy. 
So, any month you are healthy you pay them, and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you're healthy, not sick. 
(Applause) In most music, we think of the "one" as the downbeat, the beginning of the musical phrase: one, two, three, four. 
But in West African music, the "one" is thought of as the end of the phrase, like the period at the end of a sentence. 
So, you can hear it not just in the phrasing, but the way they count off their music: two, three, four, one. 
And this map is also accurate. 
(Laughter) There's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite is also true. 
So, let's never forget, whether at TED, or anywhere else, that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true. 
Domo arigato gozaimashita. 

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead through the food that they eat. 
My name's Jamie Oliver. 
I'm 34 years old. 
I'm from Essex in England and for the last seven years I've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. 
I'm not a doctor; I'm a chef, I don't have expensive equipment or medicine. 
I use information, education. 
I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. 
We have an awful, awful reality right now. 
America, you're at the top of your game. 
This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. 
Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today? 
Put your hands up. 
You can continue to put your hands up, aunties and uncles as well. 
Most of you. OK. 
We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. 
Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we've built around them. 
Two-thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese. 
You lot, you're all right, but we'll get you eventually, don't worry. 
(Laughter) The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. 
We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it; it's on the front page of every paper, CNN. 
Look at homicide at the bottom, for God's sake. 
Right? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease. 
Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that. 
Fact: diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today. 
This is a global problem. 
It's a catastrophe. 
England is right behind you, as usual. 
(Laughter) I know they were close, but not that close. 
Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health. 
Think about smoking. 
It costs way less than obesity now. 
Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your health-care bills, 150 billion dollars a year. 
In 10 years, it's set to double: 300 billion dollars a year. 
Let's be honest, guys, you haven't got that cash. 
(Laughter) I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in. 
We need it. The time is now. 
We're in a tipping-point moment. 
I've been doing this for seven years. 
I've been trying in America for seven years. 
Now is the time when it's ripe -- ripe for the picking. 
I went to the eye of the storm. 
Or it was last year. 
We've got a new one this year, but we'll work on that next season. 
(Laughter) Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town. 
I wanted to put heart and soul and people, your public, around the statistics that we've become so used to. 
I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about: your public, your children. 
She's 16 years old. 
She's got six years to live because of the food that she's eaten. 
She's the third generation of Americans that hasn't grown up within a food environment where they've been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom's mom. 
She has six years to live. 
She's eating her liver to death. 
This is a normal family, guys. 
Stacy does her best, but she's third-generation as well; she was never taught to cook at home or at school. 
Justin here, 12 years old, he's 350 pounds. 
He gets bullied, for God's sake. 
The daughter there, Katie, she's four years old. 
She's obese before she even gets to primary school. 
Marissa, she's all right, she's one of your lot. 
But you know what? 
Her father, who was obese, died in her arms, And then the second most important man in her life, her uncle, died of obesity, and now her step-dad is obese. 
You see, the thing is, obesity and diet-related disease doesn't just hurt the people that have it; it's all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters. 
Pastor Steve: an inspirational man, one of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia. 
He has to bury the people, OK? 
He's fed up with burying his friends, his family, his community. 
Come winter, three times as many people die. 
He's sick of it. 
This is preventable disease. Waste of life. 
By the way, this is what they get buried in. 
We're not geared up to do this. 
Can't even get them out the door, and I'm being serious. 
Can't even get them there. Forklift. 
This is our landscape of food. 
I need you to understand it. 
You've probably heard all this before. 
Over the last 30 years, what's happened that's ripped the heart out of this country? 
Let's be frank and honest. 
Let's start with the Main Street. 
The big brands are some of the most important powers, powerful powers, in this country. 
(Sighs) Supermarkets as well. 
Big companies. Big companies. 
Thirty years ago, most of the food was largely local and largely fresh. 
Now it's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives, extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story. 
Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem. 
Labeling is a massive problem. 
The labeling in this country is a disgrace. 
The industry wants to self-police themselves. 
What, in this kind of climate? They don't deserve it. 
How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of so much sugar? 
Home. 
The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food culture, what made our society. 
That is not happening anymore. 
And you know, as we go to work and as life changes, and as life always evolves, we kind of have to look at it holistically -- step back for a moment, and re-address the balance. 
It hasn't happened for 30 years, OK? 
I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now; the Edwards family. 
(Video) Jamie Oliver: Let's have a talk. 
This stuff goes through you and your family's body every week. 
And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. 
How are you feeling? 
Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now. 
But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn't going to get them there. 
But I'm killing them. 
JO: Yes you are. You are. 
Normal. 
Let's get on schools, something that I'm fairly much a specialist in. 
OK, school. 
What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? 
School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc. 
You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK? 
But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK? 
School food is something that most kids -- 31 million a day, actually -- have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. 
So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances. 
(Laughter) Before I crack into my rant, which I'm sure you're waiting for -- (Laughter) I need to say one thing, and it's so important in, hopefully, the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months. 
The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America -- I offer myself as their ambassador. 
I'm not slagging them off. 
They're doing the best they can do. 
They're doing their best. 
But they're doing what they're told, and what they're being told to do is wrong. 
The system is highly run by accountants; there's not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business. 
There's a problem: If you're not a food expert, and you've got tight budgets and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative, you can't duck and dive and write different things around things. 
If you're an accountant, and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit. 
Now, the reality is, the food that your kids get every day is fast food, it's highly processed, there's not enough fresh food in there at all. 
You know, the amount of additives, E numbers, ingredients you wouldn't believe -- there's not enough veggies at all. 
French fries are considered a vegetable. 
Pizza for breakfast. They don't even get crockery. 
Knives and forks? No, they're too dangerous. 
They have scissors in the classroom, but knives and forks? No. 
And the way I look at it is: If you don't have knives and forks in your school, you're purely endorsing, from a state level, fast food, because it's handheld. 
And yes, by the way, it is fast food: It's sloppy Joes, it's burgers, it's wieners, it's pizzas, it's all of that stuff. 
(Sighs) Ten percent of what we spend on health care, as I said earlier, is on obesity, and it's going to double. 
We're not teaching our kids. 
There's no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school, OK? 
We don't teach kids about food, right? 
And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England. 
(Video) Who knows what this is? 
Child: Potatoes. 
Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? 
Do you know what that is? 
Do you know what that is? 
Child: Broccoli? 
JO: What about this? Our good old friend. 
Child: Celery. 
JO: No. What do you think this is? 
Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No. 
JO: Immediately you get a really clear sense of "Do the kids know anything about where food comes from?" 
Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear? 
JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don't know. 
JO: If the kids don't know what stuff is, then they will never eat it. 
(Laughter) JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. 
Guess what fixed that. 
We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period. 
(Applause) I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we're in, guys, OK? 
I want to talk about something so basic as milk. 
Every kid has the right to milk at school. 
Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch, right? 
They'll be having two bottles, OK? 
But milk ain't good enough anymore. 
Don't get me wrong, I support milk -- but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings, colorings and sugar in milk, more kids will drink it. 
Yeah. 
Obviously now that's going to catch on the apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they'll eat more as well. 
Do you know what I mean? 
For me, there isn't any need to flavor the milk. 
Okay? There's sugar in everything. 
I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. 
Even the milk hasn't escaped the kind of modern-day problems. 
There's our milk. There's our carton. 
In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop, and they are having two a day. 
We've got one kid, here -- having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. 
You know, there's your week. 
There's your month. 
And I've taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. 
Now, I don't know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. 
That's my belief. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me. 
This, all this bad news, is preventable. 
That's the good news. 
It's very, very preventable. 
So, let's just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. 
Here is the thing, right, it cannot just come from one source. 
To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, "In 10 years' time, the history of your children's lives, happiness -- and let's not forget, you're clever if you eat well, you know you're going to live longer -- all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?" 
So, supermarkets. 
Where else do you shop so religiously? 
How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? 
Love them. 
They owe us to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. 
They need to help us shop. 
They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. 
This is not expensive. 
It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. 
The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. 
I know, easier said than done. 
It's the future. It's the only way. 
Fast food. 
With the fast-food industry you know, it's very competitive. 
I've had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants. 
I mean, basically they've weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z, and everyone loves them, right? 
So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. 
But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry, and over a five, six, seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar and all the other non-food ingredients. 
Now, also, back to the sort of big brands: labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted. 
Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site, OK? 
There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah? 
(Applause) Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. 
Life skills. 
(Applause) That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. 
If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. 
The workplace, we haven't really talked about it. 
You know, it's now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. 
The staff are the moms and dads of America's children. 
Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she'd be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. 
Definitely they shouldn't be left out. 
Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it's so achievable. 
Absolutely. 
But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. 
For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. 
And for me, it's quite romantic, but it's about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that's the whole population of America. 
Romantic, yes, but most importantly, it's about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. 
We've got to put back what's been lost. 
Huntington's Kitchen. 
Huntington, where I made this program, we've got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. 
I truly believe that change will happen. 
Huntington's Kitchen. I work with a community. 
I worked in the schools. 
I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area from the junk, onto the fresh food: six-and-a-half grand per school. 
(Applause) That's all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school. 
The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay? 
This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population, and it's people on people. 
You know, it's local cooks teaching local people. 
It's free cooking lessons, guys, in the Main Street. 
This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. 
Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. 
There is plenty of beautiful things going on. 
There are angels around America doing great things in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education -- there are amazing people doing this already. 
The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, but there's no cash. 
We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well. 
Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do. 
(Applause) And look, I know it's weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. 
All I can say is: I care. 
I'm a father, and I love this country. 
And I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. 
If America does it, other people will follow. 
It's incredibly important. 
(Audience) Yeah! 
(Applause) When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren't, I thought "If I had a magic wand, what would I do?" 
And I thought, "You know what? 
I'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America." 
I'm here. 
So, my wish. 
Dyslexic, so I'm a bit slow. 
My wish is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause continues) 

I'm going to talk today about energy and climate. 
And that might seem a bit surprising, because my full-time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. 
But energy and climate are extremely important to these people; in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. 
The climate getting worse means that many years, their crops won't grow: there will be too much rain, not enough rain; things will change in ways their fragile environment simply can't support. 
And that leads to starvation, it leads to uncertainty, it leads to unrest. 
So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. 
Also, the price of energy is very important to them. 
In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. 
Now, the price of energy has come down over time. 
Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. 
The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s, we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning; we can make modern materials and do so many things. 
And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. 
But as we make it cheaper -- and let's say, let's go for making it twice as cheap -- we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. 
CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. 
If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. 
Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be, and where the positive feedbacks are -- there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. 
And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. 
I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? 
Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? 
And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. 
And so that's a big challenge. 
It's very different than saying, "We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under." 
This is something that has to get to zero. 
Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year -- over 26 billion tons. 
For each American, it's about 20 tons. 
For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. 
It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. 
And somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. 
It's been constantly going up. 
It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. 
This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication. 
So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. 
So let's look at each one of these, and see how we can get this down to zero. 
Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. 
(Laughter) That's back from high school algebra. 
But let's take a look. 
First, we've got population. 
The world today has 6.8 billion people. 
That's headed up to about nine billion. 
Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. 
But there, we see an increase of about 1.3. 
The second factor is the services we use. 
This encompasses everything: the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. 
These are very good things. 
Getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. 
And it's a great thing for this number to go up. 
In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, overall, that will more than double the services delivered per person. 
Here we have a very basic service: Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework? 
And, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their schoolwork under the street lamps. 
Now, efficiency, "E," the energy for each service -- here, finally we have some good news. 
We have something that's not going up. 
Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings -- there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. 
Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. 
There are other services, like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. 
And so overall, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. 
But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. 
So let's look at this fourth factor -- this is going to be a key one -- and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. 
So the question is: Can you actually get that to zero? 
If you burn coal, no. 
If you burn natural gas, no. 
Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. 
And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. 
So we need energy miracles. 
Now, when I use the term "miracle," I don't mean something that's impossible. 
The microprocessor is a miracle. 
The personal computer is a miracle. 
The Internet and its services are a miracle. 
So the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. 
Usually, we don't have a deadline where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. 
Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. 
This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline. 
Now, I thought, "How could I really capture this? 
Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here?" 
I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people enjoyed that. 
(Laughter) It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitoes. 
With energy, all I could come up with is this. 
I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. 
So here we have some natural fireflies. 
I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. 
(Laughter) Now, there's all sorts of gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much. 
We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability. 
And although there's many directions that people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. 
I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. 
Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better. 
But my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. 
Let's look first at burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. 
What you need to do there seems like it might be simple, but it's not. 
And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. 
Now, we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level. 
But getting up to that full percentage -- that will be very tricky. 
And agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue: Who's going to be sure? 
Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? 
This is a lot of volume. 
So that's a tough one. 
Next would be nuclear. 
It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. 
And then what do you do with the waste? 
Although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. 
People need to feel good about it. 
So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. 
The last three of the five, I've grouped together. 
These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. 
And they actually -- although it's great they don't require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. 
One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. 
This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of times more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. 
Also, these are intermittent sources. 
The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. 
And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. 
So we've got big cost challenges here. 
We have transmission challenges; for example, say this energy source is outside your country, you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. 
And, finally, this storage problem. 
To dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries made -- for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything -- and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses. 
What I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. 
And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. 
It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. 
Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. 
If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. 
Now, how are we going to go forward on this -- what's the right approach? 
Is it a Manhattan Project? What's the thing that can get us there? 
Well, we need lots of companies working on this -- hundreds. 
In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. 
A lot of them, you'll look at and say, "They're crazy." 
That's good. 
And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. 
Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. 
Vinod Khosla is investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. 
Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. 
There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. 
Innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. 
The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium -- the one percent, which is the U235 -- we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." 
It is kind of a crazy idea. 
In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right materials approach, this looks like it would work. 
And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. 
You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. 
So instead of worrying about them, you just take that, it's a great thing. 
It breeds this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. 
You see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. 
In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. 
I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. 
This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. 
That would power the US for hundreds of years. 
And simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. 
So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. 
So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? 
What should our report card look like? 
Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. 
For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. 
That really is very important, that we get there. 
And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries -- still some agriculture; hopefully, we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. 
So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. 
The other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and are in the process of getting it elsewhere? 
That's super important. 
That's a key element of making that report card. 
Backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? 
Well, again, it should have the two elements. 
We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and therefore, the less the temperature. 
But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. 
These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. 
There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. 
The Al Gore book, "Our Choice," and the David MacKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." 
They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. 
There's a lot that has to come together. 
So this is a wish. 
It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. 
If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years -- I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented -- this is the wish I would pick. 
This is the one with the greatest impact. 
If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the US and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all, the lives of those two billion will be far worse. 
So what do we have to do? 
What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? 
We need to go for more research funding. 
When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. 
They should discuss this innovation agenda. 
You'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. 
We do need the market incentives -- CO2 tax, cap and trade -- something that gets that price signal out there. 
We need to get the message out. 
We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. 
This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Thank you. 
Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) CA: Thank you. 
I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? 
Bill Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions. 
And even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. 
The tough thing is building the pilot reactor -- finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. 
Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. 
CA: So to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground, almost like a vertical column of nuclear fuel, of this spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down? 
BG: That's right. 
Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, where you're opening it up and moving things in and out -- that's not good. 
So if you have very -- (Laughter) very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have those same complexities. 
And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done. 
CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution. 
BG: Yeah; what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there's a lot less waste under this approach -- then you can actually take that and put it into another one and burn that. 
And we start out, actually, by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry-casking by reactors -- that's our fuel to begin with. 
So the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process. 
CA: You're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities. 
Where is there most interest in actually doing something with this? 
BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called "nuclear." 
So we've got a lot of interest. 
People from the company have been in Russia, India, China. 
I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. 
So I'm optimistic. 
This is a variant on something that has been done. 
It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. 
CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? 
BG: Well, we need -- for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. 
That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. 
And TerraPower -- if things go well, which is wishing for a lot -- could easily meet that. 
And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies -- we need it to be hundreds -- who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. 
And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. 
We certainly need one to succeed. 
CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changers, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there? 
BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. 
It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. 
In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. 
You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. 
There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. 
And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal. 
And so, if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation, the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. 
CA: If this doesn't work, then what? 
Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? 
BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been overeating, and you're about to have a heart attack. 
Then where do you go? 
You may need heart surgery or something. 
There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. 
Now, that's just an insurance policy; you hope you don't need to do that. 
Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. 
I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about: Should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect? 
CA: Climate skeptics: If you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong? 
BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps. 
The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. 
Are they saying there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? 
There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. 
The main problem we have here -- it's kind of like with AIDS: you make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. 
And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later, and a somewhat uncertain pain thing. 
In fact, the IPCC report -- that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, "OK, that isn't that big of a deal." 
The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. 
But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, "OK, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2. 
But I guess I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than what's come before." 
(Applause) CA: So that would be your response to the Bjørn Lomborg argument, basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. 
BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece -- say the US should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now -- it's not that dramatic. 
It shouldn't take away from other things. 
The thing you get into big money on, and reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that -- that, to me, mostly is a waste. 
Unless you're very close, and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap, I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. 
If the trade-off you get into is, "Let's make energy super expensive," then the rich can afford that. 
I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. 
The disaster is for that two billion. 
And even Lomborg has changed. 
His shtick now is, "Why isn't the R&D getting more discussed?" 
He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. 
And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. 
The R&D piece -- it's crazy how little it's funded. 
CA: Well, Bill, I suspect I speak on behalf of most people here to say I really hope your wish comes true. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is. 
Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe -- the child remains nonverbal -- all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers. 
And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. 
(Laughter) You wouldn't have any -- (Applause) It's a continuum of traits. 
When does a nerd turn into Asperger, which is just mild autism? 
I mean, Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today. 
And one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things that Bill Gates talked about this morning. 
OK, now, if you want to understand autism: animals. 
I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking. 
You have to get away from verbal language. 
I think in pictures. I don't think in language. 
Now, the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details. 
This is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters or the little letters, and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly. 
And the thing is, the normal brain ignores the details. 
Well, if you're building a bridge, details are pretty important because it'll fall down if you ignore the details. 
And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract. 
People are getting away from doing hands-on stuff. 
I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes, because art, and classes like that -- those are the classes where I excelled. 
In my work with cattle, I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice would make the cattle balk. 
For example, this flag waving right in front of the veterinary facility. 
This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility; all they needed to do was move the flag. 
Rapid movement, contrast. 
In the early '70s when I started, I got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing. 
People thought that was crazy. 
A coat on a fence would make them balk, shadows would make them balk, a hose on the floor -- people weren't noticing these things. 
A chain hanging down ... 
And that's shown very, very nicely in the movie. 
In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. 
That's the geek side. 
And, actually, it's called "Temple Grandin," not "Thinking in Pictures." 
So what is thinking in pictures? 
It's literally movies in your head. 
My mind works like Google for images. 
When I was a young kid, I didn't know my thinking was different. 
I thought everybody thought in pictures. 
Then when I did my book, "Thinking in Pictures," I started interviewing people about how they think. 
And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different. 
Like if I say, "Think about a church steeple," most people get this sort of generalized generic one. 
Now, maybe that's not true in this room, but it's going to be true in a lot of different places. 
I see only specific pictures. 
They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures. 
And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there, where the word "shoe" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes pop into my imagination. 
OK, there's my childhood church; that's specific. 
There's some more, Fort Collins. 
OK, how about famous ones? 
And they just kind of come up, kind of like this. 
Just really quickly, like Google for pictures. 
And they come up one at a time, and then I think, "OK, well, maybe we can have it snow, or we can have a thunderstorm," and I can hold it there and turn them into videos. 
Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. 
And I've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant. 
I've got that stuff up on YouTube, if you want to look at it. 
(Laughter) But one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could test-run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. 
And this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie. 
That was like just so super cool. 
And there were a lot of, kind of, Asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set, too. 
(Laughter) But one of the things that really worries me is: Where's the younger version of those kids going today? 
They're not ending up in Silicon Valley, where they belong. 
(Laughter) (Applause) One of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social, is I had to sell my work, and not myself. 
And the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings, I showed off pictures of things. 
Another thing that helped me as a little kid is, boy, in the '50s, you were taught manners. 
You were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around. 
When kids get to be in third or fourth grade, you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker, drawing in perspective. 
Now, I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker. 
Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago, and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex. 
This is tensor imaging. 
And my great big Internet trunk line is twice as big as the control's. 
The red lines there are me, and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control. 
And there I got a gigantic one, and the control over there, the blue one, has got a really small one. 
And some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. 
Now, the thing is, the visual thinker is just one kind of mind. 
You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind -- good at one thing, bad at something else. 
And where I was bad was algebra. 
And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. 
Gigantic mistake. 
I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra, go right to geometry and trig. 
Now, another kind of mind is the pattern thinker. 
More abstract. 
These are your engineers, your computer programmers. 
This is pattern thinking. 
That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper -- no scotch tape, no cuts. 
And there in the background is the pattern for folding it. 
Here are the types of thinking: photo-realistic visual thinkers, like me; pattern thinkers, music and math minds. 
Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. 
You also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic. 
You'll see these different kinds of minds. 
And then there's a verbal mind, they know every fact about everything. 
Now, another thing is the sensory issues. 
I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face. 
And I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it, and they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin. 
But sensory is an issue. 
Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights; others have problems with sound sensitivity. 
You know, it's going to be variable. 
Now, visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind. 
Because think about it: an animal is a sensory-based thinker, not verbal -- thinks in pictures, thinks in sounds, thinks in smells. 
Think about how much information there is on the local fire hydrant. 
He knows who's been there -- (Laughter) When they were there. 
Are they friend or foe? Is there anybody he can go mate with? 
There's a ton of information on that fire hydrant. 
It's all very detailed information. 
And looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals. 
Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. 
Man on a horse, and a man on the ground -- that is viewed as two totally different things. 
You could have a horse that's been abused by a rider. 
They'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer, but you can't ride him. 
You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up, and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. 
Cattle are the same way. 
Man on a horse, a man on foot -- they're two different things. 
You see, it's a different picture. 
See, I want you to think about just how specific this is. 
Now, this ability to put information into categories, I find a lot of people are not very good at this. 
When I'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant, they don't seem to be able to figure out: "Do I have a training-people issue? 
Or do I have something wrong with the equipment?" 
In other words, categorize equipment problem from a people problem. 
I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that. 
Now, let's say I figure out it's an equipment problem. 
Is it a minor problem, with something simple I can fix? 
Or is the whole design of the system wrong? 
People have a hard time figuring that out. 
Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. 
Yeah, I'm a million-mile flier. 
I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? 
It would be their airplane tails. 
You know, five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years, the tail either came off, or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way. 
It's tails, pure and simple. 
And when the pilots walk around the plane, guess what? 
They can't see that stuff inside the tail. 
Now as I think about that, I'm pulling up all of that specific information. 
It's specific. 
I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle. 
Now, here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats. 
He'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat. 
White cowboy hats, that was absolutely fine. 
Now, the thing is, the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together. 
We've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds. 
And one of the things that is driving me really crazy as I travel around and I do autism meetings, is I'm seeing a lot of smart, geeky, nerdy kids, and they just aren't very social, and nobody's working on developing their interest in something like science. 
And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher. 
My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie. 
I was a goofball student when I was in high school. 
I just didn't care at all about studying, until I had Mr. Carlock's science class. 
He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie. 
And he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room. 
This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. 
You know, one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED, and there's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet to get these kids turned on. 
Because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky, nerdy kids, and the teachers out in the Midwest and other parts of the country when you get away from these tech areas, they don't know what to do with these kids. 
And they're not going down the right path. 
The thing is, you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind, or your mind can be wired to be more social. 
And what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here in the really brilliant mind, and we lose a few social circuits here. 
And then you can get to the point where it's so severe, you're going to have a person that's going to be non-verbal. 
In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. 
This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller. 
He studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia. 
And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain. 
And then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars. 
Now, Van Gogh doesn't know anything about physics, but I think it's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence, which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head. 
And the Wolfram stuff -- I was taking notes and writing down all the search words I could use, because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures. 
We've got to show these kids interesting stuff. 
And they've taken out the auto-shop class and the drafting class and the art class. 
I mean, art was my best subject in school. 
We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kinds of people in the future. 
And let's talk about jobs. 
OK, my science teacher got me studying, because I was a goofball that didn't want to study. 
But you know what? I was getting work experience. 
I'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven't learned basic things, like how to be on time -- I was taught that when I was eight years old. 
How to have table manners at granny's Sunday party. 
I was taught that when I was very, very young. 
And when I was 13, I had a job at a dressmaker's shop sewing clothes. 
I did internships in college, I was building things, and I also had to learn how to do assignments. 
You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little. 
My mother said, "Well let's do a picture of something else." 
They've got to learn how to do something else. 
Let's say the kid is fixated on Legos. 
The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated. 
Like if the kid loves race cars, let's use race cars for math. 
Let's figure out how long it takes a race car to go a certain distance. 
In other words, use that fixation in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do. 
I really get fed up when the teachers, especially when you get away from this part of the country, they don't know what to do with these smart kids. 
It just drives me crazy. 
What can visual thinkers do when they grow up? 
They can do graphic design, all kinds of stuff with computers, photography, industrial design. 
The pattern thinkers -- they're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians, your software engineers, your computer programmers, all of those kinds of jobs. 
And then you've got the word minds; they make great journalists, and they also make really, really good stage actors. 
Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. 
You just kind of ... you just have to learn it. 
And we need to be working with these students. 
And this brings up mentors. 
You know, my science teacher was not an accredited teacher. 
He was a NASA space scientist. 
Some states now are getting it to where, if you have a degree in biology or in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. 
We need to be doing that. 
Because what I'm observing is, the good teachers, for a lot of these kids, are out in the community colleges. 
But we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools. 
Another thing that can be very, very, very successful is: there's a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry, and they can teach your kid. 
And it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old, because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark. 
You're getting that kid turned on. 
And you get him turned on, then you'll learn all the new stuff. 
Mentors are just essential. 
I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me. 
And we've got to mentor them, hire them. 
And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. 
Don't just say, "Design new software." 
You've got to tell them something more specific: "We're designing software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing, and it can only use so much memory." 
That's the kind of specificity you need. 
Well, that's the end of my talk. 
And I just want to thank everybody for coming. 
It was great to be here. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Oh -- you have a question for me? OK. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much for that. 
You know, you once wrote -- I like this quote: "If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave." 
(Laughter) Temple Grandin: Because who do you think made the first stone spear? 
It was the Asperger guy, and if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there'd be no more Silicon Valley, and the energy crisis would not be solved. 
(Applause) CA: I want to ask you a couple other questions, and if any of these feel inappropriate, it's OK just to say, "Next question." 
But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them? 
TG: Well, first of all, we've got to look at age. 
If you have a two, three or four-year-old, no speech, no social interaction, I can't emphasize enough: Don't wait. 
You need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching. 
The thing is, autism comes in different degrees. 
About half of the people on the spectrum are not going to learn to talk, and they won't be working in Silicon Valley. 
That would not be a reasonable thing for them to do. 
But then you get these smart, geeky kids with a touch of autism, and that's where you've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things. 
I got social interaction through shared interests -- I rode horses with other kids, I made model rockets with other kids, did electronics lab with other kids. 
And in the '60s, it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show. 
(Laughter) CA: Is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them, as some might, as most, wish? 
TG: Well, I tell you, that child will be loyal, and if your house is burning down, they're going to get you out of it. 
CA: Wow. So most people, if you ask them what they're most passionate about, they'd say things like, "My kids" or "My lover." 
What are you most passionate about? 
TG: I'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place. 
When I have a mother of an autistic child say, "My kid went to college because of your book or one of your lectures," that makes me happy. 
You know, the slaughter plants I worked with in the '80s; they were absolutely awful. 
I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants, where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down? 
How many cattle are mooing their heads off? 
You directly observe a few simple things. 
It's worked really well. 
I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. 
We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff. 
CA: Totally. 
(Applause) CA: When we were talking on the phone, one of the things you said that really astonished me was that one thing you were passionate about was server farms. 
Tell me about that. 
TG: Well, the reason why I got really excited when I read about that, it contains knowledge. 
It's libraries. 
And to me, knowledge is something that is extremely valuable. 
So, maybe over 10 years ago now, our library got flooded. 
This is before the Internet got really big. 
And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked, because it was knowledge being destroyed. 
And server farms, or data centers, are great libraries of knowledge. 
CA: Temple, can I just say, it's an absolute delight to have you at TED. 
TG: Well, thank you so much. Thank you. 

Ladies and gentlemen, at TED we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement. 
So let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under three minutes and dissect some lessons from it. 
First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. 
What he's doing is so easy to follow. 
Here's his first follower with a crucial role; he's going to show everyone else how to follow. 
Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. 
Now it's not about the leader anymore; it's about them, plural. 
Now, there he is calling to his friends. 
Now, if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. 
It takes guts to stand out like that. 
The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. 
Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts -- three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. 
So a movement must be public. 
It's important to show not just the leader, but the followers, because you find that new followers emulate the followers, not the leader. 
Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. 
Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. 
Now we've got a movement. 
(Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. 
So those that were sitting on the fence before now have no reason not to. 
They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, but they will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry. 
(Laughter) So, over the next minute, you'll see all of those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in. 
And that's how you make a movement. 
But let's recap some lessons from this. 
So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. 
(Laughter) Okay, but we might have missed the real lesson here. 
The biggest lesson, if you noticed -- did you catch it? -- is that leadership is over-glorified. 
Yes, it was the shirtless guy who was first, and he'll get all the credit, but it was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. 
So, as we're told that we should all be leaders, that would be really ineffective. 
If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. 
And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. 
And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Now, I want to start with a question: When was the last time you were called "childish"? 
For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
Which really bothers me. 
After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
Now, what have kids done? 
Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
The traits the word "childish" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Then again, who's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren't exactly what the world needs? 
Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "That won't benefit me." 
For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking, like my wish that no one went hungry, or that everything were free, a kind of utopia. 
How many of you still dream like that, and believe in the possibilities? 
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos. 
On the other hand, we kids still dream about perfection. 
And that's a good thing, because in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first. 
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
For instance, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, my home state -- yoohoo, Washington! 
(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
The resident artist said they got some of their best ideas from the program, because kids don't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes, they just think of good ideas. 
Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
(Laughter) Now, our inherent wisdom doesn't have to be insider's knowledge. 
Kids already do a lot of learning from adults, and we have a lot to share. 
I think that adults should start learning from kids. 
Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd -- teachers and students, and I like this analogy: It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, "Do this, do that." 
The students should teach their teachers. 
Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal. 
The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
(Laughter) True story, by the way. 
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "Don't do that, don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. 
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. 
My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. 
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules. 
(Laughter) I loved to write from the age of four, and when I was six, my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word. 
Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
Many publishers were not quite so encouraging. 
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
Children's publisher not working with children? 
I don't know, you're kind of alienating a large client there. 
(Laughter) One publisher, Action Publishing, was willing to take that leap and trust me, and to listen to what I had to say. 
They published my first book, "Flying Fingers," you see it here. 
And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
I appreciate your attention today, because to show that you truly care, you listen. 
But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
You must lend an ear today, because we are the leaders of tomorrow, which means we're going to take care of you when you're old and senile. 
No, just kidding. 
(Laughter) No, really, we are going to be the next generation, the ones who will bring this world forward. 
And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
Are you ready to make the match? 
Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 

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

I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online. 
I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now. 
(Laughter) And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk, and said, "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?" 
And I said, "Sure." 
And four years later, it's been downloaded four million times. 
So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. 
And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Don't you feel? 
(Laughter) So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is. 
(Laughter) Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. 
And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. 
So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly. 
(Laughter) So, as I was saying -- (Laughter) You see, he's right. 
I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. 
(Laughter) But I believe there is a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. 
And you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good. 
I have one climate crisis, I don't really need the second one." 
(Laughter) But this is a crisis of, not natural resources -- though I believe that's true -- but a crisis of human resources. 
I believe fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. 
Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. 
I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything. 
Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. 
Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. 
He said, "There are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." 
(Laughter) Well, I do. 
(Laughter) I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. 
They simply go through their lives getting on with it. 
They get no great pleasure from what they do. 
They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. 
But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. 
If you said, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you're talking about. 
It isn't what they do, it's who they are. 
They say, "But this is me, you know. 
It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." 
And it's not true of enough people. 
In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. 
And I think there are many possible explanations for it. 
And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. 
And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. 
You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. 
You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. 
And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. 
Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. 
Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. 
What we need -- and the word's been used many times in the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. 
This has to be transformed into something else. 
(Applause) One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. 
Innovation is hard, because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. 
It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. 
The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense. 
Things that people think, "It can't be done differently, that's how it's done." 
I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. 
(Laughter) He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. 
I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. 
We don't teach American history in Britain. 
(Laughter) We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. 
(Laughter) No doubt, something fascinating was happening then, which the Americans among us will be aware of. 
But he said this: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. 
The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." 
I love that. 
Not rise to it, rise with it. 
"As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. 
We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." 
I love that word, "disenthrall." 
You know what it means? 
That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. 
And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. 
But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. 
Now, doing this is easier said than done. 
It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. 
And the reason is that you take it for granted. 
(Laughter) Let me ask you something you may take for granted. 
How many of you here are over the age of 25? 
That's not what you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that. 
Are there any people here under the age of 25? 
Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch? 
Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? 
Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. 
Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. 
I don't mean they can't, they just often choose not to. 
And the reason is we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. 
And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. 
Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. 
They see no reason to do this. 
And by the way, you don't need either; it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it. 
My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. 
She doesn't see the point. 
As she says, "It's a single-function device." 
(Laughter) "Like, how lame is that?" 
And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well." 
(Laughter) "It has multiple functions." 
(Laughter) But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. 
A couple of examples. 
One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. 
Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it's organic. 
We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. 
But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. 
And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. 
I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. 
Certain sorts of college. 
I don't mean you shouldn't go, but not everybody needs to go, or go now. 
Maybe they go later, not right away. 
And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. 
There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. 
I said, "What do you do?" 
And he said, "I'm a fireman." 
I asked, "How long have you been a fireman?" 
"Always. I've always been a fireman." 
"Well, when did you decide?" He said, "As a kid. 
Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman." 
(Laughter) He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman." 
And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. 
This one teacher didn't take it seriously. 
He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that." 
He said, "It was humiliating. 
It was in front of the whole class and I felt dreadful. 
But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted. 
You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher, because six months ago, I saved his life." 
(Laughter) He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well." 
He said, "I think he thinks better of me now." 
(Laughter) (Applause) You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. 
And at the heart of our challenges -- (Applause) At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. 
This linearity thing is a problem. 
When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement -- very well-intentioned -- which said, "College begins in kindergarten." 
No, it doesn't. 
(Laughter) It doesn't. 
If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. 
(Laughter) Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. 
(Laughter) A friend of mine once said, "A three year-old is not half a six year-old." 
(Laughter) (Applause) They're three. 
But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get into kindergarten -- to get to the right kindergarten -- that people are being interviewed for it at three. 
Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes -- (Laughter) Flicking through and saying, "What, this is it?" 
(Laughter) (Applause) "You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?" 
(Laughter) "You've achieved nothing -- commit. 
(Laughter) Spent the first six months breastfeeding, I can see." 
(Laughter) See, it's outrageous as a conception. 
The other big issue is conformity. 
We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. 
This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. 
There are two models of quality assurance in catering. 
One is fast food, where everything is standardized. 
The other is like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. 
And we have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. 
(Applause) We have to recognize a couple of things here. 
One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. 
People have very different aptitudes. 
I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar. 
(Laughter) It worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. 
(Laughter) In a way -- it did not for me. 
I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. 
It just wouldn't work. 
(Laughter) But it's not only about that. 
It's about passion. 
Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. 
It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. 
And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. 
My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. 
You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. 
If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. 
And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion. 
So I think we have to change metaphors. 
We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. 
We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. 
We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. 
And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. 
All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. 
So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. 
There are great ones, like KIPP's; it's a great system. 
There are many great models. 
It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. 
And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum. 
Now in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the Internet. 
These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. 
And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. 
But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. 
That's where children experience life. 
Or at home, if that's what they choose, to be educated with their families or friends. 
There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of these few days. 
And I wanted to just very quickly -- I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. 
I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know. 
He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. 
And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you." 
He says this: "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." 
And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. 
And we should tread softly. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. 
He said, "I have a dream." 
And I have a dream. 
I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. 
I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times, "The Road." 
It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. 
And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. 
And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future. 
For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. 
We have focused on the worst-case scenario. 
We have focused on the problems. 
And we have not thought enough about the solutions. 
We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. 
And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. 
It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened -- think of a deer. 
A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. 
And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. 
People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. 
And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is. 
What would it be like to be improving the human lot? 
And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is -- that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. 
This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear -- that more is better. 
Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. 
Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. 
And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. 
In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income." 
But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. 
And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. 
In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. 
And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. 
And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce. 
But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. 
And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." 
How crazy is that? That our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? 
I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. 
He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being. 
And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. 
This is from a global survey. 
It's asking people, what do they want. 
And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. 
Okay, they think money is slightly important. 
It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. 
We all need to love and be loved in life. 
It's not nearly as important as health. 
We want to be healthy and live a full life. 
These seem to be natural human aspirations. 
Why are statisticians not measuring these? 
Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? 
And really, this is what I've done with my adult life -- is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits. 
And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. 
Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? 
And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. 
That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. 
But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. 
We all have one planet. We all have to share it. 
It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. 
And economics is very interested in scarcity. 
When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. 
It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. 
And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. 
It is an efficiency measure. 
And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph. 
Running horizontally along the graph, is "ecological footprint," which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. 
More is bad. 
Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "happy life years." 
It's about the well-being of nations. 
It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. 
It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. 
And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. 
Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. 
To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. 
They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. 
Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being -- typically, sub-Saharan Africa. 
In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. 
The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. 
Malaria, HIV/AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world. 
But now for the good news! 
There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. 
This is an aspirational graph. 
We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. 
They're Latin American. 
The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. 
Maybe some of you have. 
Costa Rica. 
Costa Rica -- average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. 
That is longer than in the USA. 
They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet -- than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. 
They are the happiest place. 
They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world -- a quarter of the resources. 
What's going on there? 
What's happening in Costa Rica? 
We can look at some of the data. 
99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. 
Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. 
They abolished the army in 1949 -- 1949. 
And they invested in social programs -- health and education. 
They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. 
And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. 
They have the social connectedness. 
(Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly -- and the thing we might have to think about -- is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. 
It might be Latin American. 
And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. 
That's what we need to do. 
And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. 
And then we're starting to create a happy planet. 
That's one way of looking at it. 
Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. 
We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. 
And this is the trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. 
And so in strict happy-planet methodology, we've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. 
And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. 
It's actually not very long away. 
It's half a human lifetime away. 
A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. 
This is not the very distant future. 
This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. 
And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. 
That is changing our business. 
That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. 
And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. 
No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. 
None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. 
I think we want it to carry on. 
I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. 
And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. 
I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. 
They want to hold on to what they've got. 
And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. 
And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more. 
Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. 
And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. 
Human beings are very motivated by the "now." 
You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. 
What would that look like for society? 
Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio -- I don't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news. 
And why do I hear that? 
Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? 
Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? 
That's how you create a collective goal. 
You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. 
And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. 
At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. 
At a personal level, we need these nudges too. 
Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. 
In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do -- never my best thing. 
What are these for happiness? 
What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier? 
We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program -- lots and lots of people -- involved lots of experts -- everything evidence based -- a huge tome. 
But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? 
And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from. 
And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. 
Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? 
Keep building them. 
The second one is be active. 
The fastest way out of a bad mood: step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. 
Being active is great for our positive mood. 
The third one is take notice. 
How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? 
Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? 
Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, [very] strong for our well being. 
The fourth is keep learning and keep is important -- learning throughout the whole life course. 
Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. 
But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. 
It's more curiosity. 
It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. 
Keep learning. 
And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. 
Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. 
We feel good if we give. 
You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. 
You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. 
You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves. 
And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. 
They don't have any carbon content. 
They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. 
And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. 
Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. 
He said, "I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. 
I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land." 
Now, he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. 
And not only that, we need to create a Great Transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things. 
Human beings want to be happy. 
Pave them with the five ways. 
And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them -- something like the Happy Planet Index. 
And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want, where happiness does not cost the earth. 
(Applause) 

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