One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. 
And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, I'm really struck by the things that we have in common. 
They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. 
But I also see lots of poverty, and it's quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. 
My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world. 
So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have. 
But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. 
Coke is everywhere. 
In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. 
And so when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home and I'm thinking, "We're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations," you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? 
If they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing? 
And I'm not the first person to ask this question. 
But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. 
It's staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. 
They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. 
That's like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. 
So why does this matter? 
Well, if we're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we're set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. 
I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good. 
Coke's success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. 
So that's why I took a bit of time to study Coke. 
And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. 
They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. 
They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. 
So let's start with the data. 
Now Coke has a very clear bottom line — they report to a set of shareholders, they have to turn a profit. 
So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. 
They have this very continuous feedback loop. 
They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. 
They have a whole team called "" Knowledge and Insight. "" It's a lot like other consumer companies. 
So if you're running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. 
So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue. 
Let's contrast that for a minute to development. 
In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. 
I've sat in a lot of those meetings, and by then, it is way too late to use the data. 
I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. 
They said, "" You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. 
It's dark, you can't see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact. "" Real-time data turns on the lights. 
So what's the second thing that Coke's good at? 
They're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. 
Coke's been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldn't reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. 
And in Africa, the remote places, it's hard to find a good road. 
But Coke noticed something — they noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. 
And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. 
And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. 
They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers, and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. 
There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. 
In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Coke's sales. 
Let's look at the development side. 
What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? 
Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. 
I think a great example of this is Ethiopia's new health extension program. 
The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic, they were over a day's travel away from a health clinic. 
So if you're in an emergency situation — or if you're a mom about to deliver a baby — forget it, to get to the health care center. 
They decided that wasn't good enough, so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this, and they adapted it for Ethiopia. 
And in 2003, the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country. 
They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people. 
In just five years, their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people. 
Now, think about how this can change people's lives. 
Health extension workers can help with so many things, whether it's family planning, prenatal care, immunizations for the children, or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery. 
That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia, and it's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008. 
In Ethiopia, there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program. 
So what's the next step for Ethiopia? 
Well, they're already starting talk about this. 
They're starting to talk about, "" How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas? 
How do you incent them based on the impact that they're getting out in those remote villages? "" That's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people's potential. 
The third component of Coke's success is marketing. 
Ultimately, Coke's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a Coca-Cola. 
Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow. 
So, they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing, and what's the secret to their marketing? 
Well, it's aspirational. 
It is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live. 
So even though it's a global company, they take a very local approach. 
Coke's global campaign slogan is "" Open Happiness. "" But they localize it. 
And they don't just guess what makes people happy; they go to places like Latin America and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life. 
And in South Africa, they associate happiness with seriti or community respect. 
Now, that played itself out in the World Cup campaign. 
Let's listen to this song that Coke created for it, "" Wavin 'Flag "" by a Somali hip hop artist. 
(Video) K'Naan: ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Give you freedom, give you fire ♫ ♫ Give you reason, take you higher ♫ ♫ See the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ You define us, make us feel proud ♫ ♫ In the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ As we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ Celebration, it's around us ♫ ♫ Every nation, all around us ♫ 
Melinda French Gates: It feels pretty good, right? 
Well, they didn't stop there — they localized it into 18 different languages. 
And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries. 
It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," that also went number one on the pop charts. 
Both songs have something in common: that same appeal of celebration and unity. 
So how does health and development market? 
Well, it's based on avoidance, not aspirations. 
I'm sure you've heard some of these messages. 
"Use a condom, don't get AIDS." 
"Wash you hands, you might not get diarrhea." 
It doesn't sound anything like "" Wavin 'Flag "" to me. 
And I think we make a fundamental mistake — we make an assumption, that we think that, if people need something, we don't have to make them want that. 
And I think that's a mistake. 
And there's some indications around the world that this is starting to change. 
One example is sanitation. 
We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation. 
But there's a solution: you build a toilet. 
But what we're finding around the world, over and over again, is, if you build a toilet and you leave it there, it doesn't get used. 
People reuse it for a slab for their home. 
They sometimes store grain in it. 
I've even seen it used for a chicken coop. 
(Laughter) But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea? 
Well, you work with the community. 
You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn't be done in the village, and they agree to that. 
But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern, trendy convenience. 
One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship. 
And it works — look at these headlines. 
(Laughter) I'm not kidding. 
Women are refusing to marry men without toilets. 
No loo, no "" I do. "" (Laughter) Now, it's not just a funny headline — it's innovative. It's an innovative marketing campaign. 
But more importantly, it saves lives. 
Take a look at this — this is a room full of young men and my husband, Bill. 
And can you guess what the young men are waiting for? 
They're waiting to be circumcised. 
Can you you believe that? 
We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men. 
And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation, I have to admit, Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying, "" But who's going to volunteer for this procedure? "" But it turns out the men do, because they're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it, and the men also believe it improves their sex life. 
So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development, we can change communities and we can change whole nations. 
Well, why is all of this so important? 
So let's talk about what happens when this all comes together, when you tie the three things together. 
And polio, I think, is one of the most powerful examples. 
We've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years. 
So if you look back to 1988, there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year. 
In 2009, we're down to 1,600 cases. 
Well how did that happen? 
Let's look at a country like India. 
They have over a billion people in this country, but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis, and clinicians, a huge reporting system in chemists. 
They have two and a half million vaccinators. 
But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you. 
Let me tell you the story of Shriram, an 18 month boy in Bihar, a northern state in India. 
This year on August 8th, he felt paralysis and on the 13th, his parents took him to the doctor. 
On August 14th and 15th, they took a stool sample, and by the 25th of August, it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio. 
By August 30th, a genetic test was done, and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had. 
Now it could have come from one of two places. 
It could have come from Nepal, just to the north, across the border, or from Jharkhand, a state just to the south. 
Luckily, the genetic testing proved that, in fact, this strand came north, because, had it come from the south, it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission. 
So many more people would have been affected. 
So what's the endgame? 
Well on September 4th, there was a huge mop-up campaign, which is what you do in polio. 
They went out and where Shriram lives, they vaccinated two million people. 
So in less than a month, we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program. 
And I'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio. 
That's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading, and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands; they can save lives. 
Now one of the challenges in polio, still, is marketing, but it might not be what you think. 
It's not the marketing on the ground. 
It's not telling the parents, "" If you see paralysis, take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated. "" We have a problem with marketing in the donor community. 
The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years, but we're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations aren't willing to fund polio any longer. 
So by next summer, we're sighted to run out of money on polio. 
So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we're about to run short of money. 
And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational, if we could focus as a community on how far we've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease, we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us. 
And if we could do that, we could stop vaccinating everybody, worldwide, in all of our countries for polio. 
And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. 
And we are so close. 
And this victory is so possible. 
So if Coke's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness, I'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms. 
To me, that is deep happiness. 
And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector, then in the future we make together, that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) 

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. 
(Laughter) We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it. 
(Tuning) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. 
RM: I'm just going to take a second to introduce the band. 
(Applause) On banjo is 10-year-old Jonny. (Applause) 
And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle. 
So, it started when Jonny was little, and he first started the banjo, he would play on his back with his eyes closed, and we'd say it looked like he was sleeping. 
(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. 

And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. 
Now, before we start — (Laughter) Before we start, I need to do two things. 
(Music) (Music ends) He practices for another year and takes lessons — he's nine. (Music) (Music ends) 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this. 
(Music) (Music ends) Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. 
(Music) The 10-year-old, on every eight notes. (Music) 
And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase. (Music) 
I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company. "" (Laughter) Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. 
My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. 
You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. 
You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport... 
(Laughter) — and maybe a little bit of a march from "" Aida "" when you come into the hall. 
It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. 
Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it. "" (Laughter) All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. 
And it does, doesn't it? 
(Music) But basically, it's just a B, with four sads. 
(Laughter) Now, it goes down to A. 
And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next? 
Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord — because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does... 
(Laughter) Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E. 
No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. 
(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now, you may be wondering — (Applause) (Applause ends) You may be wondering why I'm clapping. 
I was clapping. They were clapping. 
Finally, I said, "" Why am I clapping? "" And one of them said, "" Because we were listening. "" (Laughter) Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. 
Now, how would you walk — my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. 
Thank you, thank you. 

So, the first robot to talk about is called STriDER. 
It stands for Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot. 
It's a robot that has three legs, which is inspired by nature. 
But have you seen anything in nature, an animal that has three legs? 
Probably not. So, why do I call this a biologically inspired robot? How would it work? 
But before that, let's look at pop culture. 
So, you know H.G. Wells' "" War of the Worlds, "" novel and movie. 
And what you see over here is a very popular video game, and in this fiction they describe these alien creatures that are robots that have three legs that terrorize Earth. 
But my robot, STriDER, does not move like this. 
So, this is an actual dynamic simulation animation. 
I'm just going to show you how the robot works. 
It flips its body 180 degrees and it swings its leg between the two legs and catches the fall. 
So, that's how it walks. But when you look at us human being, bipedal walking, what you're doing is you're not really using a muscle to lift your leg and walk like a robot. Right? 
What you're doing is you really swing your leg and catch the fall, stand up again, swing your leg and catch the fall. 
You're using your built-in dynamics, the physics of your body, just like a pendulum. 
We call that the concept of passive dynamic locomotion. 
What you're doing is, when you stand up, potential energy to kinetic energy, potential energy to kinetic energy. 
It's a constantly falling process. 
So, even though there is nothing in nature that looks like this, really, we were inspired by biology and applying the principles of walking to this robot. Thus it's a biologically inspired robot. 
What you see over here, this is what we want to do next. 
We want to fold up the legs and shoot it up for long-range motion. 
And it deploys legs — it looks almost like "" Star Wars "" — when it lands, it absorbs the shock and starts walking. 
What you see over here, this yellow thing, this is not a death ray. (Laughter) This is just to show you that if you have cameras or different types of sensors — because it is tall, it's 1.8 meters tall — you can see over obstacles like bushes and those kinds of things. 
So we have two prototypes. 
The first version, in the back, that's STriDER I. 
The one in front, the smaller, is STriDER II. 
The problem that we had with STriDER I is it was just too heavy in the body. We had so many motors, you know, aligning the joints, and those kinds of things. 
So, we decided to synthesize a mechanical mechanism so we could get rid of all the motors, and with a single motor we can coordinate all the motions. 
It's a mechanical solution to a problem, instead of using mechatronics. 
So, with this now the top body is light enough. So, it's walking in our lab; this was the very first successful step. 
It's still not perfected — its coffee falls down — so we still have a lot of work to do. 
The second robot I want to talk about is called IMPASS. 
It stands for Intelligent Mobility Platform with Actuated Spoke System. 
So, it's a wheel-leg hybrid robot. 
So, think of a rimless wheel or a spoke wheel, but the spokes individually move in and out of the hub; so, it's a wheel-leg hybrid. 
We are literally re-inventing the wheel here. 
Let me demonstrate how it works. 
So, in this video we're using an approach called the reactive approach. 
Just simply using the tactile sensors on the feet, it's trying to walk over a changing terrain, a soft terrain where it pushes down and changes. 
And just by the tactile information, it successfully crosses over these type of terrain. 
But, when it encounters a very extreme terrain, in this case, this obstacle is more than three times the height of the robot, Then it switches to a deliberate mode, where it uses a laser range finder, and camera systems, to identify the obstacle and the size, and it plans, carefully plans the motion of the spokes and coordinates it so that it can show this kind of very very impressive mobility. 
You probably haven't seen anything like this out there. 
This is a very high mobility robot that we developed called IMPASS. 
Ah, isn't that cool? 
When you drive your car, when you steer your car, you use a method called Ackermann steering. 
The front wheels rotate like this. 
For most small wheeled robots, they use a method called differential steering where the left and right wheel turns the opposite direction. 
For IMPASS, we can do many, many different types of motion. 
For example, in this case, even though the left and right wheel is connected with a single axle rotating at the same angle of velocity. 
We just simply change the length of the spoke. 
It affects the diameter and then can turn to the left, turn to the right. 
So, these are just some examples of the neat things that we can do with IMPASS. 
This robot is called CLIMBeR: Cable-suspended Limbed Intelligent Matching Behavior Robot. 
So, I've been talking to a lot of NASA JPL scientists — at JPL they are famous for the Mars rovers — and the scientists, geologists always tell me that the real interesting science, the science-rich sites, are always at the cliffs. 
But the current rovers cannot get there. 
So, inspired by that we wanted to build a robot that can climb a structured cliff environment. 
So, this is CLIMBeR. 
So, what it does, it has three legs. It's probably difficult to see, but it has a winch and a cable at the top — and it tries to figure out the best place to put its foot. 
And then once it figures that out in real time, it calculates the force distribution: how much force it needs to exert to the surface so it doesn't tip and doesn't slip. 
Once it stabilizes that, it lifts a foot, and then with the winch it can climb up these kinds of thing. 
Also for search and rescue applications as well. 
Five years ago I actually worked at NASA JPL during the summer as a faculty fellow. 
And they already had a six legged robot called LEMUR. 
So, this is actually based on that. This robot is called MARS: Multi-Appendage Robotic System. So, it's a hexapod robot. 
We developed our adaptive gait planner. 
We actually have a very interesting payload on there. 
The students like to have fun. And here you can see that it's walking over unstructured terrain. 
It's trying to walk on the coarse terrain, sandy area, but depending on the moisture content or the grain size of the sand the foot's soil sinkage model changes. 
So, it tries to adapt its gait to successfully cross over these kind of things. 
And also, it does some fun stuff, as can imagine. 
We get so many visitors visiting our lab. 
So, when the visitors come, MARS walks up to the computer, starts typing "" Hello, my name is MARS. "" Welcome to RoMeLa, the Robotics Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech. 
This robot is an amoeba robot. 
Now, we don't have enough time to go into technical details, I'll just show you some of the experiments. 
So, this is some of the early feasibility experiments. 
We store potential energy to the elastic skin to make it move. 
Or use an active tension cords to make it move forward and backward. It's called ChIMERA. 
We also have been working with some scientists and engineers from UPenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot. 
We do something to something And just like magic, it moves. The blob. 
This robot is a very recent project. It's called RAPHaEL. 
Robotic Air Powered Hand with Elastic Ligaments. 
There are a lot of really neat, very good robotic hands out there in the market. 
The problem is they're just too expensive, tens of thousands of dollars. 
So, for prosthesis applications it's probably not too practical, because it's not affordable. 
We wanted to go tackle this problem in a very different direction. 
Instead of using electrical motors, electromechanical actuators, we're using compressed air. 
We developed these novel actuators for joints. 
It is compliant. You can actually change the force, simply just changing the air pressure. 
And it can actually crush an empty soda can. 
It can pick up very delicate objects like a raw egg, or in this case, a lightbulb. 
The best part, it took only $200 dollars to make the first prototype. 
This robot is actually a family of snake robots that we call HyDRAS, Hyper Degrees-of-freedom Robotic Articulated Serpentine. 
This is a robot that can climb structures. 
This is a HyDRAS's arm. 
It's a 12 degrees of freedom robotic arm. 
But the cool part is the user interface. 
The cable over there, that's an optical fiber. 
And this student, probably the first time using it, but she can articulate it many different ways. 
So, for example in Iraq, you know, the war zone, there is roadside bombs. Currently you send these remotely controlled vehicles that are armed. 
It takes really a lot of time and it's expensive to train the operator to operate this complex arm. 
In this case it's very intuitive; this student, probably his first time using it, doing very complex manipulation tasks, picking up objects and doing manipulation, just like that. Very intuitive. 
Now, this robot is currently our star robot. 
We actually have a fan club for the robot, DARwIn: Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence. 
As you know, we are very interested in humanoid robot, human walking, so we decided to build a small humanoid robot. 
This was in 2004; at that time, this was something really, really revolutionary. 
This was more of a feasibility study: What kind of motors should we use? 
Is it even possible? What kinds of controls should we do? 
So, this does not have any sensors. 
So, it's an open loop control. 
For those who probably know, if you don't have any sensors and there are any disturbances, you know what happens. 
(Laughter) So, based on that success, the following year we did the proper mechanical design starting from kinematics. 
And thus, DARwIn I was born in 2005. 
It stands up, it walks — very impressive. 
However, still, as you can see, it has a cord, umbilical cord. So, we're still using an external power source and external computation. 
So, in 2006, now it's really time to have fun. 
Let's give it intelligence. We give it all the computing power it needs: a 1.5 gigahertz Pentium M chip, two FireWire cameras, rate gyros, accelerometers, four force sensors on the foot, lithium polymer batteries. 
And now DARwIn II is completely autonomous. 
It is not remote controlled. 
There are no tethers. It looks around, searches for the ball, looks around, searches for the ball, and it tries to play a game of soccer, autonomously: artificial intelligence. 
Let's see how it does. This was our very first trial, and... Spectators (Video): Goal! 
Dennis Hong: So, there is actually a competition called RoboCup. 
I don't know how many of you have heard about RoboCup. 
It's an international autonomous robot soccer competition. 
And the goal of RoboCup, the actual goal is, by the year 2050 we want to have full size, autonomous humanoid robots play soccer against the human World Cup champions and win. 
It's a true actual goal. It's a very ambitious goal, but we truly believe that we can do it. 
So, this is last year in China. 
We were the very first team in the United States that qualified in the humanoid RoboCup competition. 
This is this year in Austria. 
You're going to see the action, three against three, completely autonomous. 
There you go. Yes! 
The robots track and they team play amongst themselves. 
It's very impressive. It's really a research event packaged in a more exciting competition event. 
What you see over here, this is the beautiful Louis Vuitton Cup trophy. 
So, this is for the best humanoid, and we would like to bring this for the very first time, to the United States next year, so wish us luck. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
DARwIn also has a lot of other talents. 
Last year it actually conducted the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra for the holiday concert. 
This is the next generation robot, DARwIn IV, but smarter, faster, stronger. 
And it's trying to show off its ability: "" I'm macho, I'm strong. 
I can also do some Jackie Chan-motion, martial art movements. "" (Laughter) And it walks away. So, this is DARwIn IV. 
And again, you'll be able to see it in the lobby. 
We truly believe this is going to be the very first running humanoid robot in the United States. So, stay tuned. 
All right. So I showed you some of our exciting robots at work. 
So, what is the secret of our success? 
Where do we come up with these ideas? 
How do we develop these kinds of ideas? 
We have a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive into urban environments. We won a half a million dollars in the DARPA Urban Challenge. 
We also have the world's very first vehicle that can be driven by the blind. 
We call it the Blind Driver Challenge, very exciting. 
And many, many other robotics projects I want to talk about. 
These are just the awards that we won in 2007 fall from robotics competitions and those kinds of things. 
So, really, we have five secrets. 
First is: Where do we get inspiration? 
Where do we get this spark of imagination? 
This is a true story, my personal story. 
At night when I go to bed, 3 - 4 a.m. in the morning, I lie down, close my eyes, and I see these lines and circles and different shapes floating around. 
And they assemble, and they form these kinds of mechanisms. 
And then I think, "" Ah this is cool. "" So, right next to my bed I keep a notebook, a journal, with a special pen that has a light on it, LED light, because I don't want to turn on the light and wake up my wife. 
So, I see this, scribble everything down, draw things, and I go to bed. 
Every day in the morning, the first thing I do before my first cup of coffee, before I brush my teeth, I open my notebook. 
Many times it's empty, sometimes I have something there — if something's there, sometimes it's junk — but most of the time I can't even read my handwriting. 
And so, 4 am in the morning, what do you expect, right? 
So, I need to decipher what I wrote. 
But sometimes I see this ingenious idea in there, and I have this eureka moment. 
I directly run to my home office, sit at my computer, I type in the ideas, I sketch things out and I keep a database of ideas. 
So, when we have these calls for proposals, I try to find a match between my potential ideas and the problem. If there is a match we write a research proposal, get the research funding in, and that's how we start our research programs. 
But just a spark of imagination is not good enough. 
How do we develop these kinds of ideas? 
At our lab RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions. 
So, we gather around, we discuss about problems and social problems and talk about it. 
But before we start we set this golden rule. 
The rule is: Nobody criticizes anybody's ideas. 
Nobody criticizes any opinion. 
This is important, because many times students, they fear or they feel uncomfortable how others might think about their opinions and thoughts. 
So, once you do this, it is amazing how the students open up. 
They have these wacky, cool, crazy, brilliant ideas, and the whole room is just electrified with creative energy. 
And this is how we develop our ideas. 
Well, we're running out of time. One more thing I want to talk about is, you know, just a spark of idea and development is not good enough. 
There was a great TED moment, I think it was Sir Ken Robinson, was it? 
He gave a talk about how education and school kills creativity. 
Well, actually, there are two sides to the story. 
So, there is only so much one can do with just ingenious ideas and creativity and good engineering intuition. 
If you want to go beyond a tinkering, if you want to go beyond a hobby of robotics and really tackle the grand challenges of robotics through rigorous research we need more than that. This is where school comes in. 
Batman, fighting against bad guys, he has his utility belt, he has his grappling hook, he has all different kinds of gadgets. 
For us roboticists, engineers and scientists, these tools, these are the courses and classes you take in class. 
Math, differential equations. 
I have linear algebra, science, physics, even nowadays, chemistry and biology, as you've seen. 
These are all the tools that we need. 
So, the more tools you have, for Batman, more effective at fighting the bad guys, for us, more tools to attack these kinds of big problems. 
So, education is very important. 
Also, it's not about that, only about that. You also have to work really, really hard. 
So, I always tell my students, "Work smart, then work hard." 
This picture in the back this is 3 a.m. in the morning. 
I guarantee if you come to your lab at 3 - 4 am we have students working there, not because I tell them to, but because we are having too much fun. 
Which leads to the last topic: Do not forget to have fun. 
That's really the secret of our success, we're having too much fun. 
I truly believe that highest productivity comes when you're having fun, and that's what we're doing. 
There you go. Thank you so much. 
(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) 

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

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

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

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

So when I do my job, people hate me. 
In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me. 
And no, I'm not a meter maid, and I'm not an undertaker. 
I am a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox News. (Applause) So y'all heard that, right? Just to make sure, right? 
I am a gay talking head on Fox News. 
I am going to tell you how I do it and the most important thing I've learned. 
So I go on television. 
I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in, in some cases, who don't want me and people like me to even exist. 
It's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids, with a live television audience of millions. 
It's totally almost just like that. 
And that's just on air. 
The hate mail I get is unbelievable. 
Last week alone, I got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count. 
I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge, a cunt, and an ugly man, and that was just in one email. 
(Laughter) So what have I realized, being on the receiving end of all this ugliness? 
Well, my biggest takeaway is that for decades, we've been focused on political correctness, but what matters more is emotional correctness. 
Let me give you a small example. 
I don't care if you call me a dyke. I really don't. 
I care about two things. 
One, I care that you spell it right. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Just quick refresher, it's D-Y-K-E. 
You'd totally be surprised. 
And second, I don't care about the word, I care about how you use it. 
Are you being friendly? Are you just being naive? 
Or do you really want to hurt me personally? 
Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. 
And what I've realized is that political persuasion doesn't begin with ideas or facts or data. 
Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct. 
So when I first went to go work at Fox News, true confession, I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging. 
That, by the way, in case you're paying attention, is not emotionally correct. 
But liberals on my side, we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending, we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree with us. 
In other words, we can be politically right but emotionally wrong. 
And incidentally, that means that people don't like us. Right? 
Now here's the kicker. 
Conservatives are really nice. 
I mean, not all of them, and not the ones who send me hate mail, but you would be surprised. 
Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. 
He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates, and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help. 
Now, I think Sean Hannity is 99 percent politically wrong, but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive, and that's why people listen to him. 
Because you can't get anyone to agree with you if they don't even listen to you first. 
We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements, and if we can start to find compassion for one another, then we have a shot at building common ground. 
It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here, but when you try to put it in practice, it's really powerful. 
So someone who says they hate immigrants, I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they've always known. 
Or someone who says they don't like teachers' unions, I bet they're really devastated to see their kid's school going into the gutter, and they're just looking for someone to blame. 
Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. 
That is emotional correctness. 
I'm not saying it's easy. 
An average of, like, 5.6 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities. 
This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama. 
I'm not perfect, but what I am is optimistic, because I don't just get hate mail. 
I get a lot of really nice letters, lots of them. 
And one of my all-time favorites begins, "" I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic, but I'm a big fan of you as a person. "" Now this guy doesn't agree with me, yet. 
(Laughter) But he's listening, not because of what I said, but because of how I said it, and somehow, even though we've never met, we've managed to form a connection. 
That's emotional correctness, and that's how we start the conversations that really lead to change. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Thank you very much, Chris. Everybody who came up here said they were scared. I don't know if I'm scared, but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this. 
And I don't have any smart technology for you to look at. 
There are no slides, so you'll just have to be content with me. 
(Laughter) What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa. 
Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV / AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters. 
While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much. 
And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why. 
This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to. 
This is the Africa of opportunity. 
This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies. 
And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today. 
And I want to start by telling you a story about that change in Africa. 
On 15th of September 2005, Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria, was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London. 
He was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family. 
This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria — led by one of our most able and courageous people: Mr. Nuhu Ribadu. 
Alamieyeseigha was arraigned in London. 
Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president — as in many countries — have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office. 
Today, Alams — as we call him for short — is in jail. 
This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders. 
This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite. 
And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa — corruption all the time — I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging. 
Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no. 
There's still a long way to go, but that there's a will there. 
And that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight. 
So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this — that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case. 
There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go. 
But the truth of the matter is that this is going on. 
The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving. 
A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries. 
And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance. 
That is that people talk about corruption, corruption. 
All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa. 
That's the image: African countries. But let me say this: if Alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in London — if the other people who had taken money, estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries — if they're able to do this, what is that? Is that not corruption? 
In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted? 
So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe — where the money's going and what can be done to stop it. 
I'm working on an initiative now, along with the World Bank, on asset recovery, trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad — developing countries' moneys — to get that sent back. 
Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together. 
(Applause) The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform. 
Africans, after — they're tired, we're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care. 
We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform. 
And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it. 
We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start. 
We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information. 
And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria. 
In fact, if you're not in Nigeria, you're not in Africa. 
I want to tell you that. 
(Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people — chaotic people — but very interesting people. You'll never be bored. (Laughter) 
What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves. 
And with the support of a leader who was willing, at the time, to do the reforms, we put forward a comprehensive reform program, which we developed ourselves. 
Not the International Monetary Fund. Not the World Bank, where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president. 
No one can do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. 
We put together a program that would, one: get the state out of businesses it had nothing — it had no business being in. 
The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it's inefficient and incompetent. 
So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises. 
(Applause) We — as a result, we decided to liberalize many of our markets. 
Can you believe that prior to this reform — which started at the end of 2003, when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister — we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history? 
(Laughter) Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury. 
You couldn't get it. You had to bribe. 
You had to do everything to get your phone. 
When President Obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector, we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million GSM lines, and counting. 
Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people. 
(Laughter) The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa. 
And in the three years that I was Finance Minister, they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year. 
360 million in a market — in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita. 
So the market is there. 
When they kept this under wraps, but soon others got to know. 
Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in. 
But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know. 
So privatization is one of the things we've done. 
The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better. 
Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well. 
And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. 
So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price. 
Before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in, because oil is the biggest, most revenue-earning sector in the economy: 70 percent of our revenues come from oil. 
We de-linked that, and once we did it, we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price. 
We didn't know we could pull it off; it was very controversial. 
But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development — where, even if oil prices were high, we would grow very fast. 
When they crashed, we crashed. 
And we could hardly even pay anything, any salaries, in the economy. 
That smoothened out. We were able to save, just before I left, 27 billion dollars. Whereas — and this went to our reserves — when I arrived in 2003, we had seven billion dollars in reserves. 
By the time I left, we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars. And as we speak now, we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances. 
And that shores up our economy, makes it stable. 
Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy. 
We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent. 
And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now. 
So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy. 
And what is more important, because we want to get away from oil and diversify — and there are so many opportunities in this one big country, as in many countries in Africa — what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone, but from non-oil. 
Agriculture grew at better than eight percent. 
As telecoms sector grew, housing and construction, and I could go on and on. And this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out, the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous. 
We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said. 
We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world. 
We have opportunities in housing and real estate. 
There was nothing in a country of 140 million people — no shopping malls as you know them here. 
This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people. 
And now, we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected. 
So, huge things in construction, real estate, mortgage markets. Financial services: we had 89 banks. Too many not doing their real business. 
We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital — share capital. 
And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars. 
The banks — these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside. 
Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million. 
Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million. 
And I can go on. Dollars, on and on, into the system. 
We are doing the same with the insurance sector. 
So in financial services, a great deal of opportunity. 
In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity. 
And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on. 
But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important. 
So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. 
A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. 
Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear. 
I'm trying to tell you that since the past three years, the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum. 
This is better than the performance of many OECD countries. 
So it's clear that things are changing. 
Conflicts are down on the continent; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago, we are down to three or four conflicts — one of the most terrible, of course, of which is Darfur. 
And, you know, you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected. 
But you should know that this continent is not — is a continent of many countries, not one country. 
And if we are down to three or four conflicts, it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable, growing, exciting economies where there's plenty of opportunity. 
And I want to just make one point about this investment. 
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. 
And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs. 
There's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children's lives. That's not what I'm saying. That is fine. 
But imagine the impact on a family: if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school, that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves. 
If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet, isn't that a wonderful opportunity? Isn't that the way to go? 
And I want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women. 
(Applause) I have a CD here. I'm sorry that I didn't say anything on time. 
Otherwise, I would have liked you to have seen this. 
It says, "" Africa: Open for Business. "" And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year. 
Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June. 
But it shows you Africans, and particularly African women, who against all odds have developed businesses, some of them world-class. 
One of the women in this video, Adenike Ogunlesi, making children's clothes — which she started as a hobby and grew into a business. 
Mixing African materials, such as we have, with materials from elsewhere. 
So, she'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys, with African material mixed in. Very creative designs, has reached a stage where she even had an order from Wal-Mart. 
(Laughter) For 10,000 pieces. 
So that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing. 
And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard. 
I could go on giving examples: Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda, who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her. 
However, many of these are starved for capital to expand, because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary. Nobody thinks in terms of a market. 
Nobody thinks there's opportunity. 
But I'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now, will miss it forever. 
So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing. 
Think about the Beatrices, think about the Adenikes of this world, who are doing incredible things, that are bringing them into the global economy, whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed, and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income. 
So I invite you to explore the opportunities. 
When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

We are drowning in news. 
Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year. 
That's just one source. 
My question is: How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run? 
That's the idea behind The Long News. 
It's a project by The Long Now Foundation, which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. 
And what we're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now. 
And when you look at the news through that filter, a lot falls by the wayside. 
To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year, is this going to matter in a decade? 
Or this? Or this? 
Really? Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years? Okay, that was kind of cool. (Laughter) 
But the top story of this past year was the economy, and I'm just betting that, sooner or later, this particular recession is going to be old news. 
So, what kind of stories might make a difference for the future? 
Well, let's take science. 
Someday, little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things. 
That someday is already here if you're a mouse. 
Some recent stories: nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom; they're sending genes into the brain; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body. 
What about resources? How are we going to feed nine billion people? 
We're having trouble feeding six billion today. 
As we heard yesterday, there's over a billion people hungry. 
Britain will starve without genetically modified crops. 
Bill Gates, fortunately, has bet a billion on [agricultural] research. 
What about global politics? 
The world's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda, and they may. 
They've overtaken the U.S. as the world's biggest car market, they've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter, and they've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers. 
We're finding all kinds of ways to push back the limits of what we know. 
Some recent discoveries: There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica; there's a self-directed robot scientist that's made a discovery — soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years. 
It seems that with or without us, life will go on. 
But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one: water found on the moon. 
Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there. 
And if NASA doesn't do it, China might, or somebody in this room might write a big check. 
My point is this: In the long run, some news stories are more important than others. 
(Applause) 

Six thousand miles of road, 600 miles of subway track, 400 miles of bike lanes and a half a mile of tram track, if you've ever been to Roosevelt Island. 
These are the numbers that make up the infrastructure of New York City. 
This is from a report this year from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, where we learn that there's about 13,500 taxis here in New York City. 
Pretty interesting, right? 
But did you ever think about where these numbers came from? 
Because for these numbers to exist, someone at the city agency had to stop and say, hmm, here's a number that somebody might want want to know. 
Here's a number that our citizens want to know. 
So they go back to their raw data, they count, they add, they calculate, and then they put out reports, and those reports will have numbers like this. 
The problem is, how do they know all of our questions? 
We have lots of questions. 
In fact, in some ways there's literally an infinite number of questions that we can ask about our city. 
The agencies can never keep up. 
So the paradigm isn't exactly working, and I think our policymakers realize that, because in 2012, Mayor Bloomberg signed into law what he called the most ambitious and comprehensive open data legislation in the country. 
In a lot of ways, he's right. 
In the last two years, the city has released 1,000 datasets on our open data portal, and it's pretty awesome. 
So you go and look at data like this, and instead of just counting the number of cabs, we can start to ask different questions. 
So I had a question. 
And I thought to myself, these cabs aren't just numbers, these are GPS recorders driving around in our city streets recording each and every ride they take. 
There's data there, and I looked at that data, and I made a plot of the average speed of taxis in New York City throughout the day. 
You can see that from about midnight to around 5: 18 in the morning, speed increases, and at that point, things turn around, and they get slower and slower and slower until about 8: 35 in the morning, when they end up at around 11 and a half miles per hour. 
The average taxi is going 11 and a half miles per hour on our city streets, and it turns out it stays that way for the entire day. 
(Laughter) So I said to myself, I guess there's no rush hour in New York City. 
There's just a rush day. 
Makes sense. And this is important for a couple of reasons. 
If you're a transportation planner, this might be pretty interesting to know. 
But if you want to get somewhere quickly, you now know to set your alarm for 4: 45 in the morning and you're all set. 
New York, right? 
But there's a story behind this data. 
This data wasn't just available, it turns out. 
Chris went down, and they told him, "" Just bring a brand new hard drive down to our office, leave it here for five hours, we'll copy the data and you take it back. "" And that's where this data came from. 
Now, Chris is the kind of guy who wants to make the data public, and so it ended up online for all to use, and that's where this graph came from. 
And the fact that it exists is amazing. These GPS recorders — really cool. 
We don't need our citizens walking around with hard drives. 
Now, not every dataset is behind a FOIL Request. 
Here is a map I made with the most dangerous intersections in New York City based on cyclist accidents. 
So the red areas are more dangerous. 
And what it shows is first the East side of Manhattan, especially in the lower area of Manhattan, has more cyclist accidents. 
That might make sense because there are more cyclists coming off the bridges there. 
But there's other hotspots worth studying. 
There's Williamsburg. There's Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. 
And this is exactly the kind of data we need for Vision Zero. 
This is exactly what we're looking for. 
But there's a story behind this data as well. 
This data didn't just appear. 
How many of you guys know this logo? 
Yeah, I see some shakes. 
Have you ever tried to copy and paste data out of a PDF and make sense of it? 
So what happened is, the data that you just saw was actually on a PDF. 
In fact, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of PDF put out by our very own NYPD, and in order to access it, you would either have to copy and paste for hundreds and hundreds of hours, or you could be John Krauss. 
John Krauss was like, I'm not going to copy and paste this data. I'm going to write a program. 
It's called the NYPD Crash Data Band-Aid, and it goes to the NYPD's website and it would download PDFs. 
Every day it would search; if it found a PDF, it would download it and then it would run some PDF-scraping program, and out would come the text, and it would go on the Internet, and then people could make maps like that. 
And the fact that the data's here, the fact that we have access to it — Every accident, by the way, is a row in this table. 
The fact that we have access to that is great, but let's not release it in PDF form, because then we're having our citizens write PDF scrapers. 
Now, the good news is that the de Blasio administration actually recently released this data a few months ago, and so now we can actually have access to it, but there's a lot of data still entombed in PDF. 
For example, our crime data is still only available in PDF. 
And not just our crime data, our own city budget. 
Our city budget is only readable right now in PDF form. 
And it's not just us that can't analyze it — our own legislators who vote for the budget also only get it in PDF. 
So our legislators cannot analyze the budget that they are voting for. 
And I think as a city we can do a little better than that as well. 
Now, there's a lot of data that's not hidden in PDFs. 
Now, how do I measure dirty? 
Well, it's kind of a little weird, but I looked at the level of fecal coliform, which is a measurement of fecal matter in each of our waterways. 
The larger the circle, the dirtier the water, so the large circles are dirty water, the small circles are cleaner. 
What you see is inland waterways. 
This is all data that was sampled by the city over the last five years. 
And inland waterways are, in general, dirtier. 
That makes sense, right? 
And the bigger circles are dirty. And I learned a few things from this. 
Number one: Never swim in anything that ends in "" creek "" or "" canal. "" But number two: I also found the dirtiest waterway in New York City, by this measure, one measure. 
In Coney Island Creek, which is not the Coney Island you swim in, luckily. 
But Coney Island Creek, 94 percent of samples taken over the last five years have had fecal levels so high that it would be against state law to swim in the water. 
And this is not the kind of fact that you're going to see boasted in a city report, right? 
It's not going to be the front page on nyc.gov. 
You're not going to see it there, but the fact that we can get to that data is awesome. 
But once again, it wasn't super easy, because this data was not on the open data portal. 
If you were to go to the open data portal, you'd see just a snippet of it, a year or a few months. 
It was actually on the Department of Environmental Protection's website. 
And each one of these links is an Excel sheet, and each Excel sheet is different. 
When you do you can make maps and that's great, but once again, we can do better than that as a city, we can normalize things. 
The problem is, once you do, you will find that each agency codes their addresses differently. 
So one is street name, intersection street, street, borough, address, building, building address. 
So once again, you're spending time, even when we have this portal, you're spending time normalizing our address fields. 
And that's not the best use of our citizens' time. 
We can do better than that as a city. 
We can standardize our addresses, and if we do, we can get more maps like this. 
This is a map of fire hydrants in New York City, but not just any fire hydrants. 
(Laughter) So I learned a few things from this map, and I really like this map. 
Number one, just don't park on the Upper East Side. 
Just don't. It doesn't matter where you park, you will get a hydrant ticket. 
Number two, I found the two highest grossing hydrants in all of New York City, and they're on the Lower East Side, and they were bringing in over 55,000 dollars a year in parking tickets. 
And that seemed a little strange to me when I noticed it, so I did a little digging and it turns out what you had is a hydrant and then something called a curb extension, which is like a seven-foot space to walk on, and then a parking spot. 
And so these cars came along, and the hydrant — "It's all the way over there, I'm fine," and there was actually a parking spot painted there beautifully for them. 
This is the Google Street View car driving by finding the same parking ticket. 
So I wrote about this on my blog, on I Quant NY, and the DOT responded, and they said, "" While the DOT has not received any complaints about this location, we will review the roadway markings and make any appropriate alterations. "" And I thought to myself, typical government response, all right, moved on with my life. 
But then, a few weeks later, something incredible happened. 
They repainted the spot, and for a second I thought I saw the future of open data, because think about what happened here. 
For five years, this spot was being ticketed, and it was confusing, and then a citizen found something, they told the city, and within a few weeks the problem was fixed. 
It's amazing. And a lot of people see open data as being a watchdog. 
We can empower our citizens to be better partners for government, and it's not that hard. 
All we need are a few changes. 
If you're FOILing data, if you're seeing your data being FOILed over and over again, let's release it to the public, that's a sign that it should be made public. 
And if you're a government agency releasing a PDF, let's pass legislation that requires you to post it with the underlying data, because that data is coming from somewhere. 
Let's start with our addresses here in New York City. 
Let's just start normalizing our addresses. 
Despite all this, we are absolutely a leader in open data, and if we start normalizing things, and set an open data standard, others will follow. The state will follow, and maybe the federal government, Other countries could follow, and we're not that far off from a time where you could write one program and map information from 100 countries. 
It's not science fiction. We're actually quite close. 
And by the way, who are we empowering with this? 
Because it's not just John Krauss and it's not just Chris Whong. 
There are hundreds of meetups going on in New York City right now, active meetups. 
There are thousands of people attending these meetups. 
These people are going after work and on weekends, and they're attending these meetups to look at open data and make our city a better place. 
Groups like BetaNYC, who just last week released something called citygram.nyc that allows you to subscribe to 311 complaints around your own home, or around your office. 
And it's not just the tech community that are after these things. 
It's urban planners like the students I teach at Pratt. 
It's policy advocates, it's everyone, it's citizens from a diverse set of backgrounds. 
And with some small, incremental changes, we can unlock the passion and the ability of our citizens to harness open data and make our city even better, whether it's one dataset, or one parking spot at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. 
Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating — no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger — and definitely no fear; that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects. 
I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "" man box. "" See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. 
Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. 
But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted, and we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood. 
This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. 
They're 11 and 12. 
Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. 
There was a period of time when my wife — her name is Tammie — and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. 
(Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. 
It didn't matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. 
Daddy's got you. That's all that's important. 
Now Kendall on the other hand — and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her — he'd come to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. 
I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "" Why are you crying? 
Hold your head up. Look at me. 
Explain to me what's wrong. 
Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you. 
Why are you crying? "" And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, "" Just go in your room. 
Just go on, go on in your room. 
Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a — "" what? 
(Audience: Man.) Like a man. 
And he's five years old. 
And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, "" My God, what's wrong with me? 
What am I doing? Why would I do this? "" And I think back. 
I think back to my father. 
There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. 
My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. 
We lived in New York City, as I said. 
We lived in the Bronx at the time, and the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. 
And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. 
And the limousine empties out. 
My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine, and no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. 
He didn't want cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. 
And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground — something I just can't even imagine. 
The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me, and at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying. 
I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. 
I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "" How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl? "" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad; I'd be mad; I'd be angry, or something like that. 
No, the boy said to me — the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." 
And I said to myself, "" God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls? "" (Applause) It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. 
I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city. 
At this time we're living in the Bronx, and in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. 
He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old — younger guys. 
And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. 
And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. 
He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys?" 
And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. 
He was a troubled kid. 
His mother had died from a heroin overdose. 
He was being raised by his grandmother. 
His father wasn't on the set. 
His grandmother had two jobs. 
He was home alone a lot. 
But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude, man. 
He was cool. He was fine. 
That's what the sisters said, "" He was fine. "" He was having sex. 
We all looked up to him. 
So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something — just playing around, doing something — I don't know what. 
He looks out his window; he calls me upstairs; he said, "" Hey Anthony. "" They called me Anthony growing up as a kid. 
"Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." 
Johnny call, you go. 
So I run right upstairs. 
As he opens the door, he says to me, "" Do you want some? "" Now I immediately knew what he meant. 
Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, "" Do you want some? "" meant one of two things: sex or drugs — and we weren't doing drugs. 
Now my box, my card, my man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. 
Two things: One, I never had sex. 
We don't talk about that as men. 
You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. 
For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. 
There ain't no first time. 
(Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. 
That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. 
Women are objects, especially sexual objects. 
Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. 
So, like my mother would say, make a long story short, I just simply said to Johnny, "" Yes. "" He told me to go in his room. 
I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. 
She's 16 years old. 
She's nude. 
She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher-functioning at times than others. 
We had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her. 
Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. 
Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. 
Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes. 
So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. 
So when I go in the room, I close the door. 
Folks, I'm petrified. 
I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything, and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. 
So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do; I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. 
So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room, and lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. 
So now there's a living room full of guys. 
It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. 
And they asked me how was it, and I say to them, "" It was good, "" and I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door. 
Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught. 
But I knew I felt bad about what was happening. 
This fear, getting outside the man box, totally enveloped me. 
It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her. 
See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. 
We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. 
We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. 
We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. 
You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. 
So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. 
The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad. 
So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. 
The world I envision for her — how do I want men to be acting and behaving? 
I need you on board. I need you with me. 
I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman. (Applause) I remember asking a nine-year-old boy, I asked a nine-year-old boy, "" What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box? "" 
He said to me, "" I would be free. "" Thank you folks. 
(Applause) 

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

When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind. 
There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. 
Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. 
Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. 
Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. 
And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. 
He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. 
He was a slightly unusual guy. 
And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official. 
There's Teodorín Obiang. 
So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. 
The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. 
So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. 
I've been up to its front gates. 
I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. 
He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece — oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too. 
Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars. 
And there's Dan Etete. 
Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. 
We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion — that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later. 
So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. 
But does it just happen over there? 
Well, at 22, I was very lucky. 
My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. 
And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. 
In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. 
Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia. 
So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. 
Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film "" Blood Diamond, "" the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. 
Well, some of that sprang from our work. 
Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. 
And it was a slightly crazy place. 
So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. 
But it wasn't about blood diamonds. 
Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. 
And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. 
And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase "" weak governance. "" I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators. 
So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. 
Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. 
Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. 
He did business with global banks. 
A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. 
And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. 
He used shell companies. 
He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place. 
And then there's Dan Etete. 
Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. 
Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government — now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around. 
So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan. 
This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff. 
Now let's take the banks first. 
Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. 
For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. 
Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. 
So how did that happen? 
Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. 
So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. 
And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. 
The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. 
Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. 
And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case. 
And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. 
Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. 
But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. 
In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal. 
A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. 
It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. 
Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too. 
You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens. 
One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. 
So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. 
And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. 
Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. 
That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. 
And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? 
Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it. 
And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? 
Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. 
Corruption in that sector, no surprise. 
There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? 
Well, because there's a lot at stake. 
In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. 
Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away. 
Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. 
And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right. 
Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. 
Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. 
The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. 
Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. 
And here's the thing. 
After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there. 
Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. 
I mean, these are state assets. 
They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. 
But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so. 
And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. 
It's just how some business is done. 
It's too complex and difficult to change. 
So in effect, what? We just accept it. 
But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. 
In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. 
In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. 
But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. 
Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds. 
So this is change happening. 
This is progress. 
But we're not there yet, by far. 
Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? 
In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment. 
Today's its debut. 
It's a demonstration of augmented reality. 
And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded. 
They are live and reacting to me in real time. 
I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic. 
So fingers crossed. 
And keep your eyes on the big screen. 
Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery. 
It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder. 
Magic is deception, but it is a deception we enjoy. 
To enjoy being deceived, an audience must first suspend its disbelief. 
It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind. 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that, for a moment, constitutes poetic faith. 
MT: This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience. 
Without it, a script is just words. 
Augmented reality is just the latest technology. 
And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity. 
We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. 
We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. 
We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had. 
Without this ability there is no magic. 
It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller. 
He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio. 
Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler. 
He is an actor playing the part of a magician. 
MT: Which means magic is theater and every trick is a story. 
The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction. 
There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. 
Now many of them are intensely dramatic. 
Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape. 
But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live. 
Because the best stories always have a happy ending. 
The tricks of magic have one special element. 
They are stories with a twist. 
Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines. 
He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think. 
Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error. 
The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable, but do not, in fact, match what is being done in front of them. 
MT: In that respect, magic tricks are like jokes. 
Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination. 
But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected, we laugh. 
The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks. 
The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter. 
It's fun to be fooled. 
One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared. 
We feel compelled to tell them. 
When I do a trick at a party — (Laughter) that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again. 
They want to share the experience. 
That makes my job more difficult, because, if I want to surprise them, I need to tell a story that starts the same, but ends differently — a trick with a twist on a twist. 
It keeps me busy. 
Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained. 
We think in narrative structures. 
We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood. 
It's a uniquely human achievement. 
We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation. 
Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com. 
The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story. 
We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies. 
We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole. 
Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be. 
They give us our identity and a sense of community. 
And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

Right now is the most exciting time to see new Indian art. 
Contemporary artists in India are having a conversation with the world like never before. 
I thought it might be interesting, even for the many long-time collectors here with us at TED, local collectors, to have an outside view of 10 young Indian artists I wish everyone at TED to know. 
The first is Bharti Kher. 
The central motif of Bharti's practice is the ready-made store-bought bindi that untold millions of Indian women apply to their foreheads, every day, in an act closely associated with the institution of marriage. 
But originally the significance of the bindi is to symbolize the third eye between the spiritual world and the religious world. 
Bharti seeks to liberate this everyday cliche, as she calls it, by exploding it into something spectacular. 
She also creates life-size fiberglass sculptures, often of animals, which she then completely covers in bindis, often with potent symbolism. 
She says she first got started with 10 packets of bindis, and then wondered what she could do with 10 thousand. 
Our next artist, Balasubramaniam, really stands at the crossroads of sculpture, painting and installation, working wonders with fiberglass. 
Since Bala himself will be speaking at TED I won't spend too much time on him here today, except to say that he really succeeds at making the invisible visible. 
Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh is known for her digital collages, using Indian comic books called amar chitra kathas as her primary source material. 
These comics are a fundamental way that children, especially in the diaspora, learn their religious and mythological folk tales. 
I, for one, was steeped in these. 
Chitra basically remixes and re-titles these iconic images to tease out some of the sexual and gender politics embedded in these deeply influential comics. 
And she uses this vocabulary in her installation work as well. 
Jitish Kallat successfully practices across photography, sculpture, painting and installation. 
As you can see, he's heavily influenced by graffiti and street art, and his home city of Mumbai is an ever-present element in his work. 
He really captures that sense of density and energy which really characterizes modern urban Bombay. 
He also creates phantasmagoric sculptures made of bones from cast resin. 
Here he envisions the carcass of an autorickshaw he once witnessed burning in a riot. 
This next artist, N.S. Harsha, actually has a studio right here in Mysore. 
He's putting a contemporary spin on the miniature tradition. 
He creates these fine, delicate images which he then repeats on a massive scale. 
He uses scale to more and more spectacular effect, whether on the roof of a temple in Singapore, or in his increasingly ambitious installation work, here with 192 functioning sewing machines, fabricating the flags of every member of the United Nations. 
Mumbai-based Dhruvi Acharya builds on her love of comic books and street art to comment on the roles and expectations of modern Indian women. 
She too mines the rich source material of amar chitra kathas, but in a very different way than Chitra Ganesh. 
In this particular work, she actually strips out the images and leaves the actual text to reveal something previously unseen, and provocative. 
Raqib Shaw is Kolkata-born, Kashmir-raised, and London-trained. 
He too is reinventing the miniature tradition. 
He creates these opulent tableaus inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, but also by the Kashmiri textiles of his youth. 
He actually applies metallic industrial paints to his work using porcupine quills to get this rich detailed effect. 
I'm kind of cheating with this next artist since Raqs Media Collective are really three artists working together. 
Raqs are probably the foremost practitioners of multimedia art in India today, working across photography, video and installation. 
They frequently explore themes of globalization and urbanization, and their home of Delhi is a frequent element in their work. 
Here, they invite the viewer to analyze a crime looking at evidence and clues embedded in five narratives on these five different screens, in which the city itself may have been the culprit. 
This next artist is probably the alpha male of contemporary Indian art, Subodh Gupta. 
He was first known for creating giant photo-realistic canvases, paintings of everyday objects, the stainless steel kitchen vessels and tiffin containers known to every Indian. 
He celebrates these local and mundane objects globally, and on a grander and grander scale, by incorporating them into ever more colossal sculptures and installations. 
And finally number 10, last and certainly not least, Ranjani Shettar, who lives and works here in the state of Karnataka, creates ethereal sculptures and installations that really marry the organic to the industrial, and brings, like Subodh, the local global. 
These are actually wires wrapped in muslin and steeped in vegetable dye. 
And she arranges them so that the viewer actually has to navigate through the space, and interact with the objects. 
And light and shadow are a very important part of her work. 
She also explores themes of consumerism, and the environment, such as in this work, where these basket-like objects look organic and woven, and are woven, but with the strips of steel, salvaged from cars that she found in a Bangalore junkyard. 
10 artists, six minutes, I know that was a lot to take in. 
But I can only hope I've whet your appetite to go out and see and learn more about the amazing things that are happening in art in India today. 
Thank you very much for looking and listening. 
(Applause) 

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

I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon, which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it. 
My own interest in this subject, and my passion for it, began rather accidentally. 
I had bought a copy of this book, "" The Universe and Dr. Einstein "" — a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle. 
A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes. 
And as it happened, I read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot. 
And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do. 
And that feeling hasn't left me yet. 
That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career — from being a software engineer to become a science writer — so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others. 
And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail. 
So it took me from places like Chile — the Atacama Desert in Chile — to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole. 
And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips. 
I have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting, literally at times, their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe. 
And I first begin with a pie chart — and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation — but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos. 
All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter — the stuff that we're all made of — and that's four percent of the universe. 
Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent. 
So if you look at this pie chart, 96 percent of the universe, at this point in our exploration of it, is unknown or not well understood. 
And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. 
I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter. 
And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors. 
And the reason why they have to go underground is that, if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth, the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays, ambient radio activity, even our own bodies. You might not believe it, but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment. 
So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector. 
And I went to see one of these experiments, and this is actually — you can barely see it, and the reason for that is it's entirely dark in there — this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960. 
And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s. 
And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight. 
And today, you would see this inside the mine, half a mile underground. 
This is one of the largest underground labs in the world. 
And, among other things, they're looking for dark matter. 
There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly. 
If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about — one of them being neutrinos. 
And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules. 
When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino. 
But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this. 
You need something like tens of megatons of water — almost a gigaton of water — in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino. 
And where in the world would you find such water? 
Well the Russians have a tank in their own backyard. 
This is Lake Baikal. 
It is the largest lake in the world. It's 800 km long. 
It's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places, and one to two kilometers deep. 
And what the Russians are doing is they're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light. 
And this is the scene that greeted me when I landed there. 
This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter. 
The lake is entirely frozen. 
And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working. 
The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don't have the money to work in summer and spring, which, if they did that, they would need ships and submersibles to do their work. 
So they wait until winter — the lake is completely frozen over — and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work. 
So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter. 
They have to drill holes in the ice, dive down into the water — cold, cold water — to get hold of the instrument, bring it up, do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do, put it back and get out before the ice melts. 
Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it's full of cracks. 
And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving. 
I still don't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest, but that tells you how hard he was working. 
And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist. 
And they have dedicated their lives to it. 
And just to give you an idea, they have spent 20 million over 20 years. 
It's very harsh conditions. 
They work on a shoestring budget. 
The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack. 
And it's that basic, but they do this every year. 
From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope. The Very Large Telescope 
is one of these things that astronomers do — they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively. 
I can tell you for a fact, that the next one that they're planning is called The Extremely Large Telescope. 
(Laughter) And you wouldn't believe it, but the one after that is going to be called The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. 
But nonetheless, it's an extraordinary piece of engineering. 
These are four 8.2 meter telescopes. 
And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time. 
And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about. 
And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror. 
Each mirror, there are four of them, is made of a single piece of glass, a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic, that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [to] imagine a city like Paris, with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower, if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy, you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high. 
And that's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured. 
An extraordinary set of telescopes. 
Here's another view of the same. 
The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert. 
The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies. 
Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica. 
I want to spend most of my time on this part of the world. 
This is cosmology's final frontier. 
Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica. 
I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up. 
And that's where they do their experiments, and then the balloon, the payload, is brought down. 
So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. 
That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica. 
And here we are about to board our bus. 
And I don't know if you can read the lettering, but it says, "" Ivan the Terribus. "" And that's taking us to McMurdo. 
And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo. 
And you barely might be able to make out this hut here. 
This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole. 
Because it's so cold, the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it, with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there. 
It's an extraordinary place. 
This is McMurdo itself. About a thousand people work here in summer, and about 200 in winter when it's completely dark for six months. 
I was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument. 
This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km. 
What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight. 
So you're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km. 
And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica — I won't go into the reasons why — but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather. 
The weather, as you can imagine, this is summer, and you're standing on 200 ft of ice. 
And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top. 
And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon — the fabric, parachute and everything — on the ice and then fill it up with helium. 
And that process takes about two hours. 
And the weather can change as they're putting together this whole assembly. 
For instance, here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind, which is eventually going to be filled up with helium. 
Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium. 
Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station. 
And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon. 
The fabric alone weighs two tons. 
In order to minimize the weight, it's very thin, it's as thin as a sandwich wrapper. 
And if they have to pack it back, they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again — except, when they did it first, it would have been done in Texas. 
Here, they can't do it with the kind shoes they're wearing, so they have to take their shoes off, get barefoot into the boxes, in this cold, and do that kind of work. 
That's the kind of dedication these people have. 
Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight. 
Here's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end. 
So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload. 
And remember, all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold, in sub-zero temperatures. 
They're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff, but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that. 
And I would like to share with you a launch. 
(Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon. 
Anil Ananthaswamy: And I'll finally like to leave you with two images. 
This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India. 
And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side. 
And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery. 
This is a close-up of the Buddhist monastery. 
And I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has. 
One is exploring the cosmos on the outside, and the other one is exploring our interior being. 
And both require silence of some sort. 
And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever. 
And it was very obvious that, if we destroy these silent places on Earth, we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards, because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

If you spin these rotors at the same speed, the robot hovers. 
I'll tell you a little bit more about this. 
And so what the robot does, is it plans what we call a minimum-snap trajectory. 
So what that effectively does, is produce a smooth and graceful motion. 
So as an academic, we're always trained to be able to jump through hoops to raise funding for our labs, and we get our robots to do that. 
(Applause) So another thing the robot can do is it remembers pieces of trajectory that it learns or is pre-programmed. 
So here, you see the robot combining a motion that builds up momentum, and then changes its orientation and then recovers. 
So one of the disadvantages of these small robots is its size. 

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Applause) Herbie Hancock: Thank you. 
Marcus Miller. (Applause) Harvey Mason. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) 

Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms. 
Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us. 
What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors? 
Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems. 
And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures. 
The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment. 
And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us. 
We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here — environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning. 
Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health. 
At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air. 
And we looked at three different types of rooms. 
We looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated, which are the data points in the blue. 
We looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated, where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable, but they made them operable for our study. 
And we also sampled the outdoor air. 
If you look at the x-axis of this graph, you'll see that what we commonly want to do — which is keeping the outdoors out — we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation. 
So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types. 
But if you look at the blue data points, which is mechanically ventilated air, it's not as diverse. 
But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health. 
If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors. 
So to understand why this was the case, we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram, which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples. 
The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart. 
And the first things that you can see from this graph is, if you look at the blue data points, which are the mechanically ventilated air, they're not simply a subset of the green data points, which are the outdoor air. 
What we've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans. 
It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth, our spit. 
And this is because we're all constantly shedding microbes. 
So all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another. 
And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt. 
Why does this matter? 
It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States. 
Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings. 
And the model that we're working with in hospitals, and also with many, many different buildings, is to keep the outdoors out. 
And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health. 
And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections, or hospital-acquired infections, this is a clue that it's a good time to reconsider our current practices. 
So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors. 
I've heard somebody say that you're as healthy as your gut. 
And for this reason, many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora. 
And what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Now I'm going to give you a story. 
It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey. 
Let me begin with my parents. 
I'm a product of this visionary mother and father. 
Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s —' 50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India. 
They belonged to boys. 
They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married. 
My family, in my city, and almost in the country, was unique. 
We were four of us, not one, and fortunately no boys. 
We were four girls and no boys. 
And my parents were part of a landed property family. 
My father defied his own grandfather, almost to the point of disinheritance, because he decided to educate all four of us. 
He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education. 
As I've said, when we're born, we don't choose our parents, and when we go to school, we don't choose our school. 
Children don't choose a school. 
They just get the school which parents choose for them. 
So this is the foundation time which I got. 
I grew up like this, and so did my other three sisters. 
And my father used to say at that time, "I'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world." 
I don't know if he really meant [that], but it happened. 
I'm the only one who's left in India. 
One is a British, another is an American and the third is a Canadian. 
So we are four of us in four corners of the world. 
And since I said they're my role models, I followed two things which my father and mother gave me. 
One, they said, "" Life is on an incline. 
You either go up, or you come down. "" And the second thing, which has stayed with me, which became my philosophy of life, which made all the difference, is: 100 things happen in your life, good or bad. 
Out of 100, 90 are your creation. 
They're good. They're your creation. Enjoy it. 
If they're bad, they're your creation. Learn from it. 
Ten are nature-sent over which you can't do a thing. 
It's like a death of a relative, or a cyclone, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. 
You can't do a thing about it. 
You've got to just respond to the situation. 
But that response comes out of those 90 points. 
Since I'm a product of this philosophy, of 90 / 10, and secondly, "" life on an incline, "" that's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got. 
I'm a product of opportunities, rare opportunities in the '50s and the' 60s, which girls didn't get, and I was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique. 
Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities. 
I thought I must tell you this. 
Why I said this, is the background. 
This is what comes next. 
I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable stamina, because I used to run for my tennis titles, etc. 
But I joined the Indian Police Service, and then it was a new pattern of policing. 
For me the policing stood for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect. 
This is something like a new definition ever given in policing in India — the power to prevent. 
Because normally it was always said, power to detect, and that's it, or power to punish. 
But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was growing up. 
How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10? 
So this was how it came into my service, and it was different from the men. 
I didn't want to make it different from the men, but it was different, because this was the way I was different. 
And I redefined policing concepts in India. 
I'm going to take you on two journeys, my policing journey and my prison journey. 
What you see, if you see the title called "" PM's car held. "" This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket. 
(Laughter) That's the first time in India, and I can tell you, that's the last time you're hearing about it. 
It'll never happen again in India, because now it was once and forever. 
And the rule was, because I was sensitive, I was compassionate, I was very sensitive to injustice, and I was very pro-justice. 
That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service. 
I had other options, but I didn't choose them. 
So I'm going to move on. 
This is about tough policing, equal policing. 
Now I was known as "" here's a woman that's not going to listen. "" So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings, postings which others would say no. 
I now went to a prison assignment as a police officer. 
Normally police officers don't want to do prison. 
They sent me to prison to lock me up, thinking, "" Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to. 
Let's lock her up. "" Here I got a prison assignment. 
This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals. 
Obviously, it was. 
But 10,000 men, of which only 400 were women — 10,000 — 9,000 plus about 600 were men. 
Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters — some of them I'd sent to jail as a police officer outside. 
And then how did I deal with them? 
The first day when I went in, I didn't know how to look at them. 
And I said, "" Do you pray? "" When I looked at the group, I said, "" Do you pray? "" They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit. I said, "" Do you pray? "" 
And they didn't say anything. 
I said, "" Do you pray? Do you want to pray? "" They said, "" Yes. "" I said, "" All right, let's pray. "" I prayed for them, and things started to change. 
This is a visual of education inside the prison. 
Friends, this has never happened, where everybody in the prison studies. 
I started this with community support. 
Government had no budget. 
It was one of the finest, largest volunteerism in any prison in the world. 
This was initiated in Delhi prison. 
You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class. 
These are hundreds of classes. 
Nine to eleven, every prisoner went into the education program — the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten. 
We converted this into an ashram — from a prison to an ashram through education. 
I think that's the bigger change. 
It was the beginning of a change. 
Teachers were prisoners. Teachers were volunteers. 
Books came from donated schoolbooks. 
Stationery was donated. 
Everything was donated, because there was no budget of education for the prison. 
Now if I'd not done that, it would have been a hellhole. 
That's the second landmark. 
I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world. 
One, the numbers you'll never get to see. 
Secondly, this concept. 
This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners. 
One thousand prisoners who sat in meditation. 
This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor. 
And this is what transformed. 
You want to know more about this, go and see this film, "" Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. "" You will hear about it, and you will love it. 
And write to me on KiranBedi.com, and I'll respond to you. 
Let me show you the next slide. 
I took the same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison? 
Because crime is a product of a distorted mind. 
It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control. 
Not by preaching, not by telling, not by reading, but by addressing your mind. 
I took the same thing to the police, because police, equally, were prisoners of their minds, and they felt as if it was "" we "" and "" they, "" and that the people don't cooperate. 
This worked. 
This is a feedback box called a petition box. 
This is a concept which I introduced to listen to complaints, listen to grievances. 
This was a magic box. 
This was a sensitive box. 
This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison. 
If you see somebody in the blue — yeah, this guy — he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher. 
And you see, everybody's busy. There was no time to waste. 
Let me wrap it up. 
I'm currently into movements, movements of education of the under-served children, which is thousands — India is all about thousands. 
Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India. 
That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India. 
Friends, you will hear a lot about it. 
That's the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. 
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. 
They're bizzarre, they're beautiful, and there's very little we know about them. 
These thoughts were going through my head when I looked at the pages of my first dinosaur book. 
I was about five years old at the time, and I decided there and then that I would become a paleontologist. 
Paleontology allowed me to combine my love for animals with my desire to travel to far-flung corners of the world. 
And now, a few years later, I've led several expeditions to the ultimate far-flung corner on this planet, the Sahara. 
I've worked in the Sahara because I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a bizarre, giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus. 
A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. 
Unfortunately, all his Spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. 
So all we're left with are just a few drawings and notes. 
From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big, it had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail, and it had long, slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile, with conical teeth, that may have been used to catch slippery prey, like fish. 
But that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next 100 years. 
My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. 
It's a difficult place to work in. 
You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions, and it's very difficult to find good fossils there. 
But our hard work paid off. 
We discovered many incredible specimens. 
There's the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. 
We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters. 
These fossils were deposited in a river system. 
The river system was also home to a giant, car-sized coelacanth, a monster sawfish, and the skies over the river system were filled with pterosaurs, flying reptiles. 
It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine. 
So we're finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus, but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. 
We were just finding bits and pieces and I was hoping that we'd find a partial skeleton at some point. 
Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of Spinosaurus. 
We returned to the site, we collected more bones. 
And so after 100 years we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature. 
And we were able to reconstruct it. 
We now know that Spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile, very different from other predatory dinosaurs, very different from the T. rex. 
But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skeleton. 
We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. 
We had leg bones, we had skull bones, we had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet — again, very unusual, no other dinosaur has feet like this — and we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment, or maybe for paddling in the water. 
We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of Spinosaurus bones, and it turns out that they're very dense and compact. 
Again, this is something we see in animals that spend a lot of time in the water, it's useful for buoyancy control in the water. 
We C.T.-scanned all of our bones and built a digital Spinosaurus skeleton. 
And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. 
It's bigger than a T. rex, and yes, the head has "" fish-eating "" written all over it, but really the entire skeleton has "" water-loving "" written all over it — dense bone, paddle-like feet, and the hind limbs are reduced in size, and again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water. 
So, as we fleshed out our Spinosaurus — I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin — we realize that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur, bigger than T. rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants, feeding on the many aquatic animals I showed you earlier on. 
So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. 
It's a dinosaur like no other. 
And some people told me, "" Wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. 
There are not many things left to discover in the world. "" Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. 
I think the Sahara's still full of treasures, and when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews, and he said, "" Always, there has been an adventure just around the corner — and the world is still full of corners. "" That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines. 
And it is still true today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian artist, as an Iranian woman artist, as an Iranian woman artist living in exile. 
Well, it has its pluses and minuses. 
On the dark side, politics doesn't seem to escape people like me. 
Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. 
Politics have defined our lives. 
If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture — at times, execution. 
If you're living outside like me, you're faced with life in exile — the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family. 
Therefore, we don't find the moral, emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility. 
Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice, the speaker of my people, even if I have, indeed, no access to my own country. 
Also, people like myself, we're fighting two battles on different grounds. 
We're being critical of the West, the perception of the West about our identity — about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. 
We are there to take pride and insist on respect. 
And at the same time, we're fighting another battle. 
That is our regime, our government — our atrocious government, [that] has done every crime in order to stay in power. 
Our artists are at risk. 
We are in a position of danger. 
We pose a threat to the order of the government. 
But ironically, this situation has empowered all of us, because we are considered, as artists, central to the cultural, political, social discourse in Iran. 
We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope to our people. 
We are the reporters of our people, and are communicators to the outside world. 
Art is our weapon. 
Culture is a form of resistance. 
I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression. 
For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. 
From the fact that they are only serving one audience, mainly the Western culture. 
But also, I worry about the West, because often in this country, in this Western world that we have, culture risks being a form of entertainment. 
Our people depend on our artists, and culture is beyond communication. 
My journey as an artist started from a very, very personal place. 
I did not start to make social commentary about my country. 
The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. 
It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. 
While I was absent from Iran, the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture. 
I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in the society. 
But instead, I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn't recognize anymore. 
More so, I became very interested, as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions, I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution — how, indeed, it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. 
I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting, in the way the women of Iran, historically, seemed to embody the political transformation. 
So in a way, by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country. 
So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life, and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse — the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of God, faith, but violence and crime and cruelty. 
For me, this became incredibly important. 
And yet, I had an unusual position toward this. 
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution. 
This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn't know I would discover. 
So my art became slightly more critical. 
My knife became a little sharper. 
And I fell into a life in exile. 
I am a nomadic artist. 
I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. 
I go everywhere to make believe it's Iran. 
Now I am making films. 
Last year, I finished a film called "" Women Without Men. "" "" Women Without Men "" returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. 
It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader, Dr. Mossadegh. 
The book is written by an Iranian woman, Shahrnush Parsipur. 
It's a magical realist novel. 
This book is banned, and she spent five years in prison. 
My obsession with this book, and the reason I made this into a film, is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female — traditionally, historically in Iran — and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change, freedom and democracy — while the country of Iran, equally, as if another character, also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions. 
I made this film because I felt it's important for it to speak to the Westerners about our history as a country. 
That all of you seem to remember Iran after the Islamic Revolution. 
That Iran was once a secular society, and we had democracy, and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government. 
This film also speaks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamicized — in the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way we had intellectual life. 
And most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. 
These are some of the shots actually from my film. 
These are some of the images of the coup. 
And we made this film in Casablanca, recreating all the shots. 
This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story, but also a feminine story. 
Being a visual artist, indeed, I am foremost interested to make art — to make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism, and become an important, timeless, universal work of art. 
The challenge I have is how to do that. 
How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. 
How to move you with your emotions, but also make your mind work. 
These are some of the images and the characters of the film. 
Now comes the green movement — the summer of 2009, as my film is released — the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran. 
What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice, repeats itself now again in Tehran. 
The green movement significantly inspired the world. 
It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. 
What was most significant for me was, once again, the presence of the women. 
They're absolutely inspirational for me. 
If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran — women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist. 
These women and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside. 
I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women. 
That, under all circumstances, they have pushed the boundary. 
They have confronted the authority. 
They have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way. 
And once again, they proved themselves. 
I stand here to say that Iranian women have found a new voice, and their voice is giving me my voice. 
And it's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the West only for now. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Imagine being unable to say, "" I am hungry, "" "" I am in pain, "" "thank you," or "I love you." 
Being trapped inside your body, a body that doesn't respond to commands. 
Surrounded by people, yet utterly alone. 
Wishing you could reach out, to connect, to comfort, to participate. 
For 13 long years, that was my reality. 
Most of us never think twice about talking, about communicating. 
I've thought a lot about it. 
I've had a lot of time to think. 
For the first 12 years of my life, I was a normal, happy, healthy little boy. 
Then everything changed. 
I contracted a brain infection. 
The doctors weren't sure what it was, but they treated me the best they could. 
However, I progressively got worse. 
Eventually, I lost my ability to control my movements, make eye contact, and finally, my ability to speak. 
While in hospital, I desperately wanted to go home. 
I said to my mother, "" When home? "" Those were the last words I ever spoke with my own voice. 
I would eventually fail every test for mental awareness. 
My parents were told I was as good as not there. 
A vegetable, having the intelligence of a three-month-old baby. 
They were told to take me home and try to keep me comfortable until I died. 
My parents, in fact my entire family's lives, became consumed by taking care of me the best they knew how. 
Their friends drifted away. 
One year turned to two, two turned to three. 
It seemed like the person I once was began to disappear. 
The Lego blocks and electronic circuits I'd loved as a boy were put away. 
I had been moved out of my bedroom into another more practical one. 
I had become a ghost, a faded memory of a boy people once knew and loved. 
Meanwhile, my mind began knitting itself back together. 
Gradually, my awareness started to return. 
But no one realized that I had come back to life. 
I was aware of everything, just like any normal person. 
I could see and understand everything, but I couldn't find a way to let anybody know. 
My personality was entombed within a seemingly silent body, a vibrant mind hidden in plain sight within a chrysalis. 
The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life locked inside myself, totally alone. 
I was trapped with only my thoughts for company. 
I would never be rescued. 
No one would ever show me tenderness. 
I would never talk to a friend. 
No one would ever love me. 
I had no dreams, no hope, nothing to look forward to. 
Well, nothing pleasant. 
I lived in fear, and, to put it bluntly, was waiting for death to finally release me, expecting to die all alone in a care home. 
I don't know if it's truly possible to express in words what it's like not to be able to communicate. 
Your personality appears to vanish into a heavy fog and all of your emotions and desires are constricted, stifled and muted within you. 
For me, the worst was the feeling of utter powerlessness. 
I simply existed. 
It's a very dark place to find yourself because in a sense, you have vanished. 
Other people controlled every aspect of my life. 
They decided what I ate and when. 
Whether I was laid on my side or strapped into my wheelchair. 
I often spent my days positioned in front of the TV watching Barney reruns. 
I think because Barney is so happy and jolly, and I absolutely wasn't, it made it so much worse. 
I was completely powerless to change anything in my life or people's perceptions of me. 
I was a silent, invisible observer of how people behaved when they thought no one was watching. 
Unfortunately, I wasn't only an observer. 
With no way to communicate, I became the perfect victim: a defenseless object, seemingly devoid of feelings that people used to play out their darkest desires. 
For more than 10 years, people who were charged with my care abused me physically, verbally and sexually. 
Despite what they thought, I did feel. 
The first time it happened, I was shocked and filled with disbelief. 
How could they do this to me? 
I was confused. 
What had I done to deserve this? 
Part of me wanted to cry and another part wanted to fight. 
Hurt, sadness and anger flooded through me. 
I felt worthless. 
There was no one to comfort me. 
But neither of my parents knew this was happening. 
I lived in terror, knowing it would happen again and again. 
I just never knew when. 
All I knew was that I would never be the same. 
I remember once listening to Whitney Houston singing, "No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity." 
And I thought to myself, "" You want to bet? "" Perhaps my parents could have found out and could have helped. 
But the years of constant caretaking, having to wake up every two hours to turn me, combined with them essentially grieving the loss of their son, had taken a toll on my mother and father. 
Following yet another heated argument between my parents, in a moment of despair and desperation, my mother turned to me and told me that I should die. 
I was shocked, but as I thought about what she had said, I was filled with enormous compassion and love for my mother, yet I could do nothing about it. 
There were many moments when I gave up, sinking into a dark abyss. 
I remember one particularly low moment. 
My dad left me alone in the car while he quickly went to buy something from the store. 
A random stranger walked past, looked at me and he smiled. 
I may never know why, but that simple act, the fleeting moment of human connection, transformed how I was feeling, making me want to keep going. 
My existence was tortured by monotony, a reality that was often too much to bear. 
Alone with my thoughts, I constructed intricate fantasies about ants running across the floor. 
I taught myself to tell the time by noticing where the shadows were. 
As I learned how the shadows moved as the hours of the day passed, I understood how long it would be before I was picked up and taken home. 
Seeing my father walk through the door to collect me was the best moment of the day. 
My mind became a tool that I could use to either close down to retreat from my reality or enlarge into a gigantic space that I could fill with fantasies. 
I hoped that my reality would change and someone would see that I had come back to life. 
But I had been washed away like a sand castle built too close to the waves, and in my place was the person people expected me to be. 
To some I was Martin, a vacant shell, the vegetable, deserving of harsh words, dismissal and even abuse. 
To others, I was the tragically brain-damaged boy who had grown to become a man. 
Someone they were kind to and cared for. 
Good or bad, I was a blank canvas onto which different versions of myself were projected. 
It took someone new to see me in a different way. 
An aromatherapist began coming to the care home about once a week. 
Whether through intuition or her attention to details that others failed to notice, she became convinced that I could understand what was being said. 
She urged my parents to have me tested by experts in augmentative and alternative communication. 
And within a year, I was beginning to use a computer program to communicate. 
It was exhilarating, but frustrating at times. 
I had so many words in my mind, that I couldn't wait to be able to share them. 
Sometimes, I would say things to myself simply because I could. 
In myself, I had a ready audience, and I believed that by expressing my thoughts and wishes, others would listen, too. 
But as I began to communicate more, I realized that it was in fact only just the beginning of creating a new voice for myself. 
I was thrust into a world I didn't quite know how to function in. 
I stopped going to the care home and managed to get my first job making photocopies. 
As simple as this may sound, it was amazing. 
My new world was really exciting but often quite overwhelming and frightening. 
I was like a man-child, and as liberating as it often was, I struggled. 
I also learned that many of those who had known me for a long time found it impossible to abandon the idea of Martin they had in their heads. 
While those I had only just met struggled to look past the image of a silent man in a wheelchair. 
I realized that some people would only listen to me if what I said was in line with what they expected. 
Otherwise, it was disregarded and they did what they felt was best. 
I discovered that true communication is about more than merely physically conveying a message. 
It is about getting the message heard and respected. 
Still, things were going well. 
My body was slowly getting stronger. 
I had a job in computing that I loved, and had even got Kojak, the dog I had been dreaming about for years. 
However, I longed to share my life with someone. 
I remember staring out the window as my dad drove me home from work, thinking I have so much love inside of me and nobody to give it to. 
Just as I had resigned myself to being single for the rest of my life, I met Joan. 
Not only is she the best thing that has ever happened to me, but Joan helped me to challenge my own misconceptions about myself. 
Joan said it was through my words that she fell in love with me. 
However, after all I had been through, I still couldn't shake the belief that nobody could truly see beyond my disability and accept me for who I am. 
I also really struggled to comprehend that I was a man. 
The first time someone referred to me as a man, it stopped me in my tracks. 
I felt like looking around and asking, "" Who, me? "" That all changed with Joan. 
We have an amazing connection and I learned how important it is to communicate openly and honestly. 
I felt safe, and it gave me the confidence to truly say what I thought. 
I started to feel whole again, a man worthy of love. 
I began to reshape my destiny. 
I spoke up a little more at work. 
I asserted my need for independence to the people around me. 
Being given a means of communication changed everything. 
I used the power of words and will to challenge the preconceptions of those around me and those I had of myself. 
Communication is what makes us human, enabling us to connect on the deepest level with those around us — telling our own stories, expressing wants, needs and desires, or hearing those of others by really listening. 
All this is how the world knows who we are. 
So who are we without it? 
True communication increases understanding and creates a more caring and compassionate world. 
Once, I was perceived to be an inanimate object, a mindless phantom of a boy in a wheelchair. 
Today, I am so much more. 
A husband, a son, a friend, a brother, a business owner, a first-class honors graduate, a keen amateur photographer. 
It is my ability to communicate that has given me all this. 
We are told that actions speak louder than words. 
But I wonder, do they? 
Our words, however we communicate them, are just as powerful. 
Whether we speak the words with our own voices, type them with our eyes, or communicate them non-verbally to someone who speaks them for us, words are among our most powerful tools. 
I have come to you through a terrible darkness, pulled from it by caring souls and by language itself. 
The act of you listening to me today brings me farther into the light. 
We are shining here together. 
If there is one most difficult obstacle to my way of communicating, it is that sometimes I want to shout and other times simply to whisper a word of love or gratitude. 
It all sounds the same. 
But if you will, please imagine these next two words as warmly as you can: 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. 

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

Tyler Dewar: The way I feel right now is that all of the other speakers have said exactly what I wanted to say. 
(Laughter) And it seems that the only thing left for me to say is to thank you all for your kindness. 
TD: But maybe in the spirit of appreciating the kindness of you all, I could share with you a little story about myself. 
TD: From the time I was very young, onward, I was given a lot of different responsibilities, and it always seemed to me, when I was young, that everything was laid out before me. 
All of the plans for me were already made. 
I was given the clothes that I needed to wear and told where I needed to be, given these very precious and holy looking robes to wear, with the understanding that it was something sacred or important. 
TD: But before that kind of formal lifestyle happened for me, I was living in eastern Tibet with my family. 
And when I was seven years old, all of a sudden, a search party arrived at my home. 
They were looking the next Karmapa, and I noticed they were talking to my mom and dad, and the news came to me that they were telling me that I was the Karmapa. 
And these days, people ask me a lot, how did that feel. 
How did that feel when they came and whisked you away, and your lifestyle completely changed? 
And what I mostly say is that, at that time, it was a pretty interesting idea to me. 
I thought that things would be pretty fun and there would be more things to play with. 
(Laughter) TD: But it didn't turn out to be so fun and entertaining, as I thought it would have been. 
I was placed in a pretty strictly controlled environment. 
And immediately, a lot of different responsibilities, in terms of my education and so forth, were heaped upon me. 
I was separated, largely, from my family, including my mother and father. 
I didn't have have many personal friends to spend time with, but I was expected to perform these prescribed duties. 
So it turned out that my fantasy about an entertaining life of being the Karmapa wasn't going to come true. 
It more felt to be the case to me that I was being treated like a statue, and I was to sit in one place like a statue would. 
TD: Nevertheless, I felt that, even though I've been separated from my loved ones — and, of course, now I'm even further away. 
When I was 14, I escaped from Tibet and became even further removed from my mother and father, my relatives, my friends and my homeland. 
But nevertheless, there's no real sense of separation from me in my heart, in terms of the love that I feel for these people. 
I feel, still, a very strong connection of love for all of these people and for the land. 
TD: And I still do get to keep in touch with my mother and father, albeit infrequently. 
I talk to my mother once in a blue moon on the telephone. 
And my experience is that, when I'm talking to her, with every second that passes during our conversation, the feeling of love that binds us is bringing us closer and closer together. 
TD: So those were just a few remarks about my personal background. 
And in terms of other things that I wanted to share with you, in terms of ideas, I think it's wonderful to have a situation like this, where so many people from different backgrounds and places can come together, exchange their ideas and form relationships of friendship with each other. 
And I think that's symbolic of what we're seeing in the world in general, that the world is becoming smaller and smaller, and that all of the peoples in the world are enjoying more opportunities for connection. 
That's wonderful, but we should also remember that we should have a similar process happening on the inside. 
Along with outward development and increase of opportunity, there should be inward development and deepening of our heart connections as well as our outward connections. 
So we spoke and we heard some about design this week. 
I think that it's important for us to remember that we need to keep pushing forward on the endeavor of the design of the heart. 
We heard a lot about technology this week, and it's important for us to remember to invest a lot of our energy in improving the technology of the heart. 
TD: So, even though I'm somewhat happy about the wonderful developments that are happening in the world, still, I feel a sense of impediment, when it comes to the ability that we have to connect with each other on a heart-to-heart, or a mind-to-mind, level. 
I feel that there are some things that are getting in the way. 
TC: My relationship to this concept of heart-to-heart connection, or mind-to-mind connection, is an interesting one, because, as a spiritual leader, I'm always attempting to open my heart to others and offer myself up for heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind connections in a genuine way with other people, but at the same time, I've always been advised that I need to emphasize intelligence over the heart-to-heart connections, because, being someone in a position like mine, if I don't rely primarily on intelligence, then something dangerous may happen to me. 
So it's an interesting paradox at play there. 
But I had a really striking experience once, when a group from Afghanistan came to visit me, and we had a really interesting conversation. 
TD: So we ended up talking about the Bamiyan Buddhas, which, as you know, were destroyed some years ago in Afghanistan. 
But the basis of our conversation was the different approach to spirituality on the part of the Muslim and Buddhist traditions. 
Of course, in Muslim, because of the teachings around the concept of idolatry, you don't find as many physical representations of divinity or of spiritual liberation as you do in the Buddhist tradition, where, of course, there are many statues of the Buddha that are highly revered. 
So, we were talking about the differences between the traditions and what many people perceived as the tragedy of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but I offered the suggestion that perhaps we could look at this in a positive way. 
What we saw in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was the depletion of matter, some solid substance falling down and disintegrating. 
Maybe we could look at that to be more similar to the falling of the Berlin Wall, where a divide that had kept two types of people apart had collapsed and opened up a door for further communication. 
So I think that, in this way, it's always possible for us to derive something positive that can help us understand one another better. 
TD: So, with regard to the development that we've been talking about here at this conference, I really feel that the development that we make shouldn't create a further burden for us as human beings, but should be used to improve our fundamental lifestyle of how we live in the world. 
TD: Of course, I rejoice in the development and the growth and the rise of the noble land of India, the great country of India, but at the same time, I think, as some of us have acknowledged, we need to be aware that some aspects of this rise are coming at the cost of the very ground on which we stand. 
So, as we are climbing the tree, some of the things that we're doing in order to climb the tree are actually undermining the tree's very root. 
And so, what I think it comes down to is a question of, not only having information of what's going on, but paying attention to that and letting that shift our motivation to become more sincere and genuinely positive. 
We have hear, this week, about the horrible sufferings, for example, that so many women of the world are enduring day-to-day. 
We have that information, but what often happens to us is that we don't really choose to pay attention to it. 
We don't really choose to allow that to cause there to be a shift in our hearts. 
So I think the way forward for the world — one that will bring the path of outer development in harmony with the real root of happiness — is that we allow the information that we have to really make a change in our heart. 
TD: So I think that sincere motivation is very important for our future well-being, or deep sense of well-being as humans, and I think that means sinking in to whatever it is you're doing now. 
Whatever work you're trying to do now to benefit the world, sink into that, get a full taste of that. 
TD: So, since we've been here this week, we've taken millions of breaths, collectively, and perhaps we haven't witnessed any course changes happening in our lives, but we often miss the very subtle changes. 
And I think that sometimes we develop grand concepts of what happiness might look like for us, but that, if we pay attention, we can see that there are little symbols of happiness in every breath that we take. 
TD: So, every one of you who has come here is so talented, and you have so much to offer to the world, I think it would be a good note to conclude on then to just take a moment to appreciate how fortunate we are to have come together in this way and exchanged ideas and really form a strong aspiration and energy within ourselves that we will take the good that has come from this conference, the momentum, the positivity, and we will spread that and plant it in all of the corners of the world. 
His Holiness the Karmapa: Tomorrow is my Talk. 
TD: Lakshmi has worked incredibly hard, even in inviting me, let alone everything else that she has done to make this happen, and I was somewhat resistant at times, and I was also very nervous throughout this week. 
I was feeling under the weather and dizzy and so forth, and people would ask me, why. 
I would tell them, "" It's because I have to talk tomorrow. "" And so Lakshmi had to put up with me through all of that, but I very much appreciate the opportunity she's given me to be here. 
And to you, everyone, thank you very much. 
(Applause) HH: Thank you very much. (Applause) 

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

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

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

In October 2010, the Justice League of America will be teaming up with The 99. 
Icons like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and their colleagues will be teaming up with icons Jabbar, Noora, Jami and their colleagues. 
It's a story of intercultural intersections, and what better group to have this conversation than those that grew out of fighting fascism in their respective histories and geographies? 
As fascism took over Europe in the 1930s, an unlikely reaction came out of North America. 
As Christian iconography got changed, and swastikas were created out of crucifixes, Batman and Superman were created by Jewish young men in the United States and Canada, also going back to the Bible. 
Consider this: like the prophets, all the superheroes are missing parents. 
Superman's parents die on Krypton before the age of one. 
Bruce Wayne, who becomes Batman, loses his parents at the age of six in Gotham City. 
Spiderman is raised by his aunt and uncle. 
And all of them, just like the prophets who get their message from God through Gabriel, get their message from above. 
Peter Parker is in a library in Manhattan when the spider descends from above and gives him his message through a bite. 
Bruce Wayne is in his bedroom when a big bat flies over his head, and he sees it as an omen to become Batman. 
Superman is not only sent to Earth from the heavens, or Krypton, but he's sent in a pod, much like Moses was on the Nile. 
(Laughter) And you hear the voice of his father, Jor-El, saying to Earth, "" I have sent to you my only son. "" (Laughter) (Applause) These are clearly biblical archetypes, and the thinking behind that was to create positive, globally-resonating storylines that could be tied to the same things that other people were pulling mean messages out of because then the person that's using religion for the wrong purpose just becomes a bad man with a bad message. 
And it's only by linking positive things that the negative can be delinked. 
This is the kind of thinking that went into creating The 99. 
The 99 references the 99 attributes of Allah in the Koran, things like generosity and mercy and foresight and wisdom and dozens of others that no two people in the world would disagree about. 
It doesn't matter what your religion is; even if you're an atheist, you don't raise your kid telling him, you know, "Make sure you lie three times a day." 
Those are basic human values. 
And so the backstory of The 99 takes place in 1258, which history tells us the Mongols invaded Baghdad and destroyed it. 
All the books from Bait al-Hikma library, the most famous library in its day, were thrown in the Tigris River, and the Tigris changes color with ink. 
It's a story passed on generation after generation. 
I rewrote that story, and in my version, the librarians find out that this is going to happen — and here's a side note: if you want a comic book to do well, make the librarians the hero. It always works well. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So the librarians find out and they get together a special solution, a chemical solution called King's Water, that when mixed with 99 stones would be able to save all that culture and history in the books. 
But the Mongols get there first. 
The books and the solution get thrown in the Tigris River. 
Some librarians escape, and over the course of days and weeks, they dip the stones into the Tigris and suck up that collective wisdom that we all think is lost to civilization. 
Those stones have been smuggled as three prayer beads of 33 stones each through Arabia into Andalusia in Spain, where they're safe for 200 years. 
But in 1492, two important things happen. 
The first is the fall of Granada, the last Muslim enclave in Europe. 
The second is Columbus finally gets funded to go to India, but he gets lost. 
(Laughter) So 33 of the stones are smuggled onto the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and are spread in the New World. 
Thirty-three go on the Silk Road to China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. 
And 33 are spread between Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 
And now it's 2010, and there are 99 heroes from 99 different countries. 
Now it's very easy to assume that those books, because they were from a library called Bait al-Hikma, were Muslim books, but that's not the case because the caliph that built that library, his name was al-Ma'mun — he was Harun al-Rashid's son. 
He had told his advisers, "" Get me all the scholars to translate any book they can get their hands onto into Arabic, and I will pay them its weight in gold. "" After a while, his advisers complained. 
They said, "" Your Highness, the scholars are cheating. 
They're writing in big handwriting to take more gold. "" To which he said, "" Let them be, because what they're giving us is worth a lot more than what we're paying them. "" So the idea of an open architecture, an open knowledge, is not new to my neck of the desert. 
The concept centers on something called the Noor stones. 
Noor is Arabic for light. 
So these 99 stones, a few kind of rules in the game: Number one, you don't choose the stone; the stone chooses you. 
There's a King Arthur element to the storyline, okay. 
Number two, all of The 99, when they first get their stone, or their power, abuse it; they use it for self-interest. 
And there's a very strong message in there that when you start abusing your stone, you get taken advantage of by people who will exploit your powers, okay. 
Number three, the 99 stones all have within them a mechanism that self-updates. 
Now there are two groups that exist within the Muslim world. 
Everybody believes the Koran is for all time and all place. 
Some believe that means that the original interpretation from a couple thousand years ago is what's relevant today. 
I don't belong there. 
Then there's a group that believes the Koran is a living, breathing document, and I captured that idea within these stones that self-update. 
Now the main bad guy, Rughal, does not want these stones to update, so he's trying to get them to stop updating. 
He can't use the stones, but he can stop them. 
And by stopping them, he has more of a fascist agenda, where he gets some of The 99 to work for him — they're all wearing cookie-cutter, same color uniforms They're not allowed to individually express who they are and what they are. 
And he controls them from the top down — whereas when they work for the other side, eventually, when they find out this is the wrong person, they've been manipulated, they actually, each one has a different, colorful kind of dress. 
And the last point about the 99 Noor stones is this. 
So The 99 work in teams of three. 
Why three? A couple of reasons. 
Number one, we have a thing within Islam that you don't leave a boy and a girl alone together, because the third person is temptation or the devil, right? 
I think that's there in all cultures, right? 
But this is not about religion, it's not about proselytizing. 
There's this very strong social message that needs to get to kind of the deepest crevices of intolerance, and the only way to get there is to kind of play the game. 
And so this is the way I dealt with it. 
They work in teams of three: two boys and a girl, two girls and a boy, three boys, three girls, no problem. 
And the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, also spoke about the importance of the number three in all cultures, so I figure I'm covered. 
Well... 
I got accused in a few blogs that I was actually sent by the Pope to preach the Trinity and Catholicism in the Middle East, so you — (Laughter) you believe who you want. I gave you my version of the story. 
So here's some of the characters that we have. 
Mujiba, from Malaysia: her main power is she's able to answer any question. 
She's the Trivial Pursuit queen, if you want, but when she first gets her power, she starts going on game shows and making money. 
We have Jabbar from Saudi who starts breaking things when he has the power. 
Now, Mumita was a fun one to name. Mumita is the destroyer. 
So the 99 attributes of Allah have the yin and the yang; there's the powerful, the hegemonous, the strong, and there's also the kind, the generous. 
I'm like, are all the girls going to be kind and merciful and the guys all strong? 
I'm like, you know what, I've met a few girls who were destroyers in my lifetime, so... 
(Laughter) We have Jami from Hungary, who first starts making weapons: He's the technology wiz. 
Musawwira from Ghana, Hadya from Pakistan, Jaleel from Iran who uses fire. 
And this is one of my favorites, Al-Batina from Yemen. 
Al-Batina is the hidden. 
So Al-Batina is hidden, but she's a superhero. 
I came home to my wife and I said, "" I created a character after you. "" My wife is a Saudi from Yemeni roots. 
And she said, "" Show me. "" So I showed this. 
She said, "" That's not me. "" I said, "" Look at the eyes. They're your eyes. "" (Laughter) So I promised my investors this would not be another made-in-fifth-world-country production. 
This was going to be Superman, or it wasn't worth my time or their money. 
So from day one, the people involved in the project, bottom left is Fabian Nicieza, writer for X-Men and Power Rangers. 
Next to him is Dan Panosian, one of the character creators for the modern-day X-Men. 
Top right is Stuart Moore, a writer for Iron Man. 
Next to him is John McCrea, who was an inker for Spiderman. 
And we entered Western consciousness with a tagline: "" Next Ramadan, the world will have new heroes, "" back in 2005. 
Now I went to Dubai, to an Arab Thought Foundation Conference, and I was waiting by the coffee for the right journalist. 
Didn't have a product, but had energy. 
And I found somebody from The New York Times, and I cornered him, and I pitched him. 
And I think I scared him — (Laughter) because he basically promised me — we had no product — but he said, "" We'll give you a paragraph in the arts section if you'll just go away. "" (Laughter) So I said, "" Great. "" So I called him up a few weeks afterward. 
I said, "" Hi, Hesa. "" And he said, "" Hi. "" I said, "" Happy New Year. "" He said, "" Thank you. We had a baby. "" I said, "" Congratulations. "" Like I care, right? 
"So when's the article coming out?" 
He said, "" Naif, Islam and cartoon? 
That's not timely. 
You know, maybe next week, next month, next year, but, you know, it'll come out. "" So a few days after that, what happens? 
What happens is the world erupts in the Danish cartoon controversy. 
I became timely. 
(Laughter) So flurry of phone calls and emails from The New York Times. 
Next thing you knew, there's a full page covering us positively, January 22nd, 2006, which changed our lives forever, because anybody Googling Islam and cartoon or Islam and comic, guess what they got; they got me. 
And The 99 were like superheroes kind of flying out of what was happening around the world. 
And that led to all kinds of things, from being in curricula in universities and schools to — one of my favorite pictures I have from South Asia, it was a couple of men with long beards and a lot of girls wearing the hijab — it looked like a school. 
The good news is they're all holding copies of The 99, smiling, and they found me to sign the picture. 
The bad news is they were all photocopies, so we didn't make a dime in revenue. 
(Laughter) We've been able to license The 99 comic books into eight languages so far — Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish. 
Opened a theme park through a license in Kuwait a year and a half ago called The 99 Village Theme Park — 300,000 square feet, 20 rides, all with our characters: a couple back-to-school licenses in Spain and Turkey. 
But the biggest thing we've done to date, which is just amazing, is that we've done a 26-episode animated series, which is done for global audiences: in fact, we're already going to be in the U.S. and Turkey, we know. 
It's 3D CGI, which is going to be very high-quality, written in Hollywood by the writers behind Ben 10 and Spiderman and Star Wars: Clone Wars. 
In this clip I'm about to show you, which has never been seen in the public before, there is a struggle. 
Two of the characters, Jabbar, the one with the muscles, and Noora, the one that can use light, are actually wearing the cookie-cutter fascist gray uniform because they're being manipulated. 
They don't know, OK, and they're trying to get another member of The 99 to join them. 
So there's a struggle within the team. 
So if we can get the lights... 
["" The 99 ""] Jabbar: Dana, I can't see where to grab hold. 
I need more light. 
What's happening? 
Dana: There's too much darkness. 
Rughal: There must be something we can do. 
Man: I won't send any more commandos in until I know it's safe. 
Dr. Razem: It's time to go, Miklos. 
Miklos: Must download file contents. 
I can't forget auntie. 
Jabbar: Dana, I can't do this without you. 
Dana: But I can't help. 
Jabbar: You can, even if you don't believe in yourself right now. 
I believe in you. 
You are Noora the Light. 
Dana: No. 
I don't deserve it. I don't deserve anything. 
Jabbar: Then what about the rest of us? 
Don't we deserve to be saved? Don't I? 
Now, tell me which way to go. 
Dana: That way. 
Alarm: Threat imminent. 
Jabbar: Aaaahhh! 
Miklos: Stay away from me. 
Jabbar: We're here to help you. 
Dr. Razem: Don't listen to them. 
Dana: Miklos, that man is not your friend. 
Miklos: No. He gave me access, and you want to reboot the [unclear]. No more [unclear]. 
["" The 99 ""] Thank you. 
(Applause) So "" The 99 "" is technology; it's entertainment; it's design. 
But that's only half the story. 
As the father of five sons, I worry about who they're going to be using as role models. 
I worry because all around me, even within my extended family, I see religion being manipulated. 
As a psychologist, I worry for the world in general, but worry about the perception of how people see themselves in my part of the world. 
Now, I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm licensed in New York State. 
I trained at Bellevue Hospital Survivors of Political Torture Program, and I heard one too many stories of people growing up to idolize their leadership, only to end up being tortured by their heroes. 
And torture's a terrible enough thing as it is, but when it's done by your hero, that just breaks you in so many ways. 
I left Bellevue, went to business school and started this. 
Now, one of the things that I refer to when I — about the importance of this message — is that I gave a lecture at the medical school at Kuwait University, where I lecture on the biological basis of behavior, and I gave the students two articles, one from The New York Times and one from New York magazine. 
And I took away the name of the writer, the name of the [unclear] — everything was gone except the facts. 
And the first one was about a group called The Party of God, who wanted to ban Valentine's Day. Red was made illegal. 
Any boys and girls caught flirting would get married off immediately, okay. 
The second one was about a woman complaining because three minivans with six bearded men pulled up and started interrogating her on the spot for talking to a man who wasn't related to her. 
And I asked the students in Kuwait where they thought these incidents took place. 
The first one, they said Saudi Arabia. There was no debate. 
The second one, they were actually split between Saudi and Afghanistan. 
What blew their mind was the first one took place in India, it was the party of a Hindu God. 
The second one took place in upstate New York. 
It was an Orthodox Jewish community. 
But what breaks my heart and what's alarming is that in those two interviews, the people around, who were interviewed as well, refer to that behavior as Talibanization. 
In other words, good Hindus and good Jews don't act this way. 
This is Islam's influence on Hinduism and Judaism. 
But what do the students in Kuwait say? They said it's us — and this is dangerous. 
It's dangerous when a group self-identifies itself as extreme. 
This is one of my sons, Rayan, who's a Scooby Doo addict. 
You can tell by the glasses there. 
He actually called me a meddling kid the other day. 
(Laughter) But I borrow a lesson that I learned from him. 
Last summer when we were in our home in New York, he was out in the yard playing in his playhouse. And I was in my office working, and he came in, "" Baba, I want you to come with me. I want my toy. "" "" Yes, Rayan, just go away. "" He left his Scooby Doo in his house. 
I said, "" Go away. I'm working. I'm busy. "" And what Rayan did then is he sat there, he tapped his foot on the floor, at three and a half, and he looked at me and he said, "" Baba, I want you to come with me to my office in my house. 
I have work to do. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Rayan reframed the situation and brought himself down to my level. (Laughter) 
And with The 99, that is what we aim to do. 
You know, I think that there's a big parallel between bending the crucifix out of shape and creating swastikas. 
And when I see pictures like this, of parents or uncles who think it's cute to have a little child holding a Koran and having a suicide bomber belt around them to protest something, the hope is by linking enough positive things to the Koran, that one day we can move this child from being proud in the way they're proud there, to that. 
And I think — I think The 99 can and will achieve its mission. 
As an undergrad at Tufts University, we were giving away free falafel one day and, you know, it was Middle East Day or something. 
And people came up and picked up the culturally resonant image of the falafel, ate it and, you know, talked and left. 
And no two people could disagree about what the word free was and what the word falafel was, behind us, "" free falafel. "" You know. 
(Laughter) Or so we thought, until a woman came rushing across the campus and dropped her bag on the floor, pointed up to the sign and said, "Who's falafel?" (Laughter) 
True story. (Laughter) 
She was actually coming out of an Amnesty International meeting. (Laughter) 
Just today, D.C. Comics announced the cover of our upcoming crossover. 
On that cover you see Batman, Superman and a fully-clothed Wonder Woman with our Saudi member of The 99, our Emirati member and our Libyan member. 
On April 26, 2010, President Barack Obama said that of all the initiatives since his now famous Cairo speech — in which he reached out to the Muslim world — the most innovative was that The 99 reach back out to the Justice League of America. 
We live in a world in which the most culturally innocuous symbols, like the falafel, can be misunderstood because of baggage, and where religion can be twisted and purposefully made where it's not supposed to be by others. 
In a world like that, they'll always be a job for Superman and The 99. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. 
And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had. 
And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "" samples "" — frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water — and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. 
You know, I was a real science geek. 
But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility. 
And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. 
Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. 
So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it. 
And I was an artist. 
And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. 
You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. 
And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. 
I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. 
That was — the creativity had to find its outlet somehow. 
And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. 
I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday — that seemed pretty darn unlikely. 
But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books. 
So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. 
And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. 
But I didn't let that daunt me. 
I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. 
And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. 
And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California. 
Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. 
And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. 
Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. 
I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. 
And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was. 
But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. 
And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. 
And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. 
So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. 
And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: "" Terminator, "" "" Aliens "" and "" The Abyss. "" And with "" The Abyss, "" I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. 
So, you know, merging the two passions. 
Something interesting came out of "" The Abyss, "" which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. 
And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. 
And even though the film didn't make any money — barely broke even, I should say — I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic. 
You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 
They were seeing something magical. 
And so that got me very excited. 
And I thought, "" Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art. "" So, with "" Terminator 2, "" which was my next film, we took that much farther. 
Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. 
And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience — although we did make a little more money on that one. 
So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, "" This is going to be a whole new world, "" this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. 
So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. 
And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. 
And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while. 
But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. 
So, I wrote this piece called "" Avatar, "" which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. 
And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while. 
So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. 
(Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "" 'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "" It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film. "" Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "" Titanic. "" And that's why I made the movie. 
(Applause) And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. 
But I convinced them. I said, "" We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. 
We'll be using it in the opening of the film. 
It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook. "" And I talked them into funding an expedition. 
(Laughter) Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. 
Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. 
Not a movie, not HD — for real. 
(Applause) Now, that blew my mind. 
And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. 
But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. 
You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. 
You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. 
And I thought like, "" Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. 
This is really cool. "" And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. 
Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it — it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. 
And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. 
Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. 
As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them. 
So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. 
And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. 
After the success of "" Titanic, "" I said, "" OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while. "" And so, we started planning these expeditions. 
And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. 
We went back to the Titanic wreck. 
We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. 
And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. 
Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it. 
So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. 
And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. 
When I say, "" I'm operating it, "" but my mind is in the vehicle. 
I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. 
And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. 
And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship. 
So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. 
And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience — that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. 
It was really, really quite profound. 
And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan. 
So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals — they're basically aliens right here on Earth. 
They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. 
They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. 
And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigrade water plumes. 
You think they can't possibly exist. 
At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well — again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. 
And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. 
And this was fascinating. 
But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. 
And taking them down so that they had access — astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments — taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on. 
So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. 
I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. 
And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. 
I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. 
Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing. 
I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. 
Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "" What am I doing out here? 
Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it? "" We don't make money at these damn shows. 
We barely break even. There is no fame in it. 
People sort of think I went away between "" Titanic "" and "" Avatar "" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. 
Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience. 
No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? 
You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge — and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is — for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. 
Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time. 
And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. 
When you come back to the shore and you say, "" We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea, "" you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. 
Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect. 
So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "" Avatar, "" I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. 
And it really changed the dynamic. 
So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "" Avatar, "" coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. 
Tremendously exciting. 
Tremendously challenging. 
And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. 
And it completely changed how I do movies. 
So, people have commented on how, "" Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora. "" To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that. 
So, what can we synthesize out of all this? 
You know, what are the lessons learned? 
Well, I think number one is curiosity. 
It's the most powerful thing you own. 
Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. 
And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. 
I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "" Give me some advice for doing this. "" And I say, "" Don't put limitations on yourself. 
Other people will do that for you — don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks. "" NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." 
But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. 
And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. 
You have to be willing to take those risks. 
So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias. 
I document what these groups do when they're not shooting. 
My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation. 
I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library. 
Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed. 
It used to be a contest between states. 
No longer. 
It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors. 
For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor. 
So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful. 
So how do we do that? 
We need to know what makes these organizations tick. 
We know a lot about how they fight, why they fight, but no one looks at what they're doing when they're not fighting. 
Yet, armed struggle and unarmed politics are related. 
It is all part of the same organization. 
We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture. 
And armed groups today are complex organizations. 
Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel. 
But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus. 
Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007. 
So these groups do way more than just shoot. 
They multi-task. 
They set up complex communication machines — radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies. 
And up here, you have the ISIS magazine, printed in English and published to recruit. 
Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising — not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies. 
Now, these activities are keys. 
They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand. 
Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services. 
They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs. 
Hezbollah offers all of these services and more. 
Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security. 
The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security. 
Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population. 
But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength and their power. 
For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work. 
Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side. 
But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision. 
These groups are hybrid. 
They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance. 
And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state. 
Now, what do you call a group like Hezbollah? 
They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions, they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system. 
Is this a state? Is it a rebel group? 
Or maybe something else, something different and new? 
And what about ISIS? 
The lines are blurred. 
We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap. 
This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools. 
Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach. 
This also matters very much for peacemaking and peacebuilding. 
If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence. 
So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability. 
To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

Chris Anderson: William, hi. Good to see you. 
William Kamkwamba: Thanks. 
CA: So, we've got a picture, I think? Where is this? 
WK: This is my home. This is where I live. 
CA: Where? What country? 
WK: In Malawi, Kasungu. In Kasungu. Yeah, Mala. 
CA: OK. Now, you're 19 now? 
WK: Yeah. I'm 19 years now. 
CA: Five years ago you had an idea. What was that? 
WK: I wanted to make a windmill. 
CA: A windmill? 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: What, to power — for lighting and stuff? 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: So what did you do? How did you realize that? 
WK: After I dropped out of school, I went to library, and I read a book that would — "" Using Energy, "" and I get information about doing the mill. 
And I tried, and I made it. 
(Applause) CA: So you copied — you exactly copied the design in the book. 
WK: Ah, no. I just — CA: What happened? 
WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four — ah — three blades, and mine has got four blades. 
CA: The book had three, yours had four. 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: And you made it out of what? 
WK: I made four blades, just because I want to increase power. 
CA: OK. 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: You tested three, and found that four worked better? 
WK: Yeah. I test. 
CA: And what did you make the windmill out of? 
What materials did you use? 
WK: I use a bicycle frame, and a pulley, and plastic pipe, what then pulls — CA: Do we have a picture of that? Can we have the next slide? 
WK: Yeah. The windmill. 
CA: And so, and that windmill, what — it worked? 
WK: When the wind blows, it rotates and generates. 
CA: How much electricity? 
WK: 12 watts. 
CA: And so, that lit a light for the house? How many lights? 
WK: Four bulbs and two radios. 
CA: Wow. 
WK: Yeah. 
(Applause) CA: Next slide — so who's that? 
WK: This is my parents, holding the radio. 
CA: So what did they make of — that you were 14, 15 at the time — what did they make of this? They were impressed? 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: And so what's your — what are you going to do with this? 
WK: Um — CA: What do you — I mean — do you want to build another one? 
WK: Yeah, I want to build another one — to pump water and irrigation for crops. 
CA: So this one would have to be bigger? 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: How big? 
WK: I think it will produce more than 20 the watts. 
CA: So that would produce irrigation for the entire village? 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: Wow. And so you're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream? 
WK: Yeah, if they can help me with materials, yeah. 
CA: And as you think of your life going forward, you're 19 now, do you picture continuing with this dream of working in energy? 
WK: Yeah. I'm still thinking to work on energy. 
CA: Wow. William, it's a real honor to have you at the TED conference. 
Thank you so much for coming. 
WK: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Over our lifetimes, we've all contributed to climate change. 
Actions, choices and behaviors will have led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. 
And I think that that's quite a powerful thought. 
But it does have the potential to make us feel guilty when we think about decisions we might have made around where to travel to, how often and how, about the energy that we choose to use in our homes or in our workplaces, or quite simply the lifestyles that we lead and enjoy. 
But we can also turn that thought on its head, and think that if we've had such a profound but a negative impact on our climate already, then we have an opportunity to influence the amount of future climate change that we will need to adapt to. 
So we have a choice. 
We can either choose to start to take climate change seriously, and significantly cut and mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions, and then we will have to adapt to less of the climate change impacts in future. 
Alternatively, we can continue to really ignore the climate change problem. 
But if we do that, we are also choosing to adapt to very much more powerful climate impacts in future. 
And not only that. 
As people who live in countries with high per capita emissions, we're making that choice on behalf of others as well. 
But the choice that we don't have is a no climate change future. 
Over the last two decades, our government negotiators and policymakers have been coming together to discuss climate change, and they've been focused on avoiding a two-degree centigrade warming above pre-industrial levels. 
That's the temperature that's associated with dangerous impacts across a range of different indicators, to humans and to the environment. 
So two degrees centigrade constitutes dangerous climate change. 
But dangerous climate change can be subjective. 
So if we think about an extreme weather event that might happen in some part of the world, and if that happens in a part of the world where there is good infrastructure, where there are people that are well-insured and so on, then that impact can be disruptive. 
It can cause upset, it could cause cost. 
It could even cause some deaths. 
But if that exact same weather event happens in a part of the world where there is poor infrastructure, or where people are not well-insured, or they're not having good support networks, then that same climate change impact could be devastating. 
It could cause a significant loss of home, but it could also cause significant amounts of death. 
So this is a graph of the CO2 emissions at the left-hand side from fossil fuel and industry, and time from before the Industrial Revolution out towards the present day. 
And what's immediately striking about this is that emissions have been growing exponentially. 
If we focus in on a shorter period of time from 1950, we have established in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, then rolling on a few years, in 2009 we had the Copenhagen Accord, where it established avoiding a two-degree temperature rise in keeping with the science and on the basis of equity. 
And then in 2012, we had the Rio + 20 event. 
And all the way through, during all of these meetings and many others as well, emissions have continued to rise. 
And if we focus on our historical emission trend in recent years, and we put that together with our understanding of the direction of travel in our global economy, then we are much more on track for a four-degree centigrade global warming than we are for the two-degree centigrade. 
Now, let's just pause for a moment and think about this four-degree global average temperature. 
Most of our planet is actually made up of the sea. 
Now, because the sea has a greater thermal inertia than the land, the average temperatures over land are actually going to be higher than they are over the sea. 
The second thing is that we as human beings don't experience global average temperatures. 
We experience hot days, cold days, rainy days, especially if you live in Manchester like me. 
So now put yourself in a city center. 
Imagine somewhere in the world: Mumbai, Beijing, New York, London. 
It's the hottest day that you've ever experienced. 
There's sun beating down, there's concrete and glass all around you. 
Now imagine that same day — but it's six, eight, maybe 10 to 12 degrees warmer on that day during that heat wave. 
That's the kind of thing we're going to experience under a four-degree global average temperature scenario. 
And the problem with these extremes, and not just the temperature extremes, but also the extremes in terms of storms and other climate impacts, is our infrastructure is just not set up to deal with these sorts of events. 
So our roads and our rail networks have been designed to last for a long time and withstand only certain amounts of impacts in different parts of the world. 
And this is going to be extremely challenged. 
Our power stations are expected to be cooled by water to a certain temperature to remain effective and resilient. 
And our buildings are designed to be comfortable within a particular temperature range. 
And this is all going to be significantly challenged under a four-degree-type scenario. 
Our infrastructure has not been designed to cope with this. 
So if we go back, also thinking about four degrees, it's not just the direct impacts, but also some indirect impacts. 
So if we take food security, for example. 
Maize and wheat yields in some parts of the world are expected to be up to 40 percent lower under a four-degree scenario, rice up to 30 percent lower. 
This will be absolutely devastating for global food security. 
So all in all, the kinds of impacts anticipated under this four-degree centigrade scenario are going to be incompatible with global organized living. 
So back to our trajectories and our graphs of four degrees and two degrees. 
Is it reasonable still to focus on the two-degree path? 
There are quite a lot of my colleagues and other scientists who would say that it's now too late to avoid a two-degree warming. 
But I would just like to draw on my own research on energy systems, on food systems, aviation and also shipping, just to say that I think there is still a small fighting chance of avoiding this two-degree dangerous climate change. 
But we really need to get to grips with the numbers to work out how to do it. 
So if you focus in on this trajectory and these graphs, the yellow circle there highlights that the departure from the red four-degree pathway to the two-degree green pathway is immediate. 
And that's because of cumulative emissions, or the carbon budget. 
So in other words, because of the lights and the projectors that are on in this room right now, the CO2 that is going into our atmosphere as a result of that electricity consumption lasts a very long time. 
Some of it will be in our atmosphere for a century, maybe much longer. 
It will accumulate, and greenhouse gases tend to be cumulative. 
And that tells us something about these trajectories. 
First of all, it tells us that it's the area under these curves that matter, not where we reach at a particular date in future. 
And that's important, because it doesn't matter if we come up with some amazing whiz-bang technology to sort out our energy problem on the last day of 2049, just in the nick of time to sort things out. 
Because in the meantime, emissions will have accumulated. 
So if we continue on this red, four-degree centigrade scenario pathway, the longer we continue on it, that will need to be made up for in later years to keep the same carbon budget, to keep the same area under the curve, which means that that trajectory, the red one there, becomes steeper. 
So in other words, if we don't reduce emissions in the short to medium term, then we'll have to make more significant year-on-year emission reductions. 
We also know that we have to decarbonize our energy system. 
But if we don't start to cut emissions in the short to medium term, then we will have to do that even sooner. 
So this poses really big challenges for us. 
The other thing it does is tells us something about energy policy. 
If you live in a part of the world where per capita emissions are already high, it points us towards reducing energy demand. 
And that's because with all the will in the world, the large-scale engineering infrastructure that we need to roll out rapidly to decarbonize the supply side of our energy system is just simply not going to happen in time. 
So it doesn't matter whether we choose nuclear power or carbon capture and storage, upscale our biofuel production, or go for a much bigger roll-out of wind turbines and wave turbines. 
All of that will take time. 
So because it's the area under the curve that matters, we need to focus on energy efficiency, but also on energy conservation — in other words, using less energy. 
And if we do that, that also means that as we continue to roll out the supply-side technology, we will have less of a job to do if we've actually managed to reduce our energy consumption, because we will then need less infrastructure on the supply side. 
Another issue that we really need to grapple with is the issue of well-being and equity. 
There are many parts of the world where the standard of living needs to rise. 
Bbut with energy systems currently reliant on fossil fuel, as those economies grow so will emissions. 
And now, if we're all constrained by the same amount of carbon budget, that means that if some parts of the world's emissions are needing to rise, then other parts of the world's emissions need to reduce. 
So that poses very significant challenges for wealthy nations. 
Because according to our research, if you're in a country where per capita emissions are really high — so North America, Europe, Australia — emissions reductions of the order of 10 percent per year, and starting immediately, will be required for a good chance of avoiding the two-degree target. 
Let me just put that into context. 
The economist Nicholas Stern said that emission reductions of more than one percent per year had only ever been associated with economic recession or upheaval. 
So this poses huge challenges for the issue of economic growth, because if we have our high carbon infrastructure in place, it means that if our economies grow, then so do our emissions. 
So I'd just like to take a quote from a paper by myself and Kevin Anderson back in 2011 where we said that to avoid the two-degree framing of dangerous climate change, economic growth needs to be exchanged at least temporarily for a period of planned austerity in wealthy nations. 
This is a really difficult message to take, because what it suggests is that we really need to do things differently. 
This is not about just incremental change. 
This is about doing things differently, about whole system change, and sometimes it's about doing less things. 
And this applies to all of us, whatever sphere of influence we have. 
So it could be from writing to our local politician to talking to our boss at work or being the boss at work, or talking with our friends and family, or, quite simply, changing our lifestyles. 
Because we really need to make significant change. 
At the moment, we're choosing a four-degree scenario. 
If we really want to avoid the two-degree scenario, there really is no time like the present to act. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Alice, basically what you're saying, the talk is, unless wealthy nations start cutting 10 percent per year the emissions now, this year, not in 2020 or '25, we are going to go straight to the four-plus-degree scenario. 
I am wondering what's your take on the cut by 70 percent for 2070. 
Alice Bows-Larkin: Yeah, it's just nowhere near enough to avoid two degrees. 
One of the things that often — when there are these modeling studies that look at what we need to do, is they tend to hugely overestimate how quickly other countries in the world can start to reduce emissions. 
So they make kind of heroic assumptions about that. 
The more we do that, because it's the cumulative emissions, the short-term stuff that really matters. 
So it does make a huge difference. 
If a big country like China, for example, continues to grow even for just a few extra years, that will make a big difference to when we need to decarbonize. 
So I don't think we can even say when it will be, because it all depends on what we have to do in the short term. 
But I think we've just got huge scope, and we don't pull those levers that allow us to reduce the energy demand, which is a shame. 
ABL: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What do we know about the future? 
Difficult question, simple answer: nothing. 
We cannot predict the future. 
We only can create a vision of the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptive ideas, which is inspiring, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking. 
There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future, for instance, this vision here from the early 20th century. 
It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future. 
It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. 
Today, we know that this future vision didn't come true. 
So this is our largest airplane which we have, the Airbus A380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision I've shown to you. 
I'm working in a team with Airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation. 
So sustainability is quite important for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values. 
So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature. 
So that's why it looks maybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who deal with structures in general. 
But at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future. 
What are the main customers of the future? 
So, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trend which affects all of us. 
These are the future anthropometrics. 
So our children are getting larger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. 
So what we need is space inside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. 
These people have different needs. 
So we see a clear need of active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. 
We want to be treated as individuals. 
We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain, and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface, and we want to integrate this and show this in one product. 
So we combined these needs with technology's themes. 
So for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? 
How can we bring more natural light into the airplane? 
What about the data and communication software which we need in the future? 
My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness. 
It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology. 
This will be very different in the future. 
It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. 
And then we are talking also about materials, synthetic biology, for example. 
And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on, because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design. 
So let's compare the old world with the new world. 
I just want to show you here what we are doing today. 
It takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules. 
This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose. 
It follows the design of bone. 
The design process is completely different. 
At the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. 
So this technology, 3D printing, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issue in aircraft design, because it's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions. 
So nature is very clever. It puts all the information into these small building blocks, which we call DNA. 
And nature builds large skeletons out of it. 
So we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information, as I said, are inside the DNA. 
And this is combined with a top-down approach, because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles, we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. 
So our building block is carbon nanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day. 
How this looks in particular, you can show it here. 
So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component. 
And you've got trillions of them. 
So you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and make morphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data. 
And now we take this material, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components. 
So how might the airplane of the future look? 
So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. 
We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. 
And finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane, will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future. 
So as Jason Silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? 
See you in the future. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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. 
And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. 
(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. 
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. 
(Laughter) Let's pause 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 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. 
(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. 
(Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) 
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. 
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. 
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. 
In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. 
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. 
The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. 
Green means the student's already proficient. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
Tell me what you're thinking there. 
(Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? 
Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" 
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. 
(Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. 
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? 
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. 
(Applause) 

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

This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo. 
But it's also a fiction. There's a lot of work that went into it after that. 
And what he's done is he's actually reshaped, digitally, all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones index. 
So what you see, that precipice, that high precipice with the valley, is the 2008 financial crisis. 
The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there. 
I don't know where we are now. 
This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong. 
And similar topography. 
I wonder why. 
And this is art. This is metaphor. 
But I think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth, and it's with those teeth that I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math — not just financial math, but math in general. 
That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it — the world around us and the world inside us. 
And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. 
They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real. 
And I was thinking about this, of all places, on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago, because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary. 
And I said, "" So what were you doing? "" And he said, "" Well we were mostly breaking stealth. "" And I said, "" That's a good job. That's interesting. 
How does that work? "" And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works. 
And so — this is an over-simplification — but basically, it's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky. 
It's not just going to disappear. 
But if you can take this big, massive thing, and you could turn it into a million little things — something like a flock of birds — well then the radar that's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky. 
And if you're a radar, that's a really bad job. 
And he said, "" Yeah. "" He said, "" But that's if you're a radar. 
So we didn't use a radar; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals, electronic communication. 
And whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication, we thought, 'Probably has something to do with the Americans.' "" And I said, "" Yeah. 
That's good. 
So you've effectively negated 60 years of aeronautic research. 
What's your act two? 
What do you do when you grow up? "" And he said, "Well, financial services." 
And I said, "" Oh. "" Because those had been in the news lately. 
And I said, "" How does that work? "" And he said, "" Well there's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now, and I'm one of them. "" And I said, "" What's the black box for Wall Street? "" And he said, "" It's funny you ask that, because it's actually called black box trading. 
And it's also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading. "" And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had, which is that they're moving these positions — whether it's Proctor & Gamble or Accenture, whatever — they're moving a million shares of something through the market. 
And if they do that all at once, it's like playing poker and going all in right away. 
You just tip your hand. 
And so they have to find a way — and they use algorithms to do this — to break up that big thing into a million little transactions. 
And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market. 
So if you need to have some image of what's happening in the stock market right now, what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide, and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act. 
And all of that's great, and it's fine. 
And that's 70 percent of the United States stock market, 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension, your mortgage. 
And what could go wrong? 
What could go wrong is that a year ago, nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes, and they called it the Flash Crash of 2: 45. 
All of a sudden, nine percent just goes away, and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it, nobody asked for it. 
Nobody had any control over what was actually happening. 
All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said, "" Stop. "" And that's the thing, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read. 
And we've rendered something illegible, and we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world that we've made. 
And we're starting to make our way. 
There's a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don't know what, and they reach into all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. 
And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. 
And they do what we've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don't understand — which is that they give them a name and a story. 
So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. 
And the gag is that, of course, these aren't just running through the market. 
You can find these kinds of things wherever you look, once you learn how to look for them. 
You can find it here: this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon. 
You may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars. 
It's out of print — still... 
(Laughter) If you had bought it at 1.7, it would have been a bargain. 
A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling. 
And the question is: Nobody was buying or selling anything; what was happening? 
And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street. 
And when you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other, without any human oversight, without any adult supervision to say, "" Actually, 1.7 million is plenty. "" (Laughter) And as with Amazon, so it is with Netflix. 
And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years. 
They started with Cinematch, and they've tried a bunch of others — there's Dinosaur Planet; there's Gravity. 
They're using Pragmatic Chaos now. 
Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing. 
It's trying to get a grasp on you, on the firmware inside the human skull, so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next — which is a very, very difficult problem. 
But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don't really quite have it down, it doesn't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has. 
Pragmatic Chaos, like all Netflix algorithms, determines, in the end, 60 percent of what movies end up being rented. 
So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies. 
But what if you could rate those movies before they get made? 
Wouldn't that be handy? 
Well, a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood, and they have "" story algorithms "" — a company called Epagogix. 
And you can run your script through there, and they can tell you, quantifiably, that that's a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie. 
And the thing is, is that this isn't Google. 
This isn't information. 
These aren't financial stats; this is culture. 
And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. 
And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know? 
What would it look like? 
And they're in your house. They're in your house. 
These are two algorithms competing for your living room. 
These are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means. 
And you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them, and they're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom. 
And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched. 
It's super-real and it's happening around you. 
You feel it most when you're in a sealed metal box, a new-style elevator; they're called destination-control elevators. 
These are the ones where you have to press what floor you're going to go to before you get in the elevator. 
And it uses what's called a bin-packing algorithm. 
So none of this mishegas of letting everybody go into whatever car they want. 
Everybody who wants to go to the 10th floor goes into car two, and everybody who wants to go to the third floor goes into car five. 
And the problem with that is that people freak out. 
People panic. 
And you see why. You see why. 
It's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation, like the buttons. 
(Laughter) Like the things that people use. 
All it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says, "" Stop. "" And this is what we're designing for. 
We're designing for this machine dialect. 
And how far can you take that? How far can you take it? 
You can take it really, really far. 
So let me take it back to Wall Street. 
Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else, which is speed. 
And they operate on milliseconds and microseconds. 
And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. 
But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser. 
So if you were an algorithm, you'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper — throwing out all the furniture, all the infrastructure for human use, and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in — all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet. 
And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system. 
And of course, it is, but it's distributed from places. 
In New York, this is where it's distributed from: the Carrier Hotel located on Hudson Street. 
And this is really where the wires come right up into the city. 
And the reality is that the further away you are from that, you're a few microseconds behind every time. 
These guys down on Wall Street, Marco Polo and Cherokee Nation, they're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the Carrier Hotel. 
And that's going to keep happening. 
We're going to keep hollowing them out, because you, inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could. 
But if you zoom out, if you zoom out, you would see an 825-mile trench between New York City and Chicago that's been built over the last few years by a company called Spread Networks. 
This is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse — just for these algorithms, just for the Carnival and the Knife. 
And when you think about this, that we're running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know, that's a kind of manifest destiny; and we'll always look for a new frontier. 
Unfortunately, we have our work cut out for us. 
This is just theoretical. 
This is some mathematicians at MIT. 
And the truth is I don't really understand a lot of what they're talking about. 
It involves light cones and quantum entanglement, and I don't really understand any of that. 
But I can read this map, and what this map says is that, if you're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are, that's where people are, where the cities are, you're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively. 
And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean. 
So that's what we'll do: we'll build bubbles or something, or platforms. 
We'll actually part the water to pull money out of the air, because it's a bright future if you're an algorithm. 
(Laughter) And it's not the money that's so interesting actually. 
It's what the money motivates, that we're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency. 
And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar's photographs, and you realize that they're not metaphor, they're prophecy. 
They're prophecy for the kind of seismic, terrestrial effects of the math that we're making. 
And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird, uneasy collaboration between nature and man. 
But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms — the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival. 
And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Namaste. Salaam. 
Shalom. Sat Sri Akal. 
Greetings to all of you from Pakistan. 
It is often said that we fear that which we do not know. 
And Pakistan, in this particular vein, is very similar. 
Because it has provoked, and does provoke, a visceral anxiety in the bellies of many a Western soul, especially when viewed through the monochromatic lens of turbulence and turmoil. 
But there are many other dimensions to Pakistan. 
And what follows is a stream of images, a series of images captured by some of Pakistan's most dynamic and young photographers, that aims to give you an alternative glimpse, a look inside the hearts and minds of some ordinary Pakistani citizens. 
Here are some of the stories they wanted us to share with you. 
My name is Abdul Khan. I come from Peshawar. 
I hope that you will be able to see not just my Taliban-like beard, but also the richness and color of my perceptions, aspirations and dreams, as rich and colorful as the satchels that I sell. 
My name is Meher and this is my friend Irim. 
I hope to become a vet when I grow up so that I can take care of stray cats and dogs who wander around the streets of the village that I live near Gilgit, northern Pakistan. 
My name is Kailash. And I like to enrich lives through technicolored glass. 
Madame, would you like some of those orange bangles with the pink polka dots? 
My name is Zamin. 
And I'm an IDP, an internally displaced person, from Swat. 
Do you see me on the other side of this fence? 
Do I matter, or really exist for you? 
My name is Iman. I am a fashion model, an up-and-coming model from Lahore. 
Do you see me simply smothered in cloth? 
Or can you move beyond my veil and see me for who I truly am inside? 
My name is Ahmed. I am an Afghan refugee from the Khyber agency. 
I have come from a place of intense darkness. 
And that is why I want to illuminate the world. 
My name is Papusay. 
My heart and drum beat as one. 
If religion is the opium of the masses, then for me, music is my one and only ganja. 
A rising tide lifts all boats. 
And the rising tide of India's spectacular economic growth has lifted over 400 million Indians into a buoyant middle class. 
But there are still over 650 million Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, who remain washed up on the shores of poverty. 
Therefore as India and Pakistan, as you and I, it behooves us to transcend our differences, to celebrate our diversity, to leverage our common humanity. 
Our collective vision at Naya Jeevan, which for many of you, as you all recognize, means "" new life "" in Urdu and Hindi, is to rejuvenate the lives of millions of low income families by providing them with affordable access to catastrophic health care. 
Indeed it is the emerging world's first HMO for the urban working poor. 
Why should we do this as Indians and Pakistanis? 
We are but two threads cut from the same cloth. 
And if our fates are intertwined, then we believe that it is good karma, it is good fortune. 
And for many of us, our fortunes do indeed lie at the bottom of the pyramid. Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Fantastic. Just stay up here. 
That was fantastic. 
I found that really moving. 
You know, we fought hard to get at least a small Pakistani contingent to come. 
It felt like it was really important. 
They went through a lot to get here. 
Would the Pakistanis please just stand up please? 
I just really wanted to acknowledge you. 
(Applause) Thank you so much. 

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

This is Revolution 2.0. 
No one was a hero. No one was a hero. 
Because everyone was a hero. 
Everyone has done something. 
We all use Wikipedia. 
If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content, and at the end of the day you've built the largest encyclopedia in the world. 
From just an idea that sounded crazy, you have the largest encyclopedia in the world. 
And in the Egyptian revolution, the Revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something, small or big. They contributed something — to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions. 
It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing. 
If you look at the scene, Egypt, for 30 years, had been in a downhill — going into a downhill. 
Everything was going bad. 
Everything was going wrong. 
We only ranked high when it comes to poverty, corruption, lack of freedom of speech, lack of political activism. 
Those were the achievements of our great regime. 
Yet, nothing was happening. 
And it's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated. 
In fact, people were extremely frustrated. 
But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear. 
Everyone was scared. 
Not everyone. There were actually a few brave Egyptians that I have to thank for being so brave — going into protests as a couple of hundred, getting beaten up and arrested. 
But in fact, the majority were scared. 
Everyone did not want really to get in trouble. 
A dictator cannot live without the force. 
They want to make people live in fear. 
And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years, and here comes the Internet, technology, BlackBerry, SMS. 
It's helping all of us to connect. 
Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that, "" Wow, I'm not alone. 
There are a lot of people who are frustrated. "" There are lots of people who are frustrated. 
There are lots of people who actually share the same dream. 
There are lots of people who care about their freedom. 
They probably have the best life in the world. 
They are living in happiness. They are living in their villas. 
They are happy. They don't have problems. 
But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian. 
A lot of us, we're not really happy when we see a video of an Egyptian man who's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of Egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country. 
The Internet has played a great role, helping these people to speak up their minds, to collaborate together, to start thinking together. 
It was an educational campaign. 
Khaled Saeed was killed in June 2010. 
I still remember the photo. 
I still remember every single detail of that photo. 
The photo was horrible. 
He was tortured, brutally tortured to death. 
But then what was the answer of the regime? 
"" He choked on a pile of hash "" — that was their answer: "" He's a criminal. 
He's someone who escaped from all these bad things. "" But people did not relate to this. 
People did not believe this. 
Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth. 
And everyone started to think that "" this guy could be my brother. "" He was a middle-class guy. 
His photo was remembered by all of us. 
A page was created. 
An anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page, and there was no plan. 
"What are we going to do?" "I don't know." 
In a few days, tens of thousands of people there — angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs, "" Enough. 
Get those who killed this guy. 
To just bring them to justice. "" But of course, they don't listen. 
It was an amazing story — how everyone started feeling the ownership. 
Everyone was an owner in this page. 
People started contributing ideas. 
In fact, one of the most ridiculous ideas was, "" Hey, let's have a silent stand. 
Let's get people to go in the street, face the sea, their back to the street, dressed in black, standing up silently for one hour, doing nothing and then just leaving, going back home. "" For some people, that was like, "" Wow, silent stand. 
And next time it's going to be vibration. "" People were making fun of the idea. 
But actually when people went to the street — the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria — it felt like — it was amazing. It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream, the same frustration, the same anger, the same desire for freedom. 
And they were doing this thing. 
But did the regime learn anything? Not really. 
They were actually attacking them. 
They were actually abusing them, despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were — they were not even protesting. 
And things had developed until the Tunisian revolution. 
This whole page was, again, managed by the people. 
In fact, the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas, help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing. 
People were taking shots and photos; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt; people were suggesting ideas, they were actually voting on ideas, and then they were executing the ideas; people were creating videos. 
Everything was done by the people to the people, and that's the power of the Internet. 
There was no leader. 
The leader was everyone on that page. 
The Tunisian experiment, as Amir was saying, inspired all of us, showed us that there is a way. 
Yes we can. We can do it. 
We have the same problems; we can just go in the streets. 
And when I saw the street on the 25th, I went back and said, "" Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th. 
The revolution is happening. 
This is not the end, this is the beginning of the end. "" I was detained on the 27th night. 
Thank God I announced the locations and everything. 
But they detained me. 
And I'm not going to talk about my experience, because this is not about me. 
I was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed. 
And I did not really hear anything. I did not know anything. 
I was not allowed to speak with anyone. 
And I went out. 
The next day I was in Tahrir. 
Seriously, with the amount of change I had noticed in this square, I thought it was 12 years. 
I never had in my mind to see this Egyptian, the amazing Egyptian. 
The fear is no longer fear. 
It's actually strength — it's power. 
People were so empowered. 
It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights. 
Completely opposite. 
Extremism became tolerance. 
Who would [have] imagined before the 25th, if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them, and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of Christians are going to protect them — this is amazing. 
All the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda, or mainstream media, are proven wrong. 
This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man, the Egyptian woman, how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream. 
When I saw that, I went back and I wrote on Facebook. 
And that was a personal belief, regardless of what's going on, regardless of the details. 
I said that, "" We are going to win. 
We are going to win because we don't understand politics. 
We're going to win because we don't play their dirty games. 
We're going to win because we don't have an agenda. 
We're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. 
We're going to win because we have dreams. 
We're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams. "" And that's actually what happened. We won. 
And that's not because of anything, but because we believed in our dream. 
The winning here is not the whole details of what's going to happen in the political scene. 
The winning is the winning of the dignity of every single Egyptian. 
Actually, I had this taxi driver telling me, "" Listen, I am breathing freedom. 
I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years. "" For me that's winning, regardless of all the details. 
My last word to you is a statement I believe in, which Egyptians have proven to be true, that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power. 
Thanks a lot. 
(Applause) 

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) 

I would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs, but not the cyborgs that you think. 
You're not RoboCop, and you're not Terminator, but you're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices. 
So what's a good definition for cyborg? 
Well, traditional definition is "" an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments. "" That came from a 1960 paper on space travel, because, if you think about it, space is pretty awkward. 
People aren't supposed to be there. 
But humans are curious, and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the Alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next. 
So let's look at the concept of traditional anthropology. 
Somebody goes to another country, says, "" How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curious their culture is. "" And then they write a paper, and maybe a few other anthropologists read it, and we think it's very exotic. 
Well, what's happening is that we've suddenly found a new species. 
I, as a cyborg anthropologist, have suddenly said, "" Oh, wow. Now suddenly we're a new form of Homo sapiens, and look at these fascinating cultures, and look at these curious rituals that everybody's doing around this technology. 
They're clicking on things and staring at screens. "" Now there's a reason why I study this, versus traditional anthropology. 
And the reason is that tool use, in the beginning — for thousands and thousands of years, everything has been a physical modification of self. 
It has helped us to extend our physical selves, go faster, hit things harder, and there's been a limit on that. 
But now what we're looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an extension of the mental self, and because of that, we're able to travel faster, communicate differently. 
And the other thing that happens is that we're all carrying around little Mary Poppins technology. 
We can put anything we want into it, and it doesn't get heavier, and then we can take anything out. 
What does the inside of your computer actually look like? 
Well, if you print it out, it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you're carrying around all the time. 
And if you actually lose that information, it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind, that you suddenly feel like something's missing, except you aren't able to see it, so it feels like a very strange emotion. 
The other thing that happens is that you have a second self. 
Whether you like it or not, you're starting to show up online, and people are interacting with your second self when you're not there. 
And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night — because it's very much the equivalent. 
And suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self. 
You have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life. 
So, in the same way that you wake up, take a shower and get dressed, you have to learn to do that for your digital self. 
And the problem is that a lot of people now, especially adolescents, have to go through two adolescences. 
They have to go through their primary one, that's already awkward, and then they go through their second self's adolescence, and that's even more awkward because there's an actual history of what they've gone through online. 
And anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now, and so it's very awkward, and it's very difficult for them to do those things. 
So when I was little, my dad would sit me down at night and he would say, "I'm going to teach you about time and space in the future." 
And I said, "" Great. "" And he said one day, "" What's the shortest distance between two points? "" And I said, "" Well, that's a straight line. You told me that yesterday. "" I thought I was very clever. 
He said, "" No, no, no. Here's a better way. "" He took a piece of paper, drew A and B on one side and the other and folded them together so where A and B touched. 
And he said, "" That is the shortest distance between two points. "" And I said, "" Dad, dad, dad, how do you do that? "" He said, "" Well, you just bend time and space, it takes an awful lot of energy, and that's just how you do it. "" And I said, "" I want to do that. "" And he said, "" Well, okay. "" And so, when I went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years, I was thinking at night, "" I want to be the first person to create a wormhole, to make things accelerate faster. 
And I want to make a time machine. "" I was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders. 
But then what I realized when I went to college is that technology doesn't just get adopted because it works. 
It gets adopted because people use it and it's made for humans. 
So I started studying anthropology. 
And when I was writing my thesis on cell phones, I realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets. 
They weren't physically transporting themselves; they were mentally transporting themselves. 
They would click on a button, and they would be connected as A to B immediately. 
And I thought, "" Oh, wow. I found it. This is great. "" So over time, time and space have compressed because of this. 
You can stand on one side of the world, whisper something and be heard on the other. 
One of the other ideas that comes around is that you have a different type of time on every single device that you use. 
Every single browser tab gives you a different type of time. 
And because of that, you start to dig around for your external memories — where did you leave them? 
So now we're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we've lost on our external brains that we're carrying around in our pockets. 
And that incites a sort of panic architecture — "Oh no, where's this thing?" 
We're all "" I Love Lucy "" on a great assembly line of information, and we can't keep up. 
And so what happens is, when we bring all that into the social space, we end up checking our phones all the time. 
So we have this thing called ambient intimacy. 
It's not that we're always connected to everybody, but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want. 
And if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone, the room would be very crowded. 
These are the people that you have access to right now, in general — all of these people, all of your friends and family that you can connect to. 
And so there are some psychological effects that happen with this. 
One I'm really worried about is that people aren't taking time for mental reflection anymore, and that they aren't slowing down and stopping, being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces, paleontology and panic architecture. 
They're not just sitting there. 
And really, when you have no external input, that is a time when there is a creation of self, when you can do long-term planning, when you can try and figure out who you really are. 
And then, once you do that, you can figure out how to present your second self in a legitimate way, instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in — and oh, I have to do this, and I have to do this, and I have to do this. 
And so this is very important. 
I'm really worried that, especially kids today, they're not going to be dealing with this down-time, that they have an instantaneous button-clicking culture, and that everything comes to them, and that they become very excited about it and very addicted to it. 
So if you think about it, the world hasn't stopped either. 
It has its own external prosthetic devices, and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other. 
But when you actually visualize it, all the connections that we're doing right now — this is an image of the mapping of the Internet — it doesn't look technological. 
It actually looks very organic. 
This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we've connected in this way. 
And it's not that machines are taking over. 
It's that they're helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other. 
The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives. 
And really, it ends up being more human than technology, because we're co-creating each other all the time. 
And so this is the important point that I like to study: that things are beautiful, that it's still a human connection — it's just done in a different way. 
We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other, regardless of geography. 
So that's why I study cyborg anthropology. 
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) 

And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. 
In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. 
Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. 
(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 some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. 
Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. 
Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. 
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. 
Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. 
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? 
This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. 
In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. 
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. 
Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. 
And we need to be working with these students. 
And this brings up mentors. 
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. 
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. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Oh — you have a question for me? OK. (Applause) 

This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. 
Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. 
Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. 
But fossil fuels, carbon — coal and gas — are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. 
Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. 
There's no other cause. 
And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert. 
But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. 
We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. 
On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. 
No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. 
And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. 
Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. 
Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. 
About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying. 
I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters — that's an inch of rain — was falling. 
Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. 
Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. 
The next day, the land looked like this. 
Where had that water gone? 
Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. 
Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. 
Carbon goes back to the atmosphere. 
Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. 
But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. 
That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form. 
Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. 
Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. 
Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. 
And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs. 
Well, I have news for you. 
We were once just as certain that the world was flat. 
We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. 
And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery. 
When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. 
Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. 
Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. 
Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. 
So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. 
They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. 
And it got worse, not better. 
Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. 
One good thing did come out of it. 
It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions. 
When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. 
And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. 
And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. 
So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. 
And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "" unknown processes. "" Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. 
We have never understood it. 
Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. 
You have changed the microclimate. 
Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. 
But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? 
Why has it accelerated lately? 
We had no understanding of that. 
What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. 
Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. 
Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed. 
This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. 
It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. 
And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. 
Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. 
Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. 
But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. 
And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. 
We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. 
Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? 
And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. 
Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. 
We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. 
And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. 
But before we began, our land looked like that. 
This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. 
Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. 
This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? 
And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. 
(Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. 
And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying. 
The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. 
The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. 
They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. 
We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. 
Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals. 
I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. 
What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. 
But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. 
And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels. 
I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. 
We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. 
I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris. 
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. 
I'm just going to ask you one quick question. 
When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? 
Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. 
But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. 
It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that. 
CA: Well, I would love to — I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. 
The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and — I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful. 
CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. 
Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. 
(Applause) 

The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources. 
While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral. 
I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer. 
Soon, I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house, and this is how it looks after three years. 
These forests, compared to a conventional plantation, grow 10 times faster, they're 30 times more dense, and 100 times more biodiverse. 
Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled. 
Quality of air became better, and we started harvesting seasonal fruits growing effortlessly right in the backyard of our house. 
I wanted to make more of these forests. 
I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business, so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests. 
But to make afforestation as a mainstream business or an industry, we had to standardize the process of forest-making. 
So we benchmarked the Toyota Production System known for its quality and efficiency for the process of forest-making. 
For an example, the core of TPS, Toyota Production System, lies in heijunka, which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line. 
We replaced these cars with trees, using which now we can make multi-layered forests. 

They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. 
The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people — to say, "" Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. 
So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. 
What can managers do — enlightened managers, hopefully — what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." 
And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. 
So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. 
Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff — tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. 
You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. 
So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. 
And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. 

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) 

So I tried to do a small good thing for my wife. 
It makes me to stand here, the fame, the money I got out of it. 
So what I did, I'd gone back to my early marriage days. 
What you did in the early marriage days, you tried to impress your wife. I did the same. 
On that occasion, I found my wife carrying something like this. 
I saw. "" What is that? "" I asked. 
My wife replied, "" None of your business. "" Then, being her husband, I ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth. 
I don't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler. 
Then I understood this — adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days. 
Then I immediately asked her, why are you [using] that unhygienic method? 
She replied, I also know about [sanitary pads], but myself and my sisters, if they start using that, we have to cut our family milk budget. 
Then I was shocked. What is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget? 
And it's called affordability. 
I tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads. 
I went to a local shop, I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet. 
That fellow looks left and right, and spreads a newspaper, rolls it into the newspaper, gives it to me like a banned item, something like that. 
I don't know why. I did not ask for a condom. 
Then I took that pad. I want to see that. What is inside it? 
The very first time, at the age of 29, that day I am touching the sanitary pad, first ever. 
I must know: How many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad? 
They are not going to touch that, because it's not your matter. 
Then I thought to myself, white substance, made of cotton — oh my God, that guy is just using a penny value of raw material — inside they are selling for pounds, dollars. 
Why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife? 
That's how all this started, but after making a sanitary pad, where can I check it? 
It's not like I can just check it in the lab. 
I need a woman volunteer. Where can I get one in India? 
Even in Bangalore you won't get [one], in India. 
So only problem: the only available victim is my wife. 
Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti — my wife's name is Shanti. 
"" Close your eyes. Whatever I give, it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring, even a chocolate, I will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it. 
Close your eyes. "" Because I tried to make it intimate. 
Because it's an arranged marriage, not a love marriage. 
(Laughter) So one day she said, openly, I'm not going to support this research. 
Then other victims, they got into my sisters. 
But even sisters, wives, they're not ready to support in the research. 
That's why I am always jealous with the saints in India. 
They are having a lot of women volunteers around them. 
Why I am not getting [any]? 
You know, without them even calling, they'll get a lot of women volunteers. 
Then I used, tried to use the medical college girls. 
They also refused. Finally, I decide, use sanitary pad myself. 
Now I am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon. 
Armstrong. Then Tenzing [and] Hillary, in Everest, like that Muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe. 
I wore a sanitary pad. I filled animal blood in a football bottle, I tied it up here, there is a tube going into my panties, while I'm walking, while I'm cycling, I made a press, doses of blood will go there. 
That makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect. That five days I'll never forget — the messy days, the lousy days, that wetness. 
My God, it's unbelievable. 
But here the problem is, one company is making napkin out of cotton. It is working well. 
But I am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton. It's not working. 
That makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research. 
You need first funds. 
Not only financial crises, but because of the sanitary pad research, I come through all sorts of problems, including a divorce notice from my wife. 
Why is this? I used medical college girls. 
She suspects I am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls. 
Finally, I came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood, but even after that, you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material. Again, a stop-up. 
Then I spend another four years to create my own machine tools, a simple machine tool like this. 
In this machine, any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant, anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall. 
That is my invention. 
So after that, what I did, usually if anyone got a patent or an invention, immediately you want to make, convert into this. 
I never did this. I dropped it just like this, because you do this, if anyone runs after money, their life will not [have] any beauty. It is boredom. 
A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. 
Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? 
Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy? 
What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one? 
That's why I am giving this machine only in rural India, for rural women, because in India, [you'll be] surprised, only two percent of women are using sanitary pads. The rest, they're using a rag cloth, a leaf, husk, [saw] dust, everything except sanitary pads. 
It is the same in the 21st century. That's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India. 
So far, 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries. 
Now I'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational, transnational giants — makes all MBA students a question mark. 
A school dropout from Coimbatore, how he is able to sustaining? 
That makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all IIMs. 
(Applause) Play video one. 
(Video) Arunachalam Muruganantham: The thing I saw in my wife's hand, "" Why are you using that nasty cloth? "" She replied immediately, "" I know about napkins, but if I start using napkins, then we have to cut our family milk budget. "" Why not make myself a low-cost napkin? 
So I decided I'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups. 
That is my idea. 
AM: And previously, you need a multimillion investment for machine and all. Now, any rural woman can. 
They are performing puja. 
(Video): (Singing) You just think, competing giants, even from Harvard, Oxford, is difficult. 
I make a rural woman to compete with multinationals. 
I'm sustaining on seventh year. 
Already 600 installations. What is my mission? 
I'm going to make India [into] a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime. 
In this way I'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that I'm going to create. 
That's why I'm not running after this bloody money. 
I'm doing something serious. 
If you chase a girl, the girl won't like you. 
Do your job simply, the girl will chase you. 
Like that, I never chased Mahalakshmi. 
Mahalakshmi is chasing me, I am keeping in the back pocket. 
Not in front pocket. I'm a back pocket man. 
That's all. A school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad. 
I am becoming a solution provider. I'm very happy. 
I don't want to make this as a corporate entity. 
I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe. That's why I put all the details on public domain like an open software. 
Now 110 countries are accessing it. Okay? 
So I classify the people into three: uneducated, little educated, surplus educated. 
Little educated, done this. Surplus educated, what are you going to do for the society? 
Thank you very much. Bye! 
(Applause) 

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

My colleagues and I are fascinated by the science of moving dots. 
So what are these dots? 
Well, it's all of us. 
And we're moving in our homes, in our offices, as we shop and travel throughout our cities and around the world. 
And wouldn't it be great if we could understand all this movement? 
If we could find patterns and meaning and insight in it. 
And luckily for us, we live in a time where we're incredibly good at capturing information about ourselves. 
So whether it's through sensors or videos, or apps, we can track our movement with incredibly fine detail. 
So it turns out one of the places where we have the best data about movement is sports. 
So whether it's basketball or baseball, or football or the other football, we're instrumenting our stadiums and our players to track their movements every fraction of a second. 
So what we're doing is turning our athletes into — you probably guessed it — moving dots. 
So we've got mountains of moving dots and like most raw data, it's hard to deal with and not that interesting. 
But there are things that, for example, basketball coaches want to know. 
And the problem is they can't know them because they'd have to watch every second of every game, remember it and process it. 
And a person can't do that, but a machine can. 
The problem is a machine can't see the game with the eye of a coach. 
At least they couldn't until now. 
So what have we taught the machine to see? 
So, we started simply. 
We taught it things like passes, shots and rebounds. 
Things that most casual fans would know. 
And then we moved on to things slightly more complicated. 
Events like post-ups, and pick-and-rolls, and isolations. 
And if you don't know them, that's okay. Most casual players probably do. 
Now, we've gotten to a point where today, the machine understands complex events like down screens and wide pins. 
Basically things only professionals know. 
So we have taught a machine to see with the eyes of a coach. 
So how have we been able to do this? 
If I asked a coach to describe something like a pick-and-roll, they would give me a description, and if I encoded that as an algorithm, it would be terrible. 
The pick-and-roll happens to be this dance in basketball between four players, two on offense and two on defense. 
And here's kind of how it goes. 
So there's the guy on offense without the ball the ball and he goes next to the guy guarding the guy with the ball, and he kind of stays there and they both move and stuff happens, and ta-da, it's a pick-and-roll. 
(Laughter) So that is also an example of a terrible algorithm. 
So, if the player who's the interferer — he's called the screener — goes close by, but he doesn't stop, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. 
Or if he does stop, but he doesn't stop close enough, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. 
Or, if he does go close by and he does stop but they do it under the basket, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. 
Or I could be wrong, they could all be pick-and-rolls. 
It really depends on the exact timing, the distances, the locations, and that's what makes it hard. 
So, luckily, with machine learning, we can go beyond our own ability to describe the things we know. 
So how does this work? Well, it's by example. 
So we go to the machine and say, "" Good morning, machine. 
Here are some pick-and-rolls, and here are some things that are not. 
Please find a way to tell the difference. "" And the key to all of this is to find features that enable it to separate. 
So if I was going to teach it the difference between an apple and orange, I might say, "" Why don't you use color or shape? "" And the problem that we're solving is, what are those things? 
What are the key features that let a computer navigate the world of moving dots? 
So figuring out all these relationships with relative and absolute location, distance, timing, velocities — that's really the key to the science of moving dots, or as we like to call it, spatiotemporal pattern recognition, in academic vernacular. 
Because the first thing is, you have to make it sound hard — because it is. 
The key thing is, for NBA coaches, it's not that they want to know whether a pick-and-roll happened or not. 
It's that they want to know how it happened. 
And why is it so important to them? So here's a little insight. 
It turns out in modern basketball, this pick-and-roll is perhaps the most important play. 
And knowing how to run it, and knowing how to defend it, is basically a key to winning and losing most games. 
So it turns out that this dance has a great many variations and identifying the variations is really the thing that matters, and that's why we need this to be really, really good. 
So, here's an example. 
There are two offensive and two defensive players, getting ready to do the pick-and-roll dance. 
So the guy with ball can either take, or he can reject. 
His teammate can either roll or pop. 
The guy guarding the ball can either go over or under. 
His teammate can either show or play up to touch, or play soft and together they can either switch or blitz and I didn't know most of these things when I started and it would be lovely if everybody moved according to those arrows. 
It would make our lives a lot easier, but it turns out movement is very messy. 
People wiggle a lot and getting these variations identified with very high accuracy, both in precision and recall, is tough because that's what it takes to get a professional coach to believe in you. 
And despite all the difficulties with the right spatiotemporal features we have been able to do that. 
Coaches trust our ability of our machine to identify these variations. 
We're at the point where almost every single contender for an NBA championship this year is using our software, which is built on a machine that understands the moving dots of basketball. 
So not only that, we have given advice that has changed strategies that have helped teams win very important games, and it's very exciting because you have coaches who've been in the league for 30 years that are willing to take advice from a machine. 
And it's very exciting, it's much more than the pick-and-roll. 
Our computer started out with simple things and learned more and more complex things and now it knows so many things. 
Frankly, I don't understand much of what it does, and while it's not that special to be smarter than me, we were wondering, can a machine know more than a coach? 
Can it know more than person could know? 
And it turns out the answer is yes. 
The coaches want players to take good shots. 
So if I'm standing near the basket and there's nobody near me, it's a good shot. 
If I'm standing far away surrounded by defenders, that's generally a bad shot. 
But we never knew how good "" good "" was, or how bad "" bad "" was quantitatively. 
Until now. 
So what we can do, again, using spatiotemporal features, we looked at every shot. 
We can see: Where is the shot? What's the angle to the basket? 
Where are the defenders standing? What are their distances? 
What are their angles? 
For multiple defenders, we can look at how the player's moving and predict the shot type. 
We can look at all their velocities and we can build a model that predicts what is the likelihood that this shot would go in under these circumstances? 
So why is this important? 
We can take something that was shooting, which was one thing before, and turn it into two things: the quality of the shot and the quality of the shooter. 
So here's a bubble chart, because what's TED without a bubble chart? 
(Laughter) Those are NBA players. 
The size is the size of the player and the color is the position. 
On the x-axis, we have the shot probability. 
People on the left take difficult shots, on the right, they take easy shots. 
On the [y-axis] is their shooting ability. 
People who are good are at the top, bad at the bottom. 
So for example, if there was a player who generally made 47 percent of their shots, that's all you knew before. 
But today, I can tell you that player takes shots that an average NBA player would make 49 percent of the time, and they are two percent worse. 
And the reason that's important is that there are lots of 47s out there. 
And so it's really important to know if the 47 that you're considering giving 100 million dollars to is a good shooter who takes bad shots or a bad shooter who takes good shots. 
Machine understanding doesn't just change how we look at players, it changes how we look at the game. 
So there was this very exciting game a couple of years ago, in the NBA finals. 
Miami was down by three, there was 20 seconds left. 
They were about to lose the championship. 
A gentleman named LeBron James came up and he took a three to tie. 
He missed. 
His teammate Chris Bosh got a rebound, passed it to another teammate named Ray Allen. 
He sank a three. It went into overtime. 
They won the game. They won the championship. 
It was one of the most exciting games in basketball. 
And our ability to know the shot probability for every player at every second, and the likelihood of them getting a rebound at every second can illuminate this moment in a way that we never could before. 
Now unfortunately, I can't show you that video. 
But for you, we recreated that moment at our weekly basketball game about 3 weeks ago. 
(Laughter) And we recreated the tracking that led to the insights. 
So, here is us. This is Chinatown in Los Angeles, a park we play at every week, and that's us recreating the Ray Allen moment and all the tracking that's associated with it. 
So, here's the shot. 
I'm going to show you that moment and all the insights of that moment. 
The only difference is, instead of the professional players, it's us, and instead of a professional announcer, it's me. 
So, bear with me. 
Miami. 
Down three. 
Twenty seconds left. 
Jeff brings up the ball. 
Josh catches, puts up a three! 
[Calculating shot probability] [Shot quality] [Rebound probability] Won't go! [Rebound probability] 
Rebound, Noel. 
Back to Daria. 
[Shot quality] Her three-pointer — bang! 
Tie game with five seconds left. 
The crowd goes wild. 
(Laughter) That's roughly how it happened. 
(Applause) Roughly. (Applause) 
That moment had about a nine percent chance of happening in the NBA and we know that and a great many other things. 
I'm not going to tell you how many times it took us to make that happen. 
(Laughter) Okay, I will! It was four. (Laughter) 
Way to go, Daria. 
But the important thing about that video and the insights we have for every second of every NBA game — it's not that. 
It's the fact you don't have to be a professional team to track movement. 
You do not have to be a professional player to get insights about movement. 
In fact, it doesn't even have to be about sports because we're moving everywhere. 
We're moving in our homes, in our offices, as we shop and we travel throughout our cities and around our world. 
What will we know? What will we learn? 
Perhaps, instead of identifying pick-and-rolls, a machine can identify the moment and let me know when my daughter takes her first steps. 
Which could literally be happening any second now. 
Perhaps we can learn to better use our buildings, better plan our cities. 
I believe that with the development of the science of moving dots, we will move better, we will move smarter, we will move forward. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. 
I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. 
Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet. 
My drawings explore moments of transition, turbulence and tranquility in the landscape, allowing viewers to emotionally connect with a place you might never have the chance to visit. 
I choose to convey the beauty as opposed to the devastation. 
If you can experience the sublimity of these landscapes, perhaps you'll be inspired to protect and preserve them. 
Behavioral psychology tells us that we take action and make decisions based on our emotions above all else. 
And studies have shown that art impacts our emotions more effectively than a scary news report. 
Experts predict ice-free Arctic summers as early as 2020. 
And sea levels are likely to rise between two and ten feet by century's end. 
I have dedicated my career to illuminating these projections with an accessible medium, one that moves us in a way that statistics may not. 
My process begins with traveling to the places at the forefront of climate change. 
On-site, I take thousands of photographs. 
Back in the studio, I work from both my memory of the experience and the photographs to create very large-scale compositions, sometimes over 10 feet wide. 
I draw with soft pastel, which is dry like charcoal, but colors. 
I consider my work drawings but others call them painting. 
I cringe, though, when I'm referred to as a "" finger painter. "" (Laughter) But I don't use any tools and I have always used my fingers and palms to manipulate the pigment on the paper. 
It quiets my mind. 
I don't perceive what I'm drawing as ice or water. 
Instead, the image is stripped down to its most basic form of color and shape. 
Once the piece is complete, I can finally experience the composition as a whole, as an iceberg floating through glassy water, or a wave cresting with foam. 
On average, a piece this size takes me about, as you can see, 10 seconds. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Really, more like 200 hours, 250 hours for something that size. 
But I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, really. 
My mom was an artist, and growing up, we always had art supplies all over the house. 
My mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and I were fortunate enough to join and support her on these adventures. 
We rode camels in Northern Africa and mushed on dog sleds near the North Pole. 
In August of 2012, I led my first expedition, taking a group of artists and scholars up the northwest coast of Greenland. 
My mother was originally supposed to lead this trip. 
She and I were in the early stages of planning, as we had intended to go together, when she fell victim to a brain tumor. 
The cancer quickly took over her body and mind, and she passed away six months later. 
During the months of her illness, though, her dedication to the expedition never wavered, and I made a promise to carry out her final journey. 
My mother's passion for the Arctic echoed through my experience in Greenland, and I felt the power and the fragility of the landscape. 
The sheer size of the icebergs is humbling. 

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. 
(Music) (Video) Narrator: 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. 
It's one of those things that stuck in my head. 
It was a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. 
And it was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carre, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools of the time. 
This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall in 1928, and 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. 
You heat up one side, the hot side. 
The ammonia evaporates and it re-condenses in the other side. 
You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia re-evaporates 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: it blew up. 
Because 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 is 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 non-toxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. 
Brought in a team from the U.K. — there's a lot of great refrigeration people, it turned out, in the U.K. — and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low pressure, non-toxic 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. 
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. 
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. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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 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. 
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? 
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) 

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

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

When I knew I was going to come to speak to you, I thought, "I gotta call my mother." 
I have a little Cuban mother — she's about that big. 
Four feet. Nothing larger than the sum of her figurative parts. 
You still with me? (Laughter) I called her up. 
"Hello, how're you doing, baby?" 
"Hey, ma, I got to talk to you." 
"You're talking to me already. What's the matter?" 
I said, "" I've got to talk to a bunch of nice people. "" "" You're always talking to nice people, except when you went to the White House. "" "Ma, don't start!" 
And I told her I was coming to TED, and she said, "What's the problem?" 
And I said, "" Well, I'm not sure. "" I said, "" I have to talk to them about stories. 
It's' Technology, Entertainment and Design. '"" And she said, "" Well, you design a story when you make it up, it's entertainment when you tell it, and you're going to use a microphone. "" (Laughter) I said, "" You're a peach, ma. Pop there? "" "" What's the matter? The pearls of wisdom leaping from my lips like lemmings is no good for you? "" (Laughter) Then my pop got on there. 
My pop, he's one of the old souls, you know — old Cuban man from Camaguey. 
Camaguey is a province in Cuba. 
He's from Florida. 
He was born there in 1924. 
He grew up in a bohio of dirt floors, and the structure was the kind used by the Tainos, our old Arawak ancestors. 
My father is at once quick-witted, wickedly funny, and then poignancy turns on a dime and leaves you breathless. 
"Papi, help." 
"I already heard your mother. I think she's right." 
(Laughter) "After what I just told you?" 
My whole life, my father's been there. 
So we talked for a few minutes, and he said, "Why don't you tell them what you believe?" 
I love that, but we don't have the time. 
Good storytelling is crafting a story that someone wants to listen to. 
Great story is the art of letting go. 
So I'm going to tell you a little story. 
Remember, this tradition comes to us not from the mists of Avalon, back in time, but further still, before we were scratching out these stories on papyrus, or we were doing the pictographs on walls in moist, damp caves. 
Back then, we had an urge, a need, to tell the story. 
When Lexus wants to sell you a car, they're telling you a story. 
Have you been watching the commercials? 
Because every one of us has this desire, for once — just once — to tell our story and have it heard. 
There are stories you tell from stages. 
There's stories that you may tell in a small group of people with some good wine. 
And there's stories you tell late at night to a friend, maybe once in your life. 
And then there are stories that we whisper into a Stygian darkness. 
I'm not telling you that story. 
I'm telling you this one. 
It's called, "" You're Going to Miss Me. "" It's about human connection. 
My Cuban mother, which I just briefly introduced you to in that short character sketch, came to the United States one thousand years ago. 
I was born in 19 — I forget, and I came to this country with them in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution. 
We went from Havana, Cuba to Decatur, Georgia. 
And Decatur, Georgia's a small Southern town. 
And in that little Southern town, I grew up, and grew up hearing these stories. 
But this story only happened a few years ago. 
I called my mom. 
It was a Saturday morning. 
And I was calling about how to make ajiaco. It's a Cuban meal. 
It's delicious. It's savory. 
It makes spit froth in the little corners of your mouth — is that enough? It makes your armpits juicy, you know? 
That kind of food, yeah. 
This is the sensory part of the program, people. 
I called my mother, and she said, "" Carmen, I need you to come, please. 
I need to go to the mall, and you know your father now, he takes a nap in the afternoon, and I got to go. 
I got an errand to run. "" Let me parenthetically pause here and tell you — Esther, my mother, had stopped driving several years ago, to the collective relief of the entire city of Atlanta. 
Any vehicular outing with that woman from the time I was a young child, guys, naturally included flashing, blue lights. 
But she'd become adept at dodging the boys in blue, and when she did meet them, oh, she had wonderful, well, rapport. 
"Ma'am, did you know that was a light you just ran?" 
(Spanish) "You don't speak English?" 
"No." 
(Laughter) But eventually, every dog has its day, and she ended up in traffic court, where she bartered with the judge for a discount. 
There's a historical marker. 
But now she was a septuagenarian, she'd stopped driving. 
And that meant that everyone in the family had to sign up to take her to have her hair dyed, you know, that peculiar color of blue that matches her polyester pants suit, you know, same color as the Buick. 
Anybody? All right. 
Little picks on the legs, where she does her needlepoint, and leaves little loops. 
Rockports — they're for this. 
That's why they call them that. 
(Laughter) This is her ensemble. 
And this is the woman that wants me to come on a Saturday morning when I have a lot to do, but it doesn't take long because Cuban guilt is a weighty thing. 
I'm not going political on you but... And so, I go to my mother's. 
I show up. She's in the carport. 
Of course, they have a carport. 
The kind with the corrugated roof, you know. 
The Buick's parked outside, and she's jingling, jangling a pair of keys. 
"I got a surprise for you, baby!" 
"We taking your car?" 
"Not we, I." 
And she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a catastrophe. 
Somebody's storytelling. Interactive art. You can talk to me. 
Oh, a driver's license, a perfectly valid driver's license. 
Issued, evidently, by the DMV in her own county of Gwinnett. 
Blithering fucking idiots. 
(Laughter) I said, "" Is that thing real? "" "I think so." 
"Can you even see?" 
"I guess I must." 
"Oh, Jesus." 
She gets into the car — she's sitting on two phone books. 
I can't even make this part up because she's that tiny. 
She's engineered an umbrella so she can — bam! — slam the door. 
Her daughter, me, the village idiot with the ice cream cone in the middle of her forehead, is still standing there, slack-jawed. 
"You coming? You no coming?" 
"Oh, my God." I said, "OK, fine. Does pop know you're driving?" 
"Are you kidding me?" 
"How are you doing it?" 
"He's got to sleep sometime." 
And so we left my father fast asleep, because I knew he'd kill me if I let her go by herself, and we get in the car. 
Puts it in reverse. Fifty-five out of the driveway, in reverse. 
I am buckling in seatbelts from the front. 
I'm yanking them in from the back. I'm doing double knots. 
I mean, I've got a mouth as dry as the Kalahari Desert. 
I've got a white-knuckle grip on the door. You know what I'm talking about? 
And she's whistling, and finally I do the kind of birth breathing — you know, that one? 
Only a couple of women are going uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Right. 
And I said, "" Ma, would you slow down? "" Because now she's picked up the Highway 285, the perimeter around Atlanta, which encompasses now — there's seven lanes, she's on all of them, y'all. 
I said, "" Ma, pick a lane! "" "They give you seven lanes, they expect you to use them." 
And there she goes, right. 
I don't believe for a minute she has been out and not been stopped. 
So, I think, hey, we can talk. It'll be a diversion. 
It'll help my breathing. It'll do something for my pulse, maybe. 
"Mommy, I know you have been stopped." 
"No, no, what you talking about?" 
"You have a license. How long have you been driving?" 
"Four or five days." 
"Yeah. And you haven't been stopped?" 
"I did not get a ticket." 
I said, "" Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but come on, come on, come on. "" "" OK, so I stopped at a light and there's a guy, you know, in the back. "" "" Would this guy have, like, a blue uniform and a terrified look on his face? "" "You weren't there, don't start." 
"Come on. You got a ticket?" 
"" No. "" She explained, "" The man "" — I have to tell you as she did, because it loses something if I don't, you know — "" he come to the window, and he does a thing like this, which tells me he's pretty old, you know. 
So I look up and I'm thinking, maybe he's still going to think I'm kind of cute. "" "Ma, are you still doing that?" 
"" If it works, it works, baby. 
So, I say, 'Perdon, yo no hablo ingles.' Well, wouldn't you know, he had been in Honduras for the Peace Corps. "" (Laughter) So he's talking to her, and at some point she says, "Then, you know, it was it. That was it. It was done." 
"" Yeah? What? 
He gave you a ticket? He didn't give you a ticket? What? "" "No, I look up, and the light, she change." 
(Laughter) You should be terrified. 
Now, I don't know if she's toying with me, kind of like a cat batting back a mouse, batting back a mouse — left paw, right paw, left paw, right paw — but by now, we've reached the mall. 
Now, you have all been at a mall during the holidays, yes? 
Talk to me. Yes. Yes. You can say yes. 
Audience: Yes. 
Carmen Agra Deedy: All right, then you know that you have now entered parking lot purgatory, praying to that saint of perpetual availability that as you join that serpentine line of cars crawling along, some guy's going to turn on the brake lights just as you pull up behind him. 
But that doesn't happen most of the time, right? 
So, first I say, "" Ma, why are we here? "" "You mean, like, in the car?" 
"" No, don't — why are we here today? 
It's Saturday. It's the holidays. "" "Because I have to exchange your father's underwear." 
Now, see, this is the kind of Machiavellian thinking, that you really have to — you know, in my mind, it's a rabbit's warren, this woman's mind. 
Do I want to walk in, because unless I have Ariadne's thread to anchor — enough metaphors for you? — somewhere, I may not get out. 
But you know. 
(Laughter) "" Why do we have to take pop's underwear back now? 
And why? What is wrong with his underwear? "" "It will upset you." 
"It won't upset me. Why? What? Is something wrong with him?" 
"" No, no, no. The only thing with him is, he's an idiot. 
I sent him to the store, which was my first mistake, and he went to buy underwear, and he bought the grippers, and he's supposed to buy the boxers. "" "Why?" 
"I read it on the Intersnet. You cannot have children." 
"Oh, my God!" 
(Laughter) Olivia? Huh? Huh? 
By now, we have now crawled another four feet, and my mother finally says to me, "" I knew it, I knew it. 
I'm an immigrant. We make a space. What I tell you? Right there. "" And she points out the passenger window, and I look out, and three — three — aisles down, "Look, the Chevy." 
You want to laugh, but you don't know — you're that politically corrected, have you noticed? 
Correct the other direction now, it's OK. 
"Look, the Chevy — he's coming this way." 
"Mama, mama, mama, wait, wait, wait. The Chevy is three aisles away." 
She looks at me like I'm her, you know, her moron child, the cretin, the one she's got to speak to very slowly and distinctly. 
"" I know that, honey. Get out of the car and go stand in the parking space till I get there. "" OK, I want a vote. Come on, come on. No, no. 
How many of you once in your — you were a kid, you were an adult — you stood in a parking space to hold it for someone? 
See, we're a secret club with a secret handshake. 
(Laughter) And years of therapy later, we're doing great. 
We're doing great. We're doing fine. 
Well, I stood up to her. 
This is — you know, you'd think by now I'm — and still holding? 
I said, "" No way, ma, you have embarrassed me my entire life. "" Of course, her comeback is, "" When have I embarrassed you? "" (Spanish) And she's still talking while she puts the car in park, hits the emergency brake, opens the door, and with a spryness astounding in a woman her age, she jumps out of the car, knocks out the phone books, and then she walks around — she's carrying her cheap Kmart purse with her — around the front of the car. 
She has amazing land speed for a woman her age, too. 
Before I know it, she has skiddled across the parking lot and in between the cars, and people behind me, with that kind of usual religious charity that the holidays bring us, wah-wah wah-wah. 
"" I'm coming. "" Italian hand signals follow. 
I scoot over. I close the door. I leave the phone books. 
This is new and fast, just so you — are you still with us? 
We'll wait for the slow ones. OK. 
I start, and this is where a child says to me — and the story doesn't work if I tell you about her before, because this is my laconic child. 
A brevity, brevity of everything with this child. 
You know, she eats small portions. 
Language is something to be meted out in small phonemes, you know — just little hmm, hmm-hmm. 
She carries a mean spiral notebook and a pen. 
She wields great power. 
She listens, because that's what people who tell stories do first. 
But she pauses occasionally and says, "How do you spell that? What year? OK." 
When she writes the expose in about 20 years, don't believe a word of it. 
But this is my daughter, Lauren, my remarkable daughter, my borderline Asperger's kid. 
Bless you, Dr. Watson. 
She says, "" Ma, you got to look! "" Now, when this kid says I got to look, you know. 
But it isn't like I haven't seen this crime scene before. 
I grew up with this woman. 
I said, "" Lauren, you know what, give me a play-by-play. I can't. "" "No, mama, you got to look." 
I got to look. You got to look. 
Don't you want to look? 
There she is. 
I look in bewildered awe: she's standing, those Rockports slightly apart, but grounded. 
She's holding out that cheap Kmart purse, and she is wielding it. 
She's holding back tons of steel with the sheer force of her little personality, in that crone-ish voice, saying things like, "Back it up, buddy! No, it's reserved!" 
(Laughter) Ready? Brace yourselves. Here it comes. 
"" No, my daughter, she's coming in the Buick. 
Honey, sit up so they can see you. "" Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. 
I finally come — and now, it's the South. 
I don't know what part of the country you live in. 
I think we all secretly love stories. 
We all secretly want our blankie and our Boo Bear. 
We want to curl up and say, "" Tell it to me, tell it to me. 
Come on, honey, tell it to me. "" But in the South, we love a good story. 
People have pulled aside, I mean, they've come out of that queue line, they have popped their trunks, pulled out lawn chairs and cool drinks. 
Bets are placed. 
"I'm with the little lady. Damn!" 
(Laughter) And she's bringing me in with a slight salsa movement. 
She is, after all, Cuban. 
I'm thinking, "" Accelerator, break. Accelerator, break. "" Like you've never thought that in your life? Right? Yeah. 
I pull in. I put the car in park. 
Engine's still running — mine, not the car. 
I jump out next to her going, "" Don't you move! "" "I'm not going anywhere." 
She's got front seat in a Greek tragedy. 
I come out, and there's Esther. 
She's hugging the purse. 
"" Que? "" Which means "" what, "" and so much more. 
(Laughter) "" Ma, have you no shame? 
People are watching us all around, "" right? 
Now, some of them you've got to make up, people. 
Secret of the trade. 
Guess what? Some of these stories I sculpt a little, here and there. 
Some, they're just right there, right there. Put them right there. 
She says this to me. 
After I say — let me refresh you — "have you no shame?" 
"No. I gave it up with pantyhose — they're both too binding." 
(Laughter) (Applause) Yeah, you can clap, but then you're about 30 seconds from the end. 
I'm about to snap like a brittle twig, when suddenly someone taps me on the shoulder. 
Intrepid soul. 
I'm thinking, "" This is my kid. How dare she? 
She jumped out of that car. "" That's OK, because my mother yells at me, I yell at her. 
It's a beautiful hierarchy, and it works. 
(Laughter) I turn around, but it's not a child. It's a young woman, a little taller than I, pale green, amused eyes. 
With her is a young man — husband, brother, lover, it's not my job. 
And she says, "" Pardon me, ma'am "" — that's how we talk down there — "is that your mother?" 
I said, "" No, I follow little old women around parking lots to see if they'll stop. Yes, it's my mother! "" The boy, now, he says. "" Well, what my sister meant "" — they look at each other, it's a knowing glance — "" God, she's crazy! "" I said, (Spanish), and the young girl and the young boy say, "No, no, honey, we just want to know one more thing." 
I said, "" Look, please, let me take care of her, OK, because I know her, and believe me, she's like a small atomic weapon, you know, you just want to handle her really gingerly. "" And the girl goes, "" I know, but, I mean, I swear to God, she reminds us of our mother. "" I almost miss it. 
He turns to her on the heel of his shoe. 
It's a half-whisper, "" God, I miss her. "" They turn then, shoulder to shoulder, and walk away, lost in their own reverie. 
Memories of some maddening woman who was the luck of their DNA draw. 
And I turn to Esther, who's rocking on those 'ports, and says, "You know what, honey?" 
"What, ma?" 
"" I'm going to drive you crazy probably for about 14, 15 more years, if you're lucky, but after that, honey, you're going to miss me. "" (Applause) 

When you come to TEDx, you always think about technology, the world changing, becoming more innovative. 
You think about the driverless. 
Everyone's talking about driverless cars these days, and I love the concept of a driverless car, but when I go in one, you know, I want it really slow, I want access to the steering wheel and the brake, just in case. 
I don't know about you, but I am not ready for a driverless bus. 
How about a driverless world? 
And I ask you that because we are increasingly in one. 
It's not supposed to be that way. 
We're number one, the United States is large and in charge. 
Americanization and globalization for the last several generations have basically been the same thing. 
Right? Whether it's the World Trade Organization or it's the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods Accord on currency, these were American institutions, our values, our friends, our allies, our money, our standards. 
That was the way the world worked. 
So it's sort of interesting, if you want to look at how the US looks, here it is. 
This is our view of how the world is run. 
President Obama has got the red carpet, he goes down Air Force One, and it feels pretty good, it feels pretty comfortable. 
Well, I don't know how many of you saw the China trip last week and the G20. 
Oh my God. Right? 
This is how we landed for the most important meeting of the world's leaders in China. 
The National Security Advisor was actually spewing expletives on the tarmac — no red carpet, kind of left out the bottom of the plane along with all the media and everybody else. 
Later on in the G20, well, there's Obama. 
(Laughter) Hi, George. 
Hi, Norman. 
They look like they're about to get into a cage match, right? 
And they did. It was 90 minutes long, and they talked about Syria. 
That's what Putin wanted to talk about. 
He's increasingly calling the shots. 
He's the one willing to do stuff there. 
There's not a lot of mutual like or trust, but it's not as if the Americans are telling him what to do. 
How about when the whole 20 are getting together? 
Surely, when the leaders are all onstage, then the Americans are pulling their weight. 
Uh-oh. 
(Laughter) Xi Jinping seems fine. 
Angela Merkel has — she always does — that look, she always does that. 
But Putin is telling Turkish president Erdogan what to do, and Obama is like, what's going on over there? 
You see. And the problem is it's not a G20, the problem is it's a G-Zero world that we live in, a world order where there is no single country or alliance that can meet the challenges of global leadership. 
The G20 doesn't work, the G7, all of our friends, that's history. 
So globalization is continuing. 
Goods and services and people and capital are moving across borders faster and faster than ever before, but Americanization is not. 
So if I've convinced you of that, I want to do two things with the rest of this talk. 
I want to talk about the implications of that for the whole world. 
I'll go around it. 
And then I want to talk about what we think right here in the United States and in New York. 
So why? What are the implications. Why are we here? 
Well, we're here because the United States, we spent two trillion dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were failed. 
We don't want to do that anymore. 
We have large numbers of middle and working classes that feel like they've not benefited from promises of globalization, so they don't want to see it particularly. 
And we have an energy revolution where we don't need OPEC or the Middle East the way we used to. 
We produce all that right here in the United States. 
So the Americans don't want to be the global sheriff for security or the architect of global trade. 
The Americans don't want to even be the cheerleader of global values. 
Well, then you look to Europe, and the most important alliance in the world has been the transatlantic relationship. 
But it is now weaker than it has been at any point since World War II, all of the crises, the Brexit conversations, the hedging going on between the French and the Russians, or the Germans and the Turks, or the Brits and the Chinese. 
China does want to do more leadership. 
They do, but only in the economic sphere, and they want their own values, standards, currency, in competition with that of the US. 
The Russians want to do more leadership. 
You see that in Ukraine, in the Baltic states, in the Middle East, but not with the Americans. 
They want their own preferences and order. 
That's why we are where we are. 
So what happens going forward? 
Let's start easy, with the Middle East. 
(Laughter) You know, I left a little out, but you get the general idea. 
Look, there are three reasons why the Middle East has had stability such as it is. Right? 
One is because there was a willingness to provide some level of military security by the US and allies. 
Number two, it was easy to take a lot of cheap money out of the ground because oil was expensive. 
And number three was no matter how bad the leaders were, the populations were relatively quiescent. 
They didn't have the ability, and many didn't have the will to really rise up against. 
Well, I can tell you, in a G-Zero world, all three of those things are increasingly not true, and so failed states, terrorism, refugees and the rest. 
Does the entire Middle East fall apart? 
No, the Kurds will do better, and Iraq, Israel, Iran over time. 
But generally speaking, it's not a good look. 
OK, how about this guy? 
He's playing a poor hand very well. 
There's no question he's hitting above his weight. 
But long term — I didn't mean that. 
But long term, long term, if you think that the Russians were antagonized by the US and Europe expanding NATO right up to their borders when we said they weren't going to, and the EU encroaching them, just wait until the Chinese put hundreds of billions of dollars in every country around Russia they thought they had influence in. 
The Chinese are going to dominate it. The Russians are picking up the crumbs. 
In a G-Zero world, this is going to be a very tense 10 years for Mr. Putin. 
It's not all bad. Right? 
Asia actually looks a lot better. 
There are real leaders across Asia, they have a lot of political stability. 
They're there for a while. 
Mr. Modi in India, Mr. Abe, who is probably about to get a third term written in in the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, of course Xi Jinping who is consolidating enormous power, the most powerful leader in China since Mao. 
Those are the three most important economies in Asia. 
Now look, there are problems in Asia. 
We see the sparring over the South China Sea. 
We see that Kim Jong Un, just in the last couple of days, tested yet another nuclear weapon. 
But the leaders in Asia do not feel the need to wave the flag, to go xenophobic, to actually allow escalation of the geopolitical and cross-border tensions. 
They want to focus on long-term economic stability and growth. 
And that's what they're actually doing. 
Let's turn to Europe. 
Europe does look a little scared in this environment. 
So much of what is happening in the Middle East is washing up quite literally onto European shores. 
You see Brexit and you see the concerns of populism across all of the European states. 
Let me tell you that over the long term, in a G-Zero world, European expansion will be seen to have gone too far. 
Europe went right up to Russia, went right down to the Middle East, and if the world were truly becoming more flat and more Americanized, that would be less of a problem, but in a G-Zero world, those countries nearest Russia and nearest the Middle East actually have different economic capabilities, different social stability and different political preferences and systems than core Europe. 
So Europe was able to truly expand under the G7, but under the G-Zero, Europe will get smaller. 
Core Europe around Germany and France and others will still work, be functional, stable, wealthy, integrated. 
But the periphery, countries like Greece and Turkey and others, will not look that good at all. 
Latin America, a lot of populism, made the economies not go so well. 
They had been more opposed to the United States for decades. 
Increasingly, they're coming back. 
We see that in Argentina. 
We see it with the openness in Cuba. 
We will see it in Venezuela when Maduro falls. 
We will see it in Brazil after the impeachment and when we finally see a new legitimate president elected there. 
The only place you see that is moving in another direction is the unpopularity of Mexican president Peña Nieto. 
There you could actually see a slip away from the United States over the coming years. 
The US election matters a lot on that one, too. 
(Laughter) Africa, right? 
A lot of people have said it's going to be Africa's decade, finally. 
In a G-Zero world, it is absolutely an amazing time for a few African countries, those governed well with a lot of urbanization, a lot of smart people, women really getting into the workforce, entrepreneurship taking off. 
But for most of the countries in Africa, it's going to be a lot more dicey: extreme climate conditions, radicalism both from Islam and also Christianity, very poor governance, borders you can't defend, lots of forced migration. 
Those countries can fall off the map. 
So you're really going to see an extreme segregation going on between the winners and the losers across Africa. 
Finally, back to the United States. 
What do I think about us? 
Because there are a lot of upset people, not here at TEDx, I know, but in the United States, my God, after 15 months of campaigning, we should be upset. 
I understand that. 
But a lot of people are upset because they say, "" Washington's broken, we don't trust the establishment, we hate the media. "" Heck, even globalists like me are taking it on the chin. 
Look, I do think we have to recognize, my fellow campers, that when you are being chased by the bear, in the global context, you need not outrun the bear, you need to only outrun your fellow campers. 
(Laughter) Now, I just told you about our fellow campers. 
Right? And from that perspective, we look OK. 
A lot of people in that context say, "" Let's go dollar. Let's go New York real estate. 
Let's send our kids to American universities. "" You know, our neighbors are awesome: Canada, Mexico and two big bodies of water. 
You know how much Turkey would love to have neighbors like that? 
Those are awesome neighbors. 
Terrorism is a problem in the United States. 
God knows we know it here in New York. 
But it's a much bigger problem in Europe than the US. 
It's a much bigger problem in the Middle East than it is in Europe. 
These are factors of large magnitude. 
We just accepted 10,000 Syrian refugees, and we're complaining bitterly about it. 
You know why? Because they can't swim here. 
Right? I mean, the Turks would love to have only 10,000 Syrian refugees. 
The Jordanians, the Germans, the Brits. Right? 
That's not the situation. 
That's the reality of the United States. 
Now, that sounds pretty good. 
Here's the challenge. 
In a G-Zero world, the way you lead is by example. 
If we know we don't want to be the global cop anymore, if we know we're not going to be the architect of global trade, we're not going to be the cheerleader of global values, we're not going to do it the way we used to, the 21st century is changing, we need to lead by example — be so compelling that all these other people are going to still say, it's not just they're faster campers. 
Even when the bear is not chasing us, this is a good place to be. 
We want to emulate them. 
The election process this year is not proving a good option for leading by example. 
Hillary Clinton says it's going to be like the '90s. 
We can still be that cheerleader on values. 
We can still be the architect of global trade. 
We can still be the global sheriff. 
And Donald Trump wants to bring us back to the '30s. 
He's saying, "" Our way or the highway. You don't like it, lump it. "" Right? 
Neither are recognizing a fundamental truth of the G-Zero, which is that even though the US is not in decline, it is getting objectively harder for the Americans to impose their will, even have great influence, on the global order. 
Are we prepared to truly lead by example? 
What would we have to do to fix this after November, after the next president comes in? 
Well, either we have to have another crisis that forces us to respond. 
A depression would do that. 
Another global financial crisis could do this. 
God forbid, another 9 / 11 could do that. 
Or, absent crisis, we need to see that the hollowing out, the inequality, the challenges that are growing and growing in the United States, are themselves urgent enough to force our leaders to change, and that we have those voices. 
Through our cell phones, individually, we have those voices to compel them to change. 
There is, of course, a third choice, perhaps the most likely one, which is that we do neither of those things, and in four years time you invite me back, and I will give this speech yet again. 
Thank you very, very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world. 
(Laughter) Now I know that seems ludicrous. I know that seems ludicrous. 
So I went back to the store and said to the owner, "I love the shoes, but I hate the laces." 
As it turns out — (Laughter) there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form. 
If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe. 
Pull the knot. 
Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out — something you already know — that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else. 

I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense — a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. 
And some of you may argue, "Well, don't today's cell phones do that already?" 
When you meet someone here at TED — and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year — you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, "" Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you? "" Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make. 
So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. 
And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. 
And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far, which is still very much a work in process. 
I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf — and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time. 
And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. 
And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. 
But if you want a more stylish version, you could also paint your nails in different colors. 
And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. 
And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures. 
And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. 
But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk up to any surface, including your hand, if nothing else is available, and interact with this projected data. 
The device is completely portable, and can be — (Applause) (Applause ends) So, one important difference is that it's totally mobile. 
Another even more important difference is that in mass production, this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging — could look a lot more stylish than this version that I'm wearing around my neck. 
So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper towels. 
Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically responsible choice. 
This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. 
And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book — reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. 
If he turns to a particular page, he finds an annotation by maybe an expert or a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. 
(Laughter) You can get video annotations of the events that you're reading about. 
(Laughter) As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. 
And, if you need to know what the current time is, it's as simple as drawing a watch — (Laughter) (Applause) on your arm. 
So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. 
(Applause and cheering) (Applause ends) He does deserve a lot of applause, because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. 
Thank you. 

Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. 
(Laughter) And the Reddit community — really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. 

I want to start by doing an experiment. 
I'm going to play three videos of a rainy day. 
But I've replaced the audio of one of the videos, and instead of the sound of rain, I've added the sound of bacon frying. 
So I want you think carefully which one the clip with the bacon is. 
(Rain falls) (Rain falls) (Rain falls) All right. 
Actually, I lied. 
They're all bacon. 
(Bacon sizzles) (Applause) My point here isn't really to make you hungry every time you see a rainy scene, but it's to show that our brains are conditioned to embrace the lies. 
We're not looking for accuracy. 
So on the subject of deception, I wanted to quote one of my favorite authors. 
In "" The Decay of Lying, "" Oscar Wilde establishes the idea that all bad art comes from copying nature and being realistic; and all great art comes from lying and deceiving, and telling beautiful, untrue things. 
So when you're watching a movie and a phone rings, it's not actually ringing. 
It's been added later in postproduction in a studio. 
All of the sounds you hear are fake. 
Everything, apart from the dialogue, is fake. 
When you watch a movie and you see a bird flapping its wings — (Wings flap) They haven't really recorded the bird. 
It sounds a lot more realistic if you record a sheet or shaking kitchen gloves. 
(Flaps) The burning of a cigarette up close — (Cigarette burns) It actually sounds a lot more authentic if you take a small Saran Wrap ball and release it. 
(A Saran Warp ball being released) Punches? 
(Punch) Oops, let me play that again. (Punch) 
That's often done by sticking a knife in vegetables, usually cabbage. 
(Cabbage stabbed with a knife) The next one — it's breaking bones. 
(Bones break) Well, no one was really harmed. 
It's actually... 
breaking celery or frozen lettuce. 
(Breaking frozen lettuce or celery) (Laughter) Making the right sounds is not always as easy as a trip to the supermarket and going to the vegetable section. 
But it's often a lot more complicated than that. 
So let's reverse-engineer together the creation of a sound effect. 
One of my favorite stories comes from Frank Serafine. 
He's a contributor to our library, and a great sound designer for "" Tron "" and "" Star Trek "" and others. 
He was part of the Paramount team that won the Oscar for best sound for "" The Hunt for Red October. "" In this Cold War classic, in the '90s, they were asked to produce the sound of the propeller of the submarine. 
So they had a small problem: they couldn't really find a submarine in West Hollywood. 
So basically, what they did is, they went to a friend's swimming pool, and Frank performed a cannonball, or bomba. 
They placed an underwater mic and an overhead mic outside the swimming pool. 
So here's what the underwater mic sounds like. 
(Underwater plunge) Adding the overhead mic, it sounded a bit like this: (Water splashes) So now they took the sound and pitched it one octave down, sort of like slowing down a record. 
(Water splashes at lower octave) And then they removed a lot of the high frequencies. 
(Water splashes) And pitched it down another octave. 
(Water splashes at lower octave) And then they added a little bit of the splash from the overhead microphone. 
(Water splashes) And by looping and repeating that sound, they got this: (Propeller churns) So, creativity and technology put together in order to create the illusion that we're inside the submarine. 
But once you've created your sounds and you've synced them to the image, you want those sounds to live in the world of the story. 
And one the best ways to do that is to add reverb. 
So this is the first audio tool I want to talk about. 
Reverberation, or reverb, is the persistence of the sound after the original sound has ended. 
So it's sort of like the — all the reflections from the materials, the objects and the walls around the sound. 
Take, for example, the sound of a gunshot. 
The original sound is less than half a second long. 
(Gunshot) By adding reverb, we can make it sound like it was recorded inside a bathroom. 
(Gunshot reverbs in bathroom) Or like it was recorded inside a chapel or a church. 
(Gunshot reverbs church) Or in a canyon. 
(Gunshot reverbs in canyon) So reverb gives us a lot of information about the space between the listener and the original sound source. 
If the sound is the taste, then reverb is sort of like the smell of the sound. 
But reverb can do a lot more. 
Listening to a sound with a lot less reverberation than the on-screen action is going to immediately signify to us that we're listening to a commentator, to an objective narrator that's not participating in the on-screen action. 
Also, emotionally intimate moments in cinema are often heard with zero reverb, because that's how it would sound if someone was speaking inside our ear. 
On the completely other side, adding a lot of reverb to a voice is going to make us think that we're listening to a flashback, or perhaps that we're inside the head of a character or that we're listening to the voice of God. 
Or, even more powerful in film, Morgan Freeman. 
(Laughter) So — (Applause) But what are some other tools or hacks that sound designers use? 
Well, here's a really big one. 
It's silence. 
A few moments of silence is going to make us pay attention. 
And in the Western world, we're not really used to verbal silences. 
They're considered awkward or rude. 
So silence preceding verbal communication can create a lot of tension. 
But imagine a really big Hollywood movie, where it's full of explosions and automatic guns. 
Loud stops being loud anymore, after a while. 
So in a yin-yang way, silence needs loudness and loudness needs silence for either of them to have any effect. 
Well, it depends how it's used in each film. 
Silence can place us inside the head of a character or provoke thought. 
contemplation, meditation, being deep in thought. 
But apart from having one meaning, silence becomes a blank canvas upon which the viewer is invited to the paint their own thoughts. 
But I want to make it clear: there is no such thing as silence. 
And I know this sounds like the most pretentious TED Talk statement ever. 
But even if you were to enter a room with zero reverberation and zero external sounds, you would still be able to hear the pumping of your own blood. 
And in cinema, traditionally, there was never a silent moment because of the sound of the projector. 
And even in today's Dolby world, there's not really any moment of silence if you listen around you. 
There's always some sort of noise. 
Now, since there's no such thing as silence, what do filmmakers and sound designers use? 
Well, as a synonym, they often use ambiences. 
Ambiences are the unique background sounds that are specific to each location. 
Each location has a unique sound, and each room has a unique sound, which is called room tone. 
So here's a recording of a market in Morocco. 
(Voices, music) And here's a recording of Times Square in New York. 
(Traffic sounds, car horns, voices) Room tone is the addition of all the noises inside the room: the ventilation, the heating, the fridge. 
Here's a recording of my apartment in Brooklyn. 
(You can hear the ventilation, the boiler, the fridge and street traffic) Ambiences work in a most primal way. 
They can speak directly to our brain subconsciously. 
So, birds chirping outside your window may indicate normality, perhaps because, as a species, we've been used to that sound every morning for millions of years. 
(Birds chirp) On the other hand, industrial sounds have been introduced to us a little more recently. 
Even though I really like them personally — they've been used by one of my heroes, David Lynch, and his sound designer, Alan Splet — industrial sounds often carry negative connotations. 
(Machine noises) Now, sound effects can tap into our emotional memory. 
Occasionally, they can be so significant that they become a character in a movie. 
The sound of thunder may indicate divine intervention or anger. 
(Thunder) Church bells can remind us of the passing of time, or perhaps our own mortality. 
(Bells ring) And breaking of glass can indicate the end of a relationship or a friendship. 
(Glass breaks) Scientists believe that dissonant sounds, for example, brass or wind instruments played very loud, may remind us of animal howls in nature and therefore create a sense of irritation or fear. 
(Brass and wind instruments play) So now we've spoken about on-screen sounds. 
But occasionally, the source of a sound cannot be seen. 
That's what we call offscreen sounds, or "" acousmatic. "" Acousmatic sounds — well, the term "" acousmatic "" comes from Pythagoras in ancient Greece, who used to teach behind a veil or curtain for years, not revealing himself to his disciples. 
I think the mathematician and philosopher thought that, in that way, his students might focus more on the voice, and his words and its meaning, rather than the visual of him speaking. 
So sort of like the Wizard of Oz, or "" 1984's "" Big Brother, separating the voice from its source, separating cause and effect sort of creates a sense of ubiquity or panopticism, and therefore, authority. 
There's a strong tradition of acousmatic sound. 
Nuns in monasteries in Rome and Venice used to sing in rooms up in galleries close to the ceiling, creating the illusion that we're listening to angels up in the sky. 
Richard Wagner famously created the hidden orchestra that was placed in a pit between the stage and the audience. 
And one of my heroes, Aphex Twin, famously hid in dark corners of clubs. 
I think what all these masters knew is that by hiding the source, you create a sense of mystery. 
This has been seen in cinema over and over, with Hitchcock, and Ridley Scott in "" Alien. "" Hearing a sound without knowing its source is going to create some sort of tension. 
Also, it can minimize certain visual restrictions that directors have and can show something that wasn't there during filming. 
And if all this sounds a little theoretical, I wanted to play a little video. 
(Toy squeaks) (Typewriter) (Drums) (Ping-pong) (Knives being sharpened) (Record scratches) (Saw cuts) (Woman screams) What I'm sort of trying to demonstrate with these tools is that sound is a language. 
It can trick us by transporting us geographically; it can change the mood; it can set the pace; it can make us laugh or it can make us scared. 
On a personal level, I fell in love with that language a few years ago, and somehow managed to make it into some sort of profession. 
And I think with our work through the sound library, we're trying to kind of expand the vocabulary of that language. 
And in that way, we want to offer the right tools to sound designers, filmmakers, and video game and app designers, to keep telling even better stories and creating even more beautiful lies. 
So thanks for listening. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. 
Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. 
Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist — no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. 
All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. 
Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. 
What might they find? 
Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. 
Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. 
Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. 
And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers — buried in the hills somewhere in North America — massive versions of these same symbols. 
Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future? 
This is no hypothetical question. 
In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. 
The Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. 
It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. 
Given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. 
In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. 
They've found small objects such as these. 
Here's an example of one of these objects. 
Well obviously this is a replica. 
But who is this person? 
A king? A god? 
A priest? 
Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? 
We don't know. 
But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. 
Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. 
Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. 
In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say, and that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. 
We don't know what any of these symbols mean. 
The symbols are most commonly found on seals. 
So you see up there one such object. 
It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. 
Now that's a magnificent piece of art. 
So how big do you think that is? 
Perhaps that big? 
Or maybe that big? 
Well let me show you. 
Here's a replica of one such seal. 
It's only about one inch by one inch in size — pretty tiny. 
So what were these used for? 
We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. 
So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? 
These were used to make those kinds of packing slips. 
You might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. 
Perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other — we don't know. 
We need to decipher the script to answer that question. 
Deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. 
In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. 
First, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. 
These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. 
There's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. 
If you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. 
So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit. 
There's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. 
These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. 
And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian. 
Which of these hypotheses can be true? 
We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. 
But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. 
First, there's no Rosetta Stone. 
I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. 
We don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. 
And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. 
And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. 
So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny. 
And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. 
In the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. 
I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. 
And why was I fascinated? 
Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. 
My career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on. 
But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. 
That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. 
And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. 
And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. 
Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. 
Are you ready? 
The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. 
Here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. 
Can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? 
I'll give you a couple of seconds. 
Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. 
Okay. Left to right? 
Oh, it's almost 50 / 50. Okay. 
The answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. 
And so they had to cram the sign. 
One of the signs is also below the text on the top. 
This suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left, and so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. 
And the Indus script now has this particular property. 
What other properties of language does the script show? 
Languages contain patterns. 
If I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? 
Most of you said U, which is right. 
Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? 
Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? 
The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. 
There's a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. 
And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. 
And this is very similar to a Q and U example. 
This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. 
And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign, and this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script. 
Given such patterns, here was our idea. 
The idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. 
And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. 
Given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. 
So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. 
Here are some examples. 
You may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune. 
What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. 
In the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. 
There's also practical use for this particular procedure. 
There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. 
Here's an example of one such text. 
And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. 
Here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. 
And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze. 
Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. 
So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. 
I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. 
Such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. 
This is a physics and information theory term. 
But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. 
How many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? 
You might have encountered the stuck-key problem — so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. 
This kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. 
Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. 
What about the Indus script? 
Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. 
At the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters — and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. 
And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them in the very high range. 
At the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. 
Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range. 
Now what about the Indus script? 
We found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. 
When this result was first published, it was highly controversial. 
There were people who raised a hue and cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. 
I even started to get some hate mail. 
My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. 
Who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? 
What does this result really show? 
It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. 
So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. 
What other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language? 
Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. 
So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. 
If you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. 
Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. 
The same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. 
The computer found several texts — two of them are shown here — that have very unusual patterns. 
So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. 
This sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair. 
Why is that the case? 
We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. 
They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. 
And why were they found there? 
What I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. 
They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived, and so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. 
And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. 
It's just like our English and Dutch example. 
And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. 
This suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. 
The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language. 
If it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? 
That's our next big challenge. 
So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. 
Most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. 
So as an example, here's a word. 
Can you write it using pictures? 
I'll give you a couple seconds. 
Got it? 
Okay. Great. 
Here's my solution. 
You could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf — and that's "" belief, "" right. 
There could be other solutions. 
In the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. 
You have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. 
So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles because the stakes are so high if you solve it. 
My colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola, have been making some headway on this particular problem. 
And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. 
Here's a really short text. 
It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. 
And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. 
And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. 
In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "" meen "" which happens to sound just like the word for star. 
And so seven stars would stand for "" elu meen, "" which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. 
Similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "" aru meen, "" which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. 
And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. 
And that could be translated into "" mey meen, "" which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. 
So that was pretty exciting. 
It looks like we're getting somewhere. 
But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? 
Well not yet. 
So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. 
Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. 
The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. 
The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent. 
Why should we care? 
The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. 
These are our ancestors — yours and mine. 
They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. 
If we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. 
What would they tell us? 
What would we find out about them? About us? 
I can't wait to find out. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Hi everyone. 
I'm an artist and a dad — second time around. 
Thank you. 
And I want to share with you my latest art project. 
It's a children's book for the iPad. 
It's a little quirky and silly. 
It's called "" Pop-It, "" And it's about the things little kids do with their parents. 
(Music) So this is about potty training — as most of you, I hope, know. 
You can tickle the rug. 
You can make the baby poop. 
You can do all those fun things. 
You can burst bubbles. 
You can draw, as everyone should. 
But you know, I have a problem with children's books: I think they're full of propaganda. 
At least an Indian trying to get one of these American books in Park Slope, forget it. 
It's not the way I was brought up. 
So I said, "" I'm going to counter this with my own propaganda. "" If you notice carefully, it's a homosexual couple bringing up a child. 
You don't like it? 
Shake it, and you have a lesbian couple. 
(Laughter) Shake it, and you have a heterosexual couple. 
You know, I don't even believe in the concept of an ideal family. 
I have to tell you about my childhood. 
I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters. 
Basically, I was brought up to be a good Samaritan, and I am. 
And I'd go at the end of the day to a traditional Hindu house, which was probably the only Hindu house in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood. 
Basically, I celebrated every religious function. 
In fact, when there was a wedding in our neighborhood, all of us would paint our houses for the wedding. 
I remember we cried profusely when the little goats we played with in the summer became biriani. 
(Laughter) We all had to fast during Ramadan. 
It was a very beautiful time. 
But I must say, I'll never forget, when I was 13 years old, this happened. 
Babri Masjid — one of the most beautiful mosques in India, built by King Babur, I think, in the 16th century — was demolished by Hindu activists. 
This caused major riots in my city. 
And for the first time, I was affected by this communal unrest. 
My little five-year-old kid neighbor comes running in, and he says, "" Rags, Rags. 
You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims. Be careful. "" I'm like, "" Dude, I'm Hindu. "" (Laughter) He's like, "" Huh! "" You know, my work is inspired by events such as this. 
Even in my gallery shows, I try and revisit historic events like Babri Masjid, distill only its emotional residue and image my own life. 
Imagine history being taught differently. 
Remember that children's book where you shake and the sexuality of the parents change? 
I have another idea. 
It's a children's book about Indian independence — very patriotic. 
But when you shake it, you get Pakistan's perspective. 
Shake it again, and you get the British perspective. 
(Applause) You have to separate fact from bias, right. 
Even my books on children have cute, fuzzy animals. 
But they're playing geopolitics. 
They're playing out Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan. 
You know, I'm making a very important argument. 
And my argument [is] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage. 
After all, children's books are manuals on parenting, so you better give them children's books that teach them perspectives. 
And conversely, only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them. 
I'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy. 
You know, I can't promise my child a life without bias — we're all biased — but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos. 
It's true. 
So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters. 
We all want to be stars — celebrities, singers, comedians — and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do. 
But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture. 
Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday. 
But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 
And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment. 
So how does it happen? 
Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness. 
All right, let's go. 
(Video) Bear Vasquez: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 
Oh, my God! 
Wooo! 
Ohhhhh, wowwww! 
KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park. 
In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times. 
(Laughter) This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer. 
But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear. 
He just wanted to share a rainbow. 
Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear. 
(Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact. 
And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January. 
So what happened here? 
Jimmy Kimmel actually. 
Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become. 
Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience. 
(Video) Rebecca Black: ♫ It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. ♫ ♫ Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. ♫ ♫ Friday, Friday. Gettin 'down on Friday. ♫ KA: So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope. 
Rebecca Black's "" Friday "" is one of the most popular videos of the year. 
It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year. 
This is a chart of what it looked like. 
And similar to "" Double Rainbow, "" it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere. 
So what happened on this day? 
Well it was a Friday, this is true. 
And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays. 
(Laughter) But what about this day, this one particular Friday? 
Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about. 
Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter. 
But what's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience, accelerating the process. 
And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it. 
And now there are 10,000 parodies of "" Friday "" on YouTube. 
Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week. 
(Laughter) Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon — either by spreading it or by doing something new with it. 
(Music) So "" Nyan Cat "" is a looped animation with looped music. 
It's this, just like this. 
It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year. 
And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times. 
(Laughter) Even cats were watching this video. (Laughter) 
Cats were watching other cats watch this video. (Laughter) 
But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture. 
There were remixes. 
(Laughter) Someone made an old timey version. (Laughter) 
And then it went international. (Laughter) 
An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of. 
Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate. 
And who could have predicted any of this? 
Who could have predicted "" Double Rainbow "" or Rebecca Black or "" Nyan Cat? "" What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it? 
In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have. 
When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested. 
(Video) Casey Niestat: So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane. 
(Laughter) KA: By being totally surprising and humorous, Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times. 
And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively. 
And so it all brings us to one big question... 
(Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean? 
Ohhhh. 
(Laughter) KA: What does it mean? 
Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity. 
I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube. 
No one has to green-light your idea. 
And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture. 
And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. 
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. 
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. 
In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. 
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. 
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? 

I want to introduce you to an amazing woman. 
Her name is Davinia. 
Davinia was born in Jamaica, emigrated to the US at the age of 18, and now lives just outside of Washington, DC. 
She's not a high-powered political staffer, nor a lobbyist. 
She'd probably tell you she's quite unremarkable, but she's having the most remarkable impact. 
What's incredible about Davinia is that she's willing to spend time every single week focused on people who are not her: people not her in her neighborhood, her state, nor even in her country — people she'd likely never meet. 
Davinia's impact started a few years ago when she reached out to all of her friends on Facebook, and asked them to donate their pennies so she could fund girls' education. 
She wasn't expecting a huge response, but 700,000 pennies later, she's now sent over 120 girls to school. 
When we spoke last week, she told me she's become a little infamous at the local bank every time she rocks up with a shopping cart full of pennies. 
Now — Davinia is not alone. 
Far from it. 
She's part of a growing movement. 
And there's a name for people like Davinia: global citizens. 
A global citizen is someone who self-identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, a tribe or a nation, but as a member of the human race, and someone who is prepared to act on that belief, to tackle our world's greatest challenges. 
Our work is focused on finding, supporting and activating global citizens. 
They exist in every country and among every demographic. 
I want to make the case to you today that the world's future depends on global citizens. 
I'm convinced that if we had more global citizens active in our world, then every single one of the major challenges we face — from poverty, climate change, gender inequality — these issues become solvable. 
They are ultimately global issues, and they can ultimately only be solved by global citizens demanding global solutions from their leaders. 
Now, some people's immediate reaction to this idea is that it's either a bit utopian or even threatening. 
So I'd like to share with you a little of my story today, how I ended up here, how it connects with Davinia and, hopefully, with you. 
Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I was one of those seriously irritating little kids that never, ever stopped asking, "" Why? "" You might have been one yourself. 
I used to ask my mum the most annoying questions. 
I'd ask her questions like, "" Mum, why I can't I dress up and play with puppets all day? "" "Why do you want fries with that?" 
"" What is a shrimp, and why do we have to keep throwing them on the barbie? "" (Laughter) "" And mum — this haircut. 
Why? "" (Laughter) The worst haircut, I think. 
Still terrible. 
As a "" why "" kid, I thought I could change the world, and it was impossible to convince me otherwise. 
And when I was 12 and in my first year of high school, I started raising money for communities in the developing world. 
We were a really enthusiastic group of kids, and we raised more money than any other school in Australia. 
And so I was awarded the chance to go to the Philippines to learn more. 
It was 1998. 
We were taken into a slum in the outskirts of Manila. 
It was there I became friends with Sonny Boy, who lived on what was literally a pile of steaming garbage. 
"" Smoky Mountain "" was what they called it. 
But don't let the romance of that name fool you, because it was nothing more than a rancid landfill that kids like Sonny Boy spent hours rummaging through every single day to find something, anything of value. 
That night with Sonny Boy and his family changed my life forever, because when it came time to go to sleep, we simply laid down on this concrete slab the size of half my bedroom with myself, Sonny Boy, and the rest of his family, seven of us in this long line, with the smell of rubbish all around us and cockroaches crawling all around. 
And I didn't sleep a wink, but I lay awake thinking to myself, "" Why should anyone have to live like this when I have so much? 
Why should Sonny Boy's ability to live out his dreams be determined by where he's born, or what Warren Buffett called 'the ovarian lottery?' "" I just didn't get it, and I needed to understand why. 
Now, I only later came to understand that the poverty I'd seen in the Philippines was the result of decisions made or not made, man-made, by a succession of colonial powers and corrupt governments who had anything but the interests of Sonny Boy at heart. 
Sure, they didn't create Smoky Mountain, but they may as well have. 
And if we're to try to help kids like Sonny Boy, it wouldn't work just to try to send him a few dollars or to try to clean up the garbage dump on which he lived, because the core of the problem lay elsewhere. 
And as I worked on community development projects over the coming years trying to help build schools, train teachers, and tackle HIV and AIDS, I came to see that community development should be driven by communities themselves, and that although charity is necessary, it's not sufficient. 
We need to confront these challenges on a global scale and in a systemic way. 
And the best thing I could do is try to mobilize a large group of citizens back home to insist that our leaders engage in that systemic change. 
That's why, a few years later, I joined with a group of college friends in bringing the Make Poverty History campaign to Australia. 
We had this dream of staging this small concert around the time of the G20 with local Aussie artists, and it suddenly exploded one day when we got a phone call from Bono, the Edge and Pearl Jam, who all agreed to headline our concert. 
I got a little bit excited that day, as you can see. 
(Laughter) But to our amazement, the Australian government heard our collective voices, and they agreed to double investment into global health and development — an additional 6.2 billion dollars. 
It felt like — (Applause) It felt like this incredible validation. 
By rallying citizens together, we helped persuade our government to do the unthinkable, and act to fix a problem miles outside of our borders. 
But here's the thing: it didn't last. 
See, there was a change in government, and six years later, all that new money disappeared. 
What did we learn? 
We learned that one-off spikes are not enough. 
We needed a sustainable movement, not one that is susceptible to the fluctuating moods of a politician or the hint of an economic downturn. 
And it needed to happen everywhere; otherwise, every individual government would have this built-in excuse mechanism that they couldn't possibly carry the burden of global action alone. 
And so this is what we embarked upon. 
And as we embarked upon this challenge, we asked ourselves, how do we gain enough pressure and build a broad enough army to win these fights for the long term? 
We could only think of one way. 
We needed to somehow turn that short-term excitement of people involved with the Make Poverty History campaign into long-term passion. 
It had to be part of their identity. 
So in 2012, we cofounded an organization that had exactly that as its goal. 
And there was only one name for it: Global Citizen. 
But this is not about any one organization. 
This is about citizens taking action. 
And research data tells us that of the total population who even care about global issues, only 18 percent have done anything about it. 
And here's Dr. Raj Shah, the head of USAID, making that announcement. 
See, when thousands of global citizens find inspiration from each other, it's amazing to see their collective power. 
Global citizens like Davinia helped persuade the World Bank to boost their investment into water and sanitation. 
Here's the Bank's president Jim Kim announcing 15 billion dollars onstage at Global Citizen, and Prime Minister Modi of India affirmed his commitment to put a toilet in every household and school across India by 2019. 
Global citizens encouraged by the late-night host Stephen Colbert launched a Twitter invasion on Norway. 
Erna Solberg, the country's Prime Minister, got the message, committing to double investment into girls' education. 
Global citizens together with Rotarians called on the Canadian, UK, and Australian governments to boost their investment into polio eradication. 
They got together and committed 665 million dollars. 
But despite all of this momentum, we face some huge challenges. 
See, you might be thinking to yourself, how can we possibly persuade world leaders to sustain a focus on global issues? 
Indeed, the powerful American politician Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local." 
That's what always got politicians elected: to seek, gain and hold onto power through the pursuit of local or at very best national interests. 
I experienced this for the first time when I was 21 years old. 
I took a meeting with a then-Australian Foreign Minister who shall remain nameless — [Alexander Downer] (Laughter) And behind closed doors, I shared with him my passion to end extreme poverty. 
I said, "" Minister — Australia has this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. 
We can do this. "" And he paused, looked down on me with cold, dismissive eyes, and he said, "" Hugh, no one gives a funk about foreign aid. "" Except he didn't use the word "" funk. "" He went on. 
He said we need to look after our own backyard first. 
This is, I believe, outdated, even dangerous thinking. 
Or as my late grandfather would say, complete BS. 
Parochialism offers this false dichotomy because it pits the poor in one country against the poor in another. 
It pretends we can isolate ourselves and our nations from one another. 
The whole world is our backyard, and we ignore it at our peril. 
See, look what happened when we ignored Rwanda, when we ignore Syria, when we ignore climate change. 
Political leaders ought to give a "" funk "" because the impact of climate change and extreme poverty comes right to our shore. 
Now, global citizens — they understand this. 
We live in a time that favors the global citizen, in an age where every single voice can be heard. 
See, do you remember when the Millennium Development Goals were signed back in the year 2000? 
The most we could do in those days was fire off a letter and wait for the next election. 
There was no social media. 
Today, billions of citizens have more tools, more access to information, more capacity to influence than ever before. 
Both the problems and the tools to solve them are right before us. 
The world has changed, and those of us who look beyond our borders are on the right side of history. 
So where are we? 
So we run this amazing festival, we've scored some big policy wins, and citizens are signing up all over the world. 
But have we achieved our mission? 
No. 
We have such a long way to go. 
But this is the opportunity that I see. 
The concept of global citizenship, self-evident in its logic but until now impractical in many ways, has coincided with this particular moment in which we are privileged to live. 
We, as global citizens, now have a unique opportunity to accelerate large-scale positive change around the world. 
So in the months and years ahead, global citizens will hold world leaders accountable to ensure that the new Global Goals for Sustainable Development are tracked and implemented. 
Global citizens will partner with the world's leading NGOs to end diseases like polio and malaria. 
Global citizens will sign up in every corner of this globe, increasing the frequency, quality and impact of their actions. 
These dreams are within reach. 
Imagine an army of millions growing into tens of millions, connected, informed, engaged and unwilling to take no for an answer. 
Over all these years, I've tried to reconnect with Sonny Boy. 
Sadly, I've been unable to. 
We met long before social media, and his address has now been relocated by the authorities, as often happens with slums. 
I'd love to sit down with him, wherever he is, and share with him how much the time I spent on Smoky Mountain inspired me. 
Thanks to him and so many others, I came to understand the importance of being part of a movement of people — the kids willing to look up from their screens and out to the world, the global citizens. 
Global citizens who stand together, who ask the question "" Why?, "" who reject the naysayers, and embrace the amazing possibilities of the world we share. 
I'm a global citizen. 

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) 

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

I'm five years old, and I am very proud. 
My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. 
Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. 
This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. 
So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. 
Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. 
There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. 
She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. 
Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. 
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." 
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. 
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) 

My topic is economic growth in China and India. 
And the question I want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth. 
You may say this is not fair, because I'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy. 
Actually, exactly the opposite is what I'm going to do. 
I'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy, rather than against democracy. 
The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India. 
Over the last 30 years, in terms of the GDP growth rates, China has grown at twice the rate of India. 
In the last five years, the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth. 
But over the last 30 years, China undoubtedly has done much better than India. 
One simple answer is China has Shanghai and India has Mumbai. 
Look at the skyline of Shanghai. 
This is the Pudong area. 
The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India. 
The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law. 
It can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process, evict millions of people — that's just a small technical issue. 
Whereas in India, you cannot do that, because you have to listen to the public. 
You're being constrained by the public's opinion. 
Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with that view. 
In an interview printed in the financial press of India, He said that he wants to make Mumbai another Shanghai. 
This is an Oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values, and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of Shanghai. 
So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth, that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development: infrastructures, airports, highways, bridges, things like that. 
And you need a strong government to do that, because you cannot respect private property rights. 
You cannot be constrained by the public's opinion. 
You need also state ownership, especially of land assets, in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly. 
The implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth, rather than a facilitator of economic growth. 
Here's the key question. 
Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth? 
This is a key issue. 
If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth, then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth. If you believe 
that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe, then you will put less emphasis on strong government. 
So to illustrate that question, let me give you two countries. 
And for the sake of brevity, I'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2. Country 1 
has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures. 
Country 1 has more telephones, and Country 1 has a longer system of railways. 
So if I were to ask you, "" Which is China and which is India, and which country has grown faster? "" if you believe in the infrastructure view, then you will say, "" Country 1 must be China. 
They must have done better, in terms of economic growth. 
And Country 2 is possibly India. "" Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union, and the data referred to 1989. 
After the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones, the country collapsed. 
That's not too good. 
The picture there is Khrushchev. 
I know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the Soviet Union, but that's the best picture that I can find. 
(Laughter) Telephones, infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth. 
Country 2, that has fewer telephones, is China. 
Since 1989, the country has performed at a double-digit rate every year for the last 20 years. 
If you know nothing about China and the Soviet Union other than the fact about their telephones, you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades. 
Country 1, that has a longer system of railways, is actually India. 
And Country 2 is China. 
This is a very little known fact about the two countries. 
Yes, today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India. 
But for many years, until the late 1990s, China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India. 
In developing countries, the most common mode of transportation is the railways, and the British built a lot of railways in India. 
India is the smaller of the two countries, and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s. 
So clearly, infrastructure doesn't explain why China did better before the late 1990s, as compared with India. 
In fact, if you look at the evidence worldwide, the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth. 
The economy grows, government accumulates more resources, and the government can invest in infrastructure — rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth. 
And this is clearly the story of the Chinese economic growth. 
Let me look at this question more directly. 
Is democracy bad for economic growth? 
Now let's turn to two countries, Country A and Country B. 
Country A, in 1990, had about $300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B, which had $460 in per capita GDP. 
By 2008, Country A has surpassed Country B with $700 per capita GDP as compared with $650 per capita GDP. 
Both countries are in Asia. 
If I were to ask you, "" Which are the two Asian countries? 
And which one is a democracy? "" you may argue, "" Well, maybe Country A is China and Country B is India. "" In fact, Country A is democratic India, and Country B is Pakistan — the country that has a long period of military rule. 
And it's very common that we compare India with China. 
That's because the two countries have about the same population size. 
But the more natural comparison is actually between India and Pakistan. 
Those two countries are geographically similar. 
They have a complicated, but shared common history. 
By that comparison, democracy looks very, very good in terms of economic growth. 
So why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments? 
One reason is the East Asian Model. 
In East Asia, we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. 
Some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s. 
The problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries, "Have you won the lottery?" 
And they all tell you, "" Yes, we have won the lottery. "" And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent. 
The reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and didn't end up winning the prize. 
For each of these successful authoritarian governments in East Asia, there's a matched failure. 
Korea succeeded, North Korea didn't. 
Taiwan succeeded, China under Mao Zedong didn't. 
Burma didn't succeed. 
The Philippines didn't succeed. 
If you look at the statistical evidence worldwide, there's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth. 
So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias — it is known as selecting on a dependent variable, something we always tell our students to avoid. 
So exactly why did China grow so much faster? 
I will take you to the Cultural Revolution, when China went mad, and compare that country's performance with India under Indira Gandhi. 
The question there is: Which country did better, China or India? 
China was during the Cultural Revolution. 
It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution, China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP. 
So that's when China was mad. 
The whole country went mad. 
It must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the Cultural Revolution. 
The advantage the country had was human capital — nothing else but human capital. 
This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s. 
And this is the earliest data that I can find. 
The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India. 
The contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between Chinese women and Indian women. 
I haven't told you about the definition of literacy. 
In China, the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters. 
In India, the definition of literacy, operating definition of literacy, is the ability, the grand ability, to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak. 
The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated. 
If you go to other sources of data such as Human Development Index, that data series, go back to the early 1970s, you see exactly the same contrast. 
China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India. 
Life expectancies: as early as 1965, China had a huge advantage in life expectancy. 
On average, as a Chinese in 1965, you lived 10 years more than an average Indian. 
So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian, you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer. 
If you made that decision in 1965, the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution. 
So you have to always think carefully about these decisions. 
If you cannot chose your nationality, then you will want to become an Indian man. 
Because, as an Indian man, you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis Indian women. 
This is an extremely strange fact. 
It's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern. 
It shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the Indian society against women. 
The good news is, by 2006, India has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy. 
Today, Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men. 
So India is reverting to the normal. 
But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality. 
These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India. 
In China, it's all women. 
60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country, whereas in India, it's all men. 
Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title, "" India Poised to Overtake China in Textile. "" By looking at these two pictures, I say no, it won't overtake China for a while. 
If you look at other East Asian countries, women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off — in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia. 
India still has a long way to go to catch up with China. 
Then the issue is, what about the Chinese political system? 
You talk about human capital, you talk about education and public health. 
What about the political system? 
Isn't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China? 
Actually, the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that. 
It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system. 
Statically, China is a one-party system, authoritarian — there's no question about it. 
Dynamically, it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic. 
When you explain change — for example, economic growth; economic growth is about change — when you explain change, you use other things that have changed to explain change, rather than using the constant to explain change. 
Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change, but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change. 
In terms of the political changes, they have introduced village elections. 
They have increased the security of proprietors. 
And they have increased the security with long-term land leases. 
There are also financial reforms in rural China. 
There is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in China. 
To me, the pace of political changes is too slow, too gradual. 
And my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges, because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms. 
But nevertheless, the system has moved in a more liberal direction, moved in a more democratic direction. 
You can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on India. 
In fact, when India was growing at a Hindu rate of growth — about one percent, two percent a year — that was when India was least democratic. 
Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975. 
The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations. 
A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms, the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule, privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts. 
So the dynamic perspective fits both with China and in India in terms of the direction. 
Why do many people believe that India is still a growth disaster? 
One reason is they are always comparing India with China. 
But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth. 
If you are a NBA player and you are always being compared to Michael Jordan, you're going to look not so impressive. 
But that doesn't mean that you're a bad basketball player. 
Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark. 
In fact, if you compare India with the average developing country, even before the more recent period of acceleration of Indian growth — now India is growing between eight and nine percent — even before this period, India was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies. 
This is a very impressive record indeed. 
Let's think about the future: the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant. 
Which country has the growth momentum? 
China, I believe, still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals — mostly the social capital, the public health, the sense of egalitarianism that you don't find in India. 
But I believe that India has the momentum. 
It has the improving fundamentals. 
The government has invested in basic education, has invested in basic health. 
I believe the government should do more, but nevertheless, the direction it is moving in is the right direction. 
India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth, whereas China is still struggling with political reforms. 
I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth. 
And it's very important to have political reforms, to have widely shared benefits of economic growth. 
I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist. 
Hopefully, five years from now, I'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Blah blah blah blah blah. 
Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah. 
Blah blah blah, blah. 
So what the hell was that? 
Well, you don't know because you couldn't understand it. 
It wasn't clear. 
But hopefully, it was said with enough conviction that it was at least alluringly mysterious. 
Clarity or mystery? 
I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a New Yorker every day, and there are two elements that absolutely fascinate me. 
Here's an example. 
Now, how many people know what this is? 
Okay. Now how many people know what this is? 
Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes by the genius Charles M. Schulz, we now have seven deft strokes that in and of themselves create an entire emotional life, one that has enthralled hundreds of millions of fans for over 50 years. 
This is actually a cover of a book that I designed about the work of Schulz and his art, which will be coming out this fall, and that is the entire cover. 
There is no other typographic information or visual information on the front, and the name of the book is "" Only What's Necessary. "" So this is sort of symbolic about the decisions I have to make every day about the design that I'm perceiving, and the design I'm creating. 
So clarity. 
Clarity gets to the point. 
It's blunt. It's honest. It's sincere. 
We ask ourselves this. ["" When should you be clear? ""] Now, something like this, whether we can read it or not, needs to be really, really clear. 
Is it? 
This is a rather recent example of urban clarity that I just love, mainly because I'm always late and I am always in a hurry. 
So when these meters started showing up a couple of years ago on street corners, I was thrilled, because now I finally knew how many seconds I had to get across the street before I got run over by a car. 
Six? I can do that. (Laughter) So let's look at the yin to the clarity yang, and that is mystery. 
Mystery is a lot more complicated by its very definition. 
Mystery demands to be decoded, and when it's done right, we really, really want to. 
["" When should you be mysterious? ""] In World War II, the Germans really, really wanted to decode this, and they couldn't. 
Here's an example of a design that I've done recently for a novel by Haruki Murakami, who I've done design work for for over 20 years now, and this is a novel about a young man who has four dear friends who all of a sudden, after their freshman year of college, completely cut him off with no explanation, and he is devastated. 
And the friends' names each have a connotation in Japanese to a color. 
So there's Mr. Red, there's Mr. Blue, there's Ms. White, and Ms. Black. 
Tsukuru Tazaki, his name does not correspond to a color, so his nickname is Colorless, and as he's looking back on their friendship, he recalls that they were like five fingers on a hand. 
So I created this sort of abstract representation of this, but there's a lot more going on underneath the surface of the story, and there's more going on underneath the surface of the jacket. 
The four fingers are now four train lines in the Tokyo subway system, which has significance within the story. 
And then you have the colorless subway line intersecting with each of the other colors, which basically he does later on in the story. 
He catches up with each of these people to find out why they treated him the way they did. 
And so this is the three-dimensional finished product sitting on my desk in my office, and what I was hoping for here is that you'll simply be allured by the mystery of what this looks like, and will want to read it to decode and find out and make more clear why it looks the way it does. 
["" The Visual Vernacular. ""] This is a way to use a more familiar kind of mystery. 
What does this mean? 
This is what it means. ["" Make it look like something else. ""] The visual vernacular is the way we are used to seeing a certain thing applied to something else so that we see it in a different way. 
This is an approach I wanted to take to a book of essays by David Sedaris that had this title at the time. ["" All the Beauty You Will Ever Need ""] Now, the challenge here was that this title actually means nothing. 
It's not connected to any of the essays in the book. 
It came to the author's boyfriend in a dream. 
Thank you very much, so — (Laughter) — so usually, I am creating a design that is in some way based on the text, but this is all the text there is. 
So you've got this mysterious title that really doesn't mean anything, so I was trying to think: Where might I see a bit of mysterious text that seems to mean something but doesn't? 
And sure enough, not long after, one evening after a Chinese meal, this arrived, and I thought, "" Ah, bing, ideagasm! "" (Laughter) I've always loved the hilariously mysterious tropes of fortune cookies that seem to mean something extremely deep but when you think about them — if you think about them — they really don't. 
This says, "" Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future. "" Thank you. (Laughter) But we can take this visual vernacular and apply it to Mr. Sedaris, and we are so familiar with how fortune cookie fortunes look that we don't even need the bits of the cookie anymore. 
We're just seeing this strange thing and we know we love David Sedaris, and so we're hoping that we're in for a good time. 
["" 'Fraud' Essays by David Rakoff ""] David Rakoff was a wonderful writer and he called his first book "" Fraud "" because he was getting sent on assignments by magazines to do things that he was not equipped to do. 
So he was this skinny little urban guy and GQ magazine would send him down the Colorado River whitewater rafting to see if he would survive. 
And then he would write about it, and he felt that he was a fraud and that he was misrepresenting himself. 
And so I wanted the cover of this book to also misrepresent itself and then somehow show a reader reacting to it. 
This led me to graffiti. 
I'm fascinated by graffiti. 
I think anybody who lives in an urban environment encounters graffiti all the time, and there's all different sorts of it. 
This is a picture I took on the Lower East Side of just a transformer box on the sidewalk and it's been tagged like crazy. 
Now whether you look at this and think, "" Oh, that's a charming urban affectation, "" or you look at it and say, "" That's illegal abuse of property, "" the one thing I think we can all agree on is that you cannot read it. 
Right? There is no clear message here. 
There is another kind of graffiti that I find far more interesting, which I call editorial graffiti. 
This is a picture I took recently in the subway, and sometimes you see lots of prurient, stupid stuff, but I thought this was interesting, and this is a poster that is saying rah-rah Airbnb, and someone has taken a Magic Marker and has editorialized about what they think about it. 
And it got my attention. 
So I was thinking, how do we apply this to this book? 
So I get the book by this person, and I start reading it, and I'm thinking, this guy is not who he says he is; he's a fraud. 
And I get out a red Magic Marker, and out of frustration just scribble this across the front. 
Design done. (Laughter) And they went for it! (Laughter) Author liked it, publisher liked it, and that is how the book went out into the world, and it was really fun to see people reading this on the subway and walking around with it and what have you, and they all sort of looked like they were crazy. (Laughter) 
["" 'Perfidia' a novel by James Ellroy ""] Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer, a good friend, I've worked with him for many years. 
He is probably best known as the author of "" The Black Dahlia "" and "" L.A. Confidential. "" His most recent novel was called this, which is a very mysterious name that I'm sure a lot of people know what it means, but a lot of people don't. 
And it's a story about a Japanese-American detective in Los Angeles in 1941 investigating a murder. 
And then Pearl Harbor happens, and as if his life wasn't difficult enough, now the race relations have really ratcheted up, and then the Japanese-American internment camps are quickly created, and there's lots of tension and horrible stuff as he's still trying to solve this murder. 
And so I did at first think very literally about this in terms of all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor and we'll add it to Los Angeles and we'll make this apocalyptic dawn on the horizon of the city. 
And so that's a picture from Pearl Harbor just grafted onto Los Angeles. 
My editor in chief said, "" You know, it's interesting but I think you can do better and I think you can make it simpler. "" And so I went back to the drawing board, as I often do. 
But also, being alive to my surroundings, I work in a high-rise in Midtown, and every night, before I leave the office, I have to push this button to get out, and the big heavy glass doors open and I can get onto the elevator. 
And one night, all of a sudden, I looked at this and I saw it in a way that I hadn't really noticed it before. 
Big red circle, danger. 
And I thought this was so obvious that it had to have been done a zillion times, and so I did a Google image search, and I couldn't find another book cover that looked quite like this, and so this is really what solved the problem, and graphically it's more interesting and creates a bigger tension between the idea of a certain kind of sunrise coming up over L.A. and America. 
["" 'Gulp' A tour of the human digestive system by Mary Roach. ""] Mary Roach is an amazing writer who takes potentially mundane scientific subjects and makes them not mundane at all; she makes them really fun. 
So in this particular case, it's about the human digestive system. 
So I'm trying to figure out what is the cover of this book going to be. 
This is a self-portrait. (Laughter) Every morning I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror to see if my tongue is black. 
And if it's not, I'm good to go. 
(Laughter) I recommend you all do this. 
But I also started thinking, here's our introduction. 
Right? Into the human digestive system. 
But I think what we can all agree on is that actual photographs of human mouths, at least based on this, are off-putting. (Laughter) So for the cover, then, I had this illustration done which is literally more palatable and reminds us that it's best to approach the digestive system from this end. (Laughter) 
I don't even have to complete the sentence. All right. 
["" Unuseful mystery ""] What happens when clarity and mystery get mixed up? 
And we see this all the time. 
This is what I call unuseful mystery. 
I go down into the subway — I take the subway a lot — and this piece of paper is taped to a girder. 
Right? And now I'm thinking, uh-oh, and the train's about to come and I'm trying to figure out what this means, and thanks a lot. 
Part of the problem here is that they've compartmentalized the information in a way they think is helpful, and frankly, I don't think it is at all. 
So this is mystery we do not need. 
What we need is useful clarity, so just for fun, I redesigned this. 
This is using all the same elements. 
(Applause) Thank you. I am still waiting for a call from the MTA. (Laughter) You know, I'm actually not even using more colors than they use. 
They just didn't even bother to make the 4 and the 5 green, those idiots. (Laughter) So the first thing we see is that there is a service change, and then, in two complete sentences with a beginning, a middle and an end, it tells us what the change is and what's going to be happening. 
Call me crazy! (Laughter) ["" Useful mystery ""] All right. 
Now, here is a piece of mystery that I love: packaging. 
This redesign of the Diet Coke can by Turner Duckworth is to me truly a piece of art. 
It's a work of art. It's beautiful. 
But part of what makes it so heartening to me as a designer is that he's taken the visual vernacular of Diet Coke — the typefaces, the colors, the silver background — and he's reduced them to their most essential parts, so it's like going back to the Charlie Brown face. 
It's like, how can you give them just enough information so they know what it is but giving them the credit for the knowledge that they already have about this thing? 
It looks great, and you would go into a delicatessen and all of a sudden see that on the shelf, and it's wonderful. 
Which makes the next thing — ["" Unuseful clarity ""] — all the more disheartening, at least to me. 
So okay, again, going back down into the subway, after this came out, these are pictures that I took. 
Times Square subway station: Coca-Cola has bought out the entire thing for advertising. Okay? 
And maybe some of you know where this is going. 
Ahem. 
"" You moved to New York with the clothes on your back, the cash in your pocket, and your eyes on the prize. 
You're on Coke. "" (Laughter) "" You moved to New York with an MBA, one clean suit, and an extremely firm handshake. You're on Coke. "" (Laughter) 
These are real! (Laughter) Not even the support beams were spared, except they switched into Yoda mode. (Laughter) "" Coke you're on. "" (Laughter) ["" Excuse me, I'm on WHAT?? ""] This campaign was a huge misstep. 
It was pulled almost instantly due to consumer backlash and all sorts of unflattering parodies on the web — (Laughter) — and also that dot next to "" You're on, "" that's not a period, that's a trademark. 
So thanks a lot. 
So to me, this was just so bizarre about how they could get the packaging so mysteriously beautiful and perfect and the message so unbearably, clearly wrong. 
It was just incredible to me. 
So I just hope that I've been able to share with you some of my insights on the uses of clarity and mystery in my work, and maybe how you might decide to be more clear in your life, or maybe to be a bit more mysterious and not so over-sharing. 
(Laughter) And if there's just one thing that I leave you with from this talk, I hope it's this: Blih blih blih blah. Blah blah blih blih. ["" 'Judge This,' Chip Kidd ""] Blih blih blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. 
Blah blah. 
(Applause) 

As a software developer and technologist, I've worked on a number of civic technology projects over the years. 
Civic tech is sometimes referred to as tech for good, using technology to solve humanitarian problems. 
This is in 2010 in Uganda, working on a solution that allowed local populations to avoid government surveillance on their mobile phones for expressing dissent. 
That same technology was deployed later in North Africa for similar purposes to help activists stay connected when governments were deliberately shutting off connectivity as a means of population control. 
But over the years, as I have thought about these technologies and the things that I work on, a question kind of nags in the back of my mind, which is, what if we're wrong about the virtues of technology, and if it sometimes actively hurts the communities that we're intending to help? 
The tech industry around the world tends to operate under similar assumptions that if we build great things, it will positively affect everyone. 
Eventually, these innovations will get out and find everyone. 
But that's not always the case. 
I like to call this blind championing of technology "" trickle-down techonomics, "" to borrow a phrase. (Laughter) We tend to think that if we design things for the select few, eventually those technologies will reach everyone, and that's not always the case. 
Technology and innovation behaves a lot like wealth and capital. 
They tend to consolidate in the hands of the few, and sometimes they find their way out into the hands of the many. 
And so most of you aren't tackling oppressive regimes on the weekends, so I wanted to think of a few examples that might be a little bit more relatable. 
In the world of wearables and smartphones and apps, there's a big movement to track people's personal health with applications that track the number of calories that you burn or whether you're sitting too much or walking enough. 
These technologies make patient intake in medical facilities much more efficient, and in turn, these medical facilities are starting to expect these types of efficiencies. 
As these digital tools find their way into medical rooms, and they become digitally ready, what happens to the digitally invisible? 
What does the medical experience look like for someone who doesn't have the $400 phone or watch tracking their every movement? 
Do they now become a burden on the medical system? 
Is their experience changed? 
In the world of finance, Bitcoin and crypto-currencies are revolutionizing the way we move money around the world, but the challenge with these technologies is the barrier to entry is incredibly high, right? 
You need access to the same phones, devices, connectivity, and even where you don't, where you can find a proxy agent, usually they require a certain amount of capital to participate. 
And so the question that I ask myself is, what happens to the last community using paper notes when the rest of the world moves to digital currency? 
Another example from my hometown in Philadelphia: I recently went to the public library there, and they are facing an existential crisis. 
Public funding is dwindling, they have to reduce their footprint to stay open and stay relevant, and so one of the ways they're going about this is digitizing a number of the books and moving them to the cloud. 
This is great for most kids. Right? 
You can check out books from home, you can research on the way to school or from school, but these are really two big assumptions, that one, you have access at home, and two, that you have access to a mobile phone, and in Philadelphia, many kids do not. 
So what does their education experience look like in the wake of a completely cloud-based library, what used to be considered such a basic part of education? 
How do they stay competitive? 
A final example from across the world in East Africa: there's been a huge movement to digitize land ownership rights, for a number of reasons. 
Migrant communities, older generations dying off, and ultimately poor record-keeping have led to conflicts over who owns what. 
And so there was a big movement to put all this information online, to track all the ownership of these plots of land, put them in the cloud, and give them to the communities. 
But actually, the unintended consequence of this has been that venture capitalists, investors, real estate developers, have swooped in and they've begun buying up these plots of land right out from under these communities, because they have access to the technologies and the connectivity that makes that possible. 
So that's the common thread that connects these examples, the unintended consequences of the tools and the technologies that we make. 
As engineers, as technologists, we sometimes prefer efficiency over efficacy. 
We think more about doing things than the outcomes of what we are doing. 
This needs to change. 
We have a responsibility to think about the outcomes of the technologies we build, especially as they increasingly control the world in which we live. 
In the late '90s, there was a big push for ethics in the world of investment and banking. 
I think in 2014, we're long overdue for a similar movement in the area of tech and technology. 
So, I just encourage you, as you are all thinking about the next big thing, as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as engineers, as makers, that you think about the unintended consequences of the things that you're building, because the real innovation is in finding ways to include everyone. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I am going to teach you how to play my favorite game: massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. 
It's the only game in the world that I know of that allows you, the player, the opportunity to experience 10 positive emotions in 60 seconds or less. 
This is true, so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute, you will get to feel joy, relief, love, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, awe and wonder, contentment, and creativity, all in the span of one minute. 
In order to teach you this game, I'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly, and we're going to do a little hands-on demo. 
While they're coming up, I should let you know, this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists' collective in Austria named Monochrom. 
So thank you, Monochrom. 
Okay, so most people are familiar with traditional, two-person thumb-wrestling. 
Sunni, let's just remind them. 
One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war, and we wrestle, and of course Sunni beats me because she's the best. 
Now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, we're the gamer generation. 
There are a billion gamers on the planet now, so we need more of a challenge. 
So the first thing we need is more thumbs. 
So Eric, come on over. 
So we could get three thumbs together, and Peter could join us. 
We could even have four thumbs together, and the way you win is you're the first person to pin someone else's thumb. 
This is really important. You can't, like, wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute. 
So Eric would have won. He was the first person to pin my thumb. 
Okay, so that's the first rule, and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node, but if you feel ambitious, you don't have to hold back. 
We can really go for it. 
So you can see up here. 
Now the only other rule you need to remember is, gamer generation, we like a challenge. 
I happen to notice you all have some thumbs you're not using. 
So I think we should kind of get some more involved. 
And if we had just four people, we would do it just like this, and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time. 
Perfect. 
Now, if we had more people in the room, instead of just wrestling in a closed node, we might reach out and try and grab some other people. 
And in fact, that's what we're going to do right now. 
We're going to try and get all, something like, I don't know, 1,500 thumbs in this room connected in a single node. 
And we have to connect both levels, so if you're up there, you're going to be reaching down and reaching up. 
Now — (Laughter) — before we get started — This is great. You're excited to play. — before we get started, can I have the slides back up here really quick, because if you get good at this game, I want you to know there are some advanced levels. 
So this is the kind of simple level, right? 
But there are advanced configurations. 
This is called the Death Star Configuration. 
Any Star Wars fans? 
And this one's called the Möbius Strip. 
Any science geeks, you get that one. 
This is the hardest level. This is the extreme. 
So we'll stick with the normal one for now, and I'm going to give you 30 seconds, every thumb into the node, connect the upper and the lower levels, you guys go on down there. 
Thirty seconds. Into the network. Make the node. 
Stand up! It's easier if you stand up. 
Everybody, up up up up up! 
Stand up, my friends. 
All right. 
Don't start wrestling yet. 
If you have a free thumb, wave it around, make sure it gets connected. 
Okay. We need to do a last-minute thumb check. 
If you have a free thumb, wave it around to make sure. 
Grab that thumb! 
Reach behind you. There you go. 
Any other thumbs? 
Okay, on the count of three, you're going to go. 
Try to keep track. Grab, grab, grab it. 
Okay? One, two, three, go! 
(Laughter) Did you win? You got it? You got it? Excellent! 
(Applause) Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much. 
All right. 
While you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game, let's do a quick recap on the positive emotions. 
So curiosity. 
I said "" massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. "" You were like, "" What the hell is she talking about? "" So I provoked a little curiosity. 
Creativity: it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node. 
I'm reaching around and I'm reaching up. 
So you used creativity. That was great. 
How about surprise? The actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising. 
You heard that sound go up in the room. 
We had excitement. As you started to wrestle, maybe you're starting to win or this person's, like, really into it, so you kind of get the excitement going. 
We have relief. You got to stand up. 
You've been sitting for awhile, so the physical relief, getting to shake it out. 
We had joy. You were laughing, smiling. Look at your faces. This room is full of joy. 
We had some contentment. 
I didn't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing, so you were totally content to be playing. 
The most important three emotions, awe and wonder, we had everybody connected physically for a minute. 
When was the last time you were at TED and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room? 
And it's truly awesome and wondrous. 
And speaking of physical connection, you guys know I love the hormone oxytocin, you release oxytocin, you feel bonded to everyone in the room. 
You guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else's hand for at least six seconds. 
You guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds, so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other. That is great. 
And the last emotion of pride. 
How many people are like me. Just admit it. 
You lost both your thumbs. 
It just didn't work out for you. 
That's okay, because you learned a new skill today. 
You learned, from scratch, a game you never knew before. 
Now you know how to play it. You can teach other people. 
So congratulations. 
How many of you won just won thumb? 
All right. I have very good news for you. 
According to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, this makes you a grandmaster of the game. 
Because there aren't that many people who know how to play, we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess. 
So congratulations, grandmasters. 
Win one thumb once, you will become a grandmaster. 
Did anybody win both their thumbs? 
Yes. Awesome. Okay. 
Get ready to update your Twitter or Facebook status. 
You guys, according to the rules, are legendary grandmasters, so congratulations. 
I will just leave you with this tip, if you want to play again. 
The best way to become a legendary grandmaster, you've got your two nodes going on. 
Pick off the one that looks easiest. 
They're not paying attention. They look kind of weak. 
Focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm. 
As soon as you win, suddenly stop. 
Everybody is thrown off. You go in for the kill. 
That's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. 
Thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game. 
Wooo! (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

Do you know how many species of flowering plants there are? 
There are a quarter of a million — at least those are the ones we know about — a quarter of a million species of flowering plants. 
And flowers are a real bugger. 
They're really difficult for plants to produce. 
They take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources. 
Why would they go to that bother? 
And the answer of course, like so many things in the world, is sex. 
I know what's on your mind when you're looking at these pictures. 
And the reason that sexual reproduction is so important — there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce. 
You can take cuttings; they can sort of have sex with themselves; they can pollinate themselves. 
But they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches. 
Evolution works that way. 
Now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen. 
Some of you may have seen some of these pictures before. 
As I say, every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these. 
And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants. 
And that's actually rather useful for forensics and so on. 
Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen, and that's a very inefficient process, which is why it gets up our noses so much. 
Because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it, hoping that your sex cells, your male sex cells, which are held within the pollen, will somehow reach another flower just by chance. 
So all the grasses, which means all of the cereal crops, and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen. 
But most species actually use insects to do their bidding, and that's more intelligent in a way, because the pollen, they don't need so much of it. 
The insects and other species can take the pollen, transfer it directly to where it's required. 
So we're aware, obviously, of the relationship between insects and plants. 
There's a symbiotic relationship there, whether it's flies or birds or bees, they're getting something in return, and that something in return is generally nectar. 
Sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations — the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation. 
The plant gets something, and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else. 
Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way. 
There are markings on many plants that look like other insects. 
These are the anthers of a lily, cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it, the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with. 
And there's an orchid that might look to you as if it's got jaws, and in a way, it has; it forces the insect to crawl out, getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else. 
Orchids: there are 20,000, at least, species of orchids — amazingly, amazingly diverse. 
And they get up to all sorts of tricks. 
They have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding. 
This orchid, known as Darwin's orchid, because it's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it — you can see that there's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid. 
And basically what the insect has to do — we're in the middle of the flower — it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar. 
And Darwin said, looking at this flower, "I guess something has coevolved with this." 
And sure enough, there's the insect. 
And I mean, normally it kind of rolls it away, but in its erect form, that's what it looks like. 
Now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators, then, just as in human sex, people might start to deceive. 
They might say, "" I've got a bit of nectar. Do you want to come and get it? "" Now this is a plant. 
This is a plant here that insects in South Africa just love, and they've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom. 
And this is the mimic. 
So this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant. 
And here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic, because the mimic doesn't give it any nectar. It thought it would get some. 
So not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant, it's also — if you look very closely just at the head end, you can see that it's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant, if only some botanist hadn't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card. 
(Laughter) Now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom. 
This flower with its black dots: they might look like black dots to us, but if I tell you, to a male insect of the right species, that looks like two females who are really, really hot to trot. 
(Laughter) And when the insect gets there and lands on it, dousing itself in pollen, of course, that it's going to take to another plant, if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture, you can see that there are actually some patterning there, which is three-dimensional. 
So it probably even feels good for the insect, as well as looking good. 
And these electron microscope pictures — here's one of an orchid mimicking an insect — you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye, have very, very different textures to what an insect might perceive. 
And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles. 
And under the scanning electron microscope, you can see the surface there — really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at. 
Sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect, even to us. 
I mean, I think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast. 
It's a wonderful, amazing thing. 
This one's clever. It's called obsidian. 
I think of it as insidium sometimes. 
To the right species of bee, this looks like another very aggressive bee, and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away, and, of course, covers itself with pollen. 
The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects. 
And this one doesn't have anything for them. 
So it's deceiving on two levels — fabulous. 
(Laughter) Here we see ylang ylang, the component of many perfumes. 
I actually smelt someone with some on earlier. 
And the flowers don't really have to be that gaudy. 
They're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that'll have it. 
This one doesn't smell so good. 
This is a flower that really, really smells pretty nasty and is designed, again, evolved, to look like carrion. 
So flies love this. 
They fly in and they pollinate. 
This, which is helicodiceros, is also known as dead horse arum. 
I don't know what a dead horse actually smells like, but this one probably smells pretty much like it. 
It's really horrible. 
And blowflies just can't help themselves. 
They fly into this thing, and they fly all the way down it. 
They lay their eggs in it, thinking it's a nice bit of carrion, and not realizing that there's no food for the eggs, that the eggs are going to die, but the plant, meanwhile, has benefited, because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower — fantastic. 
Here's arum, arum maculatum, "" lords and ladies, "" or "" cuckoo-pint "" in this country. 
I photographed this thing last week in Dorset. 
This thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature — amazing. 
And if you look down into it, there's this sort of dam past the spadix, flies get attracted by the heat — which is boiling off volatile chemicals, little midges — and they get trapped underneath in this container. 
They drink this fabulous nectar and then they're all a bit sticky. 
At night they get covered in pollen, which showers down over them, and then the bristles that we saw above, they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out, covered in pollen — fabulous thing. 
Now if you think that's fabulous, this is one of my great favorites. 
This is the philodendron selloum. 
For anyone here from Brazil, you'll know about this plant. 
This is the most amazing thing. 
That sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long. 
And it does something that no other plant that I know of does, and that is that when it flowers — that's the spadix in the middle there — for a period of about two days, it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals. 
So instead of having starch, which is the food of plants, it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it's burning fat, metabolizing, about the rate of a small cat. 
And that's twice the energy output, weight for weight, than a hummingbird — absolutely astonishing. 
This thing does something else which is unusual. 
Not only will it raise itself to 115 Fahrenheit, 43 or 44 degrees Centigrade, for two days, but it keeps constant temperature. 
There's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature. 
"" Now why does it do this, "" I hear you ask. 
Now wouldn't you know it, there's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature. 
And they get inside, and they get it all on. 
(Laughter) And the plant showers them with pollen, and off they go and pollinate. 
And what a wonderful thing it is. 
Now most pollinators that we think about are insects, but actually in the tropics, many birds and butterflies pollinate. 
And many of the tropical flowers are red, and that's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us, we think, and can see the color red very well. 
But if you look at the spectrum, birds and us, we see red, green and blue and see that spectrum. 
Insects see green, blue and ultraviolet, and they see various shades of ultraviolet. 
So there's something that goes on off the end there. 
"" And wouldn't it be great if we could somehow see what that is, "" I hear you ask. 
Well yes we can. 
So what is an insect seeing? 
Last week I took these pictures of rock rose, helianthemum, in Dorset. 
These are little yellow flowers like we all see, little yellow flowers all over the place. 
And this is what it looks like with visible light. 
This is what it looks like if you take out the red. 
Most bees don't perceive red. 
And then I put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very, very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what I got. 
And that's a real fantastic bull's eye. 
Now we don't know exactly what a bee sees, any more than you know what I'm seeing when I call this red. 
We can't know what's going on in — let alone an insect's — another human being's mind. 
But the contrast will look something like that, so standing out a lot from the background. 
Here's another little flower — different range of ultraviolet frequencies, different filters to match the pollinators. 
And that's the sort of thing that it would be seeing. 
Just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property — no flower was damaged in the process of this shot; it was just attached to the tripod, not killed — then under ultraviolet light, look at that. 
And that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light. 
So maybe the chemical in that would be useful. 
Finally, there's one of evening primrose that Bjorn Rorslett from Norway sent me — fantastic hidden pattern. 
And I love the idea of something hidden. 
I think there's something poetic here, that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter, the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus — actually the clouds of Venus. 
That's the main use of that filter. 
Venus, of course, is the god of love and fertility, which is the flower story. 
And just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding, they've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death, and particularly at marriage, which, when you think of it, is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So yeah, I'm a newspaper cartoonist — political cartoonist. 
I don't know if you've heard about it — newspapers? 
It's a sort of paper-based reader. 
(Laughter) It's lighter than an iPad, it's a bit cheaper. 
You know what they say? 
They say the print media is dying — who says that? Well, the media. 
But this is no news, right? 
You've read about it already. 
(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, the world has gotten smaller. 
I know it's a cliche, but look, look how small, how tiny it has gotten. 
And you know the reason why, of course. 
This is because of technology — yeah. 
(Laughter) Any computer designers in the room? 
Yeah well, you guys are making my life miserable because track pads used to be round, a nice round shape. 
That makes a good cartoon. 
But what are you going to do with a flat track pad, those square things? 
There's nothing I can do as a cartoonist. 
Well, I know the world is flat now. 
That's true. 
And the Internet has reached every corner of the world, the poorest, the remotest places. 
Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe. 
(Laughter) Don't go asking for a Frappuccino there. 
So we are bridging the digital divide. 
The Third World is connected, we are connected. 
And what happens next? 
Well, you've got mail. 
Yeah. 
Well, the Internet has empowered us. 
It has empowered you, it has empowered me and it has empowered some other guys as well. 
(Laughter) You know, these last two cartoons — I did them live during a conference in Hanoi. 
And they were not used to that in communist 2.0 Vietnam. 
(Laughter) So I was cartooning live on a wide screen — it was quite a sensation — and then this guy came to me. 
He was taking pictures of me and of my sketches, and I thought, "" This is great, a Vietnamese fan. "" And as he came the second day, I thought, "" Wow, that's really a cartoon lover. "" And on the third day, I finally understood, the guy was actually on duty. 
So by now, there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the Vietnamese police. 
(Laughter) No, but it's true: the Internet has changed the world. 
It has rocked the music industry; it has changed the way we consume music. 
For those of you old enough to remember, we used to have to go to the store to steal it. 
(Laughter) And it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application. 
So be careful with that Facebook account — your momma told you, be careful. 
And technology has set us free — this is free WiFi. 
But yeah, it has liberated us from the office desk. 
This is your life, enjoy it. 
(Laughter) In short, technology, the internet, they have changed our lifestyle. 
Tech guru, like this man — that a German magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century — they are shaping the way we do things. 
They are shaping the way we consume. 
They are shaping our very desires. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You will not like it. 
And technology has even changed our relationship to God. 
(Laughter) Now I shouldn't get into this. 
Religion and political cartoons, as you may have heard, make a difficult couple, ever since that day of 2005, when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world — demonstrations, fatwa, they provoked violence. People died in the violence. 
This was so sickening; people died because of cartoons. 
I mean — I had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides, actually. 
They were used first by a Danish newspaper, which wanted to make a point on Islam. 
A Danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet — 12 of them refused. Did you know that? 
He told me, "" Nobody has to tell me what I should draw. 
This is not how it works. "" And then, of course, they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side. 
They wanted to stir up controversy. 
You know the story. 
We know that cartoons can be used as weapons. 
History tells us, they've been used by the Nazis to attack the Jews. 
And here we are now. 
In the United Nations, half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion — they call it the defamation of religion — while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech. 
So the clash of civilizations is here, and cartoons are at the middle of it? 
This got me thinking. 
Now you see me thinking at my kitchen table, and since you're in my kitchen, please meet my wife. 
(Laughter) In 2006, a few months after, I went Ivory Coast — Western Africa. 
Now, talk of a divided place — the country was cut in two. 
You had a rebellion in the North, the government in the South — the capital, Abidjan — and in the middle, the French army. 
This looks like a giant hamburger. 
You don't want to be the ham in the middle. 
I was there to report on that story in cartoons. 
I've been doing this for the last 15 years; it's my side job, if you want. 
So you see the style is different. 
This is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning. 
I went to places like Gaza during the war in 2009. 
So this is really journalism in cartoons. 
You'll hear more and more about it. 
This is the future of journalism, I think. 
And of course, I went to see the rebels in the north. 
Those were poor guys fighting for their rights. 
There was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in Africa. 
And I went to see the Dozo. 
The Dozo, they are the traditional hunters of West Africa. 
People fear them — they help the rebellion a lot. 
They are believed to have magical powers. 
They can disappear and escape bullets. 
I went to see a Dozo chief; he told me about his magical powers. 
He said, "" I can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life. "" I said, "" Well, maybe we don't have time for this right now. "" (Laughter) "Another time." 
So back in Abidjan, I was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there and I thought, yes, in a context like this, cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side. 
I mean, the press in Ivory Coast was bitterly divided — it was compared to the media in Rwanda before the genocide — so imagine. 
And what can a cartoonist do? 
Sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see, and the guy has to feed his family, right? 
So the idea was pretty simple. 
We brought together cartoonists from all sides in Ivory Coast. 
We took them away from their newspaper for three days. 
And I asked them to do a project together, tackle the issues affecting their country in cartoons, yes, in cartoons. 
Show the positive power of cartoons. 
It's a great tool of communication for bad or for good. 
And cartoons can cross boundaries, as you have seen. 
And humor is a good way, I think, to address serious issues. 
And I'm very proud of what they did. 
I mean, they didn't agree with each other — that was not the point. 
And I didn't ask them to do nice cartoons. 
The first day, they were even shouting at each other. 
But they came up with a book, looking back at 13 years of political crisis in Ivory Coast. 
So the idea was there. 
And I've been doing projects like this, in 2009 in Lebanon, this year in Kenya, back in January. 
In Lebanon, it was not a book. 
The idea was to have — the same principal, a divided country — take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together. 
So in Lebanon, we enrolled the newspaper editors, and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page, addressing the issue affecting Lebanon, like religion in politics and everyday life. 
And it worked. 
For three days, almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together — anti-government, pro-government, Christian, Muslim, of course, English-speaking, well, you name it. 
So this was a great project. 
And then in Kenya, what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity, which is a poison in a lot of places in Africa. 
And we did video clips — you can see them if you go to YouTube / Kenyatoons. 
So, preaching for freedom of speech is easy here, but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division, again, what can a cartoonist do? 
He has to keep his job. 
Well I believe that in any context anywhere, he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred. 
And that's the message I try to convey to them. 
I think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing. 
But we need to support these [unclear], critical and responsible voices in Africa, in Lebanon, in your local newspaper, in the Apple store. 
Today, tech companies are the world's largest editors. 
They decide what is too offensive or too provocative for you to see. 
So really, it's not about the freedom of cartoonists; it's about your freedoms. 
And for dictators all over the world, the good news is when cartoonists, journalists and activists shut up. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a neuroscientist, and I study decision-making. 
I do experiments to test how different chemicals in the brain influence the choices we make. 
I'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making: a cheese sandwich. 
That's right. According to scientists, a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions. 
How do I know? I'm the scientist who did the study. 
A few years ago, my colleagues and I were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people's decisions in social situations. 
Specifically, we wanted to know how serotonin would affect the way people react when they're treated unfairly. 
So we did an experiment. 
We manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain. 
This is the amino acid tryptophan. 
So what we found was, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to take revenge when they're treated unfairly. 
That's the study we did, and here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards. 
("" A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision-making "") ("" What a friend we have in cheeses "") ("" Eating Cheese and Meat May Boost Self-Control "") At this point, you might be wondering, did I miss something? 
("" Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy "") Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from? 
And I thought the same thing myself when these came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate. 
We gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels. 
But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. 
And of course when science says cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well, that's sure to grab people's attention. 
So there you have it: the evolution of a headline. 
When this happened, a part of me thought, well, what's the big deal? 
So the media oversimplified a few things, but in the end, it's just a news story. 
And I think a lot of scientists have this attitude. 
But the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time, and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves. 
When the headlines rolled, what happened was, the marketers came calling. 
Would I be willing to provide a scientific endorsement of a mood-boosting bottled water? 
Or would I go on television to demonstrate, in front of a live audience, that comfort foods really do make you feel better? 
I think these folks meant well, but had I taken them up on their offers, I would have been going beyond the science, and good scientists are careful not to do this. 
But nevertheless, neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing. 
Here's one example: Neuro drinks, a line of products, including Nuero Bliss here, which according to its label helps reduce stress, enhances mood, provides focused concentration, and promotes a positive outlook. 
I have to say, this sounds awesome. (Laughter) I could totally have used this 10 minutes ago. 
So when this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. 
So I went to the company's website looking to find some controlled trials of their products. 
But I didn't find any. 
Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain. 
And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties. 
A couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article. 
For half the people, the article included a brain image, and for the other half, it was the same article but it didn't have a brain image. 
At the end — you see where this is going — people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article. 
So this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image. 
And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image. 
So the take-home message here is, do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it. 
Now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades, and we're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain. 
Like, just a couple of weeks ago, neuroscientists at MIT figured out how to break habits in rats just by controlling neural activity in a specific part of their brain. 
Really cool stuff. 
But the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown, unproven claims. 
So what I'm going to do is show you how to spot a couple of classic moves, dead giveaways, really, for what's variously been called neuro-bunk, neuro-bollocks, or, my personal favorite, neuro-flapdoodle. 
So the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people's thoughts and emotions. 
Here's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in The New York Times. 
The headline? "" You Love Your iPhone. Literally. "" It quickly became the most emailed article on the site. 
So how'd they figure this out? 
They put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iPhones. 
The brain scans showed activation in a part of the brain called the insula, a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion. 
So they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula, this meant the subjects loved their iPhones. 
Now there's just one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's that the insula does a lot. 
Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain. 
So based on the same logic, I could equally conclude you hate your iPhone. 
The point here is, when you see activation in the insula, you can't just pick and choose your favorite explanation from off this list, and it's a really long list. 
My colleagues Tal Yarkoni and Russ Poldrack have shown that the insula pops up in almost a third of all brain imaging studies that have ever been published. 
So chances are really, really good that your insula is going off right now, but I won't kid myself to think this means you love me. 
So speaking of love and the brain, there's a researcher, known to some as Dr. Love, who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together, the source of love and prosperity. 
This time it's not a cheese sandwich. 
No, it's a hormone called oxytocin. 
You've probably heard of it. 
So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation. 
So he's calling oxytocin "" the moral molecule. "" Now these studies are scientifically valid, and they've been replicated, but they're not the whole story. 
Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy. It increases gloating. 
Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups. 
And in some cases, oxytocin can even decrease cooperation. 
So based on these studies, I could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule, and call myself Dr. Strangelove. 
(Laughter) So we've seen neuro-flapdoodle all over the headlines. 
We see it in supermarkets, on book covers. 
What about the clinic? 
SPECT imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain. 
For the bargain price of a few thousand dollars, there are clinics in the U.S. that will give you one of these SPECT scans and use the image to help diagnose your problems. 
These scans, the clinics say, can help prevent Alzheimer's disease, solve weight and addiction issues, overcome marital conflicts, and treat, of course, a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to ADHD. 
This sounds great. A lot of people agree. 
Some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in business. 
There's just one problem. 
The broad consensus in neuroscience is that we can't yet diagnose mental illness from a single brain scan. 
But these clinics have treated tens of thousands of patients to date, many of them children, and SPECT imaging involves a radioactive injection, so exposing people to radiation, potentially harmful. 
I am more excited than most people, as a neuroscientist, about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter. 
And if one day we can say that cheese and chocolate help us make better decisions, count me in. 
But we're not there yet. 
We haven't found a "" buy "" button inside the brain, we can't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans, and we can't turn sinners into saints with hormones. 
Maybe someday we will, but until then, we have to be careful that we don't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that's playing a much longer game. 
So here's where you come in. 
If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it, don't just take them at their word. 
Ask the tough questions. Ask to see the evidence. 
Ask for the part of the story that's not being told. 
The answers shouldn't be simple, because the brain isn't simple. 
But that's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

Last year, I went on my first book tour. 
In 13 months, I flew to 14 countries and gave some hundred talks. 
Every talk in every country began with an introduction, and every introduction began, alas, with a lie: "Taiye Selasi comes from Ghana and Nigeria," or "" Taiye Selasi comes from England and the States. "" Whenever I heard this opening sentence, no matter the country that concluded it — England, America, Ghana, Nigeria — I thought, "" But that's not true. "" Yes, I was born in England and grew up in the United States. 
My mum, born in England, and raised in Nigeria, currently lives in Ghana. 
My father was born in Gold Coast, a British colony, raised in Ghana, and has lived for over 30 years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 
For this reason, my introducers also called me "" multinational. "" "" But Nike is multinational, "" I thought, "I'm a human being." 
Then, one fine day, mid-tour, I went to Louisiana, a museum in Denmark where I shared the stage with the writer Colum McCann. 
We were discussing the role of locality in writing, when suddenly it hit me. 
I'm not multinational. 
I'm not a national at all. 
How could I come from a nation? 
How can a human being come from a concept? 
It's a question that had been bothering me for going on two decades. 
From newspapers, textbooks, conversations, I had learned to speak of countries as if they were eternal, singular, naturally occurring things, but I wondered: to say that I came from a country suggested that the country was an absolute, some fixed point in place in time, a constant thing, but was it? 
In my lifetime, countries had disappeared — Czechoslovakia; appeared — Timor-Leste; failed — Somalia. 
My parents came from countries that didn't exist when they were born. 
To me, a country — this thing that could be born, die, expand, contract — hardly seemed the basis for understanding a human being. 
And so it came as a huge relief to discover the sovereign state. 
What we call countries are actually various expressions of sovereign statehood, an idea that came into fashion only 400 years ago. 
When I learned this, beginning my masters degree in international relations, I felt a sort of surge of relief. 
It was as I had suspected. 
History was real, cultures were real, but countries were invented. 
For the next 10 years, I sought to re- or un-define myself, my world, my work, my experience, beyond the logic of the state. 
In 2005, I wrote an essay, "" What is an Afropolitan, "" sketching out an identity that privileged culture over country. 
It was thrilling how many people could relate to my experience, and instructional how many others didn't buy my sense of self. 
"" How can Selasi claim to come from Ghana, "" one such critic asked, "" when she's never known the indignities of traveling abroad on a Ghanian passport? "" Now, if I'm honest, I knew just what she meant. 
I've got a friend named Layla who was born and raised in Ghana. 
Her parents are third-generation Ghanians of Lebanese descent. 
Layla, who speaks fluent Twi, knows Accra like the back of her hand, but when we first met years ago, I thought, "" She's not from Ghana. "" In my mind, she came from Lebanon, despite the patent fact that all her formative experience took place in suburban Accra. 
I, like my critics, was imagining some Ghana where all Ghanaians had brown skin or none held U.K. passports. 
I'd fallen into the limiting trap that the language of coming from countries sets — the privileging of a fiction, the singular country, over reality: human experience. 
Speaking with Colum McCann that day, the penny finally dropped. 
"" All experience is local, "" he said. 
"" All identity is experience, "" I thought. 
"" I'm not a national, "" I proclaimed onstage. 
"I'm a local. I'm multi-local." 
See, "" Taiye Selasi comes from the United States, "" isn't the truth. 
I have no relationship with the United States, all 50 of them, not really. 
My relationship is with Brookline, the town where I grew up; with New York City, where I started work; with Lawrenceville, where I spend Thanksgiving. 
What makes America home for me is not my passport or accent, but these very particular experiences and the places they occur. 
Despite my pride in Ewe culture, the Black Stars, and my love of Ghanaian food, I've never had a relationship with the Republic of Ghana, writ large. 
My relationship is with Accra, where my mother lives, where I go each year, with the little garden in Dzorwulu where my father and I talk for hours. 
These are the places that shape my experience. 
My experience is where I'm from. 
What if we asked, instead of "" Where are you from? "" — "Where are you a local?" 
This would tell us so much more about who and how similar we are. 
Tell me you're from France, and I see what, a set of clichés? 
Adichie's dangerous single story, the myth of the nation of France? 
Tell me you're a local of Fez and Paris, better yet, Goutte d'Or, and I see a set of experiences. 
Our experience is where we're from. 
So, where are you a local? 
I propose a three-step test. 
I call these the three "" R ’ s "": rituals, relationships, restrictions. 
First, think of your daily rituals, whatever they may be: making your coffee, driving to work, harvesting your crops, saying your prayers. 
What kind of rituals are these? 
Where do they occur? 
In what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know your face? 
As a child, I carried out fairly standard suburban rituals in Boston, with adjustments made for the rituals my mother brought from London and Lagos. 
We took off our shoes in the house, we were unfailingly polite with our elders, we ate slow-cooked, spicy food. 
In snowy North America, ours were rituals of the global South. 
The first time I went to Delhi or to southern parts of Italy, I was shocked by how at home I felt. 
The rituals were familiar. 
"" R "" number one, rituals. 
Now, think of your relationships, of the people who shape your days. 
To whom do you speak at least once a week, be it face to face or on FaceTime? 
Be reasonable in your assessment; I'm not talking about your Facebook friends. 
I'm speaking of the people who shape your weekly emotional experience. 
My mother in Accra, my twin sister in Boston, my best friends in New York: these relationships are home for me. 
"" R "" number two, relationships. 
We're local where we carry out our rituals and relationships, but how we experience our locality depends in part on our restrictions. 
By restrictions, I mean, where are you able to live? 
What passport do you hold? 
Are you restricted by, say, racism, from feeling fully at home where you live? 
By civil war, dysfunctional governance, economic inflation, from living in the locality where you had your rituals as a child? 
This is the least sexy of the R ’ s, less lyric than rituals and relationships, but the question takes us past "" Where are you now? "" to "" Why aren't you there, and why? "" Rituals, relationships, restrictions. 
Take a piece of paper and put those three words on top of three columns, then try to fill those columns as honestly as you can. 
A very different picture of your life in local context, of your identity as a set of experiences, may emerge. 
So let's try it. 
I have a friend named Olu. 
He's 35 years old. 
His parents, born in Nigeria, came to Germany on scholarships. 
Olu was born in Nuremberg and lived there until age 10. 
When his family moved to Lagos, he studied in London, then came to Berlin. 
He loves going to Nigeria — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the political corruption there. 
Where is Olu from? 
I have another friend named Udo. 
He's also 35 years old. 
Udo was born in Córdoba, in northwest Argentina, where his grandparents migrated from Germany, what is now Poland, after the war. 
Udo studied in Buenos Aires, and nine years ago came to Berlin. 
He loves going to Argentina — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the economic corruption there. 
Where is Udo from? 
With his blonde hair and blue eyes, Udo could pass for German, but holds an Argentinian passport, so needs a visa to live in Berlin. 
That Udo is from Argentina has largely to do with history. 
That he's a local of Buenos Aires and Berlin, that has to do with life. 
Olu, who looks Nigerian, needs a visa to visit Nigeria. 
He speaks Yoruba with an English accent, and English with a German one. 
To claim that he's "" not really Nigerian, "" though, denies his experience in Lagos, the rituals he practiced growing up, his relationship with family and friends. 
Meanwhile, though Lagos is undoubtedly one of his homes, Olu always feels restricted there, not least by the fact that he's gay. 
Both he and Udo are restricted by the political conditions of their parents' countries, from living where some of their most meaningful rituals and relationships occur. 
To say Olu is from Nigeria and Udo is from Argentina distracts from their common experience. 
Their rituals, their relationships, and their restrictions are the same. 
Of course, when we ask, "" Where are you from? "" we're using a kind of shorthand. 
It's quicker to say "" Nigeria "" than "" Lagos and Berlin, "" and as with Google Maps, we can always zoom in closer, from country to city to neighborhood. 
But that's not quite the point. 
The difference between "" Where are you from? "" and "" Where are you a local? "" isn't the specificity of the answer; it's the intention of the question. 
Replacing the language of nationality with the language of locality asks us to shift our focus to where real life occurs. 
Even that most glorious expression of countryhood, the World Cup, gives us national teams comprised mostly of multilocal players. 
As a unit of measurement for human experience, the country doesn't quite work. 
That's why Olu says, "" I'm German, but my parents come from Nigeria. "" The "" but "" in that sentence belies the inflexibility of the units, one fixed and fictional entity bumping up against another. 
"" I'm a local of Lagos and Berlin, "" suggests overlapping experiences, layers that merge together, that can't be denied or removed. 
You can take away my passport, but you can't take away my experience. 
That I carry within me. 
Where I'm from comes wherever I go. 
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we do away with countries. 
There's much to be said for national history, more for the sovereign state. 
Culture exists in community, and community exists in context. 
Geography, tradition, collective memory: these things are important. 
What I'm questioning is primacy. 
All of those introductions on tour began with reference to nation, as if knowing what country I came from would tell my audience who I was. 
What are we really seeking, though, when we ask where someone comes from? 
And what are we really seeing when we hear an answer? 
Here's one possibility: basically, countries represent power. 
"" Where are you from? "" Mexico. Poland. Bangladesh. Less power. 
America. Germany. Japan. More power. 
China. Russia. Ambiguous. 
(Laughter) It's possible that without realizing it, we're playing a power game, especially in the context of multi-ethnic countries. 
As any recent immigrant knows, the question "" Where are you from? "" or "" Where are you really from? "" is often code for "" Why are you here? "" Then we have the scholar William Deresiewicz's writing of elite American colleges. 
"" Students think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan — never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers. "" I'm with him. 
To call one student American, another Pakistani, then triumphantly claim student body diversity ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same milieu. 
The same holds true on the other end of the economic spectrum. 
A Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeeper in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions than nationality implies. 
Perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them. 
I'm often asked if I plan to "" go back "" to Ghana. 
I go to Accra every year, but I can't "" go back "" to Ghana. 
It's not because I wasn't born there. 
My father can't go back, either. 
The country in which he was born, that country no longer exists. 
We can never go back to a place and find it exactly where we left it. 
Something, somewhere will always have changed, most of all, ourselves. 
People. 
Finally, what we're talking about is human experience, this notoriously and gloriously disorderly affair. 
In creative writing, locality bespeaks humanity. 
The more we know about where a story is set, the more local color and texture, the more human the characters start to feel, the more relatable, not less. 
The myth of national identity and the vocabulary of coming from confuses us into placing ourselves into mutually exclusive categories. 
In fact, all of us are multi — multi-local, multi-layered. 
To begin our conversations with an acknowledgement of this complexity brings us closer together, I think, not further apart. 
So the next time that I'm introduced, I'd love to hear the truth: "" Taiye Selasi is a human being, like everybody here. 
She isn't a citizen of the world, but a citizen of worlds. 
She is a local of New York, Rome and Accra. "" Thank you. 

As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister, I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower. 
In fact, the American publishers of my book, "The Elephant, The Tiger and the Cell Phone," added a gratuitous subtitle saying, "India: The next 21st-century power." 
And I just don't think that's what India's all about, or should be all about. 
Indeed, what worries me is the entire notion of world leadership seems to me terribly archaic. 
It's redolent of James Bond movies and Kipling ballads. 
After all, what constitutes a world leader? 
If it's population, we're on course to top the charts. 
We will overtake China by 2034. 
Is it military strength? Well, we have the world's fourth largest army. 
Is it nuclear capacity? We know we have that. 
The Americans have even recognized it, in an agreement. 
Is it the economy? Well, we have now the fifth-largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. 
And we continue to grow. When the rest of the world took a beating last year, we grew at 6.7 percent. 
But, somehow, none of that adds up to me, to what I think India really can aim to contribute in the world, in this part of the 21st century. 
And so I wondered, could what the future beckons for India to be all about be a combination of these things allied to something else, the power of example, the attraction of India's culture, what, in other words, people like to call "" soft power. "" Soft power is a concept invented by a Harvard academic, Joseph Nye, a friend of mine. 
And, very simply, and I'm really cutting it short because of the time limits here, it's essentially the ability of a country to attract others because of its culture, its political values, its foreign policies. 
And, you know, lots of countries do this. He was writing initially about the States, but we know the Alliance Francaise is all about French soft power, the British Council. 
The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. 
Americans have the Voice of America and the Fulbright scholarships. 
But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity. 
So soft power is something that really emerges partly because of governments, but partly despite governments. 
And in the information era we all live in today, what we might call the TED age, I'd say that countries are increasingly being judged by a global public that's been fed on an incessant diet of Internet news, of televised images, of cellphone videos, of email gossip. 
In other words, all sorts of communication devices are telling us the stories of countries, whether or not the countries concerned want people to hear those stories. 
Now, in this age, again, countries with access to multiple channels of communication and information have a particular advantage. 
And of course they have more influence, sometimes, about how they're seen. 
India has more all-news TV channels than any country in the world, in fact in most of the countries in this part of the world put together. 
But, the fact still is that it's not just that. 
In order to have soft power, you have to be connected. 
One might argue that India has become an astonishingly connected country. 
I think you've already heard the figures. 
We've been selling 15 million cellphones a month. 
Currently there are 509 million cellphones in Indian hands, in India. 
And that makes us larger than the U.S. as a telephone market. 
In fact, those 15 million cellphones are the most connections that any country, including the U.S. and China, has ever established in the history of telecommunications. 
But, what perhaps some of you don't realize is how far we've come to get there. 
You know, when I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. 
In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. 
If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone. 
But sometimes it just sat there. 
I went to high school in Calcutta. 
And we would look at this instrument sitting in the front foyer. 
But half the time we would pick it up with an expectant look on our faces, there would be no dial tone. 
If there was a dial tone and you dialed a number, the odds were two in three you wouldn't get the number you were intending to reach. 
In fact the words "" wrong number "" were more popular than the word "" Hello. "" (Laughter) If you then wanted to connect to another city, let's say from Calcutta you wanted to call Delhi, you'd have to book something called a trunk call, and then sit by the phone all day, waiting for it to come through. 
Or you could pay eight times the going rate for something called a lightning call. 
But, lightning struck rather slowly in our country in those days, so, it was like about a half an hour for a lightning call to come through. 
In fact, so woeful was our telephone service that a Member of Parliament stood up in 1984 and complained about this. 
And the Then-Communications Minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country communications are a luxury, not a right, that the government had no obligation to provide better service, and if the honorable Member wasn't satisfied with his telephone, could he please return it, since there was an eight-year-long waiting list for telephones in India. 
Now, fast-forward to today and this is what you see: the 15 million cell phones a month. 
But what is most striking is who is carrying those cell phones. 
You know, if you visit friends in the suburbs of Delhi, on the side streets you will find a fellow with a cart that looks like it was designed in the 16th century, wielding a coal-fired steam iron that might have been invented in the 18th century. 
He's called an isthri wala. But he's carrying a 21st-century instrument. 
He's carrying a cell phone because most incoming calls are free, and that's how he gets orders from the neighborhood, to know where to collect clothes to get them ironed. 
The other day I was in Kerala, my home state, at the country farm of a friend, about 20 kilometers away from any place you'd consider urban. 
And it was a hot day and he said, "" Hey, would you like some fresh coconut water? "" And it's the best thing and the most nutritious and refreshing thing you can drink on a hot day in the tropics, so I said sure. 
And he whipped out his cellphone, dialed the number, and a voice said, "" I'm up here. "" And right on top of the nearest coconut tree, with a hatchet in one hand and a cell phone in the other, was a local toddy tapper, who proceeded to bring down the coconuts for us to drink. 
Fishermen are going out to sea and carrying their cell phones. 
When they catch the fish they call all the market towns along the coast to find out where they get the best possible prices. 
Farmers now, who used to have to spend half a day of backbreaking labor to find out if the market town was open, if the market was on, whether the product they'd harvested could be sold, what price they'd fetch. 
They'd often send an eight year old boy all the way on this trudge to the market town to get that information and come back, then they'd load the cart. 
Today they're saving half a day's labor with a two minute phone call. 
So this empowerment of the underclass is the real result of India being connected. 
And that transformation is part of where India is heading today. 
But, of course that's not the only thing about India that's spreading. 
You've got Bollywood. My attitude to Bollywood is best summarized in the tale of the two goats at a Bollywood garbage dump — Mr. Shekhar Kapur, forgive me — and they're chewing away on cans of celluloid discarded by a Bollywood studio. 
And the first goat, chewing away, says, "" You know, this film is not bad. "" And the second goat says, "" No, the book was better. "" (Laughter) I usually tend to think that the book is usually better, but, having said that, the fact is that Bollywood is now taking a certain aspect of Indian-ness and Indian culture around the globe, not just in the Indian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K., but to the screens of Arabs and Africans, of Senegalese and Syrians. 
I've met a young man in New York whose illiterate mother in a village in Senegal takes a bus once a month to the capital city of Dakar, just to watch a Bollywood movie. 
She can't understand the dialogue. 
She's illiterate, so she can't read the French subtitles. 
But these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps, and she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action. 
She goes away with stars in her eyes about India, as a result. 
And this is happening more and more. 
Afghanistan, we know what a serious security problem Afghanistan is for so many of us in the world. 
India doesn't have a military mission there. 
You know what was India's biggest asset in Afghanistan in the last seven years? 
One simple fact: you couldn't try to call an Afghan at 8: 30 in the evening. 
Why? Because that was the moment when the Indian television soap opera, "" Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, "" dubbed into Dari, was telecast on Tolo T.V. 
And it was the most popular television show in Afghan history. 
Every Afghan family wanted to watch it. 
They had to suspend functions at 8: 30. 
Weddings were reported to be interrupted so guests could cluster around the T.V. set, and then turn their attention back to the bride and groom. 
Crime went up at 8: 30. I have read a Reuters dispatch — so this is not Indian propaganda, a British news agency — about how robbers in the town of Musarri Sharif * stripped a vehicle of its windshield wipers, its hubcaps, its sideview mirrors, any moving part they could find, at 8: 30, because the watchmen were busy watching the T.V. rather than minding the store. 
And they scrawled on the windshield in a reference to the show's heroine, "Tulsi Zindabad": "Long live Tulsi." 
(Laughter) That's soft power. And that is what India is developing through the "" E "" part of TED: its own entertainment industry. 
The same is true, of course — we don't have time for too many more examples — but it's true of our music, of our dance, of our art, yoga, ayurveda, even Indian cuisine. 
I mean, the proliferation of Indian restaurants since I first went abroad as a student, in the mid '70s, and what I see today, you can't go to a mid-size town in Europe or North America and not find an Indian restaurant. It may not be a very good one. 
But, today in Britain, for example, Indian restaurants in Britain employ more people than the coal mining, ship building and iron and steel industries combined. 
So the empire can strike back. 
(Applause) But, with this increasing awareness of India, with you and with I, and so on, with tales like Afghanistan, comes something vital in the information era, the sense that in today's world it's not the side of the bigger army that wins, it's the country that tells a better story that prevails. 
And India is, and must remain, in my view, the land of the better story. 
Stereotypes are changing. I mean, again, having gone to the U.S. 
as a student in the mid '70s, I knew what the image of India was then, if there was an image at all. 
Today, people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere speak of the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Technology with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT. 
This can sometimes have unintended consequences. OK. 
I had a friend, a history major like me, who was accosted at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, by an anxiously perspiring European saying, "You're Indian, you're Indian! Can you help me fix my laptop?" 
(Laughter) We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus. 
But that too is transforming the Indian story around the world. 
But, there is something more substantive to that. 
The story rests on a fundamental platform of political pluralism. 
It's a civilizational story to begin with. 
Because India has been an open society for millennia. 
India gave refuge to the Jews, fleeing the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians, and said thereafter by the Romans. 
In fact, legend has is that when Doubting Thomas, the Apostle, Saint Thomas, landed on the shores of Kerala, my home state, somewhere around 52 A.D., he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. 
And to this day remains the only Jewish diaspora in the history of the Jewish people, which has never encountered a single incident of anti-semitism. 
(Applause) That's the Indian story. 
Islam came peacefully to the south, slightly more differently complicated history in the north. 
But all of these religions have found a place and a welcome home in India. 
You know, we just celebrated, this year, our general elections, the biggest exercise in democratic franchise in human history. 
And the next one will be even bigger, because our voting population keeps growing by 20 million a year. 
But, the fact is that the last elections, five years ago, gave the world extraordinary phenomenon of an election being won by a woman political leader of Italian origin and Roman Catholic faith, Sonia Gandhi, who then made way for a Sikh, Mohan Singh, to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim, President Abdul Kalam, in a country 81 percent Hindu. 
(Applause) This is India, and of course it's all the more striking because it was four years later that we all applauded the U.S., the oldest democracy in the modern world, more than 220 years of free and fair elections, which took till last year to elect a president or a vice president who wasn't white, male or Christian. 
So, maybe — oh sorry, he is Christian, I beg your pardon — and he is male, but he isn't white. 
All the others have been all those three. 
(Laughter) All his predecessors have been all those three, and that's the point I was trying to make. (Laughter) 
But, the issue is that when I talked about that example, it's not just about talking about India, it's not propaganda. 
Because ultimately, that electoral outcome had nothing to do with the rest of the world. 
It was essentially India being itself. 
And ultimately, it seems to me, that always works better than propaganda. 
Governments aren't very good at telling stories. 
But people see a society for what it is, and that, it seems to me, is what ultimately will make a difference in today's information era, in today's TED age. 
So India now is no longer the nationalism of ethnicity or language or religion, because we have every ethnicity known to mankind, practically, we've every religion know to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism, though that has some Hindu elements somewhere. 
We have 23 official languages that are recognized in our Constitution. 
And those of you who cashed your money here might be surprised to see how many scripts there are on the rupee note, spelling out the denominations. 
We've got all of that. 
We don't even have geography uniting us, because the natural geography of the subcontinent framed by the mountains and the sea was hacked by the partition with Pakistan in 1947. 
In fact, you can't even take the name of the country for granted, because the name "" India "" comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan. 
But, the whole point is that India is the nationalism of an idea. 
It's the idea of an ever-ever-land, emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, but sustained, above all, by pluralist democracy. 
That is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one. 
And it's the nationalism of an idea that essentially says you can endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, consonant, for that matter, and still rally around a consensus. 
And the consensus is of a very simple principle, that in a diverse plural democracy like India you don't really have to agree on everything all the time, so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree. 
The great success story of India, a country that so many learned scholars and journalists assumed would disintegrate, in the '50s and' 60s, is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus. 
Now, that is the India that is emerging into the 21st century. 
And I do want to make the point that if there is anything worth celebrating about India, it isn't military muscle, economic power. 
All of that is necessary, but we still have huge amounts of problems to overcome. 
Somebody said we are super poor, and we are also super power. 
We can't really be both of those. 
We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the hardware of development, the ports, the roads, the airports, all the infrastructural things we need to do, and the software of development, the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India to be able to have a couple of square meals a day, to be able to send his or her children to a decent school, and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in their lives that can transform themselves. 
But, it's all taking place, this great adventure of conquering those challenges, those real challenges which none of us can pretend don't exist. 
But, it's all taking place in an open society, in a rich and diverse and plural civilization, in one that is determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. 
That's why India belongs at TED, and that's why TED belongs in India. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize [winner] in economics, once wrote: "" Productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything. "" So this is serious. 
There are not that many things on earth that are "" almost everything. "" Productivity is the principal driver of the prosperity of a society. 
So we have a problem. 
In the largest European economies, productivity used to grow five percent per annum in the '50s,' 60s, early '70s. 
From '73 to' 83: three percent per annum. 
From '83 to' 95: two percent per annum. 
Since 1995: less than one percent per annum. 
The same profile in Japan. 
The same profile in the US, despite a momentary rebound 15 years ago, and despite all the technological innovations around us: the Internet, the information, the new information and communication technologies. 
When productivity grows three percent per annum, you double the standard of living every generation. 
Every generation is twice as well-off as its parents'. 
When it grows one percent per annum, it takes three generations to double the standard of living. 
And in this process, many people will be less well-off than their parents. 
They will have less of everything: smaller roofs, or perhaps no roof at all, less access to education, to vitamins, to antibiotics, to vaccination — to everything. 
Think of all the problems that we're facing at the moment. 
All. 
Chances are that they are rooted in the productivity crisis. 
Why this crisis? 
Because the basic tenets about efficiency — effectiveness in organizations, in management — have become counterproductive for human efforts. 
Everywhere in public services — in companies, in the way we work, the way we innovate, invest — try to learn to work better. 
Take the holy trinity of efficiency: clarity, measurement, accountability. 
They make human efforts derail. 
There are two ways to look at it, to prove it. 
One, the one I prefer, is rigorous, elegant, nice — math. 
But the full math version takes a little while, so there is another one. 
It is to look at a relay race. 
This is what we will do today. 
It's a bit more animated, more visual and also faster — it's a race. 
Hopefully, it's faster. 
(Laughter) World championship final — women. 
Eight teams in the final. 
The fastest team is the US team. 
They have the fastest women on earth. 
They are the favorite team to win. 
Notably, if you compare them to an average team, say, the French team, (Laughter) based on their best performances in the 100-meter race, if you add the individual times of the US runners, they arrive at the finish line 3.2 meters ahead of the French team. 
And this year, the US team is in great shape. 
Based on their best performance this year, they arrive 6.4 meters ahead of the French team, based on the data. 
We are going to look at the race. 
At some point you will see, towards the end, that Torri Edwards, the fourth US runner, is ahead. 
Not surprising — this year she got the gold medal in the 100-meter race. 
And by the way, Chryste Gaines, the second runner in the US team, is the fastest woman on earth. 
So, there are 3.5 billion women on earth. 
Where are the two fastest? On the US team. 
And the two other runners on the US team are not bad, either. 
(Laughter) So clearly, the US team has won the war for talent. 
But behind, the average team is trying to catch up. 
Let's watch the race. 
(Video: French sportscasters narrate race) (Video: Race narration ends) Yves Morieux: So what happened? 
The fastest team did not win; the slower one did. 
By the way, I hope you appreciate the deep historical research I did to make the French look good. 
(Laughter) But let's not exaggerate — it's not archeology, either. (Laughter) 
But why? 
Because of cooperation. 
When you hear this sentence: "Thanks to cooperation, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts." 
This is not poetry; this is not philosophy. 
This is math. 
Those who carry the baton are slower, but their baton is faster. 
Miracle of cooperation: it multiplies energy, intelligence in human efforts. 
It is the essence of human efforts: how we work together, how each effort contributes to the efforts of others. 
With cooperation, we can do more with less. 
Now, what happens to cooperation when the holy grail — the holy trinity, even — of clarity, measurement, accountability — appears? 
Clarity. 
Management reports are full of complaints about the lack of clarity. 
Compliance audits, consultants' diagnostics. 
We need more clarity, we need to clarify the roles, the processes. 
It is as though the runners on the team were saying, "" Let's be clear — where does my role really start and end? 
Am I supposed to run for 95 meters, 96, 97...? "" It's important, let's be clear. 
If you say 97, after 97 meters, people will drop the baton, whether there is someone to take it or not. 
Accountability. 
We are constantly trying to put accountability in someone's hands. 
Who is accountable for this process? 
We need somebody accountable for this process. 
So in the relay race, since passing the baton is so important, then we need somebody clearly accountable for passing the baton. 
So between each runner, now we will have a new dedicated athlete, clearly dedicated to taking the baton from one runner, and passing it to the next runner. 
And we will have at least two like that. 
Well, will we, in that case, win the race? 
That I don't know, but for sure, we would have a clear interface, a clear line of accountability. 
We will know who to blame. 
But we'll never win the race. 
If you think about it, we pay more attention to knowing who to blame in case we fail, than to creating the conditions to succeed. 
All the human intelligence put in organization design — urban structures, processing systems — what is the real goal? 
To have somebody guilty in case they fail. 
We are creating organizations able to fail, but in a compliant way, with somebody clearly accountable when we fail. 
And we are quite effective at that — failing. 
Measurement. 
What gets measured gets done. 
Look, to pass the baton, you have to do it at the right time, in the right hand, at the right speed. 
But to do that, you have to put energy in your arm. 
This energy that is in your arm will not be in your legs. 
It will come at the expense of your measurable speed. 
You have to shout early enough to the next runner when you will pass the baton, to signal that you are arriving, so that the next runner can prepare, can anticipate. 
And you have to shout loud. 
But the blood, the energy that will be in your throat will not be in your legs. 
Because you know, there are eight people shouting at the same time. 
So you have to recognize the voice of your colleague. 
You cannot say, "" Is it you? "" Too late! 
(Laughter) Now, let's look at the race in slow motion, and concentrate on the third runner. 
Look at where she allocates her efforts, her energy, her attention. 
Not all in her legs — that would be great for her own speed — but in also in her throat, arm, eye, brain. 
That makes a difference in whose legs? 
In the legs of the next runner. 
But when the next runner runs super-fast, is it because she made a super effort, or because of the way the third runner passed the baton? 
There is no metric on earth that will give us the answer. 
And if we reward people on the basis of their measurable performance, they will put their energy, their attention, their blood in what can get measured — in their legs. 
And the baton will fall and slow down. 
To cooperate is not a super effort, it is how you allocate your effort. 
It is to take a risk, because you sacrifice the ultimate protection granted by objectively measurable individual performance. 
It is to make a super difference in the performance of others, with whom we are compared. 
It takes being stupid to cooperate, then. 
And people are not stupid; they don't cooperate. 
You know, clarity, accountability, measurement were OK when the world was simpler. 
But business has become much more complex. 
With my teams, we have measured the evolution of complexity in business. 
It is much more demanding today to attract and retain customers, to build advantage on a global scale, to create value. 
And the more business gets complex, the more, in the name of clarity, accountability, measurement we multiply structures, processes, systems. 
You know, this drive for clarity and accountability triggers a counterproductive multiplication of interfaces, middle offices, coordinators that do not only mobilize people and resources, but that also add obstacles. 
And the more complicated the organization, the more difficult it is to understand what is really happening. 
So we need summaries, proxies, reports, key performance indicators, metrics. 
So people put their energy in what can get measured, at the expense of cooperation. 
And as performance deteriorates, we add even more structure, process, systems. 
People spend their time in meetings, writing reports they have to do, undo and redo. 
Based on our analysis, teams in these organizations spend between 40 and 80 percent of their time wasting their time, but working harder and harder, longer and longer, on less and less value-adding activities. 
This is what is killing productivity, what makes people suffer at work. 
Our organizations are wasting human intelligence. 
They have turned against human efforts. 
When people don't cooperate, don't blame their mindsets, their mentalities, their personality — look at the work situations. 
Is it really in their personal interest to cooperate or not, if, when they cooperate, they are individually worse off? 
Why would they cooperate? 
When we blame personalities instead of the clarity, the accountability, the measurement, we add injustice to ineffectiveness. 
We need to create organizations in which it becomes individually useful for people to cooperate. 
Remove the interfaces, the middle offices — all these complicated coordination structures. 
Don't look for clarity; go for fuzziness. 
Fuzziness overlaps. 
Remove most of the quantitative metrics to assess performance. 
Speed the "" what. "" Look at cooperation, the "" how. "" How did you pass the baton? 
Did you throw it, or did you pass it effectively? 
Am I putting my energy in what can get measured — my legs, my speed — or in passing the baton? 
You, as leaders, as managers, are you making it individually useful for people to cooperate? 
The future of our organizations, our companies, our societies hinges on your answer to these questions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students. 
In 1931, my grandmother — bottom left for you guys over here — graduated from the eighth grade. 
She went to school to get the information because that's where the information lived. 
It was in the books; it was inside the teacher's head; and she needed to go there to get the information, because that's how you learned. 
Fast-forward a generation: this is the one-room schoolhouse, Oak Grove, where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse. 
And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher, stored it in the only portable memory he has, which is inside his own head, and take it with him, because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world. 
When I was a kid, we had a set of encyclopedias at my house. 
It was purchased the year I was born, and it was extraordinary, because I did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information. 
The information was inside my house and it was awesome. 
This was different than either generation had experienced before, and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level. 
But the information was closer to me. 
I could get access to it. 
In the time that passes between when I was a kid in high school and when I started teaching, we really see the advent of the Internet. 
Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government. 
My first year — super gung-ho — going to teach American government, loved the political system. 
Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. 
Year two: learned a few things — had to change my tactic. 
And I put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. 
I didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. 
I posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community. 
They produced flyers. They called offices. 
They checked schedules. They were meeting with secretaries. 
They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates. 
They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well, and really had this robust experiential learning. 
The older teachers — more experienced — looked at me and went, "Oh, there she is. That's so cute. She's trying to get that done." 
(Laughter) "She doesn't know what she's in for." 
But I knew that the kids would show up, and I believed it, and I told them every week what I expected out of them. 
And that night, all 90 kids — dressed appropriately, doing their job, owning it. 
I had to just sit and watch. 
It was theirs. It was experiential. It was authentic. 
It meant something to them. 
And they will step up. 
From Kansas, I moved on to lovely Arizona, where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years, this time with middle school students. 
Luckily, I didn't have to teach them American government. 
Could teach them the more exciting topic of geography. 
Again, "" thrilled "" to learn. 
But what was interesting about this position I found myself in in Arizona, was I had this really extraordinarily eclectic group of kids to work with in a truly public school, and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities. 
And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina, which is the gentleman that the movie "" Hotel Rwanda "" is based after. 
And he was going to speak at the high school next door to us. 
We could walk there. We didn't even have to pay for the buses. 
There was no expense cost. Perfect field trip. 
The problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful, and they know what to do with it. 
And so we chose to look at Paul Rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive. 
I then challenged the kids to identify someone in their own life, or in their own story, or in their own world, that they could identify that had done a similar thing. 
I asked them to produce a little movie about it. 
It's the first time we'd done this. 
Nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer, but they were into it. And I asked them to put their own voice over it. 
It was the most awesome moment of revelation that when you ask kids to use their own voice and ask them to speak for themselves, what they're willing to share. 
The last question of the assignment is: how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people? 
The things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary. 
Fast-forward to Pennsylvania, where I find myself today. 
I teach at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia. 
We are a nine through 12 public school, but we do school quite differently. 
I moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that I knew that kids learned, and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when you are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past, of information scarcity when my grandmother was in school and when my father was in school and even when I was in school, and to a moment when we have information surplus. 
So what do you do when the information is all around you? 
Why do you have kids come to school if they no longer have to come there to get the information? 
In Philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program, so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday, taking them home, getting access to information. 
And here's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you've given the tool to acquire information to students, is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process. 
We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test, and I am here to share with you: it is not learning. 
That is the absolute wrong thing to ask, to tell kids to never be wrong. 
To ask them to always have the right answer doesn't allow them to learn. 
So we did this project, and this is one of the artifacts of the project. 
I almost never show them off because of the issue of the idea of failure. 
My students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill. 
I asked them to take the examples that we were seeing of the info-graphics that existed in a lot of mass media, and take a look at what were the interesting components of it, and produce one for themselves of a different man-made disaster from American history. 
And they had certain criteria to do it. 
They were a little uncomfortable with it, because we'd never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. 
They can talk — they're very smooth, and they can write very, very well, but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them. 
But I gave them the room to just do the thing. 
Go create. Go figure it out. 
Let's see what we can do. 
And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint. 
This was done in like two or three days. 
And this is the work of the student that consistently did it. 
And when I sat the students down, I said, "" Who's got the best one? "" And they immediately went, "" There it is. "" Didn't read anything. "" There it is. "" And I said, "" Well what makes it great? "" And they're like, "" Oh, the design's good, and he's using good color. 
And there's some... "" And they went through all that we processed out loud. 
And I said, "" Go read it. "" And they're like, "" Oh, that one wasn't so awesome. "" And then we went to another one — it didn't have great visuals, but it had great information — and spent an hour talking about the learning process, because it wasn't about whether or not it was perfect, or whether or not it was what I could create. 
It asked them to create for themselves, and it allowed them to fail, process, learn from. 
And when we do another round of this in my class this year, they will do better this time, because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process. 
There are a million pictures that I could click through here, and had to choose carefully — this is one of my favorites — of students learning, of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information, but instead, ask them what they can do with it. 
Ask them really interesting questions. 
They will not disappoint. 
Ask them to go to places, to see things for themselves, to actually experience the learning, to play, to inquire. 
This is one of my favorite photos, because this was taken on Tuesday, when I asked the students to go to the polls. 
This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that. 
But this is learning too, because we asked them to go out into real spaces. 
The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark. 
And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. 
We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better. 
(Applause) 

I want to talk to you about the future of medicine. 
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about the past. 
Now, throughout much of the recent history of medicine, we've thought about illness and treatment in terms of a profoundly simple model. 
In fact, the model is so simple that you could summarize it in six words: have disease, take pill, kill something. 
Now, the reason for the dominance of this model is of course the antibiotic revolution. 
Many of you might not know this, but we happen to be celebrating the hundredth year of the introduction of antibiotics into the United States. 
But what you do know is that that introduction was nothing short of transformative. 
Here you had a chemical, either from the natural world or artificially synthesized in the laboratory, and it would course through your body, it would find its target, lock into its target — a microbe or some part of a microbe — and then turn off a lock and a key with exquisite deftness, exquisite specificity. 
And you would end up taking a previously fatal, lethal disease — a pneumonia, syphilis, tuberculosis — and transforming that into a curable, or treatable illness. 
You have a pneumonia, you take penicillin, you kill the microbe and you cure the disease. 
So seductive was this idea, so potent the metaphor of lock and key and killing something, that it really swept through biology. 
It was a transformation like no other. 
And we've really spent the last 100 years trying to replicate that model over and over again in noninfectious diseases, in chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. 
And it's worked, but it's only worked partly. 
Let me show you. 
You know, if you take the entire universe of all chemical reactions in the human body, every chemical reaction that your body is capable of, most people think that that number is on the order of a million. 
Let's call it a million. 
And now you ask the question, what number or fraction of reactions can actually be targeted by the entire pharmacopoeia, all of medicinal chemistry? 
That number is 250. 
The rest is chemical darkness. 
In other words, 0.025 percent of all chemical reactions in your body are actually targetable by this lock and key mechanism. 
You know, if you think about human physiology as a vast global telephone network with interacting nodes and interacting pieces, then all of our medicinal chemistry is operating on one tiny corner at the edge, the outer edge, of that network. 
It's like all of our pharmaceutical chemistry is a pole operator in Wichita, Kansas who is tinkering with about 10 or 15 telephone lines. 
So what do we do about this idea? 
What if we reorganized this approach? 
In fact, it turns out that the natural world gives us a sense of how one might think about illness in a radically different way, rather than disease, medicine, target. 
In fact, the natural world is organized hierarchically upwards, not downwards, but upwards, and we begin with a self-regulating, semi-autonomous unit called a cell. 
These self-regulating, semi-autonomous units give rise to self-regulating, semi-autonomous units called organs, and these organs coalesce to form things called humans, and these organisms ultimately live in environments, which are partly self-regulating and partly semi-autonomous. 
What's nice about this scheme, this hierarchical scheme building upwards rather than downwards, is that it allows us to think about illness as well in a somewhat different way. 
Take a disease like cancer. 
Since the 1950s, we've tried rather desperately to apply this lock and key model to cancer. 
We've tried to kill cells using a variety of chemotherapies or targeted therapies, and as most of us know, that's worked. 
It's worked for diseases like leukemia. 
It's worked for some forms of breast cancer, but eventually you run to the ceiling of that approach. 
And it's only in the last 10 years or so that we've begun to think about using the immune system, remembering that in fact the cancer cell doesn't grow in a vacuum. 
It actually grows in a human organism. 
And could you use the organismal capacity, the fact that human beings have an immune system, to attack cancer? 
In fact, it's led to the some of the most spectacular new medicines in cancer. 
And finally there's the level of the environment, isn't there? 
You know, we don't think of cancer as altering the environment. 
But let me give you an example of a profoundly carcinogenic environment. 
It's called a prison. 
You take loneliness, you take depression, you take confinement, and you add to that, rolled up in a little white sheet of paper, one of the most potent neurostimulants that we know, called nicotine, and you add to that one of the most potent addictive substances that you know, and you have a pro-carcinogenic environment. 
But you can have anti-carcinogenic environments too. 
There are attempts to create milieus, change the hormonal milieu for breast cancer, for instance. 
We're trying to change the metabolic milieu for other forms of cancer. 
Or take another disease, like depression. 
Again, working upwards, since the 1960s and 1970s, we've tried, again, desperately to turn off molecules that operate between nerve cells — serotonin, dopamine — and tried to cure depression that way, and that's worked, but then that reached the limit. 
And we now know that what you really probably need to do is to change the physiology of the organ, the brain, rewire it, remodel it, and that, of course, we know study upon study has shown that talk therapy does exactly that, and study upon study has shown that talk therapy combined with medicines, pills, really is much more effective than either one alone. 
Can we imagine a more immersive environment that will change depression? 
Can you lock out the signals that elicit depression? 
Again, moving upwards along this hierarchical chain of organization. 
What's really at stake perhaps here is not the medicine itself but a metaphor. 
Rather than killing something, in the case of the great chronic degenerative diseases — kidney failure, diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis — maybe what we really need to do is change the metaphor to growing something. 
And that's the key, perhaps, to reframing our thinking about medicine. 
Now, this idea of changing, of creating a perceptual shift, as it were, came home to me to roost in a very personal manner about 10 years ago. 
About 10 years ago — I've been a runner most of my life — I went for a run, a Saturday morning run, I came back and woke up and I basically couldn't move. 
My right knee was swollen up, and you could hear that ominous crunch of bone against bone. 
And one of the perks of being a physician is that you get to order your own MRIs. 
And I had an MRI the next week, and it looked like that. 
Essentially, the meniscus of cartilage that is between bone had been completely torn and the bone itself had been shattered. 
Now, if you're looking at me and feeling sorry, let me tell you a few facts. 
If I was to take an MRI of every person in this audience, 60 percent of you would show signs of bone degeneration and cartilage degeneration like this. 
85 percent of all women by the age of 70 would show moderate to severe cartilage degeneration. 
50 to 60 percent of the men in this audience would also have such signs. 
So this is a very common disease. 
Well, the second perk of being a physician is that you can get to experiment on your own ailments. 
So about 10 years ago we began, we brought this process into the laboratory, and we began to do simple experiments, mechanically trying to fix this degeneration. 
We tried to inject chemicals into the knee spaces of animals to try to reverse cartilage degeneration, and to put a short summary on a very long and painful process, essentially it came to naught. 
Nothing happened. 
And then about seven years ago, we had a research student from Australia. 
The nice thing about Australians is that they're habitually used to looking at the world upside down. 
(Laughter) And so Dan suggested to me, "" You know, maybe it isn't a mechanical problem. 
Maybe it isn't a chemical problem. Maybe it's a stem cell problem. "" In other words, he had two hypotheses. 
Number one, there is such a thing as a skeletal stem cell — a skeletal stem cell that builds up the entire vertebrate skeleton, bone, cartilage and the fibrous elements of skeleton, just like there's a stem cell in blood, just like there's a stem cell in the nervous system. 
And two, that maybe that, the degeneration or dysfunction of this stem cell is what's causing osteochondral arthritis, a very common ailment. 
So really the question was, were we looking for a pill when we should have really been looking for a cell. 
So we switched our models, and now we began to look for skeletal stem cells. 
And to cut again a long story short, about five years ago, we found these cells. 
They live inside the skeleton. 
Here's a schematic and then a real photograph of one of them. 
The white stuff is bone, and these red columns that you see and the yellow cells are cells that have arisen from one single skeletal stem cell — columns of cartilage, columns of bone coming out of a single cell. 
These cells are fascinating. They have four properties. 
Number one is that they live where they're expected to live. 
They live just underneath the surface of the bone, underneath cartilage. 
You know, in biology, it's location, location, location. 
And they move into the appropriate areas and form bone and cartilage. 
That's one. 
Here's an interesting property. 
You can take them out of the vertebrate skeleton, you can culture them in petri dishes in the laboratory, and they are dying to form cartilage. 
Remember how we couldn't form cartilage for love or money? 
These cells are dying to form cartilage. 
They form their own furls of cartilage around themselves. 
They're also, number three, the most efficient repairers of fractures that we've ever encountered. 
This is a little bone, a mouse bone that we fractured and then let it heal by itself. 
These stem cells have come in and repaired, in yellow, the bone, in white, the cartilage, almost completely. 
So much so that if you label them with a fluorescent dye you can see them like some kind of peculiar cellular glue coming into the area of a fracture, fixing it locally and then stopping their work. 
Now, the fourth one is the most ominous, and that is that their numbers decline precipitously, precipitously, tenfold, fiftyfold, as you age. 
And so what had happened, really, is that we found ourselves in a perceptual shift. 
We had gone hunting for pills but we ended up finding theories. 
And in some ways we had hooked ourselves back onto this idea: cells, organisms, environments, because we were now thinking about bone stem cells, we were thinking about arthritis in terms of a cellular disease. 
And then the next question was, are there organs? 
Can you build this as an organ outside the body? 
Can you implant cartilage into areas of trauma? 
And perhaps most interestingly, can you ascend right up and create environments? 
You know, we know that exercise remodels bone, but come on, none of us is going to exercise. 
So could you imagine ways of passively loading and unloading bone so that you can recreate or regenerate degenerating cartilage? 
And perhaps more interesting, and more importantly, the question is, can you apply this model more globally outside medicine? 
What's at stake, as I said before, is not killing something, but growing something. 
And it raises a series of, I think, some of the most interesting questions about how we think about medicine in the future. 
Could your medicine be a cell and not a pill? 
How would we grow these cells? 
What we would we do to stop the malignant growth of these cells? 
We heard about the problems of unleashing growth. 
Could we implant suicide genes into these cells to stop them from growing? 
Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body and then implanted into the body? 
Could that stop some of the degeneration? 
What if the organ needed to have memory? 
In cases of diseases of the nervous system some of those organs had memory. 
How could we implant those memories back in? 
Could we store these organs? 
Would each organ have to be developed for an individual human being and put back? 
And perhaps most puzzlingly, could your medicine be an environment? 
Could you patent an environment? 
You know, in every culture, shamans have been using environments as medicines. 
Could we imagine that for our future? 
I've talked a lot about models. I began this talk with models. 
So let me end with some thoughts about model building. 
That's what we do as scientists. 
You know, when an architect builds a model, he or she is trying to show you a world in miniature. 
But when a scientist is building a model, he or she is trying to show you the world in metaphor. 
He or she is trying to create a new way of seeing. 
The former is a scale shift. The latter is a perceptual shift. 
Now, antibiotics created such a perceptual shift in our way of thinking about medicine that it really colored, distorted, very successfully, the way we've thought about medicine for the last hundred years. 
But we need new models to think about medicine in the future. 
That's what's at stake. 
You know, there's a popular trope out there that the reason we haven't had the transformative impact on the treatment of illness is because we don't have powerful-enough drugs, and that's partly true. 
But perhaps the real reason is that we don't have powerful-enough ways of thinking about medicines. 
It's certainly true that it would be lovely to have new medicines. 
But perhaps what's really at stake are three more intangible M's: mechanisms, models, metaphors. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: I really like this metaphor. 
How does it link in? 
There's a lot of talk in technologyland about the personalization of medicine, that we have all this data and that medical treatments of the future will be for you specifically, your genome, your current context. 
Does that apply to this model you've got here? 
Siddhartha Mukherjee: It's a very interesting question. 
We've thought about personalization of medicine very much in terms of genomics. 
That's because the gene is such a dominant metaphor, again, to use that same word, in medicine today, that we think the genome will drive the personalization of medicine. 
But of course the genome is just the bottom of a long chain of being, as it were. 
That chain of being, really the first organized unit of that, is the cell. 
So, if we are really going to deliver in medicine in this way, we have to think of personalizing cellular therapies, and then personalizing organ or organismal therapies, and ultimately personalizing immersion therapies for the environment. 
So I think at every stage, you know — there's that metaphor, there's turtles all the way. 
Well, in this, there's personalization all the way. 
CA: So when you say medicine could be a cell and not a pill, you're talking about potentially your own cells. 
SM: Absolutely. CA: So converted to stem cells, perhaps tested against all kinds of drugs or something, and prepared. 
SM: And there's no perhaps. This is what we're doing. 
This is what's happening, and in fact, we're slowly moving, not away from genomics, but incorporating genomics into what we call multi-order, semi-autonomous, self-regulating systems, like cells, like organs, like environments. 

Two thousand and seven, five years ago, my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer. 
Now, looking back, the most harrowing part of that experience was not just the hospital visits — these were very painful for my wife, understandably so. 
Or should it be a less aggressive form of treatment? 
A simplistic answer would be, the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally. 
And since I study human decision making, I said, I'm going to run some studies to find some answers. 
And I'm going to share one of these studies with you today. 
You are going to solve a series of puzzles, and I'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily. 
Now comes the between-subjects design, the AB design, the AB testing. 
Now, you're all going to consume the tea. 
So imagine that you're taking the tea now, we'll wait for you to finish the tea. 
Yeah, so what we'd do if we had you who gave the answer as a participant, we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise. 
We also observe another thing, and that is, you folks not only are solving fewer puzzles, you're also putting less juice into the task — less effort, you're less persistent, and so on. 
One is, what is the time, on average, you're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles? 
And under what situations — when — would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better, more favorable outcomes, compared to the driver? 
You were responsible for your decision. 
So what do you do? 
And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive. 
I want to finish up on a more upbeat note. 

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

They fly, not with rotating components, so they fly only by flapping their wings. 
So we looked at the birds, and we tried to make a model that is powerful, ultralight, and it must have excellent aerodynamic qualities that would fly by its own and only by flapping its wings. 
So what would be better than to use the herring gull, in its freedom, circling and swooping over the sea, and to use this as a role model? 
We are a company in the field of automation, and we'd like to do very lightweight structures because that's energy efficient, and we'd like to learn more about pneumatics and air flow phenomena. 
The length is one meter and six, and the weight is only 450 grams. 
In the middle we have a motor, and we also have a gear in it, and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor. 
So if you go down, you have the large area of propulsion, and if you go up, the wings are not that large, and it is easier to get up. 
With the split wing, we get the lift at the upper wing, and we get the propulsion at the lower wing. 

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

I'm really grateful that I get a chance to play for everyone. 

In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it. 
(Applause) Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. 
Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. 
Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. 
You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. 
She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. 
The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. 
And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. 
When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. 
When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. 
Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. 
At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. 
Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. 
She can have fun. 
She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. 
But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. 
She is no more a free individual. 
She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed. 
And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. 
I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. 
So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor. 
And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. 
A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. 
It is the criteria. 
The role model good girl should be very quiet. 
She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. 
If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. 
In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. 
And it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. 
And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. 
Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women. 
Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. 
And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. 
Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. 
A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came — and it was a coincidence — he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. 
But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "" Malala. "" And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. 
You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? 
Yes, I must mention it. 
It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. 
Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. 
Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. 
I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. 
And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. 
That was the reason that I valued my daughter. 
I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. 
I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. 
And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. 
And this was not only she, only Malala. 
I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students and boy students as well. 
I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. 
I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor. 
Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. 
But we came across a new phenomenon. 
It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights. 
It was called Talibanization. 
It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities. 
Hundreds of schools were lost. 
Girls were prohibited from going to school. 
Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. 
Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed. 
Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. 
At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. 
She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. 
And her voice was the most powerful voice. 
It spread like a crescendo all around the world. 
And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range. 
It was a doomsday for my family and for me. 
The world turned into a big black hole. 
While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, "" Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter? "" And she abruptly told me, "" Please don't blame yourself. 
You stood for the right cause. 
You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. 
You both were on the right path and God will protect her. "" These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again. 
When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. 
But my daughter never complained. 
She used to tell us, "" I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. 
I'll be okay. Please don't worry. "" She was a solace for us, and she consoled us. 
Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl. 
She cries when her homework is incomplete. 
She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that. 
People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? 
Ask me what I did not do. 
I did not clip her wings, and that's all. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) 

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

Clearly, we're living in a moment of crisis. 
Arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us, and yet I stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive. 
Because of some of technologies we've been talking about. 
Because of the resources, the skills, and certainly the surge of talent we're seeing all around the world, with the mindset to create change. 
And we've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen, who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower, but that we've got to engage in a different way with the world. 
And by definition, every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul, a global citizen. 
You work on the front lines. And you've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another. 
And no matter what country you live or work in, you've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of, even in their most ordinariness. 
Today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty, how best we release their energies. 
On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. 
And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. 
And what I want to talk about is something that compliments both systems. 
We call it patient capital. 
The critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in Africa since 1970 and say, and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty, rampant corruption? 
They use Mobutu as metaphor. 
And their policy prescription is to make government more accountable, focus on the capital markets, invest, don't give anything away. 
On the other side, as I said, there are those who say the problem is that we need more money. 
That when it comes to the rich, we'll bail out and we'll hand a lot of aid, but when it comes to our poor brethren, we want little to do with it. 
They point to the successes of aid: the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals. 
Both sides are right. 
And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. 
Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves. 
After 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation, it's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet than low-income people. 
They must navigate markets daily, making micro-decisions, dozens and dozens, to move their way through society, and yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family, they could be put back into poverty, sometimes for generations. 
And so we need both the market and we need aid. 
Patient capital works between, and tries to take the best of both. 
It's money that's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy, thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity, but as individual customers, consumers, clients, people who want to make decisions in their own lives. 
Patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk, a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment, to use the market as the best listening device that we have, and the expectation of below-market returns, but outsized social impact. 
It recognizes that the market has its limitation, and so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy to include all people. 
Now, entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons. 
First, they tend to work in markets where people make one, two, three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level. 
Second, the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure — no roads to speak of, sporadic electricity and high levels of corruption. 
Third, they are often creating markets. 
Even if you're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages, it is something new. 
And so many low-income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience. 
It also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance. 
Not only to build the systems, the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way, but to connect those business to other markets, to governments, to corporations — real partnerships if we want to get to scale. 
I want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation. 
In 2002 I met this incredible entrepreneur named Amitabha Sadangi from India, who'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet. 
And he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether, despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in India make under a dollar a day. 
They were creating subsidies either for large farms, or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use, rather than that the farmers wanted to use. 
At the same time Amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in Israel. 
It was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant. 
And it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green. 
But the market also had bypassed low income farmers, because these systems were both too expensive, and they were constructed for fields that were too large. 
The average small village farmer works on two acres or less. 
And so, Amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves, because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he thought that they should have. 
And he used three fundamental principles. 
The first one was miniaturization. 
The drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre, even if he had two, because it was too frightening, given all that he had at stake. 
Second, it had to be extremely affordable. 
In other words, that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest, or else they wouldn't take the risk. 
And third, it had to be what Amitabha calls infinitely expandable. 
What I mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre, the farmers could buy a second and a third and a fourth. 
As of today, IDE India, Amitabha's organization, has sold over 300,000 farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple on average, but this didn't happen overnight. 
In fact, when you go back to the beginning, there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day, that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors, agriculture. 
And so we needed grants. And he used significant grants to research, to experiment, to fail, to innovate and try again. 
And when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers, that's when patient capital could come in. 
And we helped him build a company, for profit, that would build on IDE's knowledge, and start looking at sales and exports, and be able to tap into other kinds of capital. 
Secondarily, we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries. 
And so we met Dr. Sono Khangharani in Pakistan. 
And while, again, you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in India into Pakistan, just to get the permits, over time we were able to start a company with Dr. Sono, who runs a large community development organization in the Thar Desert, which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country. 
And though that company has just started, our assumption is that there too we'll see the impact on millions. 
But drip irrigation isn't the only innovation. 
We're starting to see these happening all around the world. 
In Arusha, Tanzania, A to Z Textile Manufacturing has worked in partnership with us, with UNICEF, with the Global Fund, to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people, mostly women. 
And they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for Africans around the world. 
Lifespring Hospital is a joint venture between Acumen and the government of India to bring quality, affordable maternal health care to low-income women, and it's been so successful that it's currently building a new hospital every 35 days. 
And 1298 Ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry, building an ambulance service in Bombay that would use the technology of Google Earth, a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access, and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption. 
So that in the terrorist attacks of November they were the first responder, and are now beginning to scale, because of partnership. 
They've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances, and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in India. 
This idea of scale is critical. 
Because we're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people. All of the ones I discussed have reached at least a quarter million people. 
But that's obviously not enough. 
And it's where the idea of partnership becomes so important. 
Whether it's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets, government itself, or partner with major corporations, there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation. 
President Obama understands that. 
He recently authorized the creation of a Social Innovation Fund to focus on what works in this country, and look at how we can scale it. 
And I would submit that it's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations, not only for their country, but ones that we can use in the developed world as well. 
Invest financial assistance, but also management assistance. 
And then measure the returns, both from a financial perspective and from a social impact perspective. 
When we think about new approaches to aid, it's impossible not to talk about Pakistan. 
We've had a rocky relationship with that country and, in all fairness, the United States has not always been a very reliable partner. 
But again I would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen. 
And if we take that notion of a global innovation fund, we could use this time to invest not directly in government, though we would have government's blessing, nor in international experts, but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country. 
People like Rashani Zafar, who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country, and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country. 
And Tasneem Siddiqui, who developed a way called incremental housing, where he has moved 40,000 slum dwellers into safe, affordable community housing. 
Educational initiatives like DIL and The Citizen Foundation that are building schools across the country. 
It's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the Taliban. 
I've invested in Pakistan for over seven years now, and those of you who've also worked there can attest that Pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population, and there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature. 
President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. 
I would say that the converse is true. 
That these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of Pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day, provide real pathways to hope. 
And as we think about how we construct aid for Pakistan, while we need to strengthen the judiciary, build greater stability, we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world. 
On one of my last visits to Pakistan, I asked Dr. Sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the Thar Desert. 
And we left Karachi one morning before dawn. 
It was about 115 degrees. 
And we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color, lots of heat, very little discussion, because we were exhausted. 
And finally, at the end of the journey, I could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon. 
And as we got closer, its significance became apparent. 
That there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall. 
Because one of the poorest farmers on Earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life. 
His name was Raja, and he had kind, twinkly hazel eyes and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father. 
And he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he hadn't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day. 
Because he was building these crops. 
And with the money he earned he could stay this year. 
And for the first time ever in three generations, his children would go to school. 
We asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons. 
And he said, "" Of course I will. 
Because I don't want them discriminated against anymore. "" When we think about solutions to poverty, we cannot deny individuals their fundamental dignity. 
Because at the end of the day, dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. 
And what's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity. 
Because that is where dignity really starts. 
Martin Luther King said that love without power is anemic and sentimental, and that power without love is reckless and abusive. 
Our generation has seen both approaches tried, and often fail. 
But I think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power. 
For that is what we'll need, as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us, and to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal to every human being on the planet. 
The time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions, a cross sector, is now. 
I can only talk from my own experience, but in eight years of running Acumen fund, I've seen the power of patient capital. 
Not only to inspire innovation and risk taking, but to truly build systems that have created more than 25,000 jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet. 
I know it works. 
But I know that many other kinds of innovation also work. 
And so I urge you, in whatever sector you work, in whatever job you do, to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we're trying to help. 
Rather than what we think that they might need. 
It will take embracing the world with both arms. 
And it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability, with a sense of integrity and perseverance. 
And yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations. 
And there is so much good that we can do. 
Just think of all those sunflowers in the desert. 
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) 

I'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view, and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion. 
The truth of the matter is otherwise. 
Our holy book, the Koran, consists of 114 chapters, and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala, the saying of "" In the name of God, the all compassionate, the all merciful, "" or, as Sir Richard Burton — not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the Sir Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature — translates it. "" In the name of God, the compassionating, the compassionate. "" And in a saying of the Koran, which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity, God says to his prophet Muhammad — 
whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets, beginning with Adam, including Noah, including Moses, including Abraham, including Jesus Christ, and ending with Muhammad — that, "" We have not sent you, O Muhammad, except as a 'rahmah,' except as a source of compassion to humanity. "" For us human beings, and certainly for us as Muslims, whose mission, and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet. 
And the prophet, in one of his sayings, said, "Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God." 
And because God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion — in fact, the Koran says that "" God decreed upon himself compassion, "" or, "" reigned himself in by compassion "" — therefore, our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion, activators of compassion, actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion. 
That is all well and good, but where do we go wrong, and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world? 
For the answer to this, we turn to our spiritual path. 
In every religious tradition, there is the outer path and the inner path, or the exoteric path and the esoteric path. 
The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism, or "" tasawwuf "" in Arabic. 
And these doctors or these masters, these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition, refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies. 
In one of the battles that the prophet waged, he told his followers, "" We are returning from the lesser war to the greater war, to the greater battle. "" And they said, "" Messenger of God, we are battle-weary. 
How can we go to a greater battle? "" He said, "" That is the battle of the self, the battle of the ego. "" The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, "" I. "" The famous Sufi master Rumi, who is very well known to most of you, has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend, and he knocks on the door, and a voice answers, "" Who's there? "" "It's me," or, more grammatically correctly, "It is I," as we might say in English. 
The voice says, "" Go away. "" After many years of training, of disciplining, of search and struggle, he comes back. 
With much greater humility, he knocks again on the door. 
The voice asks, "" Who is there? "" He said, "" It is you, O heartbreaker. "" The door swings open, and the voice says, "Come in, for there is no room in this house for two I's," — two capital I's, not these eyes — "" for two egos. "" And Rumi's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path. 
In the presence of God, there is no room for more than one "" I, "" and that is the "" I "" of divinity. 
In a teaching — called a "" hadith qudsi "" in our tradition — God says that, "" My servant, "" or "" My creature, my human creature, does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do. "" And those of you who are employers know exactly what I mean. 
You want your employees to do what you ask them to do, and if they've done that, then they can do extra. 
But don't ignore what you've asked them to do. 
"" And, "" God says, "" my servant continues to get nearer to me, by doing more of what I've asked them to do "" — extra credit, we might call it — "" until I love him or love her. 
And when I love my servant, "" God says, "" I become the eyes by which he or she sees, the ears by which he or she listens, the hand by which he or she grasps, and the foot by which he or she walks, and the heart by which he or she understands. "" It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions. 
Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism, the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path. 
When he says, "" I am the spirit, and I am the way, "" and when the prophet Muhammad said, "" Whoever has seen me has seen God, "" it is because they became so much an instrument of God, they became part of God's team — so that God's will was manifest through them, and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos. 
Compassion on earth is given, it is in us. 
All we have to do is to get our egos out of the way, get our egotism out of the way. 
I'm sure, probably all of you here, or certainly the very vast majority of you, have had what you might call a spiritual experience, a moment in your lives when, for a few seconds, a minute perhaps, the boundaries of your ego dissolved. 
And at that minute, you felt at one with the universe — one with that jug of water, one with every human being, one with the Creator — and you felt you were in the presence of power, of awe, of the deepest love, the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives. 
That is a moment which is a gift of God to us — a gift when, for a moment, he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on "" I, I, I, me, me, me, "" and instead, like the person in Rumi's story, we say, "" Oh, this is all you. 
This is all you. And this is all us. 
And us, and I, and us are all part of you. 
O, Creator! O, the Objective! The source of our being and the end of our journey, you are also the breaker of our hearts. 
You are the one whom we should all be towards, for whose purpose we live, and for whose purpose we shall die, and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings. "" Our message today, and our purpose today, and those of you who are here today, and the purpose of this charter of compassion, is to remind. 
For the Koran always urges us to remember, to remind each other, because the knowledge of truth is within every human being. 
We know it all. 
We have access to it all. 
Jung may have called it "" the subconscious. "" Through our subconscious, in your dreams — the Koran calls our state of sleep "" the lesser death, "" "" the temporary death "" — in our state of sleep we have dreams, we have visions, we travel even outside of our bodies, for many of us, and we see wonderful things. 
We travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it, and beyond the limitations of time as we know it. 
But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating, the compassionate. 
God, Bokh, whatever name you want to call him with, Allah, Ram, Om, whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity, it is the locus of absolute being, absolute love and mercy and compassion, and absolute knowledge and wisdom, what Hindus call "" satchidananda. "" The language differs, but the objective is the same. 
Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and — and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. 
One is asking for angur — one is, say, an Englishman — one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. 
And they have a fight and an argument because — "" I want grapes. "" "" I want eneb. "" I want angur. "" — not knowing that the word that they're using refers to the same reality in different languages. 
There's only one absolute reality by definition, one absolute being by definition, because absolute is, by definition, single, and absolute and singular. 
There's this absolute concentration of being, the absolute concentration of consciousness, awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity. 
And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human. 
For what defines humanity, perhaps biologically, is our physiology, but God defines humanity by our spirituality, by our nature. 
And the Koran says, He speaks to the angels and says, "" When I have finished the formation of Adam from clay, and breathed into him of my spirit, then, fall in prostration to him. "" The angels prostrate, not before the human body, but before the human soul. 
Why? Because the soul, the human soul, embodies a piece of the divine breath, a piece of the divine soul. 
This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image. 
What is the imagery of God? 
The imagery of God is absolute being, absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love. 
And therefore, for us to be human — in the greatest sense of what it means to be human, in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human — means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us, and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being, of being alive, of beingness; the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, of awareness; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings. 
This is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform on which we must all stand, and when we stand on this platform as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. 
And I believe, personally, that we're on the verge and that, with the presence and help of people like you here, we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah. 
For he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore. 
We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option: we must, we must lower our egos, control our egos — whether it is individual ego, personal ego, family ego, national ego — and let all be for the glorification of the one. 
Thank you, and God bless you. 
(Applause) 

Can we, as adults, grow new nerve cells? 
There's still some confusion about that question, as this is a fairly new field of research. 
For example, I was talking to one of my colleagues, Robert, who is an oncologist, and he was telling me, "" Sandrine, this is puzzling. 
Some of my patients that have been told they are cured of their cancer still develop symptoms of depression. "" And I responded to him, "" Well, from my point of view that makes sense. 
The drug you give to your patients that stops the cancer cells multiplying also stops the newborn neurons being generated in their brain. "" And then Robert looked at me like I was crazy and said, "" But Sandrine, these are adult patients — adults do not grow new nerve cells. "" And much to his surprise, I said, "" Well actually, we do. "" And this is a phenomenon that we call neurogenesis. 
[Neurogenesis] Now Robert is not a neuroscientist, and when he went to medical school he was not taught what we know now — that the adult brain can generate new nerve cells. 
So Robert, you know, being the good doctor that he is, wanted to come to my lab to understand the topic a little bit better. 
And I took him for a tour of one of the most exciting parts of the brain when it comes to neurogenesis — and this is the hippocampus. 
So this is this gray structure in the center of the brain. 
And what we've known already for very long, is that this is important for learning, memory, mood and emotion. 
However, what we have learned more recently is that this is one of the unique structures of the adult brain where new neurons can be generated. 
And if we slice through the hippocampus and zoom in, what you actually see here in blue is a newborn neuron in an adult mouse brain. 
So when it comes to the human brain — my colleague Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet, has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. 
You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. 
But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons. 
So why are these new neurons important and what are their functions? 
First, we know that they're important for learning and memory. 
And in the lab we have shown that if we block the ability of the adult brain to produce new neurons in the hippocampus, then we block certain memory abilities. 
And this is especially new and true for spatial recognition — so like, how you navigate your way in the city. 
We are still learning a lot, and neurons are not only important for memory capacity, but also for the quality of the memory. 
And they will have been helpful to add time to our memory and they will help differentiate very similar memories, like: how do you find your bike that you park at the station every day in the same area, but in a slightly different position? 
And more interesting to my colleague Robert is the research we have been doing on neurogenesis and depression. 
So in an animal model of depression, we have seen that we have a lower level of neurogenesis. 
And if we give antidepressants, then we increase the production of these newborn neurons, and we decrease the symptoms of depression, establishing a clear link between neurogenesis and depression. 
But moreover, if you just block neurogenesis, then you block the efficacy of the antidepressant. 
So by then, Robert had understood that very likely his patients were suffering from depression even after being cured of their cancer, because the cancer drug had stopped newborn neurons from being generated. 
And it will take time to generate new neurons that reach normal functions. 
So, collectively, now we think we have enough evidence to say that neurogenesis is a target of choice if we want to improve memory formation or mood, or even prevent the decline associated with aging, or associated with stress. 
So the next question is: can we control neurogenesis? 
The answer is yes. 
And we are now going to do a little quiz. 
I'm going to give you a set of behaviors and activities, and you tell me if you think they will increase neurogenesis or if they will decrease neurogenesis. 
Are we ready? 
OK, let's go. 
So what about learning? 
Increasing? 
Yes. 
Learning will increase the production of these new neurons. 
How about stress? 
Yes, stress will decrease the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. 
How about sleep deprivation? 
Indeed, it will decrease neurogenesis. 
How about sex? 
Oh, wow! 
(Laughter) Yes, you are right, it will increase the production of new neurons. 
However, it's all about balance here. 
We don't want to fall in a situation — (Laughter) about too much sex leading to sleep deprivation. (Laughter) 
How about getting older? 
So the neurogenesis rate will decrease as we get older, but it is still occurring. 
And then finally, how about running? 
I will let you judge that one by yourself. 
So this is one of the first studies that was carried out by one of my mentors, Rusty Gage from the Salk Institute, showing that the environment can have an impact on the production of new neurons. 
And here you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had no running wheel in its cage. 
And the little black dots you see are actually newborn neurons-to-be. 
And now, you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had a running wheel in its cage. 
So you see the massive increase of the black dots representing the new neurons-to-be. 
So activity impacts neurogenesis, but that's not all. 
What you eat will have an effect on the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. 
So here we have a sample of diet — of nutrients that have been shown to have efficacy. 
And I'm just going to point a few out to you: Calorie restriction of 20 to 30 percent will increase neurogenesis. 
Intermittent fasting — spacing the time between your meals — will increase neurogenesis. 
Intake of flavonoids, which are contained in dark chocolate or blueberries, will increase neurogenesis. 
Omega-3 fatty acids, present in fatty fish, like salmon, will increase the production of these new neurons. 
Conversely, a diet rich in high saturated fat will have a negative impact on neurogenesis. 
Ethanol — intake of alcohol — will decrease neurogenesis. 
However, not everything is lost; resveratrol, which is contained in red wine, has been shown to promote the survival of these new neurons. 
So next time you are at a dinner party, you might want to reach for this possibly "" neurogenesis-neutral "" drink. 
(Laughter) And then finally, let me point out the last one — a quirky one. 
So Japanese groups are fascinated with food textures, and they have shown that actually soft diet impairs neurogenesis, as opposed to food that requires mastication — chewing — or crunchy food. 
So all of this data, where we need to look at the cellular level, has been generated using animal models. 
But this diet has also been given to human participants, and what we could see is that the diet modulates memory and mood in the same direction as it modulates neurogenesis, such as: calorie restriction will improve memory capacity, whereas a high-fat diet will exacerbate symptoms of depression — as opposed to omega-3 fatty acids, which increase neurogenesis, and also help to decrease the symptoms of depression. 
So we think that the effect of diet on mental health, on memory and mood, is actually mediated by the production of the new neurons in the hippocampus. 
And it's not only what you eat, but it's also the texture of the food, when you eat it and how much of it you eat. 
On our side — neuroscientists interested in neurogenesis — we need to understand better the function of these new neurons, and how we can control their survival and their production. 
We also need to find a way to protect the neurogenesis of Robert's patients. 
And on your side — I leave you in charge of your neurogenesis. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Margaret Heffernan: Fantastic research, Sandrine. 
Now, I told you you changed my life — I now eat a lot of blueberries. 
Sandrine Thuret: Very good. 
MH: I'm really interested in the running thing. 
Do I have to run? 
Or is it really just about aerobic exercise, getting oxygen to the brain? 
Could it be any kind of vigorous exercise? 
ST: So for the moment, we can't really say if it's just the running itself, but we think that anything that indeed will increase the production — or moving the blood flow to the brain, should be beneficial. 
MH: So I don't have to get a running wheel in my office? 
ST: No, you don't! 
MH: Oh, what a relief! That's wonderful. 
Sandrine Thuret, thank you so much. 
ST: Thank you, Margaret. 
(Applause) 

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

So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy. 
And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel. 
And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it, and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn't understand it at all. 
Ancient Palestine had a — along its eastern border, there's a mountain range. 
Still same is true of Israel today. 
And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region, so Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. 
And then there's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean, where Tel Aviv is now. 
And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah, which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west, and you can follow the Shephelah, go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains. 
And the Shephelah, if you've been to Israel, you'll know it's just about the most beautiful part of Israel. 
It's gorgeous, with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards. 
But more importantly, though, in the history of that region, it's served, it's had a real strategic function, and that is, it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way, get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains. 
And 3,000 years ago, that's exactly what happens. 
The Philistines, who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel, are living in the coastal plain. 
They're originally from Crete. They're a seafaring people. 
And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two. 
And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah. 
And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge, and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge, and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other, because they're deadlocked. 
Neither can attack the other, because to attack the other side you've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side, and you're completely exposed. 
So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, "" Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us. "" This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat. 
It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle. 
And the Philistine who is sent down, their mighty warrior, is a giant. 
He's 6 foot 9. 
He's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor, and he's got a sword and he's got a javelin and he's got his spear. He is absolutely terrifying. 
And he's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him. 
It's a death wish, right? There's no way they think they can take him. 
And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy, and he goes up to Saul and he says, "" I'll fight him. "" And Saul says, "" You can't fight him. That's ridiculous. 
You're this kid. This is this mighty warrior. "" But the shepherd is adamant. He says, "" No, no, no, you don't understand, I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years. I think I can do it. "" And Saul has no choice. He's got no one else who's come forward. 
So he says, "" All right. "" And then he turns to the kid, and he says, "But you've got to wear this armor. You can't go as you are." 
So he tries to give the shepherd his armor, and the shepherd says, "" No. "" He says, "" I can't wear this stuff. "" The Biblical verse is, "" I cannot wear this for I have not proved it, "" meaning, "" I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy. "" So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant. 
And the giant sees this figure approaching, and calls out, "" Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field. "" He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him. 
And the shepherd draws closer and closer, and the giant sees that he's carrying a staff. 
That's all he's carrying. 
Instead of a weapon, just this shepherd's staff, and he says — he's insulted — "Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?" 
And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket, puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes — right here, in his most vulnerable spot — and he falls down either dead or unconscious, and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head, and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run. 
And of course, the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David, and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong. 
So David, in that story, is supposed to be the underdog, right? 
In fact, that term, David and Goliath, has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger. 
Now why do we call David an underdog? 
Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. 
We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior, and David is just a shepherd. 
But most importantly, we call him an underdog because all he has is — it's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry, this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear, and all David has is this sling. 
Well, let's start there with the phrase "All David has is this sling," because that's the first mistake that we make. 
In ancient warfare, there are three kinds of warriors. 
There's cavalry, men on horseback and with chariots. 
There's heavy infantry, which are foot soldiers, armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor. 
And there's artillery, and artillery are archers, but, more importantly, slingers. 
And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it, and they put a projectile, either a rock or a lead ball, inside the pouch, and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go, and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target. 
That's what David has, and it's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot. 
It's not this, right? It's not a child's toy. 
It's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon. 
When David rolls it around like this, he's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second, and that means that when the rock is released, it's going forward really fast, probably 35 meters per second. 
That's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers. 
More than that, the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks. They were barium sulphate, which are rocks twice the density of normal stones. 
If you do the calculations on the ballistics, on the stopping power of the rock fired from David's sling, it's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [.45 caliber] handgun. 
This is an incredibly devastating weapon. 
Accuracy, we know from historical records that slingers — experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards. 
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. 
They were incredibly accurate. 
When David lines up — and he's not 200 yards away from Goliath, he's quite close to Goliath — when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath, he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes. 
If you go back over the history of ancient warfare, you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another. 
So what's Goliath? He's heavy infantry, and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman. 
When he says, "" Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, "" the key phrase is "" Come to me. "" Come up to me because we're going to fight, hand to hand, like this. 
Saul has the same expectation. 
David says, "" I want to fight Goliath, "" and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, "" Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath,' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat,' infantry on infantry. "" But David has absolutely no expectation. 
He's not going to fight him that way. Why would he? 
He's a shepherd. He's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves. 
That's where his strength lies. 
So here he is, this shepherd, experienced in the use of a devastating weapon, up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat. 
Goliath is a sitting duck. He doesn't have a chance. 
So why do we keep calling David an underdog, and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable? 
There's a second piece of this that's important. 
It's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry. 
It's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath. 
Goliath is not what he seems to be. 
There's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text, things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don't square with his image as this mighty warrior. 
So to begin with, the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant. 
Now that is weird, right? 
Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat. 
Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy, presumably, to the point of combat? 
Secondly, the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves, another odd thing to say when you're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point. 
And then there's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David. 
So David's coming down the mountain, and he's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat. 
There is nothing about him that says, "I am about to fight you like this." 
He's not even carrying a sword. 
Why does Goliath not react to that? 
It's as if he's oblivious to what's going on that day. 
And then there's that strange comment he makes to David: "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" 
Sticks? David only has one stick. 
Well, it turns out that there's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath, an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies. 
There have been many articles written. 
The first one was in 1960 in the Indiana Medical Journal, and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath's height. 
So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era, and usually when someone is that far out of the norm, there's an explanation for it. 
So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. 
And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly. 
So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11. 
He had acromegaly. 
Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant? 
Famous. He had acromegaly. 
There's even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly. 
Anyone who's unusually tall, that's the first explanation we come up with. 
And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it, principally having to do with vision. 
The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted. 
So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath, they've said, "" Wait a minute, he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly. "" And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day. 
Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant? 
Because he can't make his way on his own. 
Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn't understand that David's not going to fight him until the very last moment? 
Because he can't see him. 
When he says, "" Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, "" the phrase "" come to me "" is a hint also of his vulnerability. 
Come to me because I can't see you. 
And then there's, "" Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks? "" He sees two sticks when David has only one. 
So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe. 
What they didn't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness. 
And there is, I think, in that, a very important lesson for all of us. 
Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. 
And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Well after many years working in trade and economics, four years ago, I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability. 
And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can't even obtain a meal. 
This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian. 
And I carry this around as a symbol, really, of the challenge and also the hope. 
Because one cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. 
But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning, about a billion people on Earth — or one out of every seven — woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. 
One out of every seven people. 
First, I'll ask you: Why should you care? 
Why should we care? 
For most people, if they think about hunger, they don't have to go far back on their own family history — maybe in their own lives, or their parents' lives, or their grandparents' lives — to remember an experience of hunger. 
I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience. 
Some are driven by compassion, feel it's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity. 
As Gandhi said, "To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of God." 
Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world. 
We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight. 
The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history. 
One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food. 
Others think about Malthusian nightmares. 
Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades? 
This is not a negotiable thing, hunger. 
People have to eat. 
There's going to be a lot of people. 
This is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain. 
But I actually came to this issue in a different way. 
This is a picture of me and my three children. 
In 1987, I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television. 
And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia. 
One two years earlier had killed more than a million people. 
But it never struck me as it did that moment, because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby, and she had no milk to nurse. 
And the baby's cry really penetrated me, as a mother. 
And I thought, there's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food — the most fundamental expectation of every human being. 
And it was at that moment that I just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem. 
This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for. 
We know how to fix hunger. 
A hundred years ago, we didn't. 
We actually have the technology and systems. 
And I was just struck that this is out of place. 
At our time in history, these images are out of place. 
Well guess what? 
This is last week in northern Kenya. 
Yet again, the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day. 
In fact, what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger. 
This is more than HIV / AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. 
And we know that the issue is not just production of food. 
One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug, my hero. 
But today I'm going to talk about access to food, because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis, there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories. 
So why is it that we have a billion people who can't find food? 
And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge. 
In 2008, Lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days — from conception to two years old — does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible. 
Their brains and bodies will be stunted. 
And here you see a brain scan of two children — one who had adequate nutrition, another, neglected and who was deeply malnourished. 
And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children. 
And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don't form. 
And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies, which I'll talk about later. 
But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years. 
So this burden of knowledge drives me. 
Because actually we know how to fix it very simply. 
And yet, in many places, a third of the children, by the time they're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this. 
I'd like to talk about some of the things I've seen on the front lines of hunger, some of the things I've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector. 
I'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is. 
Well first, I'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth, breastfeeding. 
You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life. 
But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively. 
In Mauritania, less than three percent. 
This is something that can be transformed with knowledge. 
This message, this word, can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business; it's a brilliant way of saving your child's life. 
And so today we focus on not just passing out food, but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment, and teaching them about breastfeeding. 
The second thing I'd like to talk about: If you were living in a remote village somewhere, your child was limp, and you were in a drought, or you were in floods, or you were in a situation where there wasn't adequate diversity of diet, what would you do? 
Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars, like we can, and pick the right one to match? 
Well I find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count. 
And I go to those shops, if there are any, or out to the fields to see what they can get, and they cannot obtain the nutrition. 
Even if they know what they need to do, it's not available. 
And I'm very excited about this, because one thing we're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops. 
And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs. 
It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as, what I call, food for humanity. 
We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan — really about three of them. 
But this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this. 
One package, 17 cents a day — their malnutrition is overcome. 
So I am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods. 
And this is climate-proof. 
It doesn't need to be refrigerated, it doesn't need water, which is often lacking. 
And these types of technologies, I see, have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition, malnutrition out on the front lines. 
The next thing I want to talk about is school feeding. 
Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. 
When disaster strikes — the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things — there is nothing to fall back on. 
And usually the institutions — churches, temples, other things — do not have the resources to provide a safety net. 
What we have found working with the World Bank is that the poor man's safety net, the best investment, is school feeding. 
And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers, you have a transformative effect. 
Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal. 
But when that food is there, it's transformative. 
It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life. 
But what is most amazing is the effect on girls. 
In countries where girls don't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school, we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys. 
We see a transformation in attendance by girls. 
And there was no argument, because it's incentive. 
Families need the help. 
And we find that if we keep girls in school later, they'll stay in school until they're 16, and won't get married if there's food in school. 
Or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week — it costs about 50 cents — will keep a girl in school, and they'll give birth to a healthier child, because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation. 
We know that there's boom and bust cycles of hunger. 
We know this. 
Right now on the Horn of Africa, we've been through this before. 
So is this a hopeless cause? 
Absolutely not. 
I'd like to talk about what I call our warehouses for hope. 
Cameroon, northern Cameroon, boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades. 
Food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons. 
Well two years ago, we decided, let's transform the model of fighting hunger, and instead of giving out the food aid, we put it into food banks. 
And we said, listen, during the lean season, take the food out. 
You manage, the village manages these warehouses. 
And during harvest, put it back with interest, food interest. 
So add in five percent, 10 percent more food. 
For the past two years, 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid — they're self-sufficient. 
And the food banks are growing. 
And they're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village. 
But they've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources. 
I love this idea that came from the village level: three keys to unlock that warehouse. 
Food is gold there. 
And simple ideas can transform the face, not of small areas, of big areas of the world. 
I'd like to talk about what I call digital food. 
Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine. 
Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize for saying, "" Guess what, famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it. "" We certainly saw that in 2008. 
We're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year. 
Food can be there and people can't buy it. 
Well this picture — I was in Hebron in a small shop, this shop, where instead of bringing in food, we provide digital food, a card. 
It says "" bon appetit "" in Arabic. 
And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items. 
They have to be nutritious, and they have to be locally produced. 
And what's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry — where this card's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus — the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent. 
The shopkeepers are hiring more people. 
It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving. 
We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways. 
Perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that Bill Gates, Howard Buffett and others have supported boldly, which is to ask the question: What if, instead of looking at the hungry as victims — and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families — what if we view them as the solution, as the value chain to fight hunger? 
What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food — there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with — what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere? 
And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries. 
And guess what? 
In virtually every case, when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market — if you say, "" We will buy 300 metric tons of this. 
We'll pick it up. We'll make sure it's stored properly. "" — their yields have gone up two-, three-, fourfold and they figure it out, because it's the first guaranteed opportunity they've had in their life. 
And we're seeing people transform their lives. 
Today, food aid, our food aid — huge engine — 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world. 
Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food. 
Now you'd ask, can this be done at scale? 
These are great ideas, village-level ideas. 
Well I'd like to talk about Brazil, because I've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years, when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now. 
And what I've found is, rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things, they invested in a school feeding program. 
And they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity. 
And they're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day. 
And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty. 
It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil, and it's at scale, and it's creating opportunities. 
I've gone out there; I've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this. 
Now if we look at the economic imperative here, this isn't just about compassion. 
The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger — the cost to society, the burden it has to bear — is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year. 
And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year. 
Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars — 10.3 — to address malnutrition in those countries. 
You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity. 
The amazing thing I've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader. 
When a leader says, "" Not under my watch, "" everything begins to change. 
And the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this. 
And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important. 
Because food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person, nation by nation. 
We have to stand together. 
And we're seeing nations in Africa. 
WFP's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations. 
What I would like to offer here is a challenge. 
I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. 
Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. 
I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. 
And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "" No more. 
No more are we going to accept this. "" And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I told you three things last year. 
I told you that the statistics of the world have not been made properly available. 
Because of that, we still have the old mindset of developing in industrialized countries, which is wrong. 
And that animated graphics can make a difference. 
Things are changing and today, on the United Nations Statistic Division Home Page, it says, by first of May, full access to the databases. 
(Applause) And if I could share the image with you on the screen. 
So three things have happened. 
U.N. opened their statistic databases, and we have a new version of the software up working as a beta on the net, so you don't have to download it any longer. 
And let me repeat what you saw last year. 
The bubbles are the countries. 
Here you have the fertility rate — the number of children per woman — and there you have the length of life in years. 
This is 1950 — those were the industrialized countries, those were developing countries. 
At that time there was a "" we "" and "" them. "" There was a huge difference in the world. 
But then it changed, and it went on quite well. 
And this is what happens. 
You can see how China is the red, big bubble. 
The blue there is India. 
And they go over all this — I'm going to try to be a little more serious this year in showing you how things really changed. 
And it's Africa that stands out as the problem down here, doesn't it? 
Large families still, and the HIV epidemic brought down the countries like this. 
This is more or less what we saw last year, and this is how it will go on into the future. 
And I will talk on, is this possible? 
Because you see now, I presented statistics that don't exist. 
Because this is where we are. 
Will it be possible that this will happen? 
I cover my lifetime here, you know? 
I expect to live 100 years. 
And this is where we are today. 
Now could we look here instead at the economic situation in the world? 
And I would like to show that against child survival. 
We'll swap the axis. 
Here you have child mortality — that is, survival — four kids dying there, 200 dying there. 
And this is GDP per capita on this axis. 
And this was 2007. 
And if I go back in time, I've added some historical statistics — here we go, here we go, here we go — not so much statistics 100 years ago. 
Some countries still had statistics. 
We are looking down in the archive, and when we are down into 1820, there is only Austria and Sweden that can produce numbers. 
(Laughter) But they were down here. They had 1,000 dollars per person per year. 
And they lost one-fifth of their kids before their first birthday. 
So this is what happens in the world, if we play the entire world. 
How they got slowly richer and richer, and they add statistics. 
Isn't it beautiful when they get statistics? 
You see the importance of that? 
And here, children don't live longer. 
The last century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most of this statistics is Europe. 
It was only by the turn of the century that more than 90 percent of the children survived their first year. 
This is India coming up, with the first data from India. 
And this is the United States moving away here, earning more money. 
And we will soon see China coming up in the very far end corner here. 
And it moves up with Mao Tse-Tung getting health, not getting so rich. 
There he died, then Deng Xiaoping brings money. 
It moves this way over here. 
And the bubbles keep moving up there, and this is what the world looks like today. 
(Applause) Let us have a look at the United States. 
We have a function here — I can tell the world, "" Stay where you are. "" And I take the United States — we still want to see the background — I put them up like this, and now we go backwards. 
And we can see that the United States goes to the right of the mainstream. 
They are on the money side all the time. 
And down in 1915, the United States was a neighbor of India — present, contemporary India. 
And that means United States was richer, but lost more kids than India is doing today, proportionally. 
And look here — compare to the Philippines of today. 
The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as the United States during the First World War. 
But we have to bring United States forward quite a while to find the same health of the United States as we have in the Philippines. 
About 1957 here, the health of the United States is the same as the Philippines. 
And this is the drama of this world which many call globalized, is that Asia, Arabic countries, Latin America, are much more ahead in being healthy, educated, having human resources than they are economically. 
There's a discrepancy in what's happening today in the emerging economies. 
There now, social benefits, social progress, are going ahead of economical progress. 
And 1957 — the United States had the same economy as Chile has today. 
And how long do we have to bring United States to get the same health as Chile has today? 
I think we have to go, there — we have 2001, or 2002 — the United States has the same health as Chile. 
Chile's catching up! 
Within some years Chile may have better child survival than the United States. 
This is really a change, that you have this lag of more or less 30, 40 years' difference on the health. 
And behind the health is the educational level. 
And there's a lot of infrastructure things, and general human resources are there. 
Now we can take away this — and I would like to show you the rate of speed, the rate of change, how fast they have gone. 
And we go back to 1920, and I want to look at Japan. 
And I want to look at Sweden and the United States. 
And I'm going to stage a race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red Toyota down there, and the brownish Volvo. 
(Laughter) And here we go. Here we go. 
The Toyota has a very bad start down here, you can see, and the United States Ford is going off-road there. 
And the Volvo is doing quite fine. 
This is the war. The Toyota got off track, and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden — can you see that? 
And they are taking over Sweden, and they are now healthier than Sweden. 
That's the part where I sold the Volvo and bought the Toyota. 
(Laughter) And now we can see that the rate of change was enormous in Japan. 
They really caught up. 
And this changes gradually. 
We have to look over generations to understand it. 
And let me show you my own sort of family history — we made these graphs here. 
And this is the same thing, money down there, and health, you know? 
And this is my family. 
This is Sweden, 1830, when my great-great-grandma was born. 
Sweden was like Sierra Leone today. 
And this is when great-grandma was born, 1863. 
And Sweden was like Mozambique. 
And this is when my grandma was born, 1891. 
She took care of me as a child, so I'm not talking about statistic now — now it's oral history in my family. 
That's when I believe statistics, when it's grandma-verified statistics. 
(Laughter) I think it's the best way of verifying historical statistics. 
Sweden was like Ghana. 
It's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa. 
I told you last year, I'll tell you again, my mother was born in Egypt, and I — who am I? 
I'm the Mexican in the family. 
And my daughter, she was born in Chile, and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore, now the healthiest country on this Earth. 
It bypassed Sweden about two to three years ago, with better child survival. 
But they're very small, you know? 
They're so close to the hospital we can never beat them out in these forests. 
(Laughter) But homage to Singapore. 
Singapore is the best one. 
Now this looks also like a very good story. 
But it's not really that easy, that it's all a good story. 
Because I have to show you one of the other facilities. 
We can also make the color here represent the variable — and what am I choosing here? 
Carbon-dioxide emission, metric ton per capita. 
This is 1962, and United States was emitting 16 tons per person. 
And China was emitting 0.6, and India was emitting 0.32 tons per capita. 
And what happens when we moved on? 
Well, you see the nice story of getting richer and getting healthier — everyone did it at the cost of emission of carbon dioxide. 
There is no one who has done it so far. 
And we don't have all the updated data any longer, because this is really hot data today. 
And there we are, 2001. 
And in the discussion I attended with global leaders, you know, many say now the problem is that the emerging economies, they are getting out too much carbon dioxide. 
The Minister of the Environment of India said, "Well, you were the one who caused the problem." 
The OECD countries — the high-income countries — they were the ones who caused the climate change. 
"" But we forgive you, because you didn't know it. 
But from now on, we count per capita. 
From now on we count per capita. 
And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission. "" This really shows you, we have not seen good economic and health progress anywhere in the world without destroying the climate. 
And this is really what has to be changed. 
I've been criticized for showing you a too positive image of the world, but I don't think it's like this. 
The world is quite a messy place. 
This we can call Dollar Street. 
Everyone lives on this street here. 
What they earn here — what number they live on — is how much they earn per day. 
This family earns about one dollar per day. 
We drive up the street here, we find a family here which earns about two to three dollars a day. 
And we drive away here — we find the first garden in the street, and they earn 10 to 50 dollars a day. 
And how do they live? 
If we look at the bed here, we can see that they sleep on a rug on the floor. 
This is what poverty line is — 80 percent of the family income is just to cover the energy needs, the food for the day. 
This is two to five dollars. You have a bed. 
And here it's a much nicer bedroom, you can see. 
I lectured on this for Ikea, and they wanted to see the sofa immediately here. 
(Laughter) And this is the sofa, how it will emerge from there. 
And the interesting thing, when you go around here in the photo panorama, you see the family still sitting on the floor there. 
Although there is a sofa, if you watch in the kitchen, you can see that the great difference for women does not come between one to 10 dollars. 
It comes beyond here, when you really can get good working conditions in the family. 
And if you really want to see the difference, you look at the toilet over here. 
This can change. This can change. 
These are all pictures and images from Africa, and it can become much better. 
We can get out of poverty. 
My own research has not been in IT or anything like this. 
I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine. 
And this is the result of the farmers-needs research. 
The nice thing here is that you can't see who are the researchers in this picture. 
That's when research functions in poor societies — you must really live with the people. 
When you're in poverty, everything is about survival. 
It's about having food. 
And these two young farmers, they are girls now — because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS — they discuss with a trained agronomist. 
This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi, Junatambe Kumbira, and he's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant — the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found. 
And they are very, very eagerly interested to get advice, and that's to survive in poverty. 
That's one context. 
Getting out of poverty. 
The women told us one thing. "" Get us technology. 
We hate this mortar, to stand hours and hours. 
Get us a mill so that we can mill our flour, then we will be able to pay for the rest ourselves. "" Technology will bring you out of poverty, but there's a need for a market to get away from poverty. 
And this woman is very happy now, bringing her products to the market. 
But she's very thankful for the public investment in schooling so she can count, and won't be cheated when she reaches the market. 
She wants her kid to be healthy, so she can go to the market and doesn't have to stay home. 
And she wants the infrastructure — it is nice with a paved road. 
It's also good with credit. 
Micro-credits gave her the bicycle, you know. 
And information will tell her when to go to market with which product. 
You can do this. 
I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible. 
Africa has not done bad. 
In 50 years they've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe, with a functioning nation and state. 
I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years. 
Because we don't consider where they came from. 
It's this stupid concept of developing countries that puts us, Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago, and says that Mozambique did worse. 
We have to know a little more about the world. 
I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine. 
He knows everything. 
He knows the name of the grape, the temperature and everything. 
I only know two types of wine — red and white. 
(Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries — industrialized and developing. 
And I know 200, I know about the small data. 
But you can do that. 
(Applause) But I have to get serious. And how do you get serious? 
You make a PowerPoint, you know? 
(Laughter) Homage to the Office package, no? 
What is this, what is this, what am I telling? 
I'm telling you that there are many dimensions of development. 
Everyone wants your pet thing. 
If you are in the corporate sector, you love micro-credit. 
If you are fighting in a non-governmental organization, you love equity between gender. 
Or if you are a teacher, you'll love UNESCO, and so on. 
On the global level, we have to have more than our own thing. 
We need everything. 
All these things are important for development, especially when you just get out of poverty and you should go towards welfare. 
Now, what we need to think about is, what is a goal for development, and what are the means for development? 
Let me first grade what are the most important means. 
Economic growth to me, as a public-health professor, is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival. 
Governance. To have a government which functions — that's what brought California out of the misery of 1850. 
It was the government that made law function finally. 
Education, human resources are important. 
Health is also important, but not that much as a mean. 
Environment is important. 
Human rights is also important, but it just gets one cross. 
Now what about goals? Where are we going toward? 
We are not interested in money. 
Money is not a goal. 
It's the best mean, but I give it zero as a goal. 
Governance, well it's fun to vote in a little thing, but it's not a goal. 
And going to school, that's not a goal, it's a mean. 
Health I give two points. I mean it's nice to be healthy — at my age especially — you can stand here, you're healthy. 
And that's good, it gets two plusses. 
Environment is very, very crucial. 
There's nothing for the grandkid if you don't save up. 
But where are the important goals? 
Of course, it's human rights. 
Human rights is the goal, but it's not that strong of a mean for achieving development. 
And culture. Culture is the most important thing, I would say, because that's what brings joy to life. 
That's the value of living. 
So the seemingly impossible is possible. 
Even African countries can achieve this. 
And I've shown you the shot where the seemingly impossible is possible. 
And remember, please remember my main message, which is this: the seemingly impossible is possible. 
We can have a good world. 
I showed you the shots, I proved it in the PowerPoint, and I think I will convince you also by culture. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Bring me my sword! 
Sword swallowing is from ancient India. 
It's a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious. 
(Laughter) And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel — solid steel — this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war. 
And it's all solid steel — you can hear here. 
And I'm going to take this blade of steel, and push it down through my body of blood and flesh, and prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible. 
Can I request a moment of absolute silence? 
(Applause) 

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

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

I want to talk about the transformed media landscape, and what it means for anybody who has a message that they want to get out to anywhere in the world. 
And I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation. 
I'll start here. Last November there was a presidential election. 
You probably read something about it in the papers. 
And there was some concern that in some parts of the country there might be voter suppression. 
And so a plan came up to video the vote. 
And the idea was that individual citizens with phones capable of taking photos or making video would document their polling places, on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques, and would upload this to a central place. 
And that this would operate as a kind of citizen observation — that citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes, but also to help ensure the sanctity of the vote overall. 
So this is a pattern that assumes we're all in this together. 
What matters here isn't technical capital, it's social capital. 
These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. 
It isn't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. 
It's when everybody is able to take them for granted. 
Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together. 
And so we're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere, and moving from one spot to another. 
That is a huge transformation. 
Not to put too fine a point on it, the moment we're living through — the moment our historical generation is living through — is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. 
Now that's a big claim. I'm going to try to back it up. 
There are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label "" revolution. "" The first one is the famous one, the printing press: movable type, oil-based inks, that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside-down, starting in the middle of the 1400s. 
Then, a couple of hundred years ago, there was innovation in two-way communication, conversational media: first the telegraph, then the telephone. 
Slow, text-based conversations, then real-time voice based conversations. 
Then, about 150 years ago, there was a revolution in recorded media other than print: first photos, then recorded sound, then movies, all encoded onto physical objects. 
And finally, about 100 years ago, the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air — radio and television. 
This is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century. 
This is what those of us of a certain age grew up with, and are used to. 
But there is a curious asymmetry here. 
The media that is good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. 
And the media that's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations. 
If you want to have a conversation in this world, you have it with one other person. 
If you want to address a group, you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group, whether you're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press. 
That was the media landscape as we had it in the twentieth century. 
And this is what changed. 
This thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is Bill Cheswick's map of the Internet. 
He traces the edges of the individual networks and then color codes them. 
The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. 
Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one-to-many pattern, the Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern. 
For the first time, media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations. 
That's one of the big changes. 
The second big change is that, as all media gets digitized, the Internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media, meaning that phone calls migrate to the Internet, magazines migrate to the Internet, movies migrate to the Internet. 
And that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium. 
Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well. 
And the third big change is that members of the former audience, as Dan Gilmore calls them, can now also be producers and not consumers. 
Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and produce. 
It's as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free; it's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons. 
That is a huge change in the media landscape we're used to. 
And it's not just Internet or no Internet. 
We've had the Internet in its public form for almost 20 years now, and it's still changing as the media becomes more social. 
It's still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the Internet well. 
Second story. 
Last May, China in the Sichuan province had a terrible earthquake, 7.9 magnitude, massive destruction in a wide area, as the Richter Scale has it. 
And the earthquake was reported as it was happening. 
People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of buildings. 
They were taking videos of buildings shaking. 
They were uploading it to QQ, China's largest Internet service. 
They were Twittering it. 
And so as the quake was happening the news was reported. 
And because of the social connections, Chinese students coming elsewhere, and going to school, or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China — there were people listening all over the world, hearing this news. 
The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter. 
Twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to read. 
The last time China had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened. 
(Laughter) Now they might have liked to have done that here, rather than seeing these pictures go up online. 
But they weren't given that choice, because their own citizens beat them to the punch. 
Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens, rather than from the Xinhua News Agency. 
And this stuff rippled like wildfire. 
For a while there the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter, the global short messaging service — nine of the top 10 links were about the quake. 
People collating information, pointing people to news sources, pointing people to the US geological survey. 
The 10th one was kittens on a treadmill, but that's the Internet for you. 
(Laughter) But nine of the 10 in those first hours. 
And within half a day donation sites were up, and donations were pouring in from all around the world. 
This was an incredible, coordinated global response. 
And the Chinese then, in one of their periods of media openness, decided that they were going to let it go, that they were going to let this citizen reporting fly. 
And then this happened. 
People began to figure out, in the Sichuan Provence, that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed — because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day — the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those building to be built to less than code. 
And so they started, the citizen journalists started reporting that as well. And there was an incredible picture. 
You may have seen in on the front page of the New York Times. 
A local official literally prostrated himself in the street, in front of these protesters, in order to get them to go away. 
Essentially to say, "" We will do anything to placate you, just please stop protesting in public. "" But these are people who have been radicalized, because, thanks to the one child policy, they have lost everyone in their next generation. 
Someone who has seen the death of a single child now has nothing to lose. 
And so the protest kept going. 
And finally the Chinese cracked down. 
That was enough of citizen media. 
And so they began to arrest the protesters. 
They began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on. 
China is probably the most successful manager of Internet censorship in the world, using something that is widely described as the Great Firewall of China. 
And the Great Firewall of China is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals, it mostly comes in from the outside world, it comes in relatively sparse chunks, and it comes in relatively slowly. 
And because of those four characteristics they are able to filter it as it comes into the country. 
But like the Maginot Line, the great firewall of China was facing in the wrong direction for this challenge, because not one of those four things was true in this environment. 
The media was produced locally. It was produced by amateurs. 
It was produced quickly. And it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared. 
And so now the Chinese government, who for a dozen years, has quite successfully filtered the web, is now in the position of having to decide whether to allow or shut down entire services, because the transformation to amateur media is so enormous that they can't deal with it any other way. 
And in fact that is happening this week. 
On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen they just, two days ago, announced that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter, because there was no way to filter it other than that. 
They had to turn the spigot entirely off. 
Now these changes don't just affect people who want to censor messages. 
They also affect people who want to send messages, because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole, not just a particular strategy. 
The classic media problem, from the 20th century is, how does an organization have a message that they want to get out to a group of people distributed at the edges of a network. 
And here is the twentieth century answer. 
Bundle up the message. Send the same message to everybody. 
National message. Targeted individuals. 
Relatively sparse number of producers. 
Very expensive to do, so there is not a lot of competition. 
This is how you reach people. 
All of that is over. 
We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. 
Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. 
The audience can talk back. 
And that's a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do. 
But that's not the really crazy change that we're living in the middle of. 
The really crazy change is here: it's the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other, the fact that former consumers are now producers, the fact that the audience can talk directly to one another; because there is a lot more amateurs than professionals, and because the size of the network, the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants, meaning that the network, when it grows large, grows very, very large. 
As recently at last decade, most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals. 
Those days are over, never to return. 
It is the green lines now, that are the source of the free content, which brings me to my last story. 
We saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama campaign. 
And I don't mean most imaginative use in politics — I mean most imaginative use ever. 
And one of the things Obama did, was they famously, the Obama campaign did, was they famously put up MyBarackObama.com, myBO.com And millions of citizens rushed in to participate, and to try and figure out how to help. 
An incredible conversation sprung up there. 
And then, this time last year, Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on FISA, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 
He had said, in January, that he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly warrantless spying on American persons. 
By the summer, in the middle of the general campaign, He said, "" I've thought about the issue more. I've changed my mind. 
I'm going to vote for this bill. "" And many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk. 
It was Senator Obama when they created it. They changed the name later. 
"Please get FISA right." 
Within days of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on myBO.com; within weeks of its being created it was the largest group. 
Obama had to issue a press release. 
He had to issue a reply. 
And he said essentially, "" I have considered the issue. 
I understand where you are coming from. 
But having considered it all, I'm still going to vote the way I'm going to vote. 
But I wanted to reach out to you and say, I understand that you disagree with me, and I'm going to take my lumps on this one. "" This didn't please anybody. But then a funny thing happened in the conversation. 
People in that group realized that Obama had never shut them down. 
Nobody in the Obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join, to deny its existence, to delete it, to take to off the site. 
They had understood that their role with myBO.com was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters. 
And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media. 
Media, the media landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was, as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs, is increasingly slipping away. 
In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants, in that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. 
It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. 
And the choice we face, I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world, isn't whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in. 
That's the media environment we've got. 
The question we all face now is, "" How can we make best use of this media? 
Even though it means changing the way we've always done it. "" Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? 
In the next decade? 
Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years? 
Well, according to the governments of the world, yes we can. 
In the last few days, the leaders of the world, meeting at the UN in New York, agreed a new set of Global Goals for the development of the world to 2030. 
And here they are: these goals are the product of a massive consultation exercise. 
The Global Goals are who we, humanity, want to be. 
Now that's the plan, but can we get there? 
Can this vision for a better world really be achieved? 
Well, I'm here today because we've run the numbers, and the answer, shockingly, is that maybe we actually can. 
But not with business as usual. 
Now, the idea that the world is going to get a better place may seem a little fanciful. 
Watch the news every day and the world seems to be going backwards, not forwards. 
And let's be frank: it's pretty easy to be skeptical about grand announcements coming out of the UN. 
But please, I invite you to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. 
Because back in 2001, the UN agreed another set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals. 
And the flagship target there was to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. 
The target was to take from a baseline of 1990, when 36 percent of the world's population lived in poverty, to get to 18 percent poverty this year. 
Did we hit this target? 
Well, no, we didn't. 
We exceeded it. 
This year, global poverty is going to fall to 12 percent. 
Now, that's still not good enough, and the world does still have plenty of problems. 
But the pessimists and doomsayers who say that the world can't get better are simply wrong. 
So how did we achieve this success? 
Well, a lot of it was because of economic growth. 
Some of the biggest reductions in poverty were in countries such as China and India, which have seen rapid economic growth in recent years. 
So can we pull off the same trick again? 
Can economic growth get us to the Global Goals? 
Well, to answer that question, we need to benchmark where the world is today against the Global Goals and figure out how far we have to travel. 
But that ain't easy, because the Global Goals aren't just ambitious, they're also pretty complicated. 
Over 17 goals, there are then 169 targets and literally hundreds of indicators. 
Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific — end hunger — others are a lot vaguer — promote peaceful and tolerant societies. 
So to help us with this benchmarking, I'm going to use a tool called the Social Progress Index. 
What this does is measures all the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve, but sums it up into a single number that we can use as our benchmark and track progress over time. 
The Social Progress Index basically asks three fundamental questions about a society. 
First of all, does everyone have the basic needs of survival: food, water, shelter, safety? 
Secondly, does everyone have the building blocks of a better life: education, information, health and a sustainable environment? 
And what we find is that there's a wide diversity of performance in the world today. 
Well, the Social Progress Index can help us calculate this, because as you might have noticed, there are no economic indicators in there; there's no GDP or economic growth in the Social Progress Index model. 
Well, we asked a team of economists at Deloitte who checked and crunched the numbers, and they came back and said, well, look: if the world's average wealth goes from $14,000 a year to $23,000 a year, social progress is going to increase from 61 to 62.4. 
So that's the bad news. 
So are the pessimists right? 
Because the Social Progress Index also has some very good news. 
Let me take you back to that regression line. 
So this is the average relationship between GDP and social progress, and this is what our last forecast was based on. 
But as you saw already, there is actually lots of noise around this trend line. 
Russia has lots of natural resource wealth, but lots of social problems. 
China has boomed economically, but hasn't made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. 
India has a space program and millions of people without toilets. 
Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are overperforming on social progress relative to their GDP. 
Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. 
And Costa Rica's not alone. 
First of all, it tells us that we already in the world have the solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. 
Our choices matter: if we prioritize the well-being of people, then we can make a lot more progress than our GDP might expect. 
How much? Enough to get us to the Global Goals? 
Well, let's look at some numbers. 
What we know already: the world today is scoring 61 on social progress, and the place we want to get to is 75. 
If we rely on economic growth alone, we're going to get to 62.4. 
So let's assume now that we can get the countries that are currently underperforming on social progress — the Russia, China, Indias — just up to the average. 
What if every country in the world chose to be like Costa Rica in prioritizing human well-being, using its wealth for the well-being of its citizens? 
And we need to hold them to that promise by holding them accountable, tracking their progress all the way through the next 15 years. 
And I want to finish by showing you a way to do that, called the People's Report Card. 
The People's Report Card brings together all this data into a simple framework that we'll all be familiar with from our school days, to hold them to account. 
It grades our performance on the Global Goals on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst, and A is humanity at its best. 
Our world today is scoring a C-. 
The Global Goals are all about getting to an A, and that's why we're going to be updating the People's Report Card annually, for the world and for all the countries of the world, so we can hold our leaders to account to achieve this target and fulfill this promise. 
Because getting to the Global Goals will only happen if we do things differently, if our leaders do things differently, and for that to happen, that needs us to demand it. 
So let's reject business as usual. 
Let's demand a different path. 
Let's choose the world that we want. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Michael. 
Michael, just one question: the Millennium Development Goals established 15 years ago, they were kind of applying to every country but it turned out to be really a scorecard for emerging countries. 
Now the new Global Goals are explicitly universal. 
They ask for every country to show action and to show progress. 
How can I, as a private citizen, use the report card to create pressure for action? 
Michael Green: This is a really important point; it's a big shift in priorities — it's no longer about poor countries and just poverty. 
It's about every country. 
Then we can really see, how are we doing? 
And it's not going to be rich countries scoring straight A's. 
And that, then, I think, is to provide a point of focus for people to start demanding action and start demanding progress. 
BG: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, "" I exist. "" Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, "" They exist. "" From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine, the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio, paper and glue — as easy as that. 
I asked a question last year: Can art change the world? 
Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed... what else? 
The Occupy movement found a voice, and I still have to speak English constantly. 
So there has been a lot of change. 
So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept. 
You are going to take the photos. 
You're going to send them to me. 
I'm going to print them and send them back to you. 
Then you're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement. 
This is Inside Out. 
One hundred thousand posters have been printed this year. 
Those are the kind of posters, let me show you. 
And we keep sending more every day. 
This is the size. 
Just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it. 
This one was from Haiti. 
When I launched my wish last year, hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us. 
But I say it has to be under the conditions I've always worked: no credit, no logos, no sponsoring. 
A week later, a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world. 
These are the people I want to talk about to you today. 
Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made. 
And they pasted [over] every single portrait of the dictator [with] their own photos. 
Boom! This is what happened. 
Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country. 
They really make Inside Out their own project. 
Actually, that photo was pasted in a police station, and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police. 
Russia. Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia. 
He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say, "" We have rights. "" They used Inside Out as a platform for protest. 
Karachi, Pakistan. 
Sharmeen is actually here. 
She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town. 
And I want to thank her today. 
North Dakota. Standing Rock Nation, in this Turtle Island, [unclear name] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here. 
The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights. 
He pasted up portraits all over his reservation. 
And he's here also today. 
Each time I get a wall in New York, I use his photos to continue spreading the project. 
Juarez: You've heard of the border — one of the most dangerous borders in the world. 
Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border. 
Do you know what it takes to do this? 
People, energy, make the glue, organize the team. 
It was amazing. 
While in Iran at the same time Abololo — of course a nickname — has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government. 
I don't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action. 
There are tons of school projects. 
Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools. 
Education is so essential. 
Kids just make photos in a class, the teacher receives them, they paste them on the school. 
Here they even got the help of the firemen. 
There should be even more schools doing this kind of project. 
Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine. 
So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck. 
You go on the back of that truck, it takes your photo, 30 seconds later take it from the side, you're ready to rock. 
Thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street. 
This is march, the 450,000 march — beginning of September. 
They were all holding their photo as a statement. 
On the other side, people were wrapping up streets, buildings. 
It's everywhere. 
Come on, don't tell me that people aren't ready for peace out there. 
These projects took thousands of actions in one year, making hundreds of thousands of people participating, creating millions of views. 
This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on. 
So back to the question, "" Can art change the world? "" Maybe not in one year. That's the beginning. 
But maybe we should change the question. 
Can art change people's lives? 
From what I've seen this year, yes. 
And you know what? It's just the beginning. 
Let's turn the world inside out together. 
Thank you. 
(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! 

I live in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in Sindhekela, a village in Orissa, in India. 
My father was a government worker. 
My mother could not read or write, but she would say to me, "" A king is worshipped only in his own kingdom. A poet is respected everywhere. "" So I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. 
But I almost didn't go to college until an aunt offered financial help. 
I went to study in Sambalpur, the largest town in the region, where, already in college, I saw a television for the first time. 
I had dreams of going to the United States for higher studies. 
When the opportunity came, I crossed two oceans, with borrowed money for airfare and only a $20 bill in my pocket. 
In the U.S., I worked in a research center, part-time, while taking graduate classes in economics. 
And with the little I earned, I would finance myself and then I would send money home to my brother and my father. 
My story is not unique. 
There are millions of people who migrate each year. 
With the help of the family, they cross oceans, they cross deserts, they cross rivers, they cross mountains. 
They risk their lives to realize a dream, and that dream is as simple as having a decent job somewhere so they can send money home and help the family, which has helped them before. 
There are 232 million international migrants in the world. 
These are people who live in a country other than their country of birth. 
If there was a country made up of only international migrants, that would be larger, in population, than Brazil. 
That would be larger, in its size of the economy, than France. 
Some 180 million of them, from poor countries, send money home regularly. 
Those sums of money are called remittances. 
Here is a fact that might surprise you: 413 billion dollars, 413 billion dollars was the amount of remittances sent last year by migrants to developing countries. 
Migrants from developing countries, money sent to developing countries — 413 billion dollars. 
That's a remarkable number because that is three times the size of the total of development aid money. 
And yet, you and I, my colleagues in Washington, we endlessly debate and discuss about development aid, while we ignore remittances as small change. 
True, people send 200 dollars per month, on average. But, repeated month after month, by millions of people, these sums of money add up to rivers of foreign currency. 
So India, last year, received 72 billion dollars, larger than its IT exports. 
In Egypt remittances are three times the size of revenues from the Suez Canal. 
In Tajikistan, remittances are 42 percent of GDP. 
And in poorer countries, smaller countries, fragile countries, conflict-afflicted countries, remittances are a lifeline, as in Somalia or in Haiti. 
No wonder these flows have huge impacts on economies and on poor people. 
Remittances, unlike private investment money, they don't flow back at the first sign of trouble in the country. 
They actually act like an insurance. 
When the family is in trouble, facing hardship, facing hard times, remittances increase, they act like an insurance. 
Migrants send more money then. 
Unlike development aid money, that must go through official agencies, through governments, remittances directly reach the poor, reach the family, and often with business advice. 
So in Nepal, the share of poor people was 42 percent in 1995, the share of poor people in the population. 
By 2005, a decade later, at a time of political crisis, economic crisis, the share of poor people went down to 31 percent. 
That decline in poverty, most of it, about half of it, is believed to be because of remittances from India, another poor country. 
In El Salvador, the school dropout rate among children is lower in families that receive remittances. 
In Mexico and Sri Lanka, the birth weight of children is higher among families that receive remittances. 
Remittances are dollars wrapped with care. 
Migrants send money home for food, for buying necessities, for building houses, for funding education, for funding healthcare for the elderly, for business investments for friends and family. 
Migrants send even more money home for special occasions like a surgery or a wedding. And migrants also send money, perhaps far too many times, for unexpected funerals that they cannot attend. 
Much as these flows do all that good, there are barriers to these flows of remittances, these 400 billion dollars of remittances. 
Foremost among them is the exorbitant cost of sending money home. 
Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor. 
They will say, "" Up to 500 dollars if you want to send, we will charge you 30 dollars fixed. "" If you are poor and if you have only 200 dollars to send, you have to pay that $30 fee. 
The global average cost of sending money is eight percent. 
That means you send 100 dollars, the family on the other side receives only 92 dollars. 
To send money to Africa, the cost is even higher: 12 percent. 
To send money within Africa, the cost is even higher: over 20 percent. 
For example, sending money from Benin to Nigeria. 
And then there is the case of Venezuela, where, because of exchange controls, you send 100 dollars and you are lucky if the family on the other side receives even 10 dollars. 
Of course, nobody sends money to Venezuela through the official channel. 
It all goes in suitcases. 
Whereever costs are high, money goes underground. 
And what is worse, many developing countries actually have a blanket ban on sending money out of the country. 
Many rich nations also have a blanket ban on sending money to specific countries. 
So, is it that there are no options, no better options, cheaper options, to send money? 
There are. 
M-Pesa in Kenya enables people to send money and receive money at a fixed cost of only 60 cents per transaction. 
U.S. Fed started a program with Mexico to enable money service businesses to send money to Mexico for a fixed cost of only 67 cents per transaction. 
And yet, these faster, cheaper, better options can't be applied internationally because of the fear of money laundering, even though there is little data to support any connection, any significant connection between money laundering and these small remittance transactions. 
Many international banks now are wary of hosting bank accounts of money service businesses, especially those serving Somalia. 
Somalia, a country where the per capita income is only 250 dollars per year. 
Monthly remittances, on average, to Somalia is larger than that amount. 
Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. 
And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations. 
Then there is the case of poor people from villages, like me. 
In the villages, the only place where you can get money is through the post office. 
Most of the governments in the world have allowed their post offices to have exclusive partnerships with money transfer companies. 
So, if I have to send money to my father in the village, I must send money through that particular money transfer company, even if the cost is high. 
I cannot go to a cheaper option. 
This has to go. 
So, what can international organizations and social entrepreneurs do to reduce the cost of sending money home? 
First, relax regulations on small remittances under 1,000 dollars. 
Governments should recognize that small remittances are not money laundering. 
Second, governments should abolish exclusive partnerships between their post office and the money transfer company. 
For that matter, between the post office and any national banking system that has a large network that serves the poor. 
In fact, they should promote competition, open up the partnership so that we will bring down costs like we did, like they did, in the telecommunications industry. 
You have seen what has happened there. 
Third, large nonprofit philanthropic organizations should create a remittance platform on a nonprofit basis. 
They should create a nonprofit remittance platform to serve the money transfer companies so that they can send money at a low cost, while complying with all the complex regulations all over the world. 
The development community should set a goal of reducing remittance costs to one percent from the current eight percent. 
If we reduce costs to one percent, that would release a saving of 30 billion dollars per year. 
Thirty billion dollars, that's larger than the entire bilateral aid budget going to Africa per year. 
That is larger than, or almost similar to, the total aid budget of the United States government, the largest donor on the planet. 
Actually, the savings would be larger than that 30 billion because remittance channels are also used for aid, trade and investment purposes. 
Another major impediment to the flow of remittances reaching the family is the large and exorbitant and illegal cost of recruitment, fees that migrants pay, migrant workers pay to laborers who found them the job. 
I was in Dubai a few years ago. 
I visited a camp for workers. 
It was 8 in the evening, dark, hot, humid. 
Workers were coming back from their grueling day of work, and I struck a conversation with a Bangladeshi construction worker. 
He was preoccupied that he is sending money home, he has been sending money home for a few months now, and the money is mostly going to the recruitment agent, to the labor agent who found him that job. 
And in my mind, I could picture the wife waiting for the monthly remittance. 
The remittance arrives. 
She takes the money and hands it over to the recruitment agent, while the children are looking on. 
This has to stop. 
It is not only construction workers from Bangladesh, it is all the workers. There are millions of migrant workers who suffer from this problem. 
A construction worker from Bangladesh, on an average, pays about 4,000 dollars in recruitment fees for a job that gives him only 2,000 dollars per year in income. 
That means that for the two years or three years of his life, he is basically sending money to pay for the recruitment fees. 
The family doesn't get to see any of it. 
It is not only Dubai, it is the dark underbelly of every major city in the world. 
It is not only Bangladeshi construction workers, it is workers from all over the world. 
It is not only men. 
Women are especially vulnerable to recruitment malpractices. 
One of the most exciting and newest thing happening in the area of remittances is how to mobilize, through innovation, diaspora saving and diaspora giving. 
Migrants send money home, but they also save a large amount of money where they live. 
Annually, migrant savings are estimated to be 500 billion dollars. 
Most of that money is parked in bank deposits that give you zero percent interest rate. 
If a country were to come and offer a three percent or four percent interest rate, and then say that the money would be used for building schools, roads, airports, train systems in the country of origin, a lot of migrants would be interested in parting with their money because it's not only financial gains that give them an opportunity to stay engaged with their country's development. 
Remittance channels can be used to sell these bonds to migrants because when they come on a monthly basis to send remittances, that's when you can actually sell it to them. 
You can also do the same for mobilizing diaspora giving. 
I would love to invest in a bullet train system in India and I would love to contribute to efforts to fight malaria in my village. 
Remittances are a great way of sharing prosperity between places in a targeted way that benefits those who need them most. 
Remittances empower people. 
We must do all we can to make remittances and recruitment safer and cheaper. 
And it can be done. 
As for myself, I have been away from India for two decades now. 
My wife is a Venezuelan. 
My children are Americans. 
Increasingly, I feel like a global citizen. 
And yet, I am growing nostalgic about my country of birth. 
I want to be in India and in the U.S. at the same time. 
My parents are not there anymore. 
My brothers and sisters have moved on. 
There is no real urgency for me to send money home. 
And yet, from time to time, I send money home to friends, to relatives, to the village, to be there, to stay engaged — that's part of my identity. 
And, I'm still striving to be a poet for the hardworking migrants and their struggle to break free of the cycle of poverty. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For emotions, we should not move quickly to the desert. 
So, first, a small housekeeping announcement: please switch off your proper English check programs installed in your brain. 
(Applause) So, welcome to the Golden Desert, Indian desert. 
It receives the least rainfall in the country, lowest rainfall. 
If you are well-versed with inches, nine inches, centimeters, 16 [centimeters]. 
The groundwater is 300 feet deep, 100 meters. 
And in most parts it is saline, not fit for drinking. 
So, you can't install hand pumps or dig wells, though there is no electricity in most of the villages. 
But suppose you use the green technology, solar pumps — they are of no use in this area. 
So, welcome to the Golden Desert. 
Clouds seldom visit this area. 
But we find 40 different names of clouds in this dialect used here. 
There are a number of techniques to harvest rain. 
This is a new work, it's a new program. 
But for the desert society this is no program; this is their life. 
And they harvest rain in many ways. 
So, this is the first device they use in harvesting rain. 
It's called kunds; somewhere it is called [unclear]. 
And you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment. 
The desert is there, sand dunes, some small field. 
And this is all big raised platform. 
You can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment, and there is a slope. 
Sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms, but here they will care properly. 
And the water will go where it should go. 
And then it is 40 feet deep. 
The waterproofing is done perfectly, better than our city contractors, because not a single drop should go waste in this. 
They collect 100 thousand liters in one season. 
And this is pure drinking water. 
Below the surface there is hard saline water. 
But now you can have this for year round. 
It's two houses. 
We often use a term called bylaws. 
Because we are used to get written things. 
But here it is unwritten by law. 
And people made their house, and the water storage tanks. 
These raised up platforms just like this stage. 
In fact they go 15 feet deep, and collect rain water from roof, there is a small pipe, and from their courtyard. 
It can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon. 
Another big one, this is of course out of the hardcore desert area. 
This is near Jaipur. This is called the Jaigarh Fort. 
And it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season. 
The age is 400 years. 
So, since 400 years it has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season. 
You can calculate the price of that water. 
It draws water from 15 kilometers of canals. 
You can see a modern road, hardly 50 years old. 
It can break sometimes. 
But this 400 year old canal, which draws water, it is maintained for so many generations. 
Of course if you want to go inside, the two doors are locked. 
But they can be opened for TED people. 
(Laughter) And we request them. 
You can see person coming up with two canisters of water. 
And the water level — these are not empty canisters — water level is right up to this. 
It can envy many municipalities, the color, the taste, the purity of this water. 
And this is what they call Zero B type of water, because it comes from the clouds, pure distilled water. 
We stop for a quick commercial break, and then we come back to the traditional systems. 
The government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from the Himalayas. 
That's why I said that this is a commercial break. 
(Laughter) But we will come back, once again, to the traditional thing. 
So, water from 300, 400 kilometers away, soon it become like this. 
In many portions, water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything. 
Of course there are some areas where water is reaching, I'm not saying that it is not reaching at all. 
But the tail end, the Jaisalmer area, you will notice in Bikaner things like this: where the water hyacinth couldn't grow, the sand is flowing in these canals. 
The bonus is that you can find wildlife around it. 
(Laughter) We had full-page advertisements, some 30 years, 25 years ago when this canal came. 
They said that throw away your traditional systems, these new cement tanks will supply you piped water. 
It's a dream. And it became a dream also. 
Because soon the water was not able to reach these areas. 
And people started renovating their own structures. 
These are all traditional water structures, which we won't be able to explain in such a short time. 
But you can see that no woman is standing on those. 
(Laughter) And they are plaiting hair. 
(Applause) Jaisalmer. This is heart of desert. 
This town was established 800 years ago. 
I'm not sure by that time Bombay was there, or Delhi was there, or Chennai was there, or Bangalore was there. 
So, this was the terminal point for silk route. 
Well connected, 800 years ago, through Europe. 
None of us were able to go to Europe, but Jaisalmer was well connected to it. 
And this is the 16 centimeter area. 
Such a limited rainfall, and highest colorful life flourished in these areas. 
You won't find water in this slide. 
But it is invisible. 
Somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here. 
Or, if you want to paint, you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms. 
But apart from this system, they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town. 
And what we call private public partnership you can add estate also. 
So, estate, public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body. 
And it's a kind of water body for all seasons. 
You will admire it. Just behold the beauty throughout the year. 
Whether water level goes up or down, the beauty is there throughout. 
Another water body, dried up, of course, during the summer period, but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics, with the heart. 
These statues, marvelous statues, gives you an idea of water table. 
When this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank, it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in English today "" mass communication. "" This was for mass communication. 
Everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned, so water will be there for seven months or nine months, or 12 months. 
And then they will come and worship this pond, pay respect, their gratitude. 
Another small water body, called the [unclear]. 
It is difficult to translate in English, especially in my English. 
But the nearest would be "" glory, "" a reputation. 
The reputation in desert of this small water body is that it never dries up. 
In severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up. 
And perhaps they knew the future also. 
It was designed some 150 years ago. 
But perhaps they knew that on sixth, November, 2009, there will be a TED green and blue session, so they painted it like this. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Dry water body. Children are standing on a very difficult device to explain. 
This is called kund. We have, in English, surface water and ground water. 
But this is not ground water. 
You can draw ground water from any well. 
But this is no ordinary well. 
It squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand. 
And they have dubbed this water as the third one called [unclear]. 
And there is a gypsum belt running below it. 
And it was deposited by the great mother Earth, some three million years ago. 
And where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water. 
This is the same dry water body. 
Now, you don't find any kund; they are all submerged. 
But when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year. 
This year they have received only six centimeters. 
Six centimeter of rainfall, and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city, Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Mysore, please come to our area of six centimeters, we can give you water. 
(Laughter) How they maintain them? 
There are three things: concept, planning, making the actual thing, and also maintaining them. 
It is a structure for maintain, for centuries, by generations, without any department, without any funding, So the secret is "" [unclear], "" respect. 
Your own thing, not personal property, my property, every time. 
So, these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area. 
Don't spit, don't do anything wrong, so that the clean water can be collected. 
Another pillar, stone pillar on your right side. 
If you climb these three, six steps you will find something very nice. 
This was done in 11th century. 
And you have to go further down. 
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we can say a thousand words right now, an another thousand words. 
If the water table goes down, you will find new stairs. 
If it comes up, some of them will be submerged. 
So, throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure. 
Three sides, such steps, on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such TED conferences anytime. 
(Applause) Excuse me, who built these structures? 
They are in front of you. 
The best civil engineers we had, the best planners, the best architects. 
We can say that because of them, because of their forefathers, India could get the first engineering college in 1847. 
There were no English medium schools at that time, even no Hindi schools, [unclear] schools. 
But such people, compelled to the East India Company, which came here for business, a very dirty kind of business... 
(Laughter) but not to create the engineering colleges. 
But because of them, first engineering college was created in a small village, not in the town. 
The last point, we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert. 
So, you can find through your Jeep, a camel, and a cart. 
This tire comes from the airplane. 
So, look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater, and also create something through a tire from a jet plane, and used in a camel cart. 
Last picture, it's a tattoo, 2,000-years-old tattoo. 
They were using it on their body. 
Tattoo was, at one time, a kind of a blacklisted or con thing, but now it is in thing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You can copy this tattoo. I have some posters of this. (Laughter) 
The center of life is water. 
These are the beautiful waves. 
These are the beautiful stairs which we just saw in one of the slides. 
These are the trees. 
And these are the flowers which add fragrance to our lives. 
So, this is the message of desert. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So, first of all, I wish I had your eloquence, truly, in any language. (Applause) 
These artifacts and designs are inspiring. 
Do you believe that they can be used elsewhere, that the world can learn from this? 
Or is this just right for this place? 
Anupam Mishra: No, the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area. 
So, the ponds, the open bodies, are everywhere, right from Sri Lanka to Kashmir, and in other parts also. 
And these [unclear], which stored water, there are two type of things. 
One recharge, and one stores. 
So, it depends on the terrain. 
But kund, which uses the gypsum belt, for that you have to go back to your calendar, three million years ago. 
If it is there it can be done right now. 
Otherwise, it can't be done. 
(Laughter) (Applause) CA: Thank you so much. (Applause) 

Many believe driving is an activity solely reserved for those who can see. 
A blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task, until now. 
Hello, my name is Dennis Hong, and we're bringing freedom and independence to the blind by building a vehicle for the visually impaired. 
So before I talk about this car for the blind, let me briefly tell you about another project that I worked on called the DARPA Urban Challenge. 
Now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself. 
You press start, nobody touches anything, and it can reach its destination fully autonomously. 
So in 2007, our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition. 
So about that time, the National Federation of the Blind, or NFB, challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently. 
We decided to give it a try, because we thought, "" Hey, how hard could it be? "" We have already an autonomous vehicle. 
We just put a blind person in it and we're done, right? 
(Laughter) We couldn't have been more wrong. 
What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around, but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive. 
So we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch. 
So to test this crazy idea, we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility. 
And in the summer of 2009, we invited dozens of blind youth from all over the country and gave them a chance to take it for a spin. 
It was an absolutely amazing experience. 
But the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment, in a flat, closed-off parking lot — even the lanes defined by red traffic cones. 
So with this success, we decided to take the next big step, to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads. 
So how does it work? 
Well, it's a rather complex system, but let me try to explain it, maybe simplify it. 
So we have three steps. 
We have perception, computation and non-visual interfaces. 
Now obviously the driver cannot see, so the system needs to perceive the environment and gather information for the driver. 
For that, we use an initial measurement unit. 
So it measures acceleration, angular acceleration — like a human ear, inner ear. 
We fuse that information with a GPS unit to get an estimate of the location of the car. 
We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road. 
And we also use three laser range finders. 
The lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles — a car approaching from the front, the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads, any obstacles around the vehicle. 
So all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer, and the computer can do two things. 
One is, first of all, process this information to have an understanding of the environment — these are the lanes of the road, there's the obstacles — and convey this information to the driver. 
The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car. 
So we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle. 
But the problem is this: How do we convey this information and instructions to a person who cannot see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive? 
So for this, we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology. 
So starting from a three-dimensional ping sound system, a vibrating vest, a click wheel with voice commands, a leg strip, even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot. 
But today we're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces. 
Now the first interface is called a DriveGrip. 
So these are a pair of gloves, and it has vibrating elements on the knuckle part so you can convey instructions about how to steer — the direction and the intensity. 
Another device is called SpeedStrip. 
So this is a chair — as a matter of fact, it's actually a massage chair. 
We gut it out, and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns, and we actuate them to convey information about the speed, and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal. 
So over here, you can see how the computer understands the environment, and because you cannot see the vibration, we actually put red LED's on the driver so that you can see what's happening. 
This is the sensory data, and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer. 
So these two devices, DriveGrip and SpeedStrip, are very effective. 
But the problem is these are instructional cue devices. 
So this is not really freedom, right? 
The computer tells you how to drive — turn left, turn right, speed up, stop. 
We call this the "" backseat-driver problem. "" So we're moving away from the instructional cue devices, and we're now focusing more on the informational devices. 
A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix. 
So think of it as a monitor for the blind. 
So it's a small tablet, has many holes in it, and compressed air comes out, so it can actually draw images. 
So even though you are blind, you can put your hand over it, you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles. 
Actually, you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature. 
So it's actually a multi-dimensional user interface. 
So here you can see the left camera, the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the AirPix. 
For this, we're showing a simulator, a blind person driving using the AirPix. 
This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces. 
So basically that's how it works. 
So just a month ago, on January 29th, we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event. 
We also had some surprises. Let's take a look. 
(Music) (Video) Announcer: This is an historic day in January. 
He's coming up to the grandstand, fellow Federationists. 
(Cheering) (Honking) There's the grandstand now. 
And he's [unclear] following that van that's out in front of him. 
Well there comes the first box. 
Now let's see if Mark avoids it. 
He does. He passes it on the right. 
Third box is out. The fourth box is out. 
And he's perfectly making his way between the two. 
He's closing in on the van to make the moving pass. 
Well this is what it's all about, this kind of dynamic display of audacity and ingenuity. 
He's approaching the end of the run, makes his way between the barrels that are set up there. 
(Honking) (Applause) Dennis Hong: I'm so happy for you. 
Mark's going to give me a ride back to the hotel. 
Mark Riccobono: Yes. 
(Applause) DH: So since we started this project, we've been getting hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls from people from all around the world. 
Letters thanking us, but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one: "Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine." 
(Laughter) But sometimes — (Laughter) But sometimes I also do get — I wouldn't call it hate mail — but letters of really strong concern: "" Dr. Hong, are you insane, trying to put blind people on the road? 
You must be out of your mind. "" But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle, and it's not going to be on the road until it's proven as safe as, or safer than, today's vehicle. 
And I truly believe that this can happen. 
But still, will the society, would they accept such a radical idea? 
How are we going to handle insurance? 
How are we going to issue driver's licenses? 
There's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality. 
Of course, the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind. 
But potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project. 
The sensors that are used can see through the dark, the fog and rain. 
And together with this new type of interfaces, we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people. 
Or for the blind, everyday home appliances — in the educational setting, in the office setting. 
Just imagine, in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what's written and read using these non-visual interfaces. 
This is priceless. 
So today, the things I've showed you today, is just the beginning. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So a couple of years ago I started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate; we have them work in government. 
The program is called Code for America, and it's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks. 
We select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments. 
Instead of sending them off into the Third World, we send them into the wilds of City Hall. 
And there they make great apps, they work with city staffers. 
But really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today. 
So meet Al. 
Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston. 
Here it kind of looks like he's looking for a date, but what he's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in, because he knows he's not very good at fighting fires when he's covered in four feet of snow. 
Now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner? 
We had a team of fellows in Boston last year through the Code for America program. 
They were there in February, and it snowed a lot in February last year. 
And they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants. 
But one fellow in particular, a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober, noticed something else, and that's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things. 
So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app. 
It's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant. 
So you agree to dig it out when it snows. 
If you do, you get to name it, and he called the first one Al. 
And if you don't, someone can steal it from you. 
So it's got cute little game dynamics on it. 
This is a modest little app. 
It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year. 
But it's doing something that no other government technology does. 
It's spreading virally. 
There's a guy in the I.T. department of the City of Honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it, not for snow, but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens. 
It's very important that these tsunami sirens work, but people steal the batteries out of them. 
So he's getting citizens to check on them. 
And then Seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains. 
And Chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows. 
So we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this. 
And this has spread just frictionlessly, organically, naturally. 
If you know anything about government technology, you know that this isn't how it normally goes. 
Procuring software usually takes a couple of years. 
We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months. 
It was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids. 
We were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels, it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars. 
And that's nothing. 
There is one project in the California court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and it doesn't work. 
And there are projects like this at every level of government. 
So an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally, that's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government. 
It suggests how government could work better — not more like a private company, as many people think it should. 
And not even like a tech company, but more like the Internet itself. 
And that means permissionless, it means open, it means generative. 
And that's important. 
But what's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government — not as the problem of an ossified institution, but as a problem of collective action. 
And that's great news, because, it turns out, we're very good at collective action with digital technology. 
Now there's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively. 
It's not just Code for America fellows, there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities. 
They haven't given up on government. 
They are frustrated as hell with it, but they're not complaining about it, they're fixing it. 
And these folks know something that we've lost sight of. 
And that's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the DMV and all those other things that we're really mad about, government is, at its core, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, "What we do together that we can't do alone." 
Now a lot of people have given up on government. 
And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. 
Politics is not changing; government is changing. 
And because government ultimately derives its power from us — remember "" We the people? "" — how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens. 
Now I didn't know very much about government when I started this program. 
And like a lot of people, I thought government was basically about getting people elected to office. 
Well after two years, I've come to the conclusion that, especially local government, is about opossums. 
This is the call center for the services and information line. 
It's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city. 
If you should ever have the chance to staff your city's call center, as our fellow Scott Silverman did as part of the program — in fact, they all do that — you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues, including having an opossum stuck in your house. 
So Scott gets this call. 
He types "" Opossum "" into this official knowledge base. 
He doesn't really come up with anything. He starts with animal control. 
And finally, he says, "" Look, can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves? "" So that worked. So booya for Scott. 
But that wasn't the end of the opossums. 
Boston doesn't just have a call center. 
It has an app, a Web and mobile app, called Citizens Connect. 
Now we didn't write this app. 
This is the work of the very smart people at the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston. 
So one day — this is an actual report — this came in: "" Opossum in my trashcan. Can't tell if it's dead. 
How do I get this removed? "" But what happens with Citizens Connect is different. 
So Scott was speaking person-to-person. 
But on Citizens Connect everything is public, so everybody can see this. 
And in this case, a neighbor saw it. 
And the next report we got said, "" I walked over to this location, found the trashcan behind the house. 
Opossum? Check. Living? Yep. 
Turned trashcan on its side. Walked home. 
Goodnight sweet opossum. "" (Laughter) Pretty simple. 
So this is great. This is the digital meeting the physical. 
And it's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game. 
But it's also a great example of government as a platform. 
And I don't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here. 
I'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others. 
So one citizen helped another citizen, but government played a key role here. 
It connected those two people. 
And it could have connected them with government services if they'd been needed, but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services. 
When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities. 
We call animal control, it just costs a lot of money. 
Now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it's not the same thing as politics. 
And most people get that, but they think that one is the input to the other. 
That our input to the system of government is voting. 
Now how many times have we elected a political leader — and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected — and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs, and then not that much changes? 
That's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top. 
And what's under that is what we call bureaucracy. 
And we say that word with such contempt. 
But it's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that's working against us, this other thing, and then we're disempowering ourselves. 
People seem to think politics is sexy. 
If we want this institution to work for us, we're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy. 
Because that's where the real work of government happens. 
We have to engage with the machinery of government. 
So that's OccupytheSEC movement has done. 
Have you seen these guys? 
It's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that's a response to the SEC's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill. 
That's not being politically active, that's being bureaucratically active. 
Now for those of us who've given up on government, it's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children. 
You have to see the enormous challenges that they're going to face. 
Do we really think we're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us? 
We can't do without government, but we do need it to be more effective. 
The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society. 
And there's a generation out there that's grown up on the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to architect the systems the right way. 
Now the average age of our fellows is 28, so I am, begrudgingly, almost a generation older than most of them. 
This is a generation that's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted. 
They're not fighting that battle that we're all fighting about who gets to speak; they all get to speak. 
They can express their opinion on any channel at any time, and they do. 
So when they're faced with the problem of government, they don't care as much about using their voices. 
They're using their hands. They're using their hands 
to write applications that make government work better. 
And those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better. 
That could be shoveling out a hydrant, pulling a weed, turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it. 
And certainly, we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along, and many people do. 
But these apps are like little digital reminders that we're not just consumers, and we're not just consumers of government, putting in our taxes and getting back services. 
We're more than that, we're citizens. 
And we're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship. 
So the question I have for all of you here: When it comes to the big, important things that we need to do together, all of us together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we also going to be a crowd of hands? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Last year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC. 
And I promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. 
So this is it. And for those of you that weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted — 27 kilometers in circumference. 
Its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began, up to 600 million times a second. 
It's nothing if not ambitious. 
This is the machine below Geneva. 
We take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors. 
This is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector — 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter. 
Spectacular picture here of ATLAS under construction so you can see the scale. 
On the 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time. 
And this picture was taken by ATLAS. 
It caused immense celebration in the control room. 
It's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the LHC, colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately, and showering particles into the detector. 
In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th we knew the machine worked, which is a great triumph. 
I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer, or this, when someone went onto Google and saw the front page was like that. 
It means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact. 
About a week later we had a problem with the machine, related actually to these bits of wire here — these gold wires. 
Those wires carry 13 thousand amps when the machine is working in full power. 
Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say, "No they don't. They're small wires." 
They can do that because when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire. 
So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, those wires can take that current. 
In one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in LHC, there was a manufacturing defect. 
So the wire heated up slightly, and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance. 
This was the result. 
Now that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons, and they moved about a foot. 
So we damaged about 50 of the magnets. 
We had to take them out, which we did. 
We reconditioned them all, fixed them. 
They're all on their way back underground now. 
By the end of March the LHC will be intact again. 
We will switch it on, and we expect to take data in June or July, and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are. 
Now of course, in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refute. 
I think that the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we're overreaching, is the value of things like the LHC. 
I will leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, I suspect, when defending his protege's useless experiments — his protege was Michael Faraday — said this, "" Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I didn't always love unintended consequences, but I've really learned to appreciate them. 
I've learned that they're really the essence of what makes for progress, even when they seem to be terrible. 
And I'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do. 
Let's go to 40,000 years before the present, to the time of the cultural explosion, when music, art, technology, so many of the things that we're enjoying today, so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED were born. 
And the anthropologist Randall White has made a very interesting observation: that if our ancestors 40,000 years ago had been able to see what they had done, they wouldn't have really understood it. 
They were responding to immediate concerns. 
They were making it possible for us to do what they do, and yet, they didn't really understand how they did it. 
Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present. 
And this is when it really gets interesting. 
What about the domestication of grains? 
What about the origins of agriculture? 
What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment? 
And I could just imagine the committees reporting back to them on where agriculture was going to take humanity, at least in the next few hundred years. 
It was really bad news. 
First of all, worse nutrition, maybe shorter life spans. 
It was simply awful for women. 
The skeletal remains from that period have shown that they were grinding grain morning, noon and night. 
And politically, it was awful. 
It was the beginning of a much higher degree of inequality among people. 
If there had been rational technology assessment then, I think they very well might have said, "Let's call the whole thing off." 
Even now, our choices are having unintended effects. 
Historically, for example, chopsticks — according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan — resulted in long-term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public. 
And we are also changing our teeth right now. 
There is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time. 
That's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence. 
But I think from the point of view of a Neanderthal, there would have been a lot of disapproval of the wimpish choppers that we now have. 
So these things are kind of relative to where you or your ancestors happen to stand. 
In the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences, and there was a very healthy sense of caution, reflected in the Tree of Knowledge, in Pandora's Box, and especially in the myth of Prometheus that's been so important in recent metaphors about technology. 
And that's all very true. 
The physicians of the ancient world — especially the Egyptians, who started medicine as we know it — were very conscious of what they could and couldn't treat. 
And the translations of the surviving texts say, "This I will not treat. This I cannot treat." 
They were very conscious. 
So were the followers of Hippocrates. 
The Hippocratic manuscripts also — repeatedly, according to recent studies — show how important it is not to do harm. 
More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing. 
But he did his best, and he kept meticulous records that let him transform that branch of medicine. 
Now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century, we find a new style of technology. 
What we find is, no longer simple tools, but systems. 
We find more and more complex arrangements of machines that make it harder and harder to diagnose what's going on. 
And the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century, who were the original hackers. 
Thomas Edison would have been very, very comfortable in the atmosphere of a software firm today. 
And these hackers had a word for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems that they called bugs. 
That was the origin of the word "" bug. "" This consciousness, though, was a little slow to seep through the general population, even people who were very, very well informed. 
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times — at least until 1918 — registered with the U.S. Patent Office. 
That was the Paige typesetter. 
The Paige typesetter had 18,000 parts. 
The patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures. 
It was such a beautiful machine because it did everything that a human being did in setting type — including returning the type to its place, which was a very difficult thing. 
And Mark Twain, who knew all about typesetting, really was smitten by this machine. 
Unfortunately, he was smitten in more ways than one, because it made him bankrupt, and he had to tour the world speaking to recoup his money. 
And this was an important thing about 19th century technology, that all these relationships among parts could make the most brilliant idea fall apart, even when judged by the most expert people. 
Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated. 
And that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger. 
The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries, was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship. 
And this was the result of the tragic loss of lives of people who could not get into them. 
However, there was another case, the Eastland, a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915, and it killed 841 people — that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the Titanic. 
The reason for it, in part, was the extra life boats that were added that made this already unstable ship even more unstable. 
And that again proves that when you're talking about unintended consequences, it's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw. 
It's really a question of the system, how the ship was loaded, the ballast and many other things. 
So the 20th century, then, saw how much more complex reality was, but it also saw a positive side. 
It saw that invention could actually benefit from emergencies. 
It could benefit from tragedies. 
And my favorite example of that — which is not really widely known as a technological miracle, but it may be one of the greatest of all times, was the scaling up of penicillin in the Second World War. 
Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but even by 1940, no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced. 
A number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it. 
They were working on it independently, and they weren't getting anywhere. 
And the Government Research Bureau brought representatives together and told them that this is something that has to be done. 
And not only did they do it, but within two years, they scaled up penicillin from preparation in one-liter flasks to 10,000-gallon vats. 
That was how quickly penicillin was produced and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time. 
In the Second World War, too, the existence of solar radiation was demonstrated by studies of interference that was detected by the radar stations of Great Britain. 
So there were benefits in calamities — benefits to pure science, as well as to applied science and medicine. 
Now when we come to the period after the Second World War, unintended consequences get even more interesting. 
And my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976, when it was discovered that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters, but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of Legionella bacillus. 
Well, technology to the rescue. 
So chemists got to work, and they developed a bactericide that became widely used in those systems. 
But something else happened in the early 1980s, and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic of failures of tape drives all over the United States. 
And IBM, which made them, just didn't know what to do. 
They commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate, and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts. 
What happened was the bactericide was formulated with minute traces of tin. 
And these tin particles were deposited on the tape heads and were crashing the tape heads. 
So they reformulated the bactericide. 
But what's interesting to me is that this was the first case of a mechanical device suffering, at least indirectly, from a human disease. 
So it shows that we're really all in this together. 
(Laughter) In fact, it also shows something interesting, that although our capabilities and technology have been expanding geometrically, unfortunately, our ability to model their long-term behavior, which has also been increasing, has been increasing only arithmetically. 
So one of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight. 
One other very positive consequence of 20th century technology, though, was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances. 
There are two historians of business at the University of Maryland, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, who have done some extremely interesting work, much of it still unpublished, on the history of major innovations. 
They have combined the list of major innovations, and they've discovered that the greatest number, the greatest decade, for fundamental innovations, as reflected in all of the lists that others have made — a number of lists that they have merged — was the Great Depression. 
And nobody knows just why this was so, but one story can reflect something of it. 
It was the origin of the Xerox copier, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. 
And Chester Carlson, the inventor, was a patent attorney. 
He really was not intending to work in patent research, but he couldn't really find an alternative technical job. 
So this was the best job he could get. 
He was upset by the low quality and high cost of existing patent reproductions, and so he started to develop a system of dry photocopying, which he patented in the late 1930s — and which became the first dry photocopier that was commercially practical in 1960. 
So we see that sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity. 
What does this mean? 
It means, I think, that we're living in a time of unexpected possibilities. 
Think of the financial world, for example. 
The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash. 
And he published that book in the early 1930s, and the book still exists in further editions and is still a fundamental textbook. 
So many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters. 
Now think of the large and small plagues that we have now — bed bugs, killer bees, spam — and it's very possible that the solutions to those will really extend well beyond the immediate question. 
If we think, for example, of Louis Pasteur, who in the 1860s was asked to study the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry, and his discoveries were really the beginning of the germ theory of disease. 
So very often, some kind of disaster — sometimes the consequence, for example, of over-cultivation of silk worms, which was a problem in Europe at the time — can be the key to something much bigger. 
So this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences. 
We need to take a really positive view. 
We need to see what they can do for us. 
We need to learn from those figures that I mentioned. 
We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing, who killed patients in the course of his early operations. 
He had to have some errors. He had to have some mistakes. 
And he learned meticulously from his mistakes. 
And as a result, when we say, "" This isn't brain surgery, "" that pays tribute to how difficult it was for anyone to learn from their mistakes in a field of medicine that was considered so discouraging in its prospects. 
And we can also remember how the pharmaceutical companies were willing to pool their knowledge, to share their knowledge, in the face of an emergency, which they hadn't really been for years and years. 
They might have been able to do it earlier. 
The message, then, for me, about unintended consequences is chaos happens; let's make better use of it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Let me talk about India through the evolution of ideas. 
Now I believe this is an interesting way of looking at it because in every society, especially an open democratic society, it's only when ideas take root that things change. 
Slowly ideas lead to ideology, lead to policies that lead to actions. 
In 1930 this country went through a Great Depression, which led to all the ideas of the state and social security, and all the other things that happened in Roosevelt's time. 
In the 1980s we had the Reagan revolution, which lead to deregulation. 
And today, after the global economic crisis, there was a whole new set of rules about how the state should intervene. 
So ideas change states. 
And I looked at India and said, really there are four kinds of ideas which really make an impact on India. 
The first, to my mind, is what I call as "" the ideas that have arrived. "" These ideas have brought together something which has made India happen the way it is today. 
The second set of ideas I call "" ideas in progress. "" Those are ideas which have been accepted but not implemented yet. 
The third set of ideas are what I call as "" ideas that we argue about "" — those are ideas where we have a fight, an ideological battle about how to do things. 
And the fourth thing, which I believe is most important, is "the ideas that we need to anticipate." 
Because when you are a developing country in the world where you can see the problems that other countries are having, you can actually anticipate what that did and do things very differently. 
Now in India's case I believe there are six ideas which are responsible for where it has come today. 
The first is really the notion of people. 
In the '60s and' 70s we thought of people as a burden. 
We thought of people as a liability. 
Today we talk of people as an asset. 
We talk of people as human capital. 
And I believe this change in the mindset, of looking at people as something of a burden to human capital, has been one of the fundamental changes in the Indian mindset. 
And this change in thinking of human capital is linked to the fact that India is going through a demographic dividend. 
As healthcare improves, as infant mortality goes down, fertility rates start dropping. And India is experiencing that. 
India is going to have a lot of young people with a demographic dividend for the next 30 years. 
What is unique about this demographic dividend is that India will be the only country in the world to have this demographic dividend. 
In other words, it will be the only young country in an aging world. 
And this is very important. At the same time if you peel away the demographic dividend in India, there are actually two demographic curves. 
One is in the south and in the west of India, which is already going to be fully expensed by 2015, because in that part of the country, the fertility rate is almost equal to that of a West European country. 
Then there is the whole northern India, which is going to be the bulk of the future demographic dividend. 
But a demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital. 
Only if the people have education, they have good health, they have infrastructure, they have roads to go to work, they have lights to study at night — only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend. 
In other words, if you don't really invest in the human capital, the same demographic dividend can be a demographic disaster. 
Therefore India is at a critical point where either it can leverage its demographic dividend or it can lead to a demographic disaster. 
The second thing in India has been the change in the role of entrepreneurs. 
When India got independence entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot, as people who would exploit. 
But today, after 60 years, because of the rise of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs have become role models, and they are contributing hugely to the society. 
This change has contributed to the vitality and the whole economy. 
The third big thing I believe that has changed India is our attitude towards the English language. 
English language was seen as a language of the imperialists. 
But today, with globalization, with outsourcing, English has become a language of aspiration. 
This has made it something that everybody wants to learn. 
And the fact that we have English is now becoming a huge strategic asset. 
The next thing is technology. 
Forty years back, computers were seen as something which was forbidding, something which was intimidating, something that reduced jobs. 
Today we live in a country which sells eight million mobile phones a month, of which 90 percent of those mobile phones are prepaid phones because people don't have credit history. 
Forty percent of those prepaid phones are recharged at less than 20 cents at each recharge. 
That is the scale at which technology has liberated and made it accessible. 
And therefore technology has gone from being seen as something forbidding and intimidating to something that is empowering. 
Twenty years back, when there was a report on bank computerization, they didn't name the report as a report on computers, they call them as "" ledger posting machines. "" They didn't want the unions to believe that they were actually computers. 
And when they wanted to have more advanced, more powerful computers they called them "" advanced ledger posting machines. "" So we have come a long way from those days where the telephone has become an instrument of empowerment, and really has changed the way Indians think of technology. 
And then I think the other point is that Indians today are far more comfortable with globalization. 
Again, after having lived for more than 200 years under the East India Company and under imperial rule, Indians had a very natural reaction towards globalization believing it was a form of imperialism. 
But today, as Indian companies go abroad, as Indians come and work all over the world, Indians have gained a lot more confidence and have realized that globalization is something they can participate in. 
And the fact that the demographics are in our favor, because we are the only young country in an aging world, makes globalization all the more attractive to Indians. 
And finally, India has had the deepening of its democracy. 
When democracy came to India 60 years back it was an elite concept. 
It was a bunch of people who wanted to bring in democracy because they wanted to bring in the idea of universal voting and parliament and constitution and so forth. 
But today democracy has become a bottom-up process where everybody has realized the benefits of having a voice, the benefits of being in an open society. 
And therefore democracy has become embedded. 
I believe these six factors — the rise of the notion of population as human capital, the rise of Indian entrepreneurs, the rise of English as a language of aspiration, technology as something empowering, globalization as a positive factor, and the deepening of democracy — has contributed to why India is today growing at rates it has never seen before. 
But having said that, then we come to what I call as ideas in progress. 
Those are the ideas where there is no argument in a society, but you are not able to implement those things. 
And really there are four things here. 
One is the question of education. 
For some reason, whatever reason — lack of money, lack of priorities, because of religion having an older culture — primary education was never given the focus it required. 
But now I believe it's reached a point where it has become very important. 
Unfortunately the government schools don't function, so children are going to private schools today. 
Even in the slums of India more than 50 percent of urban kids are going into private schools. 
So there is a big challenge in getting the schools to work. 
But having said that, there is an enormous desire among everybody, including the poor, to educate their children. 
So I believe primary education is an idea which is arrived but not yet implemented. 
Similarly, infrastructure — for a long time, infrastructure was not a priority. 
Those of you who have been to India have seen that. 
It's certainly not like China. 
But today I believe finally infrastructure is something which is agreed upon and which people want to implement. 
It is reflected in the political statements. 
20 years back the political slogan was, "" Roti, kapada, makaan, "" which meant, "" Food, clothing and shelter. "" And today's political slogan is, "" Bijli, sadak, pani, "" which means "" Electricity, water and roads. "" And that is a change in the mindset where infrastructure is now accepted. 
So I do believe this is an idea which has arrived, but simply not implemented. 
The third thing is again cities. 
It's because Gandhi believed in villages and because the British ruled from the cities, therefore Nehru thought of New Delhi as an un-Indian city. 
For a long time we have neglected our cities. 
And that is reflected in the kinds of situations that you see. 
But today, finally, after economic reforms, and economic growth, I think the notion that cities are engines of economic growth, cities are engines of creativity, cities are engines of innovation, have finally been accepted. 
And I think now you're seeing the move towards improving our cities. 
Again, an idea which is arrived, but not yet implemented. 
The final thing is the notion of India as a single market — because when you didn't think of India as a market, you didn't really bother about a single market, because it didn't really matter. 
And therefore you had a situation where every state had its own market for products. 
Every province had its own market for agriculture. 
Increasingly now the policies of taxation and infrastructure and all that, are moving towards creating India as a single market. 
So there is a form of internal globalization which is happening, which is as important as external globalization. 
These four factors I believe — the ones of primary education, infrastructure, urbanization, and single market — in my view are ideas in India which have been accepted, but not implemented. 
Then we have what I believe are the ideas in conflict. 
The ideas that we argue about. 
These are the arguments we have which cause gridlock. 
What are those ideas? One is, I think, are ideological issues. 
Because of the historical Indian background, in the caste system, and because of the fact that there have been many people who have been left out in the cold, a lot of the politics is about how to make sure that we'll address that. 
And it leads to reservations and other techniques. 
It's also related to the way that we subsidize our people, and all the left and right arguments that we have. 
A lot of the Indian problems are related to the ideology of caste and other things. 
This policy is causing gridlock. 
This is one of the factors which needs to be resolved. 
The second one is the labor policies that we have, which make it so difficult for entrepreneurs to create standardized jobs in companies, that 93 percent of Indian labor is in the unorganized sector. 
They have no benefits: they don't have social security; they don't have pension; they don't have healthcare; none of those things. 
This needs to be fixed because unless you can bring these people into the formal workforce, you will end up creating a whole lot of people who are completely disenfranchised. 
Therefore we need to create a new set of labor laws, which are not as onerous as they are today. 
At the same time give a policy for a lot more people to be in the formal sector, and create the jobs for the millions of people that we need to create jobs for. 
The third thing is our higher education. 
Indian higher education is completely regulated. 
It's very difficult to start a private university. 
It's very difficult for a foreign university to come to India. 
As a result of that our higher education is simply not keeping pace with India's demands. 
That is leading to a lot of problems which we need to address. 
But most important I believe are the ideas we need to anticipate. 
Here India can look at what is happening in the west and elsewhere, and look at what needs to be done. 
The first thing is, we're very fortunate that technology is at a point where it is much more advanced than when other countries had the development. 
So we can use technology for governance. 
We can use technology for direct benefits. 
We can use technology for transparency, and many other things. 
The second thing is, the health issue. 
India has equally horrible health problems of the higher state of cardiac issue, the higher state of diabetes, the higher state of obesity. 
So there is no point in replacing a set of poor country diseases with a set of rich country diseases. 
Therefore we're to rethink the whole way we look at health. 
We really need to put in place a strategy so that we don't go to the other extreme of health. 
Similarly today in the West you're seeing the problem of entitlement — the cost of social security, the cost of Medicare, the cost of Medicaid. 
Therefore when you are a young country, again you have a chance to put in place a modern pension system so that you don't create entitlement problems as you grow old. 
And then again, India does not have the luxury of making its environment dirty, because it has to marry environment and development. 
Just to give an idea, the world has to stabilize at something like 20 gigatons per year. 
On a population of nine billion our average carbon emission will have to be about two tons per year. 
India is already at two tons per year. 
But if India grows at something like eight percent, income per year per person will go to 16 times by 2050. 
So we're saying: income growing at 16 times and no growth in carbon. 
Therefore we will fundamentally rethink the way we look at the environment, the way we look at energy, the way we create whole new paradigms of development. 
Now why does this matter to you? 
Why does what's happening 10 thousand miles away matter to all of you? 
Number one, this matters because this represents more than a billion people. 
A billion people, 1 / 6th of the world population. 
It matters because this is a democracy. 
And it is important to prove that growth and democracy are not incompatible, that you can have a democracy, that you can have an open society, and you can have growth. 
It's important because if you solve these problems, you can solve the problems of poverty in the world. It's important because 
you need it to solve the world's environment problems. 
If we really want to come to a point, we really want to put a cap on our carbon emission, we want to really lower the use of energy — it has to be solved in countries like India. 
You know if you look at the development in the West over 200 years, the average growth may have been about two percent. 
Here we are talking about countries growing at eight to nine percent. 
And that makes a huge difference. 
When India was growing at about three, 3.5 percent and the population was growing at two percent, its per capita income was doubling every 45 years. 
When the economic growth goes to eight percent and population growth drops to 1.5 percent, then per capita income is doubling every nine years. 
In other words, you're certainly fast-forwarding this whole process of a billion people going to prosperity. 
And you must have a clear strategy which is important for India and important for the world. 
That is why I think all of you should be equally concerned with it as I am. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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) 

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) 

I thought I would think about changing your perspective on the world a bit, and showing you some of the designs that we have in nature. 
And so, I have my first slide to talk about the dawning of the universe and what I call the cosmic scene investigation, that is, looking at the relics of creation and inferring what happened at the beginning, and then following it up and trying to understand it. 
And so one of the questions that I asked you is, when you look around, what do you see? 
Well, you see this space that's created by designers and by the work of people, but what you actually see is a lot of material that was already here, being reshaped in a certain form. 
And so the question is: how did that material get here? 
How did it get into the form that it had before it got reshaped, and so forth? 
It's a question of what's the continuity? 
So one of the things I look at is, how did the universe begin and shape? 
What was the whole process in the creation and the evolution of the universe to getting to the point that we have these kinds of materials? 
So that's sort of the part, and let me move on then and show you the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. 
If you look at this picture, what you will see is a lot of dark with some light objects in it. 
And everything but — four of these light objects are stars, and you can see them there — little pluses. 
This is a star, this is a star, everything else is a galaxy, OK? 
So there's a couple of thousand galaxies you can see easily with your eye in here. 
And when I look out at particularly this galaxy, which looks a lot like ours, I wonder if there's an art design college conference going on, and intelligent beings there are thinking about, you know, what designs they might do, and there might be a few cosmologists trying to understand where the universe itself came from, and there might even be some in that galaxy looking at ours trying to figure out what's going on over here. 
But there's a lot of other galaxies, and some are nearby, and they're kind of the color of the Sun, and some are further away and they're a little bluer, and so forth. 
But one of the questions is — this should be, to you — how come there are so many galaxies? 
Because this represents a very clean fraction of the sky. 
This is only 1,000 galaxies. 
We think there's on the order — visible to the Hubble Space Telescope, if you had the time to scan it around — about 100 billion galaxies. Right? 
It's a very large number of galaxies. 
And that's roughly how many stars there are in our own galaxy. 
But when you look at some of these regions like this, you'll see more galaxies than stars, which is kind of a conundrum. 
So the question should come to your mind is, what kind of design, you know, what kind of creative process and what kind of design produced the world like that? 
And then I'm going to show you it's actually a lot more complicated. 
We're going to try and follow it up. 
We have a tool that actually helps us out in this study, and that's the fact that the universe is so incredibly big that it's a time machine, in a certain sense. 
We draw this set of nested spheres cut away so you see it. 
Put the Earth at the center of the nested spheres, just because that's where we're making observations. 
And the moon is only two seconds away, so if you take a picture of the moon using ordinary light, it's the moon two seconds ago, and who cares. 
Two seconds is like the present. 
The Sun is eight minutes ago. That's not such a big deal, right, unless there's solar flares coming then you want to get out the way. 
You'd like to have a little advance warning. 
But you get out to Jupiter and it's 40 minutes away. It's a problem. 
You hear about Mars, it's a problem communicating to Mars because it takes light long enough to go there. 
But if you look out to the nearest set of stars, to the nearest 40 or 50 stars, it's about 10 years. 
So if you take a picture of what's going on, it's 10 years ago. 
But you go and look to the center of the galaxy, it's thousands of years ago. 
If you look at Andromeda, which is the nearest big galaxy, and it's two million years ago. 
If you took a picture of the Earth two million years ago, there'd be no evidence of humans at all, because we don't think there were humans yet. 
I mean, it just gives you the scale. 
With the Hubble Space Telescope, we're looking at hundreds of millions of years to a billion years. 
But if we were capable to come up with an idea of how to look even further — there's some things even further, and that was what I did in a lot of my work, was to develop the techniques — we could look out back to even earlier epochs before there were stars and before there were galaxies, back to when the universe was hot and dense and very different. 
And so that's the sort of sequence, and so I have a more artistic impression of this. 
There's the galaxy in the middle, which is the Milky Way, and around that are the Hubble — you know, nearby kind of galaxies, and there's a sphere that marks the different times. 
And behind that are some more modern galaxies. 
You see the whole big picture? 
The beginning of time is funny — it's on the outside, right? 
And then there's a part of the universe we can't see because it's so dense and so hot, light can't escape. 
It's like you can't see to the center of the Sun; you have to use other techniques to know what's going on inside the Sun. 
But you can see the edge of the Sun, and the universe gets that way, and you can see that. 
And then you see this sort of model area around the outside, and that is the radiation coming from the Big Bang, which is actually incredibly uniform. 
The universe is almost a perfect sphere, but there are these very tiny variations which we show here in great exaggeration. 
And from them in the time sequence we're going to have to go from these tiny variations to these irregular galaxies and first stars to these more advanced galaxies, and eventually the solar system, and so forth. 
So it's a big design job, but we'll see about how things are going on. 
So the way these measurements were done, there's been a set of satellites, and this is where you get to see. 
So there was the COBE satellite, which was launched in 1989, and we discovered these variations. 
And then in 2000, the MAP satellite was launched — the WMAP — and it made somewhat better pictures. 
And later this year — this is the cool stealth version, the one that actually has some beautiful design features to it, and you should look — the Planck satellite will be launched, and it will make very high-resolution maps. 
And that will be the sequence of understanding the very beginning of the universe. 
And what we saw was, we saw these variations, and then they told us the secrets, both about the structure of space-time, and about the contents of the universe, and about how the universe started in its original motions. 
So we have this picture, which is quite a spectacular picture, and I'll come back to the beginning, where we're going to have some mysterious process that kicks the universe off at the beginning. 
And we go through a period of accelerating expansion, and the universe expands and cools until it gets to the point where it becomes transparent, then to the Dark Ages, and then the first stars turn on, and they evolve into galaxies, and then later they get to the more expansive galaxies. 
And somewhere around this period is when our solar system started forming. 
And it's maturing up to the present time. 
And there's some spectacular things. 
And this wastebasket part, that's to represent what the structure of space-time itself is doing during this period. 
And so this is a pretty weird model, right? 
What kind of evidence do we have for that? 
So let me show you some of nature's patterns that are the result of this. 
I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean. 
It's a marker of where the interesting waves are and whatever went on. 
So here is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showing the location of a million galaxies. 
So there's a dot on here for every galaxy. 
They go out and point a telescope at the sky, take a picture, identify what are stars and throw them away, look at the galaxies, estimate how far away they are, and plot them up. 
And just put radially they're going out that way. 
And you see these structures, this thing we call the Great Wall, but there are voids and those kinds of stuff, and they kind of fade out because the telescope isn't sensitive enough to do it. 
Now I'm going to show you this in 3D. 
What happens is, you take pictures as the Earth rotates, you get a fan across the sky. 
There are some places you can't look because of our own galaxy, or because there are no telescopes available to do it. 
So the next picture shows you the three-dimensional version of this rotating around. 
Do you see the fan-like scans made across the sky? 
Remember, every spot on here is a galaxy, and you see the galaxies, you know, sort of in our neighborhood, and you sort of see the structure. 
And you see this thing we call the Great Wall, and you see the complicated structure, and you see these voids. 
There are places where there are no galaxies and there are places where there are thousands of galaxies clumped together, right. 
So there's an interesting pattern, but we don't have enough data here to actually see the pattern. 
We only have a million galaxies, right? 
So we're keeping, like, a million balls in the air but, what's going on? 
There's another survey which is very similar to this, called the Two-degree Field of View Galaxy Redshift Survey. 
Now we're going to fly through it at warp a million. 
And every time there's a galaxy — at its location there's a galaxy — and if we know anything about the galaxy, which we do, because there's a redshift measurement and everything, you put in the type of galaxy and the color, so this is the real representation. 
And when you're in the middle of the galaxies it's hard to see the pattern; it's like being in the middle of life. 
It's hard to see the pattern in the middle of the audience, it's hard to see the pattern of this. 
So we're going to go out and swing around and look back at this. 
And you'll see, first, the structure of the survey, and then you'll start seeing the structure of the galaxies that we see out there. 
So again, you can see the extension of this Great Wall of galaxies showing up here. 
But you can see the voids, you can see the complicated structure, and you say, well, how did this happen? 
Suppose you're the cosmic designer. 
How are you going to put galaxies out there in a pattern like that? 
It's not just throwing them out at random. 
There's a more complicated process going on here. 
How are you going to end up doing that? 
And so now we're in for some serious play. 
That is, we have to seriously play God, not just change people's lives, but make the universe, right. 
So if that's your responsibility, how are you going to do that? 
What's the kind of technique? 
What's the kind of thing you're going to do? 
So I'm going to show you the results of a very large-scale simulation of what we think the universe might be like, using, essentially, some of the play principles and some of the design principles that, you know, humans have labored so hard to pick up, but apparently nature knew how to do at the beginning. 
And that is, you start out with very simple ingredients and some simple rules, but you have to have enough ingredients to make it complicated. 
And then you put in some randomness, some fluctuations and some randomness, and realize a whole bunch of different representations. 
So what I'm going to do is show you the distribution of matter as a function of scales. 
We're going to zoom in, but this is a plot of what it is. 
And we had to add one more thing to make the universe come out right. 
It's called dark matter. 
That is matter that doesn't interact with light the typical way that ordinary matter does, the way the light's shining on me or on the stage. 
It's transparent to light, but in order for you to see it, we're going to make it white. OK? 
So the stuff that's in this picture that's white, that is the dark matter. 
It should be called invisible matter, but the dark matter we've made visible. 
And the stuff that is in the yellow color, that is the ordinary kind of matter that's turned into stars and galaxies. 
So I'll show you the next movie. 
So this — we're going to zoom in. 
Notice this pattern and pay attention to this pattern. 
We're going to zoom in and zoom in. 
And you'll see there are all these filaments and structures and voids. 
And when a number of filaments come together in a knot, that makes a supercluster of galaxies. 
This one we're zooming in on is somewhere between 100,000 and a million galaxies in that small region. 
So we live in the boonies. 
We don't live in the center of the solar system, we don't live in the center of the galaxy and our galaxy's not in the center of the cluster. 
So we're zooming in. 
This is a region which probably has more than 100,000, on the order of a million galaxies in that region. 
We're going to keep zooming in. OK. 
And so I forgot to tell you the scale. 
A parsec is 3.26 light years. 
So a gigaparsec is three billion light years — that's the scale. 
So it takes light three billion years to travel over that distance. 
Now we're into a distance sort of between here and here. 
That's the distance between us and Andromeda, right? 
These little specks that you're seeing in here, they're galaxies. 
Now we're going to zoom back out, and you can see this structure that, when we get very far out, looks very regular, but it's made up of a lot of irregular variations. 
So they're simple building blocks. 
There's a very simple fluid to begin with. 
It's got dark matter, it's got ordinary matter, it's got photons and it's got neutrinos, which don't play much role in the later part of the universe. 
And it's just a simple fluid and it, over time, develops into this complicated structure. 
And so you know when you first saw this picture, it didn't mean quite so much to you. 
Here you're looking across one percent of the volume of the visible universe and you're seeing billions of galaxies, right, and nodes, but you realize they're not even the main structure. 
There's a framework, which is the dark matter, the invisible matter, that's out there that's actually holding it all together. 
So let's fly through it, and you can see how much harder it is when you're in the middle of something to figure this out. 
So here's that same end result. 
You see a filament, you see the light is the invisible matter, and the yellow is the stars or the galaxies showing up. 
And we're going to fly around, and we'll fly around, and you'll see occasionally a couple of filaments intersect, and you get a large cluster of galaxies. 
And then we'll fly in to where the very large cluster is, and you can see what it looks like. 
And so from inside, it doesn't look very complicated, right? 
It's only when you look at it at a very large scale, and explore it and so forth, you realize it's a very intricate, complicated kind of a design, right? 
And it's grown up in some kind of way. 
So the question is, how hard would it be to assemble this, right? 
How big a contractor team would you need to put this universe together, right? 
That's the issue, right? 
And so here we are. 
You see how the filament — you see how several filaments are coming together, therefore making this supercluster of galaxies. 
And you have to understand, this is not how it would actually look if you — first, you can't travel this fast, everything would be distorted, but this is using simple rendering and graphic arts kind of stuff. 
This is how, if you took billions of years to go around, it might look to you, right? 
And if you could see invisible matter, too. 
And so the idea is, you know, how would you put together the universe in a very simple way? 
We're going to start and realize that the entire visible universe, everything we can see in every direction with the Hubble Space Telescope plus our other instruments, was once in a region that was smaller than an atom. 
It started with tiny quantum mechanical fluctuations, but expanding at a tremendous rate. 
And those fluctuations were stretched to astronomical sizes, and those fluctuations eventually are the things we see in the cosmic microwave background. 
And then we needed some way to turn those fluctuations into galaxies and clusters of galaxies and make these kinds of structures go on. 
So I'm going to show you a smaller simulation. 
This simulation was run on 1,000 processors for a month in order to make just this simple visible one. 
So I'm going to show you one that can be run on a desktop in two days in the next picture. 
So you start out with teeny fluctuations when the universe was at this point, now four times smaller, and so forth. 
And you start seeing these networks, this cosmic web of structure forming. 
And this is a simple one, because it doesn't have the ordinary matter and it just has the dark matter in it. 
And you see how the dark matter lumps up, and the ordinary matter just trails along behind. 
So there it is. 
At the beginning it's very uniform. 
The fluctuations are a part in 100,000. 
There are a few peaks that are a part in 10,000, and then over billions of years, gravity just pulls in. 
This is light over density, pulls the material around in. 
That pulls in more material and pulls in more material. 
But the distances on the universe are so large and the time scales are so large that it takes a long time for this to form. 
And it keeps forming until the universe is roughly about half the size it is now, in terms of its expansion. 
And at that point, the universe mysteriously starts accelerating its expansion and cuts off the formation of larger-scale structure. 
So we're just seeing as large a scale structure as we can see, and then only things that have started forming already are going to form, and then from then on it's going to go on. 
So we're able to do the simulation, but this is two days on a desktop. 
We need, you know, 30 days on 1,000 processors to do the kind of simulation that I showed you before. 
So we have an idea of how to play seriously, creating the universe by starting with essentially less than an eyedrop full of material, and we create everything we can see in any direction, right, from almost nothing — that is, something extremely tiny, extremely small — and it is almost perfect, except it has these tiny fluctuations at a part in 100,000 level, which turn out to produce the interesting patterns and designs we see, that is, galaxies and stars and so forth. 
So we have a model, and we can calculate it, and we can use it to make designs of what we think the universe really looks like. 
And that design is sort of way beyond what our original imagination ever was. 
So this is what we started with 15 years ago, with the Cosmic Background Explorer — made the map on the upper right, which basically showed us that there were large-scale fluctuations, and actually fluctuations on several scales. You can kind of see that. 
Since then we've had WMAP, which just gives us higher angular resolution. 
We see the same large-scale structure, but we see additional small-scale structure. 
And on the bottom right is if the satellite had flipped upside down and mapped the Earth, what kind of a map we would have got of the Earth. 
You can see, well, you can, kind of pick out all the major continents, but that's about it. 
But what we're hoping when we get to Planck, we'll have resolution about equivalent to the resolution you see of the Earth there, where you can really see the complicated pattern that exists on the Earth. 
And you can also tell, because of the sharp edges and the way things fit together, there are some non-linear processes. 
Geology has these effects, which is moving the plates around and so forth. 
You can see that just from the map alone. 
We want to get to the point in our maps of the early universe we can see whether there are any non-linear effects that are starting to move, to modify, and are giving us a hint about how space-time itself was actually created at the beginning moments. 
So that's where we are today, and that's what I wanted to give you a flavor of. 
Give you a different view about what the design and what everything else looks like. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. 
But in fact, here in the northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "" gardens watered by running streams. "" Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. 
But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? 
I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its "" otherness. "" The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran "" as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble. "" (Laughter) Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book — as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God — and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad — 
were just another author on the bestseller list. 
Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote — that is, to misquote. 
Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "" highlighter version, "" which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes. 
So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly — as properly as I could, that is. 
My Arabic's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side, verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic. 
Now I did have an advantage. 
My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a-Sunni split, and for that I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. 
I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran — an informed one, an experienced one even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading some else's holy book. 
(Laughter) So I read slowly. (Laughter) 
I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by "" hubris "" — (Laughter) — because it turned out to be three months. 
I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. 
But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran — that feeling of "" I get it now "" — it would slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land, and yet the terrain was very familiar. 
The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. 
So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. 
God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh — jealously insisting on no other gods. 
The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. 
And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. 
And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic. 
Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. 
It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. 
And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. 
The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. 
It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. 
So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation." 
But all is not lost in translation. 
As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises — a degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. 
And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine, the Koran includes women — talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women. 
Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. 
Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca where fighting was usually forbidden, and the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. 
Not "" You must kill unbelievers in Mecca, "" but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over and only if there's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. 
And even then — God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme — and so, essentially, better if you don't. 
(Laughter) This was perhaps the biggest surprise — how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. 
"" Some of these verses are definite in meaning, "" it says, "and others are ambiguous." 
The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. 
Only God knows the true meaning. 
The phrase "" God is subtle "" appears again and again, and indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. 
As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. 
Old-fashioned Orientalism comes into play here. 
The word used four times is Houris, rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. 
Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: Houris. 
Not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight. 
(Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "" pure beings "" — like in angels — or it may be like the Greek Kouros or Kórē, an eternal youth. 
But the truth is nobody really knows, and that's the point. 
Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise" and that you will be "" recreated in a form unknown to you, "" which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. 
(Laughter) And that number 72 never appears. 
There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. 
That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. 
Paradise is quite the opposite. 
It's not virginity; it's fecundity. 
It's plenty. 
It's gardens watered by running streams. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm here to enlist you in helping reshape the story about how humans and other critters get things done. 
Here is the old story — we've already heard a little bit about it: biology is war in which only the fiercest survive; businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition; politics is about your side winning at all costs. 
But I think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge. 
It's a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines, in which cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role. 
And the central, but not all-important, role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room. 
I started thinking about the relationship between communication, media and collective action when I wrote "" Smart Mobs, "" and I found that when I finished the book, I kept thinking about it. 
In fact, if you look back, human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time. 
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization in small family groups. Nomadic hunters bring down rabbits, gathering food. 
The form of wealth in those days was enough food to stay alive. 
But at some point, they banded together to hunt bigger game. 
And we don't know exactly how they did this, although they must have solved some collective action problems; it only makes sense that you can't hunt mastodons while you're fighting with the other groups. 
And again, we have no way of knowing, but it's clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged. 
More protein than a hunter's family could eat before it rotted. 
So that raised a social question that I believe must have driven new social forms. 
Did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families? 
And if so, how did they make arrangements? 
Again, we can't know, but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication must have been involved. 
Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. 
And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time. 
Not too much longer after that, the alphabet was invented. 
And this powerful tool was really reserved, for thousands of years, for the elite administrators (Laughter) who kept track of accounts for the empires. 
And then another communication technology enabled new media: the printing press came along, and within decades, millions of people became literate. 
And from literate populations, new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge, religion and politics. 
We saw scientific revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before. 
Not created by the printing press, but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy. 
And again, new forms of wealth emerged. 
Now, commerce is ancient. Markets are as old as the crossroads. 
But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping. 
Now of course, the enabling technologies are based on the Internet, and in the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a marketplace. 
Evolution is speeding up. 
More recently, that power is untethering and leaping off the desktops, and very, very quickly, we're going to see a significant proportion, if not the majority of the human race, walking around holding, carrying or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be broadband today. 
Now, when I started looking into collective action, the considerable literature on it is based on what sociologists call "" social dilemmas. "" And there are a couple of mythic narratives of social dilemmas. 
I'm going to talk briefly about two of them: the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons. 
Now, when I talked about this with Kevin Kelly, he assured me that everybody in this audience pretty much knows the details of the prisoner's dilemma, so I'm just going to go over that very, very quickly. 
If you have more questions about it, ask Kevin Kelly later. (Laughter) The prisoner's dilemma is actually a story that's overlaid on a mathematical matrix that came out of the game theory in the early years of thinking about nuclear war: two players who couldn't trust each other. 
Let me just say that every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner's dilemma. 
Person with the goods, person with the money, because they can't trust each other, are not going to exchange. 
Neither one wants to be the first one or they're going to get the sucker's payoff, but both lose, of course, because they don't get what they want. 
If they could only agree, if they could only turn a prisoner's dilemma into a different payoff matrix called an assurance game, they could proceed. 
Twenty years ago, Robert Axelrod used the prisoner's dilemma as a probe of the biological question: if we are here because our ancestors were such fierce competitors, how does cooperation exist at all? 
He started a computer tournament for people to submit prisoner's dilemma strategies and discovered, much to his surprise, that a very, very simple strategy won — it won the first tournament, and even after everyone knew it won, it won the second tournament — that's known as tit for tat. 
Another economic game that may not be as well known as the prisoner's dilemma is the ultimatum game, and it's also a very interesting probe of our assumptions about the way people make economic transactions. 
Here's how the game is played: there are two players; they've never played the game before, they will not play the game again, they don't know each other, and they are, in fact, in separate rooms. 
First player is offered a hundred dollars and is asked to propose a split: 50 / 50, 90 / 10, whatever that player wants to propose. The second player either accepts the split — both players are paid and the game is over — or rejects the split — neither player is paid and the game is over. 
Now, the fundamental basis of neoclassical economics would tell you it's irrational to reject a dollar because someone you don't know in another room is going to get 99. 
Yet in thousands of trials with American and European and Japanese students, a significant percentage would reject any offer that's not close to 50 / 50. 
And although they were screened and didn't know about the game and had never played the game before, proposers seemed to innately know this because the average proposal was surprisingly close to 50 / 50. 
Now, the interesting part comes in more recently when anthropologists began taking this game to other cultures and discovered, to their surprise, that slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the Amazon or nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia or a dozen different cultures — each had radically different ideas of what is fair. 
Which suggests that instead of there being an innate sense of fairness, that somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions, whether we know that or not. 
The other major narrative of social dilemmas is the tragedy of the commons. 
Garrett Hardin used it to talk about overpopulation in the late 1960s. 
He used the example of a common grazing area in which each person by simply maximizing their own flock led to overgrazing and the depletion of the resource. 
He had the rather gloomy conclusion that humans will inevitably despoil any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it. 
Now, Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, in 1990 asked the interesting question that any good scientist should ask, which is: is it really true that humans will always despoil commons? 
So she went out and looked at what data she could find. 
She looked at thousands of cases of humans sharing watersheds, forestry resources, fisheries, and discovered that yes, in case after case, humans destroyed the commons that they depended on. 
But she also found many instances in which people escaped the prisoner's dilemma; in fact, the tragedy of the commons is a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma. 
And she said that people are only prisoners if they consider themselves to be. 
They escape by creating institutions for collective action. 
And she discovered, I think most interestingly, that among those institutions that worked, there were a number of common design principles, and those principles seem to be missing from those institutions that don't work. 
I'm moving very quickly over a number of disciplines. In biology, the notions of symbiosis, group selection, evolutionary psychology are contested, to be sure. 
But there is really no longer any major debate over the fact that cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology, from the level of the cell to the level of the ecology. 
And again, our notions of individuals as economic beings have been overturned. 
Rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor. 
In fact, people will act to punish cheaters, even at a cost to themselves. 
And most recently, neurophysiological measures have shown that people who punish cheaters in economic games show activity in the reward centers of their brain. 
Which led one scientist to declare that altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together. 
Now, I've been talking about how new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped create new economic forms. 
Commerce is ancient. Markets are very old. Capitalism is fairly recent; socialism emerged as a reaction to that. 
And yet we see very little talk about how the next form may be emerging. 
Jim Surowiecki briefly mentioned Yochai Benkler's paper about open source, pointing to a new form of production: peer-to-peer production. 
I simply want you to keep in mind that if in the past, new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth, we may be moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different from previous ones. 
Very briefly, let's look at some businesses. IBM, as you know, HP, Sun — some of the most fierce competitors in the IT world are open sourcing their software, are providing portfolios of patents for the commons. 
Eli Lilly — in, again, the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical world — has created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems. 
Toyota, instead of treating its suppliers as a marketplace, treats them as a network and trains them to produce better, even though they are also training them to produce better for their competitors. 
Now none of these companies are doing this out of altruism; they're doing it because they're learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest. 
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them. 
Google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through AdSense. 
Amazon has opened its Application Programming Interface to 60,000 developers, countless Amazon shops. 
They're enriching others, not out of altruism but as a way of enriching themselves. 
eBay solved the prisoner's dilemma and created a market where none would have existed by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner's dilemma game into an assurance game. 
Instead of, "" Neither of us can trust each other, so we have to make suboptimal moves, "" it's, "" You prove to me that you are trustworthy and I will cooperate. "" Wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopedia with a million and a half articles in 200 languages in just a couple of years. 
We've seen that ThinkCycle has enabled NGOs in developing countries to put up problems to be solved by design students around the world, including something that's being used for tsunami relief right now: it's a mechanism for rehydrating cholera victims that's so simple to use it, illiterates can be trained to use it. 
BitTorrent turns every downloader into an uploader, making the system more efficient the more it is used. 
Millions of people have contributed their desktop computers when they're not using them to link together through the Internet into supercomputing collectives that help solve the protein folding problem for medical researchers — that's Folding @ home at Stanford — to crack codes, to search for life in outer space. 
I don't think we know enough yet. 
I don't think we've even begun to discover what the basic principles are, but I think we can begin to think about them. 
And I don't have enough time to talk about all of them, but think about self-interest. 
This is all about self-interest that adds up to more. 
In El Salvador, both sides that withdrew from their civil war took moves that had been proven to mirror a prisoner's dilemma strategy. 
In the U.S., in the Philippines, in Kenya, around the world, citizens have self-organized political protests and get out the vote campaigns using mobile devices and SMS. 
Is an Apollo Project of cooperation possible? 
A transdisciplinary study of cooperation? 
I believe that the payoff would be very big. 
I think we need to begin developing maps of this territory so that we can talk about it across disciplines. 
And I am not saying that understanding cooperation is going to cause us to be better people — and sometimes people cooperate to do bad things — but I will remind you that a few hundred years ago, people saw their loved ones die from diseases they thought were caused by sin or foreigners or evil spirits. 
Descartes said we need an entire new way of thinking. 
When the scientific method provided that new way of thinking and biology showed that microorganisms caused disease, suffering was alleviated. 
What forms of suffering could be alleviated, what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation? 
I don't think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen; it's going to require effort. 
So I enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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) 

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) 

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

A human child is born, and for quite a long time is a consumer. 
It cannot be consciously a contributor. 
It is helpless. 
It doesn't know how to survive, even though it is endowed with an instinct to survive. 
It needs the help of mother, or a foster mother, to survive. 
It can't afford to doubt the person who tends the child. 
It has to totally surrender, as one surrenders to an anesthesiologist. 
It has to totally surrender. 
That implies a lot of trust. 
That implies the trusted person won't violate the trust. 
As the child grows, it begins to discover that the person trusted is violating the trust. 
It doesn't know even the word "" violation. "" Therefore, it has to blame itself, a wordless blame, which is more difficult to really resolve — the wordless self-blame. 
As the child grows to become an adult: so far, it has been a consumer, but the growth of a human being lies in his or her capacity to contribute, to be a contributor. 
One cannot contribute unless one feels secure, one feels big, one feels: I have enough. 
To be compassionate is not a joke. 
It's not that simple. 
One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. 
That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. 
The self: you are self-aware. 
On that self, it should be centered — a bigness, a wholeness. 
Otherwise, compassion is just a word and a dream. 
You can be compassionate occasionally, more moved by empathy than by compassion. 
Thank God we are empathetic. 
When somebody's in pain, we pick up the pain. 
In a Wimbledon final match, these two guys fight it out. 
Each one has got two games. 
It can be anybody's game. 
What they have sweated so far has no meaning. 
One person wins. 
The tennis etiquette is, both the players have to come to the net and shake hands. 
The winner boxes the air and kisses the ground, throws his shirt as though somebody is waiting for it. 
(Laughter) And this guy has to come to the net. 
When he comes to the net, you see, his whole face changes. 
It looks as though he's wishing that he didn't win. 
Why? Empathy. 
That's human heart. 
No human heart is denied of that empathy. 
No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. 
No culture, no nation and nationalism — nothing can touch it because it is empathy. 
And that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people, you do something that makes a difference in somebody's life — even words, even time. 
Compassion is not defined in one form. 
There's no Indian compassion. 
There's no American compassion. 
It transcends nation, the gender, the age. 
Why? Because it is there in everybody. 
It's experienced by people occasionally. 
Then this occasional compassion, we are not talking about — it will never remain occasional. 
By mandate, you cannot make a person compassionate. 
You can't say, "" Please love me. "" Love is something you discover. 
It's not an action, but in the English language, it is also an action. 
I will come to it later. 
So one has got to discover a certain wholeness. 
I am going to cite the possibility of being whole, which is within our experience, everybody's experience. 
In spite of a very tragic life, one is happy in moments which are very few and far between. 
And the one who is happy, even for a slapstick joke, accepts himself and also the scheme of things in which one finds oneself. 
That means the whole universe, known things and unknown things. 
All of them are totally accepted because you discover your wholeness in yourself. 
The subject — "" me "" — and the object — the scheme of things — fuse into oneness, an experience nobody can say, "" I am denied of, "" an experience common to all and sundry. 
That experience confirms that, in spite of all your limitations — all your wants, desires, unfulfilled, and the credit cards and layoffs and, finally, baldness — you can be happy. 
But the extension of the logic is that you don't need to fulfill your desire to be happy. 
You are the very happiness, the wholeness that you want to be. 
There's no choice in this: that only confirms the reality that the wholeness cannot be different from you, cannot be minus you. 
It has got to be you. 
You cannot be a part of wholeness and still be whole. 
Your moment of happiness reveals that reality, that realization, that recognition: "" Maybe I am the whole. 
Maybe the swami is right. 
Maybe the swami is right. "" You start your new life. 
Then everything becomes meaningful. 
I have no more reason to blame myself. 
If one has to blame oneself, one has a million reasons plus many. 
But if I say, in spite of my body being limited — if it is black it is not white, if it is white it is not black: body is limited any which way you look at it. Limited. 
Your knowledge is limited, health is limited, and power is therefore limited, and the cheerfulness is going to be limited. 
Compassion is going to be limited. 
Everything is going to be limitless. 
You cannot command compassion unless you become limitless, and nobody can become limitless, either you are or you are not. Period. 
And there is no way of your being not limitless too. 
Your own experience reveals, in spite of all limitations, you are the whole. 
And the wholeness is the reality of you when you relate to the world. 
It is love first. 
When you relate to the world, the dynamic manifestation of the wholeness is, what we say, love. 
And itself becomes compassion if the object that you relate to evokes that emotion. 
Then that again transforms into giving, into sharing. 
You express yourself because you have compassion. 
To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate. 
To discover the capacity to give and share, you need to be giving and sharing. 
There is no shortcut: it is like swimming by swimming. 
You learn swimming by swimming. 
You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. 
(Laughter) You learn swimming by swimming. You learn cycling by cycling. 
You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook. 
(Laughter) And, therefore, what I say, you have to fake it and make it. (Laughter) 
You need to. 
My predecessor meant that. 
You have to act it out. 
You have to act compassionately. 
There is no verb for compassion, but you have an adverb for compassion. 
That's interesting to me. 
You act compassionately. 
But then, how to act compassionately if you don't have compassion? 
That is where you fake. 
You fake it and make it. This is the mantra of the United States of America. 
(Laughter) You fake it and make it. 
You act compassionately as though you have compassion: grind your teeth, take all the support system. 
If you know how to pray, pray. 
Ask for compassion. 
Let me act compassionately. 
Do it. 
You'll discover compassion and also slowly a relative compassion, and slowly, perhaps if you get the right teaching, you'll discover compassion is a dynamic manifestation of the reality of yourself, which is oneness, wholeness, and that's what you are. 
With these words, thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I really am honored to be here, and as Chris said, it's been over 20 years since I started working in Africa. 
My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty, Ivory Coast morning. 
I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials — some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar — because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent. 
But literally within days of arriving I was told, in no uncertain terms, by a number of West African women, that Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me. 
I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn't really know Africa, and besides, my French was pitiful. 
And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening. 
I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there. 
And I did, and we ended up naming it Duterimbere, meaning "" to go forward with enthusiasm. "" And while we were doing it, I realized that there weren't a lot of businesses that were viable and started by women, and so maybe I should try to run a business, too. 
And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes. 
And, being a little intrigued, I went to go meet this group, and what I found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive. 
And it was really the beginning of my understanding the power of language, and how what we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little. 
I also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business, that, in fact, it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person, who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods, and living on 50 cents a day, still in poverty. 
So, I made a deal with the women. I said, "" Look, we get rid of the charity side, and we run this as a business and I'll help you. "" They nervously agreed. I nervously started, and, of course, things are always harder than you think they're going to be. 
First of all, I thought, well, we need a sales team, and we clearly aren't the A-Team here, so let's — I did all this training. 
And the epitome was when I literally marched into the streets of Nyamirambo, which is the popular quarter of Kigali, with a bucket, and I sold all these little doughnuts to people, and I came back, and I was like, "" You see? "" And the women said, "" You know, Jacqueline, who in Nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall American woman? "" And like — (Laughter) — it's a good point. 
So then I went the whole American way, with competitions, team and individual. Completely failed, but over time, the women learnt to sell on their own way. 
And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips, and banana chips, and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average. 
And with that confidence surge, I thought, "" Well, it's time to create a real bakery, so let's paint it. "" And the women said, "" That's a really great idea. "" And I said, "" Well, what color do you want to paint it? "" And they said, "" Well, you choose. "" And I said, "" No, no, I'm learning to listen. 
You choose. It's your bakery, your street, your country — not mine. "" But they wouldn't give me an answer. 
So, one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, "" Well, how about blue? "" And they said, "" Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue. "" So, I went to the store, I brought Gaudence, the recalcitrant one of all, and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains, and on painting day, we all gathered in Nyamirambo, and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim, like a little French bakery. But that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky. 
So, blue, blue, everything became blue. 
The walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue. 
And Aretha Franklin was shouting "" R-E-S-P-E-C-T, "" the women's hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes, but it was their day. 
And at the end of it, we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done, and I said, "" It is so beautiful. "" And the women said, "" It really is. "" And I said, "" And I think the color is perfect, "" and they all nodded their head, except for Gaudence, and I said, "" What? "" And she said, "" Nothing. "" And I said, "" What? "" And she said, "" Well, it is pretty, but, you know, our color, really, it is green. "" And — (Laughter) — I learned then that listening isn't just about patience, but that when you've lived on charity and dependent your whole life long, 
it's really hard to say what you mean. 
And, mostly because people never really ask you, and when they do, you don't really think they want to know the truth. 
And so then I learned that listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions. 
And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life. 
And it taught me three lessons that I think are so important for us today, and certainly in the work that I do. 
The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. 
As Eleni has said, when people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity. 
But as human beings, we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that. 
The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty. 
I think Andrew pretty well covered that, so I will move to the third point, which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty. 
Yes, we ran this as a business, but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training, and the management support, the strategic advice and, maybe most important of all, the access to new contacts, networks and new markets. 
And so, on a micro level, there's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy. 
And on a macro level — some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized. 
But, having had a father with heart disease, and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten, and having a good friend step in to help, I really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford. 
I think the market can help us figure that out, but there's got to be a charitable component, or I don't think we're going to create the kind of societies we want to live in. 
And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago. 
It's a nonprofit, venture capital fund for the poor, a few oxymorons in one sentence. 
It essentially raises charitable funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health, housing, energy, clean water to low income people in South Asia and Africa, so that they can make their own choices. 
We've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them. 
I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa. 
Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets. 
Both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise, and both of them, because they're manufacturers, create jobs directly, and create incomes indirectly, because they're in the malaria sector, and Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria. 
And so as people get healthier, they also get wealthier. 
The first one is called Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited. 
It's a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues. 
These are old-hand farmers who've gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in Kenya over the last 30 years. 
Now, this plant is an Artemisia plant; it's the basic component for artemisinin, which is the best-known treatment for malaria. 
It's indigenous to China and the Far East, but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in Africa, Patrick and his colleagues said, "" Let's bring it here, because it's a high value-add product. "" The farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize. 
And so, using patient capital — money that they could raise early on, that actually got below market returns and was willing to go the long haul and be combined with management assistance, strategic assistance — they've now created a company where they purchase from 7,500 farmers. 
So that's about 50,000 people affected. 
And I think some of you may have visited — these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient. 
They buy it, they dry it and they bring it to this factory, which was purchased in part by, again, patient capital from Novartis, who has a real interest in getting the powder so that they can make Coartem. 
Acumen's been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital. 
And I really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so. Because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make Coartem, when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history. 
And we called all of the social investors we know. 
Now, some of these same social investors are really interested in Africa and understand the importance of agriculture, and they even helped the farmers. 
And even when we explained that if ABE goes away, all those 7,500 jobs go away too, we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social. 
And it's really time we start thinking more creatively about how they can be fused. 
So Acumen made not one, but two bridge loans, and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20-million-dollar round, to move it to the next level, and I think that this will be one of the more important companies in East Africa. 
This is Samuel. He's a farmer. 
He was actually living in the Kibera slums when his father called him and told him about Artemisia and the value-add potential. 
So he moved back to the farm, and, long story short, they now have seven acres under cultivation. 
Samuel's kids are in private school, and he's starting to help other farmers in the area also go into Artemisia production — dignity being more important than wealth. 
The next one, many of you know. 
I talked about it a little at Oxford two years ago, and some of you visited A to Z manufacturing, which is one of the great, real companies in East Africa. 
It's another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise. 
And this is really a story about a public-private solution that has really worked. 
It started in Japan. Sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide, so you could create a bed net, a malaria bed net, that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped. 
It could alter the vector, but like Artemisia, it had been produced only in East Asia. And as part of its social responsibility, Sumitomo said, "" Why don't we experiment with whether we can produce it in Africa, for Africans? "" UNICEF came forward and said, "" We'll buy most of the nets, and then we'll give them away, as part of the global fund's and the U.N. 's commitment to pregnant women and children, for free. "" Acumen came in with the patient capital, and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in Africa, and Exxon provided the initial resin. 
Well, in looking around for entrepreneurs, there was none better that we could find on earth than Anuj Shah, in A to Z manufacturing company. 
It's a 40-year-old company, it understands manufacturing. 
It's gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it. 
And so, Anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in Africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria. 
And, long story short, again, they've been so successful. 
In our first year, the first net went off the line in October of 2003. 
We thought the hitting-it-out-of-the-box number was 150,000 nets a year. 
This year, they are now producing eight million nets a year, and they employ 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom are women, mostly unskilled. 
They're in a joint venture with Sumitomo. 
And so, from an enterprise perspective for Africa, and from a public health perspective, these are real successes. 
But it's only half the story if we're really looking at solving problems of poverty, because it's not long-term sustainable. 
It's a company with one big customer. 
And if avian flu hits, or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority, everybody loses. 
And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day. 
It costs, at manufacturing point, six dollars to produce these, and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it, so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net. 
Most people can't afford that, so let's give it away free. 
And we said, "" Well, there's another option. 
Let's use the market as the best listening device we have, and understand at what price people would pay for this, so they get the dignity of choice. 
We can start building local distribution, and actually, it can cost the public sector much less. "" And so we came in with a second round of patient capital to A to Z, a loan as well as a grant, so that A to Z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace, and found a number of things. 
One, that people will pay different prices, but the overwhelming number of people will come forth at one dollar per net and make a decision to buy it. 
And when you listen to them, they'll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they don't like. 
And that some of the channels we thought would work didn't work. 
But because of this experimentation and iteration that was allowed because of the patient capital, we've now found that it costs about a dollar in the private sector to distribute, and a dollar to buy the net. 
So then, from a policy perspective, when you start with the market, we have a choice. 
We can continue going along at 12 dollars a net, and the customer pays zero, or we could at least experiment with some of it, to charge one dollar a net, costing the public sector another six dollars a net, give the people the dignity of choice, and have a distribution system that might, over time, start sustaining itself. 
We've got to start having conversations like this, and I don't think there's any better way to start than using the market, but also to bring other people to the table around it. 
Whenever I go to visit A to Z, I think of my grandmother, Stella. 
She was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines. 
She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn't have very much education. 
She moved to the United States, where she met my grandfather, who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies. 
My grandmother had tuberculosis, and she worked in a sewing machine shop, making shirts for about 10 cents an hour. 
She, like so many of the women I see at A to Z, worked hard every day, understood what suffering was, had a deep faith in God, loved her children and would never have accepted a handout. 
But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams. 
I look around at my siblings and my cousins — and as I said, there are a lot of us — and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers. 
One sister who makes other people's wishes come true. 
And my wish, when I see those women, I meet those farmers, and I think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day, is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility, and that they also can believe and get access to services, so that their children, too, can live those lives of great purpose. 
It shouldn't be that difficult. 
But what it takes is a commitment from all of us to essentially refuse trite assumptions, get out of our ideological boxes. 
It takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success. 
It takes opening your arms, both, wide, and expecting very little love in return, but demanding accountability, and bringing the accountability to the table as well. 
And most of all, most of all, it requires that all of us have the courage and the patience, whether we are rich or poor, African or non-African, local or diaspora, left or right, to really start listening to each other. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It was April, last year. 
I was on an evening out with friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. 
We hadn't been all together for a couple of weeks; it was a perfect evening, as we were all reunited. 
At the end of the evening, I caught the last underground train back to the other side of London. 
The journey was smooth. 
I got back to my local station and I began the 10-minute walk home. 
As I turned the corner onto my street, my house in sight up ahead, I heard footsteps behind me that seemed to have approached out of nowhere and were picking up pace. 
Before I had time to process what was happening, a hand was clapped around my mouth so that I could not breathe, and the young man behind me dragged me to the ground, beat my head repeatedly against the pavement until my face began to bleed, kicking me in the back and neck while he began to assault me, ripping off my clothes and telling me to "" shut up, "" as I struggled to cry for help. 
With each smack of my head to the concrete ground, a question echoed through my mind that still haunts me today: "Is this going to be how it all ends?" 
Little could I have realized, I'd been followed the whole way from the moment I left the station. 
And hours later, I was standing topless and barelegged in front of the police, having the cuts and bruises on my naked body photographed for forensic evidence. 
Now, there are few words to describe the all-consuming feelings of vulnerability, shame, upset and injustice that I was ridden with in that moment and for the weeks to come. 
But wanting to find a way to condense these feelings into something ordered that I could work through, I decided to do what felt most natural to me: I wrote about it. 
It started out as a cathartic exercise. 
I wrote a letter to my assaulter, humanizing him as "" you, "" to identify him as part of the very community that he had so violently abused that night. 
Stressing the tidal-wave effect of his actions, I wrote: "" Did you ever think of the people in your life? 
I don't know who the people in your life are. 
I don't know anything about you. 
But I do know this: you did not just attack me that night. 
I'm a daughter, I'm a friend, I'm a sister, I'm a pupil, I'm a cousin, I'm a niece, I'm a neighbor; I'm the employee who served everyone coffee in the café under the railway. 
And all the people who form these relations to me make up my community. 
And you assaulted every single one of them. 
You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for, and which all of these people represent: that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad. "" But, determined not to let this one incident make me lose faith in the solidarity in my community or humanity as a whole, I recalled the 7 / 7 terrorist bombings in July 2005 on London transport, and how the mayor of London at the time, and indeed my own parents, had insisted that we all get back on the tubes the next day, so we wouldn't be defined or changed by those that had made us feel unsafe. 
I told my attacker, "" You've carried out your attack, but now I'm getting back on my tube. 
My community will not feel we are unsafe walking home after dark. 
We will get on the last tubes home, and we will walk up our streets alone, because we will not ingrain or submit to the idea that we are putting ourselves in danger in doing so. 
We will continue to come together, like an army, when any member of our community is threatened. 
And this is a fight you will not win. "" At the time of writing this letter — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
At the time of writing this letter, I was studying for my exams in Oxford, and I was working on the local student paper there. 
Despite being lucky enough to have friends and family supporting me, it was an isolating time. 
I didn't know anyone who'd been through this before; at least I didn't think I did. 
I'd read news reports, statistics, and knew how common sexual assault was, yet I couldn't actually name a single person that I'd heard speak out about an experience of this kind before. 
So in a somewhat spontaneous decision, I decided that I would publish my letter in the student paper, hoping to reach out to others in Oxford that might have had a similar experience and be feeling the same way. 
At the end of the letter, I asked others to write in with their experiences under the hashtag, "" # NotGuilty, "" to emphasize that survivors of assault could express themselves without feeling shame or guilt about what happened to them — to show that we could all stand up to sexual assault. 
What I never anticipated is that almost overnight, this published letter would go viral. 
Soon, we were receiving hundreds of stories from men and women across the world, which we began to publish on a website I set up. 
And the hashtag became a campaign. 
There was an Australian mother in her 40s who described how on an evening out, she was followed to the bathroom by a man who went to repeatedly grab her crotch. 
There was a man in the Netherlands who described how he was date-raped on a visit to London and wasn't taken seriously by anyone he reported his case to. 
I had personal Facebook messages from people in India and South America, saying, how can we bring the message of the campaign there? 
One of the first contributions we had was from a woman called Nikki, who described growing up, being molested my her own father. 
And I had friends open up to me about experiences ranging from those that happened last week to those that happened years ago, that I'd had no idea about. 
And the more we started to receive these messages, the more we also started to receive messages of hope — people feeling empowered by this community of voices standing up to sexual assault and victim-blaming. 
One woman called Olivia, after describing how she was attacked by someone she had trusted and cared about for a long time, said, "" I've read many of the stories posted here, and I feel hopeful that if so many women can move forward, then I can, too. 
I've been inspired by many, and I hope I can be as strong as them someday. 
I'm sure I will. "" People around the world began tweeting under this hashtag, and the letter was republished and covered by the national press, as well as being translated into several other languages worldwide. 
But something struck me about the media attention that this letter was attracting. 
For something to be front-page news, given the word "" news "" itself, we can assume it must be something new or something surprising. 
And yet sexual assault is not something new. 
Sexual assault, along with other kinds of injustices, is reported in the media all the time. 
But through the campaign, these injustices were framed as not just news stories, they were firsthand experiences that had affected real people, who were creating, with the solidarity of others, what they needed and had previously lacked: a platform to speak out, the reassurance they weren't alone or to blame for what happened to them and open discussions that would help to reduce stigma around the issue. 
The voices of those directly affected were at the forefront of the story — not the voices of journalists or commentators on social media. 
And that's why the story was news. 
We live in an incredibly interconnected world with the proliferation of social media, which is of course a fantastic resource for igniting social change. 
But it's also made us increasingly reactive, from the smallest annoyances of, "" Oh, my train's been delayed, "" to the greatest injustices of war, genocides, terrorist attacks. 
Our default response has become to leap to react to any kind of grievance by tweeting, Facebooking, hastagging — anything to show others that we, too, have reacted. 
The problem with reacting in this manner en masse is it can sometimes mean that we don't actually react at all, not in the sense of actually doing anything, anyway. 
It might make ourselves feel better, like we've contributed to a group mourning or outrage, but it doesn't actually change anything. 
And what's more, it can sometimes drown out the voices of those directly affected by the injustice, whose needs must be heard. 
Worrying, too, is the tendency for some reactions to injustice to build even more walls, being quick to point fingers with the hope of providing easy solutions to complex problems. 
One British tabloid, on the publication of my letter, branded a headline stating, "Oxford Student Launches Online Campaign to Shame Attacker." 
But the campaign never meant to shame anyone. 
It meant to let people speak and to make others listen. 
Divisive Twitter trolls were quick to create even more injustice, commenting on my attacker's ethnicity or class to push their own prejudiced agendas. 
And some even accused me of feigning the whole thing to push, and I quote, my "" feminist agenda of man-hating. "" (Laughter) I know, right? 
As if I'm going to be like, "" Hey guys! Sorry I can't make it, I'm busy trying to hate the entire male population by the time I'm 30. "" (Laughter) Now, I'm almost sure that these people wouldn't say the things they say in person. 
But it's as if because they might be behind a screen, in the comfort in their own home when on social media, people forget that what they're doing is a public act — that other people will be reading it and be affected by it. 
Returning to my analogy of getting back on our trains, another main concern I have about this noise that escalates from our online responses to injustice is that it can very easily slip into portraying us as the affected party, which can lead to a sense of defeatism, a kind of mental barrier to seeing any opportunity for positivity or change after a negative situation. 
A couple of months before the campaign started or any of this happened to me, I went to a TEDx event in Oxford, and I saw Zelda la Grange speak, the former private secretary to Nelson Mandela. 
One of the stories she told really struck me. 
She spoke of when Mandela was taken to court by the South African Rugby Union after he commissioned an inquiry into sports affairs. 
In the courtroom, he went up to the South African Rugby Union's lawyers, shook them by the hand and conversed with them, each in their own language. 
And Zelda wanted to protest, saying they had no right to his respect after this injustice they had caused him. 
He turned to her and said, "You must never allow the enemy to determine the grounds for battle." 
At the time of hearing these words, I didn't really know why they were so important, but I felt they were, and I wrote them down in a notebook I had on me. 
But I've thought about this line a lot ever since. 
Revenge, or the expression of hatred towards those who have done us injustice may feel like a human instinct in the face of wrong, but we need to break out of these cycles if we are to hope to transform negative events of injustice into positive social change. 
To do otherwise continues to let the enemy determine the grounds for battle, creates a binary, where we who have suffered become the affected, pitted against them, the perpetrators. 
And just like we got back on our tubes, we can't let our platforms for interconnectivity and community be the places that we settle for defeat. 
But I don't want to discourage a social media response, because I owe the development of the # NotGuilty campaign almost entirely to social media. 
But I do want to encourage a more considered approach to the way we use it to respond to injustice. 
The start, I think, is to ask ourselves two things. 
Firstly: Why do I feel this injustice? 
In my case, there were several answers to this. 
Someone had hurt me and those who I loved, under the assumption they wouldn't have to be held to account or recognize the damage they had caused. 
Not only that, but thousands of men and women suffer every day from sexual abuse, often in silence, yet it's still a problem we don't give the same airtime to as other issues. 
It's still an issue many people blame victims for. 
Next, ask yourself: How, in recognizing these reasons, could I go about reversing them? 
With us, this was holding my attacker to account — and many others. 
It was calling them out on the effect they had caused. 
It was giving airtime to the issue of sexual assault, opening up discussions amongst friends, amongst families, in the media that had been closed for too long, and stressing that victims shouldn't feel to blame for what happened to them. 
We might still have a long way to go in solving this problem entirely. 
But in this way, we can begin to use social media as an active tool for social justice, as a tool to educate, to stimulate dialogues, to make those in positions of authority aware of an issue by listening to those directly affected by it. 
Because sometimes these questions don't have easy answers. 
In fact, they rarely do. 
But this doesn't mean we still can't give them a considered response. 
In situations where you can't go about thinking how you'd reverse this feeling of injustice, you can still think, maybe not what you can do, but what you can not do. 
You can not build further walls by fighting injustice with more prejudice, more hatred. 
You can not speak over those directly affected by an injustice. 
And you can not react to injustice, only to forget about it the next day, just because the rest of Twitter has moved on. 
Sometimes not reacting instantly is, ironically, the best immediate course of action we can take. 
Because we might be angry, upset and energized by injustice, but let's consider our responses. 
Let us hold people to account, without descending into a culture that thrives off shaming and injustice ourselves. 
Let us remember that distinction, so often forgotten by internet users, between criticism and insult. 
Let us not forget to think before we speak, just because we might have a screen in front of us. 
And when we create noise on social media, let it not drown out the needs of those affected, but instead let it amplify their voices, so the internet becomes a place where you're not the exception if you speak out about something that has actually happened to you. 
All these considered approaches to injustice evoke the very keystones on which the internet was built: to network, to have signal, to connect — all these terms that imply bringing people together, not pushing people apart. 
Because if you look up the word "" justice "" in the dictionary, before punishment, before administration of law or judicial authority, you get: "The maintenance of what is right." 
And I think there are few things more "" right "" in this world than bringing people together, than unions. 
And if we allow social media to deliver that, then it can deliver a very powerful form of justice, indeed. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I could never have imagined that a 19-year-old suicide bomber would actually teach me a valuable lesson. 
But he did. 
He taught me to never presume anything about anyone you don't know. 
On a Thursday morning in July 2005, the bomber and I, unknowingly, boarded the same train carriage at the same time, standing, apparently, just feet apart. 
I didn't see him. 
Actually, I didn't see anyone. 
You know not to look at anyone on the Tube, but I guess he saw me. 
I guess he looked at all of us, as his hand hovered over the detonation switch. 
I've often wondered: What was he thinking? 
Especially in those final seconds. 
I know it wasn't personal. 
He didn't set out to kill or maim me, Gill Hicks. 
I mean — he didn't know me. 
No. 
Instead, he gave me an unwarranted and an unwanted label. 
I had become the enemy. 
To him, I was the "" other, "" the "" them, "" as opposed to "" us. "" The label "" enemy "" allowed him to dehumanize us. 
It allowed him to push that button. 
And he wasn't selective. 
Twenty-six precious lives were taken in my carriage alone, and I was almost one of them. 
In the time it takes to draw a breath, we were plunged into a darkness so immense that it was almost tangible; what I imagine wading through tar might be like. 
We didn't know we were the enemy. 
We were just a bunch of commuters who, minutes earlier, had followed the Tube etiquette: no direct eye contact, no talking and absolutely no conversation. 
But in the lifting of the darkness, we were reaching out. 
We were helping each other. 
We were calling out our names, a little bit like a roll call, waiting for responses. 
"" I'm Gill. I'm here. 
I'm alive. 
OK. "" "" I'm Gill. 
Here. 
Alive. 
OK. "" I didn't know Alison. 
But I listened for her check-ins every few minutes. 
I didn't know Richard. 
But it mattered to me that he survived. 
All I shared with them was my first name. 
They didn't know that I was a head of a department at the Design Council. 
And here is my beloved briefcase, also rescued from that morning. 
They didn't know that I published architecture and design journals, that I was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, that I wore black — still do — that I smoked cigarillos. 
I don't smoke cigarillos anymore. 
I drank gin and I watched TED Talks, of course, never dreaming that one day I would be standing, balancing on prosthetic legs, giving a talk. 
I was a young Australian woman doing extraordinary things in London. 
And I wasn't ready for that all to end. 
I was so determined to survive that I used my scarf to tie tourniquets around the tops of my legs, and I just shut everything and everyone out, to focus, to listen to myself, to be guided by instinct alone. 
I lowered my breathing rate. 
I elevated my thighs. 
I held myself upright and I fought the urge to close my eyes. 
I held on for almost an hour, an hour to contemplate the whole of my life up until this point. 
Perhaps I should have done more. 
Perhaps I could have lived more, seen more. 
Maybe I should have gone running, dancing, taken up yoga. 
But my priority and my focus was always my work. 
I lived to work. 
Who I was on my business card mattered to me. 
But it didn't matter down in that tunnel. 
By the time I felt that first touch from one of my rescuers, I was unable to speak, unable to say even a small word, like "" Gill. "" I surrendered my body to them. 
I had done all I possibly could, and now I was in their hands. 
I understood just who and what humanity really is, when I first saw the ID tag that was given to me when I was admitted to hospital. 
And it read: "One unknown estimated female." One unknown estimated female. 
Those four words were my gift. What they told me very clearly 
was that my life was saved, purely because I was a human being. 
Difference of any kind made no difference to the extraordinary lengths that the rescuers were prepared to go to save my life, to save as many unknowns as they could, and putting their own lives at risk. 
To them, it didn't matter if I was rich or poor, the color of my skin, whether I was male or female, my sexual orientation, who I voted for, whether I was educated, if I had a faith or no faith at all. 
Nothing mattered other than I was a precious human life. 
I see myself as a living fact. 
I am proof that unconditional love and respect can not only save, but it can transform lives. 
Here is a wonderful image of one of my rescuers, Andy, and I taken just last year. 
Ten years after the event, and here we are, arm in arm. 
Throughout all the chaos, my hand was held tightly. 
My face was stroked gently. 
What did I feel? 
I felt loved. 
What's shielded me from hatred and wanting retribution, what's given me the courage to say: this ends with me is love. 
I was loved. 
I believe the potential for widespread positive change is absolutely enormous because I know what we're capable of. 
I know the brilliance of humanity. 
So this leaves me with some pretty big things to ponder and some questions for us all to consider: Is what unites us not far greater than what can ever divide? 
Does it have to take a tragedy or a disaster for us to feel deeply connected as one species, as human beings? 
And when will we embrace the wisdom of our era to rise above mere tolerance and move to an acceptance for all who are only a label until we know them? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It was less than a year after September 11, and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders, and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed. 
I had done some activism in college, so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing. 
I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive, but of course I have the absolute worst luck ever, and we were all arrested. 
Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence. 
My charges were dismissed, but a few weeks later, two FBI agents knocked on my door, and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups, they would put me on a domestic terrorist list. 
I'd love to tell you that I didn't flinch, but I was terrified, and when my fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out how this happened, how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI's number one domestic terrorism threat. 
A few years later, I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting, and I told lawmakers that, while everybody is talking about going green, some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines. 
They're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers' harpoons and the whales. 
These are everyday people, like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing. 
And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular, so in 1985, their opponents made up a new word, eco-terrorist, to shift how we view them. 
They just made it up. 
Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits. 
Now most people never even heard about this law, including members of Congress. 
Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House. 
The rest were outside at a new memorial. 
They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment. 
Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists: the vandals, the arsonists, the radicals. 
But right now, companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists. 
The FBI's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence, they're about public relations. 
The first of these ag-gag prosecutions, as they're called, was a young woman named Amy Meyer, and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street. 
But apparently, even exposing stuff like that is a threat. 
Through the Freedom of Information Act, I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one. 

Every day, I listen to harrowing stories of people fleeing for their lives, across dangerous borders and unfriendly seas. 
But there's one story that keeps me awake at night, and it's about Doaa. 
A Syrian refugee, 19 years old, she was living a grinding existence in Egypt working day wages. 
Her dad was constantly thinking of his thriving business back in Syria that had been blown to pieces by a bomb. 
And the community that once welcomed them there had become weary of them. 
Once an aspiring student thinking only of her future, now she was scared all the time. 
Bassem was also struggling in Egypt, and he said to Doaa, "" Let's go to Europe; seek asylum, safety. 
I will work, you can study — the promise of a new life. "" And he asked her father for her hand in marriage. 
But they knew to get to Europe they had to risk their lives, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea, putting their hands in smugglers', notorious for their cruelty. 
It was August that year, and already 2,000 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean, but Doaa knew of a friend who had made it all the way to Northern Europe, and she thought, "" Maybe we can, too. "" So she asked her parents if they could go, and after a painful discussion, they consented, and Bassem paid his entire life savings — 2,500 dollars each — to the smugglers. 
It was a Saturday morning when the call came, and they were taken by bus to a beach, hundreds of people on the beach. 
They were taken then by small boats onto an old fishing boat, 500 of them crammed onto that boat, 300 below, [200] above. 
There were Syrians, Palestinians, Africans, Muslims and Christians, 100 children, including Sandra — little Sandra, six years old — and Masa, 18 months. 
There were families on that boat, crammed together shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet. 
Doaa was sitting with her legs crammed up to her chest, Bassem holding her hand. 
Day two on the water, they were sick with worry and sick to their stomachs from the rough sea. 
Day three, Doaa had a premonition. 
I fear the boat is going to sink. "" And Bassem said to her, "" Please be patient. 
We will make it to Sweden, we will get married and we will have a future. "" Day four, the passengers were getting agitated. 
He said, "" In 16 hours we will reach the shores of Italy. "" They were weak and weary. 
Soon they saw a boat approach — a smaller boat, 10 men on board, who started shouting at them, hurling insults, throwing sticks, asking them to all disembark and get on this smaller, more unseaworthy boat. 
The parents were terrified for their children, and they collectively refused to disembark. 
So the boat sped away in anger, and a half an hour later, came back and started deliberately ramming a hole in the side of Doaa's boat, just below where she and Bassem were sitting. 
And she heard how they yelled, "Let the fish eat your flesh!" 
The 300 people below deck were doomed. 
Doaa was holding on to the side of the boat as it sank, and watched in horror as a small child was cut to pieces by the propeller. 
Bassem said to her, "" Please let go, or you'll be swept in and the propeller will kill you, too. "" And remember — she can't swim. 
But she let go and she started moving her arms and her legs, thinking, "" This is swimming. "" And miraculously, Bassem found a life ring. 
One man approached them with a small baby perched on his shoulder, nine months old — Malek. 
Back to those neighboring countries hosting so many. 
I have never loved anyone as much as I love you. "" And he released himself into the water, and Doaa watched as the love of her life drowned before her eyes. 
And it had become dark, but finally the searchlights found her and they extended a rope, astonished to see a woman clutching onto two babies. 
The doctors did everything in their medical power to save them, and the Greek nurses never left her side, holding her, hugging her, singing her words. 

I'm Dr. David Hanson, and I build robots with character. 
And by that, I mean that I develop robots that are characters, but also robots that will eventually come to empathize with you. 
So we're starting with a variety of technologies that have converged into these conversational character robots that can see faces, make eye contact with you, make a full range of facial expressions, understand speech and begin to model how you're feeling and who you are, and build a relationship with you. 
I developed a series of technologies that allowed the robots to make more realistic facial expressions than previously achieved, on lower power, which enabled the walking biped robots, the first androids. 
So, it's a full range of facial expressions simulating all the major muscles in the human face, running on very small batteries, extremely lightweight. 
The materials that allowed the battery-operated facial expressions is a material that we call Frubber, and it actually has three major innovations in the material that allow this to happen. 
One is hierarchical pores, and the other is a macro-molecular nanoscale porosity in the material. 
There he's starting to walk. 
This is at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. 
I built the head. They built the body. 
So the goal here is to achieve sentience in machines, and not just sentience, but empathy. 
We're working with the Machine Perception Laboratory at the U.C. San Diego. 
They have this really remarkable facial expression technology that recognizes facial expressions, what facial expressions you're making. 
It also recognizes where you're looking, your head orientation. 
We're emulating all the major facial expressions, and then controlling it with the software that we call the Character Engine. 
And here is a little bit of the technology that's involved in that. 
In fact, right now — plug it from here, and then plug it in here, and now let's see if it gets my facial expressions. 
Okay. So I'm smiling. 
(Laughter) Now I'm frowning. 
And this is really heavily backlit. 
Okay, here we go. 
Oh, it's so sad. 
Okay, so you smile, frowning. 
So his perception of your emotional states is very important for machines to effectively become empathetic. 
Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Right? 
Those machines have no place for empathy. 
And there is billions of dollars being spent on that. 
Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. 
So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future. 
So, we've made 20 robots in the last eight years, during the course of getting my Ph.D. 
And then I started Hanson Robotics, which has been developing these things for mass manufacturing. 
This is one of our robots that we showed at Wired NextFest a couple of years ago. 
And it sees multiple people in a scene, remembers where individual people are, and looks from person to person, remembering people. 
So, we're involving two things. 
One, the perception of people, and two, the natural interface, the natural form of the interface, so that it's more intuitive for you to interact with the robot. 
You start to believe that it's alive and aware. 
So one of my favorite projects was bringing all this stuff together in an artistic display of an android portrait of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote great works like, "" Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "" which was the basis of the movie "" Bladerunner. "" In these stories, robots often think that they're human, and they sort of come to life. 
So we put his writings, letters, his interviews, correspondences, into a huge database of thousands of pages, and then used some natural language processing to allow you to actually have a conversation with him. 
And it was kind of spooky, because he would say these things that just sounded like they really understood you. 
And this is one of the most exciting projects that we're developing, which is a little character that's a spokesbot for friendly artificial intelligence, friendly machine intelligence. 
And we're getting this mass-manufactured. 
We specked it out to actually be doable with a very, very low-cost bill of materials, so that it can become a childhood companion for kids. 
Interfacing with the Internet, it gets smarter over the years. 
As artificial intelligence evolves, so does his intelligence. 
Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. That's incredible. 
(Applause) 

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

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) 

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) 

When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. 
And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. 
And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands. 
And that day I knew that when I grew up, I was going to become a brain doctor, scientist, something or the other. 
Years later, when I finally grew up, my dream came true. 
And it was while I was doing my Ph.D. 
on the neurological causes of dyslexia in children that I encountered a startling fact that I'd like to share with you all today. 
It is estimated that one in six children, that's one in six children, suffer from some developmental disorder. 
This is a disorder that retards mental development in the child and causes permanent mental impairments. 
Which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder. 
But here's what really perplexed me. 
Despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain, most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior. 
But diagnosing a brain disorder without actually looking at the brain is analogous to treating a patient with a heart problem based on their physical symptoms, without even doing an ECG or a chest X-ray to look at the heart. 
It seemed so intuitive to me. 
To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately, it would be necessary to look at the brain directly. 
Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete, or even a misleading, picture of the child's problems. 
Yet, despite all the advances in medical technology, the diagnosis of brain disorders in one in six children still remained so limited. 
And then I came across a team at Harvard University that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it, instead of in brain research, towards diagnosing brain disorders in children. 
Their groundbreaking technology records the EEG, or the electrical activity of the brain, in real time, allowing us to watch the brain as it performs various functions and then detect even the slightest abnormality in any of these functions: vision, attention, language, audition. 
A program called Brain Electrical Activity Mapping then triangulates the source of that abnormality in the brain. 
And another program called Statistical Probability Mapping then performs mathematical calculations to determine whether any of these abnormalities are clinically significant, allowing us to provide a much more accurate neurological diagnosis of the child's symptoms. 
And so I became the head of neurophysiology for the clinical arm of this team, and we're finally able to use this technology towards actually helping children with brain disorders. 
And I'm happy to say that I'm now in the process of setting up this technology here in India. 
I'd like to tell you about one such child, whose story was also covered by ABC News. 
Seven-year-old Justin Senigar came to our clinic with this diagnosis of very severe autism. 
Like many autistic children, his mind was locked inside his body. 
There were moments when he would actually space out for seconds at a time. 
And the doctors told his parents he was never going to be able to communicate or interact socially, and he would probably never have too much language. 
When we used this groundbreaking EEG technology to actually look at Justin's brain, the results were startling. 
It turned out that Justin was almost certainly not autistic. 
He was suffering from brain seizures that were impossible to see with the naked eye, but that were actually causing symptoms that mimicked those of autism. 
After Justin was given anti-seizure medication, the change in him was amazing. 
Within a period of 60 days, his vocabulary went from two to three words to 300 words. 
And his communication and social interaction were improved so dramatically that he was enrolled into a regular school and even became a karate super champ. 
Research shows that 50 percent of children, almost 50 percent of children diagnosed with autism are actually suffering from hidden brain seizures. 
These are the faces of the children that I have tested with stories just like Justin. 
All these children came to our clinic with a diagnosis of autism, attention deficit disorder, mental retardation, language problems. 
Instead, our EEG scans revealed very specific problems hidden within their brains that couldn't possibly have been detected by their behavioral assessments. 
So these EEG scans enabled us to provide these children with a much more accurate neurological diagnosis and much more targeted treatment. 
For too long now, children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen. 
And for too long, these children and their parents have suffered undue frustration and desperation. 
But we are now in a new era of neuroscience, one in which we can finally look directly at brain function in real time with no risks and no side effects, non-invasively, and find the true source of so many disabilities in children. 
So if I could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder, then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved. 
One more mind will be unlocked. 
And one more child who has been misdiagnosed or even undiagnosed by the system will finally realize his or her true potential while there's still time for his or her brain to recover. 
And all this by simply watching the child's brainwaves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I want to start with a story, a la Seth Godin, from when I was 12 years old. 
My uncle Ed gave me a beautiful blue sweater — at least I thought it was beautiful. 
And it had fuzzy zebras walking across the stomach, and Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru were kind of right across the chest, that were also fuzzy. 
And I wore it whenever I could, thinking it was the most fabulous thing I owned. 
Until one day in ninth grade, when I was standing with a number of the football players. 
And my body had clearly changed, and Matt, who was undeniably my nemesis in high school, said in a booming voice that we no longer had to go far away to go on ski trips, but we could all ski on Mount Novogratz. 
(Laughter) And I was so humiliated and mortified that I immediately ran home to my mother and chastised her for ever letting me wear the hideous sweater. 
We drove to the Goodwill and we threw the sweater away somewhat ceremoniously, my idea being that I would never have to think about the sweater nor see it ever again. 
Fast forward — 11 years later, I'm a 25-year-old kid. 
I'm working in Kigali, Rwanda, jogging through the steep slopes, when I see, 10 feet in front of me, a little boy — 11 years old — running toward me, wearing my sweater. 
And I'm thinking, no, this is not possible. 
But so, curious, I run up to the child — of course scaring the living bejesus out of him — grab him by the collar, turn it over, and there is my name written on the collar of this sweater. 
I tell that story, because it has served and continues to serve as a metaphor to me about the level of connectedness that we all have on this Earth. 
We so often don't realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know. 
I also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be. 
That this traveled into the Goodwill in Virginia, and moved its way into the larger industry, which at that point was giving millions of tons of secondhand clothing to Africa and Asia. 
Which was a very good thing, providing low cost clothing. 
And at the same time, certainly in Rwanda, it destroyed the local retailing industry. 
Not to say that it shouldn't have, but that we have to get better at answering the questions that need to be considered when we think about consequences and responses. 
So, I'm going to stick in Rwanda, circa 1985, 1986, where I was doing two things. 
I had started a bakery with 20 unwed mothers. 
We were called the "" Bad News Bears, "" and our notion was we were going to corner the snack food business in Kigali, which was not hard because there were no snacks before us. 
And because we had a good business model, we actually did it, and I watched these women transform on a micro-level. 
But at the same time, I started a micro-finance bank, and tomorrow Iqbal Quadir is going to talk about Grameen, which is the grandfather of all micro-finance banks, which now is a worldwide movement — you talk about a meme — but then it was quite new, especially in an economy that was moving from barter into trade. 
We got a lot of things right. 
We focused on a business model; we insisted on skin in the game. 
The women made their own decisions at the end of the day as to how they would use this access to credit to build their little businesses, earn more income so they could take care of their families better. 
What we didn't understand, what was happening all around us, with the confluence of fear, ethnic strife and certainly an aid game, if you will, that was playing into this invisible but certainly palpable movement inside Rwanda, that at that time, 30 percent of the budget was all foreign aid. 
The genocide happened in 1994, seven years after these women all worked together to build this dream. 
And the good news was that the institution, the banking institution, lasted. 
In fact, it became the largest rehabilitation lender in the country. 
The bakery was completely wiped out, but the lessons for me were that accountability counts — got to build things with people on the ground, using business models where, as Steven Levitt would say, the incentives matter. 
Understand, however complex we may be, incentives matter. 
So when Chris raised to me how wonderful everything that was happening in the world, that we were seeing a shift in zeitgeist, on the one hand I absolutely agree with him, and I was so thrilled to see what happened with the G8 — that the world, because of people like Tony Blair and Bono and Bob Geldof — the world is talking about global poverty; the world is talking about Africa in ways I have never seen in my life. 
It's thrilling. 
And at the same time, what keeps me up at night is a fear that we'll look at the victories of the G8 — 50 billion dollars in increased aid to Africa, 40 billion in reduced debt — as the victory, as more than chapter one, as our moral absolution. 
And in fact, what we need to do is see that as chapter one, celebrate it, close it, and recognize that we need a chapter two that is all about execution, all about the how-to. 
And if you remember one thing from what I want to talk about today, it's that the only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. 
If we do that, we really can make poverty history. 
And it was that — that whole philosophy — that encouraged me to start my current endeavor called "" Acumen Fund, "" which is trying to build some mini-blueprints for how we might do that in water, health and housing in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt. 
And I want to talk a little bit about that, and some of the examples, so you can see what it is that we're doing. 
But before I do this — and this is another one of my pet peeves — I want to talk a little bit about who the poor are. 
Because we too often talk about them as these strong, huge masses of people yearning to be free, when in fact, it's quite an amazing story. 
On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day. 
That's who we talk about when we think about "" the poor. "" If you aggregate it, it's the third largest economy on Earth, and yet most of these people go invisible. 
Where we typically work, there's people making between one and three dollars a day. 
Who are these people? 
They are farmers and factory workers. 
They work in government offices. They're drivers. 
They are domestics. 
They typically pay for critical goods and services like water, like healthcare, like housing, and they pay 30 to 40 times what their middleclass counterparts pay — certainly where we work in Karachi and Nairobi. 
The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity. 
So, two examples. 
One is in India, where there are 240 million farmers, most of whom make less than two dollars a day. 
Where we work in Aurangabad, the land is extraordinarily parched. 
You see people on average making 60 cents to a dollar. 
This guy in pink is a social entrepreneur named Ami Tabar. 
What he did was see what was happening in Israel, larger approaches, and figure out how to do a drip irrigation, which is a way of bringing water directly to the plant stock. 
But previously it's only been created for large-scale farms, so Ami Tabar took this and modularized it down to an eighth of an acre. 
A couple of principles: build small. 
Make it infinitely expandable and affordable to the poor. 
This family, Sarita and her husband, bought a 15-dollar unit when they were living in a — literally a three-walled lean-to with a corrugated iron roof. 
After one harvest, they had increased their income enough to buy a second system to do their full quarter-acre. 
A couple of years later, I meet them. 
They now make four dollars a day, which is pretty much middle class for India, and they showed me the concrete foundation they had just laid to build their house. 
And I swear, you could see the future in that woman's eyes. 
Something I truly believe. 
You can't talk about poverty today without talking about malaria bed nets, and I again give Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard huge kudos for bringing to the world this notion of his rage — for five dollars you can save a life. 
Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 
300 to 500 million cases are reported. 
It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. 
Five dollars can save a life. 
We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars — why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people? 
The question, though, is not "" Why can't we? "" The question is how can we help Africans do this for themselves? 
A lot of hurdles. 
One: production is too low. Two: price is too high. 
Three: this is a good road in — right near where our factory is located. 
Distribution is a nightmare, but not impossible. 
We started by making a 350,000-dollar loan to the largest traditional bed net manufacturer in Africa so that they could transfer technology from Japan and build these long-lasting, five-year nets. 
Here are just some pictures of the factory. 
Today, three years later, the company has employed another thousand women. 
It contributes about 600,000 dollars in wages to the economy of Tanzania. 
It's the largest company in Tanzania. 
The throughput rate right now is 1.5 million nets, three million by the end of the year. 
We hope to have seven million at the end of next year. 
So the production side is working. 
On the distribution side, though, as a world, we have a lot of work to do. 
Right now, 95 percent of these nets are being bought by the U.N., and then given primarily to people around Africa. 
We're looking at building on some of the most precious resources of Africa: people. 
Their women. 
And so I want you to meet Jacqueline, my namesake, 21 years old. 
If she were born anywhere else but Tanzania, I'm telling you, she could run Wall Street. 
She runs two of the lines, and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house. 
She makes about two dollars a day, is creating an education fund, and told me she is not marrying nor having children until these things are completed. 
And so, when I told her about our idea — that maybe we could take a Tupperware model from the United States, and find a way for the women themselves to go out and sell these nets to others — she quickly started calculating what she herself could make and signed up. 
We took a lesson from IDEO, one of our favorite companies, and quickly did a prototyping on this, and took Jacqueline into the area where she lives. 
She brought 10 of the women with whom she interacts together to see if she could sell these nets, five dollars apiece, despite the fact that people say nobody will buy one, and we learned a lot about how you sell things. 
Not coming in with our own notions, because she didn't even talk about malaria until the very end. 
First, she talked about comfort, status, beauty. 
These nets, she said, you put them on the floor, bugs leave your house. 
Children can sleep through the night; the house looks beautiful; you hang them in the window. 
And we've started making curtains, and not only is it beautiful, but people can see status — that you care about your children. 
Only then did she talk about saving your children's lives. 
A lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how we sell goods and services to the poor. 
I want to end just by saying that there's enormous opportunity to make poverty history. 
To do it right, we have to build business models that matter, that are scaleable and that work with Africans, Indians, people all over the developing world who fit in this category, to do it themselves. 
Because at the end of the day, it's about engagement. 
It's about understanding that people really don't want handouts, that they want to make their own decisions; they want to solve their own problems; and that by engaging with them, not only do we create much more dignity for them, but for us as well. 
And so I urge all of you to think next time as to how to engage with this notion and this opportunity that we all have — to make poverty history — by really becoming part of the process and moving away from an us-and-them world, and realizing that it's about all of us, and the kind of world that we, together, want to live in and share. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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. 
And we know why kids drop out. 
We know why kids don't learn. 
It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... 
But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. 
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. 
Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. 
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. 
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. 
He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. 
You ever thought about that? 
(Laughter) I taught a lesson once on ratios. 
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. 
How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? 
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 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. 
(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. 
(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 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? 
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. 
We're born to make a difference. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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. 

Hi. 
I want to talk about understanding, and the nature of understanding, and what the essence of understanding is, because understanding is something we aim for, everyone. 
We want to understand things. 
My claim is that understanding has to do with the ability to change your perspective. 
If you don't have that, you don't have understanding. 
So that is my claim. 
And I want to focus on mathematics. 
Many of us think of mathematics as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percent, geometry, algebra — all that stuff. 
But actually, I want to talk about the essence of mathematics as well. 
And my claim is that mathematics has to do with patterns. 
Behind me, you see a beautiful pattern, and this pattern actually emerges just from drawing circles in a very particular way. 
So my day-to-day definition of mathematics that I use every day is the following: First of all, it's about finding patterns. 
And by "" pattern, "" I mean a connection, a structure, some regularity, some rules that govern what we see. 
Second of all, I think it is about representing these patterns with a language. 
We make up language if we don't have it, and in mathematics, this is essential. 
It's also about making assumptions and playing around with these assumptions and just seeing what happens. 
We're going to do that very soon. 
And finally, it's about doing cool stuff. 
Mathematics enables us to do so many things. 
So let's have a look at these patterns. 
If you want to tie a tie knot, there are patterns. 
Tie knots have names. 
And you can also do the mathematics of tie knots. 
This is a left-out, right-in, center-out and tie. 
This is a left-in, right-out, left-in, center-out and tie. 
This is a language we made up for the patterns of tie knots, and a half-Windsor is all that. 
This is a mathematics book about tying shoelaces at the university level, because there are patterns in shoelaces. 
You can do it in so many different ways. 
We can analyze it. 
We can make up languages for it. 
And representations are all over mathematics. 
This is Leibniz's notation from 1675. 
He invented a language for patterns in nature. 
When we throw something up in the air, it falls down. 
Why? 
We're not sure, but we can represent this with mathematics in a pattern. 
This is also a pattern. 
This is also an invented language. 
Can you guess for what? 
It is actually a notation system for dancing, for tap dancing. 
That enables him as a choreographer to do cool stuff, to do new things, because he has represented it. 
I want you to think about how amazing representing something actually is. 
Here it says the word "" mathematics. "" But actually, they're just dots, right? 
So how in the world can these dots represent the word? 
Well, they do. 
They represent the word "" mathematics, "" and these symbols also represent that word and this we can listen to. 
It sounds like this. 
(Beeps) Somehow these sounds represent the word and the concept. 
How does this happen? 
There's something amazing going on about representing stuff. 
So I want to talk about that magic that happens when we actually represent something. 
Here you see just lines with different widths. 
They stand for numbers for a particular book. 
And I can actually recommend this book, it's a very nice book. 
(Laughter) Just trust me. 
OK, so let's just do an experiment, just to play around with some straight lines. 
This is a straight line. 
Let's make another one. 
So every time we move, we move one down and one across, and we draw a new straight line, right? 
We do this over and over and over, and we look for patterns. 
So this pattern emerges, and it's a rather nice pattern. 
It looks like a curve, right? 
Just from drawing simple, straight lines. 
Now I can change my perspective a little bit. I can rotate it. 
Have a look at the curve. 
What does it look like? 
Is it a part of a circle? 
It's actually not a part of a circle. 
So I have to continue my investigation and look for the true pattern. 
Perhaps if I copy it and make some art? 
Well, no. 
Perhaps I should extend the lines like this, and look for the pattern there. 
Let's make more lines. 
We do this. 
And then let's zoom out and change our perspective again. 
Then we can actually see that what started out as just straight lines is actually a curve called a parabola. 
This is represented by a simple equation, and it's a beautiful pattern. 
So this is the stuff that we do. 
We find patterns, and we represent them. 
And I think this is a nice day-to-day definition. 
But today I want to go a little bit deeper, and think about what the nature of this is. 
What makes it possible? 
There's one thing that's a little bit deeper, and that has to do with the ability to change your perspective. 
And I claim that when you change your perspective, and if you take another point of view, you learn something new about what you are watching or looking at or hearing. 
And I think this is a really important thing that we do all the time. 
So let's just look at this simple equation, x + x = 2 • x. 
This is a very nice pattern, and it's true, because 5 + 5 = 2 • 5, etc. 
We've seen this over and over, and we represent it like this. 
But think about it: this is an equation. 
It says that something is equal to something else, and that's two different perspectives. 
One perspective is, it's a sum. 
It's something you plus together. 
On the other hand, it's a multiplication, and those are two different perspectives. 
And I would go as far as to say that every equation is like this, every mathematical equation where you use that equality sign is actually a metaphor. 
It's an analogy between two things. 
You're just viewing something and taking two different points of view, and you're expressing that in a language. 
Have a look at this equation. 
This is one of the most beautiful equations. 
It simply says that, well, two things, they're both -1. 
This thing on the left-hand side is -1, and the other one is. 
And that, I think, is one of the essential parts of mathematics — you take different points of view. 
So let's just play around. 
Let's take a number. 
We know four-thirds. We know what four-thirds is. 
It's 1.333, but we have to have those three dots, otherwise it's not exactly four-thirds. 
But this is only in base 10. 
You know, the number system, we use 10 digits. 
If we change that around and only use two digits, that's called the binary system. 
It's written like this. 
The number is four-thirds. 
We can write it like this, and we can change the base, change the number of digits, and we can write it differently. 
So these are all representations of the same number. 
We can even write it simply, like 1.3 or 1.6. 
It all depends on how many digits you have. 
Or perhaps we just simplify and write it like this. 
I like this one, because this says four divided by three. 
And this number expresses a relation between two numbers. 
You have four on the one hand and three on the other. 
And you can visualize this in many ways. 
What I'm doing now is viewing that number from different perspectives. 
I'm playing around. 
I'm playing around with how we view something, and I'm doing it very deliberately. 
We can take a grid. 
If it's four across and three up, this line equals five, always. 
It has to be like this. This is a beautiful pattern. 
Four and three and five. 
And this rectangle, which is 4 x 3, you've seen a lot of times. 
This is your average computer screen. 
800 x 600 or 1,600 x 1,200 is a television or a computer screen. 
So these are all nice representations, but I want to go a little bit further and just play more with this number. 
Here you see two circles. I'm going to rotate them like this. 
Observe the upper-left one. 
It goes a little bit faster, right? 
You can see this. 
It actually goes exactly four-thirds as fast. 
That means that when it goes around four times, the other one goes around three times. 
Now let's make two lines, and draw this dot where the lines meet. 
We get this dot dancing around. 
(Laughter) And this dot comes from that number. 
Right? Now we should trace it. 
Let's trace it and see what happens. 
This is what mathematics is all about. 
It's about seeing what happens. 
And this emerges from four-thirds. 
I like to say that this is the image of four-thirds. 
It's much nicer — (Cheers) Thank you! 
(Applause) This is not new. 
This has been known for a long time, but — (Laughter) But this is four-thirds. 
Let's do another experiment. 
Let's now take a sound, this sound: (Beep) This is a perfect A, 440Hz. 
Let's multiply it by two. 
We get this sound. (Beep) When we play them together, it sounds like this. 
This is an octave, right? 
We can do this game. We can play a sound, play the same A. 
We can multiply it by three-halves. 
(Beep) This is what we call a perfect fifth. (Beep) 
They sound really nice together. 
Let's multiply this sound by four-thirds. (Beep) What happens? 
You get this sound. (Beep) This is the perfect fourth. 
If the first one is an A, this is a D. 
They sound like this together. (Beeps) This is the sound of four-thirds. 
What I'm doing now, I'm changing my perspective. 
I'm just viewing a number from another perspective. 
I can even do this with rhythms, right? 
I can take a rhythm and play three beats at one time (Drumbeats) in a period of time, and I can play another sound four times in that same space. 
(Clanking sounds) Sounds kind of boring, but listen to them together. 
(Drumbeats and clanking sounds) (Laughter) Hey! So. (Laughter) 
I can even make a little hi-hat. 
(Drumbeats and cymbals) Can you hear this? 
So, this is the sound of four-thirds. 
Again, this is as a rhythm. 
(Drumbeats and cowbell) And I can keep doing this and play games with this number. 
Four-thirds is a really great number. I love four-thirds! 
(Laughter) Truly — it's an undervalued number. 
So if you take a sphere and look at the volume of the sphere, it's actually four-thirds of some particular cylinder. 
So four-thirds is in the sphere. It's the volume of the sphere. 
OK, so why am I doing all this? 
Well, I want to talk about what it means to understand something and what we mean by understanding something. 
That's my aim here. 
And my claim is that you understand something if you have the ability to view it from different perspectives. 
Let's look at this letter. It's a beautiful R, right? 
How do you know that? 
Well, as a matter of fact, you've seen a bunch of R's, and you've generalized and abstracted all of these and found a pattern. 
So you know that this is an R. 
So what I'm aiming for here is saying something about how understanding and changing your perspective are linked. 
And I'm a teacher and a lecturer, and I can actually use this to teach something, because when I give someone else another story, a metaphor, an analogy, if I tell a story from a different point of view, I enable understanding. 
I make understanding possible, because you have to generalize over everything you see and hear, and if I give you another perspective, that will become easier for you. 
Let's do a simple example again. 
This is four and three. This is four triangles. 
So this is also four-thirds, in a way. 
Let's just join them together. 
Now we're going to play a game; we're going to fold it up into a three-dimensional structure. 
I love this. 
This is a square pyramid. 
And let's just take two of them and put them together. 
So this is what is called an octahedron. 
It's one of the five platonic solids. 
Now we can quite literally change our perspective, because we can rotate it around all of the axes and view it from different perspectives. 
And I can change the axis, and then I can view it from another point of view, but it's the same thing, but it looks a little different. 
I can do it even one more time. 
Every time I do this, something else appears, so I'm actually learning more about the object when I change my perspective. 
I can use this as a tool for creating understanding. 
I can take two of these and put them together like this and see what happens. 
And it looks a little bit like the octahedron. 
Have a look at it if I spin it around like this. 
What happens? 
Well, if you take two of these, join them together and spin it around, there's your octahedron again, a beautiful structure. 
If you lay it out flat on the floor, this is the octahedron. 
This is the graph structure of an octahedron. 
And I can continue doing this. 
You can draw three great circles around the octahedron, and you rotate around, so actually three great circles is related to the octahedron. 
And if I take a bicycle pump and just pump it up, you can see that this is also a little bit like the octahedron. 
Do you see what I'm doing here? 
I am changing the perspective every time. 
So let's now take a step back — and that's actually a metaphor, stepping back — and have a look at what we're doing. 
I'm playing around with metaphors. 
I'm playing around with perspectives and analogies. 
I'm telling one story in different ways. 
I'm telling stories. 
I'm making a narrative; I'm making several narratives. 
And I think all of these things make understanding possible. 
I think this actually is the essence of understanding something. 
I truly believe this. 
So this thing about changing your perspective — it's absolutely fundamental for humans. 
Let's play around with the Earth. 
Let's zoom into the ocean, have a look at the ocean. 
We can do this with anything. 
We can take the ocean and view it up close. 
We can look at the waves. 
We can go to the beach. 
We can view the ocean from another perspective. 
Every time we do this, we learn a little bit more about the ocean. 
If we go to the shore, we can kind of smell it, right? 
We can hear the sound of the waves. 
We can feel salt on our tongues. 
So all of these are different perspectives. 
And this is the best one. 
We can go into the water. 
We can see the water from the inside. 
And you know what? 
This is absolutely essential in mathematics and computer science. 
If you're able to view a structure from the inside, then you really learn something about it. 
That's somehow the essence of something. 
So when we do this, and we've taken this journey into the ocean, we use our imagination. 
And I think this is one level deeper, and it's actually a requirement for changing your perspective. 
We can do a little game. 
You can imagine that you're sitting there. 
You can imagine that you're up here, and that you're sitting here. 
You can view yourselves from the outside. 
That's really a strange thing. 
You're changing your perspective. 
You're using your imagination, and you're viewing yourself from the outside. 
That requires imagination. 
Mathematics and computer science are the most imaginative art forms ever. 
And this thing about changing perspectives should sound a little bit familiar to you, because we do it every day. 
And then it's called empathy. 
When I view the world from your perspective, I have empathy with you. 
If I really, truly understand what the world looks like from your perspective, I am empathetic. 
That requires imagination. 
And that is how we obtain understanding. 
And this is all over mathematics and this is all over computer science, and there's a really deep connection between empathy and these sciences. 
So my conclusion is the following: understanding something really deeply has to do with the ability to change your perspective. 
So my advice to you is: try to change your perspective. 
You can study mathematics. 
It's a wonderful way to train your brain. 
Changing your perspective makes your mind more flexible. 
It makes you open to new things, and it makes you able to understand things. 
And to use yet another metaphor: have a mind like water. 
That's nice. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation, the third-largest organized crime, a $10 billion industry. 
I'm talking to you about modern-day slavery. 
I'd like to tell you the story of these three children, Pranitha, Shaheen and Anjali. 
Pranitha's mother was a woman in prostitution, a prostituted person. 
She got infected with HIV, and towards the end of her life, when she was in the final stages of AIDS, she could not prostitute, so she sold four-year-old Pranitha to a broker. 
By the time we got the information, we reached there, Pranitha was already raped by three men. 
Shaheen's background I don't even know. 
We found her in a railway track, raped by many, many men, I don't know many. 
But the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body. 
And when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body. 
We still don't know who her parents are, who she is. 
All that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally. 
Anjali's father, a drunkard, sold his child for pornography. 
You're seeing here images of three years, four-year-olds, and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. 
In this country, and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. 
But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. 
They are sold in the name of adoption. 
They are sold in the name of organ trade. 
They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything. 
I work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation. 
And I tell you stories from there. 
My own journey to work with these children started as a teenager. 
I was 15 when I was gang-raped by eight men. 
I don't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. 
Yes, there were eight men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn't go into my consciousness. 
I never felt like a victim, then or now. 
But what lingered from then till now — I am 40 today — is this huge outrageous anger. 
Two years, I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated, because I was a victim. 
And that's what we do to all traffic survivors. 
We, as a society, we have PhDs in victimizing a victim. 
Right from the age of 15, when I started looking around me, I started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices, but have absolutely no respite, because we don't allow them to come in. 
Where does their journey begin? 
Most of them come from very optionless families, not just poor. 
You have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked. 
I had this I.S. officer's daughter, who is 14 years old, studying in ninth standard, who was raped chatting with one individual, and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine, who was trafficked. 
I have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families, and children from well-to-do families, who are getting trafficked. 
These people are deceived, forced. 
99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution. 
Some pay the price for it. 
They're killed; we don't even hear about them. 
They are voiceless, [unclear], nameless people. 
But the rest, who succumb into it, go through everyday torture. 
Because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends, or who want to have a family with you. 
These are men who buy you for an hour, for a day, and use you, throw you. 
Each of the girls that I have rescued — I have rescued more than 3,200 girls — each of them tell me one story in common... 
(Applause) one story about one man, at least, putting chili powder in her vagina, one man taking a cigarette and burning her, one man whipping her. 
We are living among those men: they're our brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, all around us. 
And we are silent about them. 
We think it is easy money. 
We think it is shortcut. 
We think the person likes to do what she's doing. 
But the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, you name it, substance abuse, drugs, everything under the sun. 
And one day she gives up on you and me, because we have no options for her. 
And therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation. 
She believes, "" Yes, this is it, this is what my destiny is about. "" And this is normal, to get raped by 100 men a day. 
And it's abnormal to live in a shelter. 
It's abnormal to get rehabilitated. 
It's in that context that I work. 
It's in that context that I rescue children. 
I've rescued children as young as three years, and I've rescued women as old as 40 years. 
When I rescued them, one of the biggest challenges I had was where do I begin. 
Because I had lots of them who were already HIV infected. 
One third of the people I rescue are HIV positive. 
And therefore my challenge was to understand how can I get out the power from this pain. 
And for me, I was my greatest experience. 
Understanding my own self, understanding my own pain, my own isolation, was my greatest teacher. 
Because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential. 
You see a girl here who is trained as a welder. 
She works for a very big company, a workshop in Hyderabad, making furnitures. 
She earns around 12,000 rupees. 
She is an illiterate girl, trained, skilled as a welder. 
Why welding and why not computers? 
We felt, one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage. 
They did not have any pardas inside their body, hijabs inside themselves; they've crossed the barrier of it. 
And therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world, very easily, and not feel very shy about it. 
We have trained girls as carpenters, as masons, as security guards, as cab drivers. 
And each one of them are excelling in their chosen field, gaining confidence, restoring dignity, and building hopes in their own lives. 
These girls are also working in big construction companies like Ram-ki construction, as masons, full-time masons. 
What has been my challenge? 
My challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up. 
I've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life. 
I can't hear from my right ear. 
I've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue. 
My biggest challenge is society. 
It's you and me. 
My biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own. 
A very supportive friend of mine, a well-wisher of mine, used to give me every month, 2,000 rupees for vegetables. 
When her mother fell sick she said, "" Sunitha, you have so much of contacts. 
Can you get somebody in my house to work, so that she can look after my mother? "" And there is a long pause. 
And then she says, "" Not one of our girls. "" It's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, in this fantastic A-C hall. 
It's very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. 
But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. 
It's not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. 
It's not nice for our children to study with their children. 
There it ends. 
That's my biggest challenge. 
If I'm here today, I'm here not only as Sunitha Krishnan. 
I'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking. 
They need your compassion. 
They need your empathy. 
They need, much more than anything else, your acceptance. 
Many times when I talk to people, I keep telling them one thing: don't tell me hundred ways how you cannot respond to this problem. 
Can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem? 
And that's what I'm here for, asking for your support, demanding for your support, requesting for your support. 
Can you break your culture of silence? 
Can you speak to at least two persons about this story? 
Tell them this story. Convince them to tell the story to another two persons. 
I'm not asking you all to become Mahatma Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings, or Medha Patkars, or something like that. 
I'm asking you, in your limited world, can you open your minds? Can you open your hearts? 
Can you just encompass these people too? 
Because they are also a part of us. 
They are also part of this world. 
I'm asking you, for these children, whose faces you see, they're no more. 
They died of AIDS last year. 
I'm asking you to help them, accept as human beings — not as philanthropy, not as charity, but as human beings who deserve all our support. 
I'm asking you this because no child, no human being, deserves what these children have gone through. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Climate change is already a heavy topic, and it's getting heavier because we're understanding that we need to do more than we are. 
We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions. 
That's, to put it mildly, not what's on the table now. 
And it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face. 
And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us, we tend to seek simple answers. 
And I think this is what we've done with climate change. 
We look at where the emissions are coming from — they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth, and we say, okay, well the problem is that they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning, so therefore, the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. 
And while, of course, we do need clean energy, I would put to you that it's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it. 
And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing. 
That shouldn't be news to any of us. 
However, it's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization. 
By mid-century, we're going to have about eight billion — perhaps more — people living in cities or within a day's travel of one. 
We will be an overwhelmingly urban species. 
In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for eight billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global North live in today, we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy. 
It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy. 
So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution. 
The solution, in fact, may be closer to hand than we think, because all of those cities we're building are opportunities. 
Every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants. 
We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing — I choose to turn this light switch on — but really, enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in. 
I won't show you very many graphs today, but if I can just focus on this one for a moment, it really tells us a lot of what we need to know — which is, quite simply, that if you look, for example, at transportation, a major category of climate emissions, there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air. 
And the correlation, of course, is that denser places tend to have lower emissions — which isn't really all that difficult to figure out, if you think about it. 
Basically, we substitute, in our lives, access to the things we want. 
We go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place. 
And we're basically using mobility to get the access we need. 
But when we live in a denser community, suddenly what we find, of course, is that the things we need are close by. 
And since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place, suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable. 
And it is possible, of course, to increase the density of the communities around us. 
Some places are doing this with new eco districts, developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods, which is nice work if you can get it, but most of the time, what we're talking about is, in fact, reweaving the urban fabric that we already have. 
So we're talking about things like infill development: really sharp little changes to where we have buildings, where we're developing. 
Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there. 
Increasingly, we're realizing that we don't even need to densify an entire city. 
What we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we don't drive as much and so on. 
And that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot. 
So you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city. 
And we find that when we do that, we can, in fact, have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results. 
Now we may find that there are places that are really, really dense and still hold onto their cars, but the reality is that, by and large, what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect, where people simply stop driving as much, and increasingly, more and more people, if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home, give up their cars altogether. 
And this is a huge, huge energy savings, because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars. 
We have the manufacture of the car, the disposal of the car, all of the parking and freeways and so on. 
When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn't use any of them really, you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent. 
And people are embracing this. 
All around the world, we're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life. 
People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood. 
And when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we're starting to see, what you find is, in fact, even more access suffused into spaces. 
Some of it's transportation access. 
This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case, how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation. 
Some of it is about walking. It's not all perfect yet. 
This is Google Walking Maps. 
I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway, and it told me to go via Guernsey. 
It did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths, though. 
(Laughter) But the technologies are getting better, and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation. 
And as we just heard earlier, of course, we're also learning how to put information on dumb objects. 
Things that don't have any wiring in them at all, we're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation. 
Part of what we're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption, which is to get a bunch of stuff, is not, in fact, how we really live best in dense environments. 
What we're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things. 
My favorite example is a drill. Who here owns a drill, a home power drill? 
Okay. I do too. 
The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime, depending on who you ask. 
And so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time, use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit. 
Our cities, I would put to you, are stockpiles of these surplus capacities. 
And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities — such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit — what we probably will find is that, in fact, turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them, is a far smarter way to go. 
And in fact, even space itself is turning into a service. 
We're finding that people can share the same spaces, do stuff with vacant space. 
Buildings are becoming bundles of services. 
So we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on — like heating, cooling etc. — and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on. 
So we light our buildings with daylight. 
We cool them with breezes. We heat them with sunshine. 
In fact, when we use all these things, what we've found is that, in some cases, energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent. 
Which brings on another threshold effect I like to call furnace dumping, which is, quite simply, if you have a building that doesn't need to be heated with a furnace, you save a whole bunch of money up front. 
These things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives. 
Now when we look at being able to slash our product use, slash our transportation use, slash our building energy use, all of that is great, but it still leaves something behind. 
And if we're going to really, truly become sustainable cities, we need to think a little differently. 
This is one way to do it. 
This is Vancouver's propaganda about how green a city they are. 
And certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery. 
So we have visions like this. 
We have visions like this. We have visions like this. 
Now all of these are fine projects, but they really have missed an essential point, which is it's not about the leaves above, it's about the systems below. 
Do they, for instance, capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use? 
Water is energy intensive. 
Do they, perhaps, include green infrastructure, so that we can take runoff and water that's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees? 
Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by, for example, connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration? 
Do they allow for pollination, pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities? 
Do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth, and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon — take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities? 
I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible, they're being done right now, and that it's a darn good thing. 
Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, "" by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP. "" And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people, living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast. 
But if we think differently, I think that, in fact, we can have cities that are not only zero emissions, but have unlimited possibilities as well. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with. 
They're all the perfect size, and they don't have an ounce of fat. 
Did I mention they're gorgeous? 
And they're scientific models? (Laughs) As you might have guessed, I'm a tissue engineer, and this is a video of some of the beating heart that I've engineered in the lab. 
And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body. 
But what I'm going to tell you about today is how these tissues make awesome models. 
Well, let's think about the drug screening process for a moment. 
You go from drug formulation, lab testing, animal testing, and then clinical trials, which you might call human testing, before the drugs get to market. 
It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, and sometimes, even when a drug hits the market, it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people. 
And the later it fails, the worse the consequences. 
It all boils down to two issues. One, humans are not rats, and two, despite our incredible similarities to one another, actually those tiny differences between you and I have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us. 
So what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity? 
Let's see how we can do it with tissue engineering. 
One of the key technologies that's really important is what's called induced pluripotent stem cells. 
They were developed in Japan pretty recently. 
Okay, induced pluripotent stem cells. 
They're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy. 
We induce cells, okay, say, skin cells, by adding a few genes to them, culturing them, and then harvesting them. 
So they're skin cells that can be tricked, kind of like cellular amnesia, into an embryonic state. 
So without the controversy, that's cool thing number one. 
Cool thing number two, you can grow any type of tissue out of them: brain, heart, liver, you get the picture, but out of your cells. 
So we can make a model of your heart, your brain on a chip. 
Generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece, and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery. 
And this is a schematic of a bioreactor we're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular, scalable way. 
Going forward, imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue. 
It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip. 
But another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells, let's say, from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them, we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab. 
Here's an example from Kevin Eggan's lab at Harvard. 
He generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have Lou Gehrig's Disease, and he differentiated them into neurons, and what's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease. 
So with disease models like these, we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before, and maybe discover drugs even faster. 
This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa. 
This is a degeneration of the retina. 
It's a disease that runs in my family, and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure. 
So some people think that these models sound well and good, but ask, "" Well, are these really as good as the rat? "" The rat is an entire organism, after all, with interacting networks of organs. 
A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver, and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat. 
Don't you miss all that with these tissue-engineered models? 
Well, this is another trend in the field. 
By combining tissue engineering techniques with microfluidics, the field is actually evolving towards just that, a model of the entire ecosystem of the body, complete with multiple organ systems to be able to test how a drug you might take for your blood pressure might affect your liver or an antidepressant might affect your heart. 
These systems are really hard to build, but we're just starting to be able to get there, and so, watch out. 
But that's not even all of it, because once a drug is approved, tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments. 
This is an example that you might care about someday, and I hope you never do, because imagine if you ever get that call that gives you that bad news that you might have cancer. 
Wouldn't you rather test to see if those cancer drugs you're going to take are going to work on your cancer? 
This is an example from Karen Burg's lab, where they're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments. 
And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next, and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies. 
And so thinking about the models that we've just discussed, you can see, going forward, that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path: disease models making for better drug formulations, massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials, and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all. 
Essentially, we're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body. 
Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively. 
It gives new meaning to models against animal testing, doesn't it? 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris, and the phone rang and I heard, "" Hey, JR, you won the TED Prize 2011. 
You have to make a wish to save the world. "" I was lost. 
I mean, I can't save the world. Nobody can. 
The world is fucked up. 
Come on, you have dictators ruling the world, population is growing by millions, there's no more fish in the sea, the North Pole is melting and as the last TED Prize winner said, we're all becoming fat. 
(Laughter) Except maybe French people. 
Whatever. 
So I called back and I told her, "" Look, Amy, tell the TED guys I just won't show up. 
I can't do anything to save the world. "" She said, "" Hey, JR, your wish is not to save the world, but to change the world. "" "Oh, all right." 
(Laughter) "That's cool." 
I mean, technology, politics, business do change the world — not always in a good way, but they do. 
What about art? 
Could art change the world? 
I started when I was 15 years old. 
And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world. 
I was doing graffiti — writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. 
I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. 
Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. 
It was like leaving our mark on society, to say, "" I was here, "" on the top of a building. 
So when I found a cheap camera on the subway, I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies — really small photos just that size. 
That's how, at 17 years old, I started pasting them. 
And I did my first "" expo de rue, "" which means sidewalk gallery. 
And I framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising. 
I mean, the city's the best gallery I could imagine. 
I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. 
I would control it directly with the public in the streets. 
So that's Paris. 
I would change — depending on the places I would go — the title of the exhibition. 
That's on the Champs-Elysees. 
I was quite proud of that one. 
Because I was just 18 and I was just up there on the top of the Champs-Elysees. 
Then when the photo left, the frame was still there. 
(Laughter) November 2005: the streets are burning. 
A large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of Paris. 
Everyone was glued to the TV, watching disturbing, frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood. 
I mean, these kids, without control, throwing Molotov cocktails, attacking the cops and the firemen, looting everything they could in the shops. 
These were criminals, thugs, dangerous, destroying their own environment. 
And then I saw it — could it be possible? — my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car — a pasting I'd done a year earlier — an illegal one — still there. 
I mean, these were the faces of my friends. 
I know those guys. 
All of them are not angels, but they're not monsters either. 
So it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television. 
So I went back there with a 28 mm lens. 
It was the only one I had at that time. 
But with that lens, you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person. 
So you can do it only with their trust. 
So I took full portraits of people from Le Bosquet. 
They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves. 
And then I pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of Paris with the name, age, even building number of these guys. 
A year later, the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris. 
And we go from thug images, who've been stolen and distorted by the media, who's now proudly taking over his own image. 
That's where I realized the power of paper and glue. 
So could art change the world? 
A year later, I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict. 
I mean, at that time, trust me, they were only referring to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. 
So with my friend Marco, we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis. 
Are they so different? 
When we got there, we just went in the street, started talking with people everywhere, and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media. 
So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs — taxi-driver, lawyer, cooks. 
Asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment. 
Not a smile — that really doesn't tell about who you are and what you feel. 
They all accepted to be pasted next to the other. 
I decided to paste in eight Israeli and Palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall. 
We launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever. 
We called the project Face 2 Face. 
The experts said, "" No way. 
The people will not accept. 
The army will shoot you, and Hamas will kidnap you. "" We said, "" Okay, let's try and push as far as we can. "" I love the way that people will ask me, "How big will my photo be?" 
"It will be as big as your house." 
When we did the wall, we did the Palestinian side. 
So we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough. 
And so Palestinians guys say, "Calm down. No wait. I'm going to find you a solution." 
So he went to the Church of Nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen Jesus being born. 
(Laughter) We did Face 2 Face with only six friends, two ladders, two brushes, a rented car, a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper. 
We had all sorts of help from all walks of life. 
Okay, for example, that's Palestine. 
We're in Ramallah right now. 
We're pasting portraits — so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market. 
People come around us and start asking, "What are you doing here?" 
"" Oh, we're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an Israeli and a Palestinian doing the same job. 
And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers. "" And then there was always a silence. 
"" You mean you're pasting an Israeli face — doing a face — right here? "" "Well, yeah, yeah, that's part of the project." 
And I would always leave that moment, and we would ask them, "So can you tell me who is who?" 
And most of them couldn't say. 
(Applause) We even pasted on Israeli military towers, and nothing happened. 
When you paste an image, it's just paper and glue. 
People can tear it, tag on it, or even pee on it — some are a bit high for that, I agree — but the people in the street, they are the curator. 
The rain and the wind will take them off anyway. 
They are not meant to stay. 
But exactly four years after, the photos, most of them are still there. 
Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible — and, you know what, even easy. 
We didn't push the limit; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought. 
In the Middle East, I experienced my work in places without [many] museums. 
So the reactions in the street were kind of interesting. 
So I decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums. 
When you go in these developing societies, women are the pillars of their community, but the men are still the ones holding the streets. 
So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos. 
I called that project Women Are Heroes. 
When I listened to all the stories everywhere I went on the continents, I couldn't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict. 
I just observed. 
Sometimes there was no words, no sentence, just tears. 
I just took their pictures and pasted them. 
Women Are Heroes took me around the world. 
Most of the places I went to, I decided to go there because I've heard about it through the media. 
So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro — the first favela of Brazil named Providencia. 
Three kids — that was three students — were [detained] by the army because they were not carrying their papers. 
And the army took them, and instead of bringing them to the police station, they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces. 
I was shocked. 
All Brazil was shocked. 
I heard it was one of the most violent favelas, because the largest drug cartel controls it. 
So I decided to go there. 
When I arrived — I mean, I didn't have any contact with any NGO. 
There was none in place — no association, no NGOs, nothing — no eyewitnesses. 
So we just walked around, and we met a woman, and I showed her my book. 
And she said, "" You know what? 
We're hungry for culture. 
We need culture out there. "" So I went out and I started with the kids. 
I just took a few photos of the kids, and the next day I came with the posters and we pasted them. 
The day after, I came back and they were already scratched. 
But that's okay. 
I wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them. 
Then the next day, I held a meeting on the main square and some women came. 
They were all linked to the three kids that got killed. 
There was the mother, the grandmother, the best friend — they all wanted to shout the story. 
After that day, everyone in the favela gave me the green light. 
I took more photos, and we started the project. 
The drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place, so I told them, "" You know what? 
I'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons. 
You see that enough in the media. 
What I want to show is the incredible life and energy. 
I've been seeing it around me the last few days. "" So that's a really symbolic pasting, because that's the first one we did that you couldn't see from the city. 
And that's where the three kids got arrested, and that's the grandmother of one of them. 
And on that stairs, that's where the traffickers always stand and there's a lot of exchange of fire. 
Everyone there understood the project. 
And then we pasted everywhere — the whole hill. 
(Applause) What was interesting is that the media couldn't get in. 
I mean, you should see that. 
They would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens, and we would see ourselves, on TV, pasting. 
And they would put a number: "" Please call this number if you know what's going on in Providencia. "" We just did a project and then left so the media wouldn't know. 
So how can we know about the project? 
So they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them. 
So you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women. 
We kept traveling. 
We went to Africa, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya. 
In war-torn places like Monrovia, people come straight to you. 
I mean, they want to know what you're up to. 
They kept asking me, "" What is the purpose of your project? 
Are you an NGO? Are you the media? "" Art. Just doing art. 
Some people question, "" Why is it in black and white? 
Don't you have color in France? "" (Laughter) Or they tell you, "" Are these people all dead? "" Some who understood the project would explain it to others. 
And to a man who did not understand, I heard someone say, "" You know, you've been here for a few hours trying to understand, discussing with your fellows. 
During that time, you haven't thought about what you're going to eat tomorrow. 
This is art. "" I think it's people's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects. 
And then it becomes more. 
It becomes a desire, a need, an armor. 
On this bridge that's in Monrovia, ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war. 
Women are always the first ones targeted during conflict. 
This is Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums of Africa. 
You might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008. 
This time we covered the roofs of the houses, but we didn't use paper, because paper doesn't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house — vinyl does. 
Then art becomes useful. 
So the people kept it. 
You know what I love is, for example, when you see the biggest eye there, there are so [many] houses inside. 
And I went there a few months ago — photos are still there — and it was missing a piece of the eye. 
So I asked the people what happened. 
"Oh, that guy just moved." 
(Laughter) When the roofs were covered, a woman said as a joke, "Now God can see me." 
When you look at Kibera now, they look back. 
Okay, India. 
Before I start that, just so you know, each time we go to a place, we don't have authorization, so we set up like commandos — we're a group of friends who arrive there, and we try to paste on the walls. 
But there are places where you just can't paste on a wall. 
In India it was just impossible to paste. 
I heard culturally and because of the law, they would just arrest us at the first pasting. 
So we decided to paste white, white on the walls. 
So imagine white guys pasting white papers. 
So people would come to us and ask us, "Hey, what are you up to?" 
"Oh, you know, we're just doing art." "Art?" 
Of course, they were confused. 
But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets, and the more dust you would have going up in the air, on the white paper you can almost see, but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker. 
So the more dust you have, the more it will reveal the photo. 
So we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So we didn't get caught this time. 
Each project — that's a film from Women Are Heroes. 
(Music) Okay. 
For each project we do a film. 
And most of what you see — that's a trailer from "" Women Are Heroes "" — its images, photography, taken one after the other. 
And the photos kept traveling even without us. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Hopefully, you'll see the film, and you'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos. 
Because that's a big part of it. There's layers behind each photo. 
Behind each image is a story. 
Women Are Heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities, and the women kept that dynamic after we left. 
For example, we did books — not for sale — that all the community would get. 
But to get it, they would have to [get] it signed by one of the women. 
We did that in most of the places. 
We go back regularly. 
And so in Providencia, for example, in the favela, we have a cultural center running there. 
In Kibera, each year we cover more roofs. 
Because of course, when we left, the people who were just at the edge of the project said, "" Hey, what about my roof? "" So we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project. 
A really important point for me is that I don't use any brand or corporate sponsors. 
So I have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects. 
(Applause) And that is for me one of the more important things in the work. 
I think, today, as important as the result is the way you do things. 
And that has always been a central part of the work. 
And what's interesting is that fine line that I have with images and advertising. 
We just did some pasting in Los Angeles on another project in the last weeks. 
And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum. 
But yesterday the city called them and said, "" Look, you're going to have to tear it down. 
Because this can be taken for advertising, and because of the law, it has to be taken down. "" But tell me, advertising for what? 
The people I photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community. 
But they asked me for a promise basically. 
They asked me, "" Please, make our story travel with you. "" So I did. That's Paris. 
That's Rio. 
In each place, we built exhibitions with a story, and the story traveled. 
You understand the full scope of the project. 
That's London. 
New York. 
And today, they are with you in Long Beach. 
All right, recently I started a public art project where I don't use my artwork anymore. 
I use Man Ray, Helen Levitt, Giacomelli, other people's artwork. 
It doesn't matter today if it's your photo or not. 
The importance is what you do with the images, the statement it makes where it's pasted. 
So for example, I pasted the photo of the minaret in Switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country. 
(Applause) This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground. 
In some ways, art can change the world. 
Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. 
Art can change the way we see the world. 
Art can create an analogy. 
Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables you to change the world. 
When I do my work, I have two kinds of reactions. 
People say, "" Oh, why don't you go in Iraq or Afghanistan. 
They would be really useful. "" Or, "" How can we help? "" I presume that you belong to the second category, and that's good, because for that project, I'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them. 
So now my wish is: (mock drum roll) (Laughter) I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world inside out. 
And this starts right now. 
Yes, everyone in the room. 
Everyone watching. 
I wanted that wish to actually start now. 
So a subject you're passionate about, a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos — tell me what you stand for. 
Take the photos, the portraits, upload it — I'll give you all the details — and I'll send you back your poster. Join by groups and reveal things to the world. 
The full data is on the website — insideoutproject.net — that is launching today. 
What we see changes who we are. 
When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts. 
So I hope that, together, we'll create something that the world will remember. 
And this starts right now and depends on you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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. 
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) 

And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that. 
Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane! (Laughter) 
Driving ourselves. 
(Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but — (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. 
And she said "" Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper. "" And the man said, "He's come down a long way, hasn't he?" 
(Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies. (Laughter) 
The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. 
And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!" 
(Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. 
(Laughter) And the story began, "" Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday, "" quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant' "" — (Laughter) "" 'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.' "" (Laughter) Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on — one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, "" One more burger with fries! "" (Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" (Laughter) 
But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time. 
I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. 
Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. 
Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. 
It's an easy, visible target of concern — and it should be — but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. 
Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. 
You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. 
Participant Productions convened — with my active involvement — the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. 
And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets. 
Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. 
Invest sustainably. 
And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. 
(Applause) Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? 
Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. 
Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination. 

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

You may never have heard of Kenema, Sierra Leone or Arua, Nigeria. 
But I know them as two of the most extraordinary places on earth. 
In hospitals there, there's a community of nurses, physicians and scientists that have been quietly battling one of the deadliest threats to humanity for years: Lassa virus. 
Lassa virus is a lot like Ebola. 
It can cause a severe fever and can often be fatal. 
But these individuals, they risk their lives every day to protect the individuals in their communities, and by doing so, protect us all. 
But one of the most extraordinary things I learned about them on one of my first visits out there many years ago was that they start each morning — these challenging, extraordinary days on the front lines — by singing. 
They gather together, and they show their joy. 
They show their spirit. 
And over the years, from year after year as I've visited them and they've visited me, I get to gather with them and I sing and we write and we love it, because it reminds us that we're not just there to pursue science together; we're bonded through a shared humanity. 
And that of course, as you can imagine, becomes extremely important, even essential, as things begin to change. 
And that changed a great deal in March of 2014, when the Ebola outbreak was declared in Guinea. 
This is the first outbreak in West Africa, near the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia. 
And it was frightening, frightening for us all. 
We had actually suspected for some time that Lassa and Ebola were more widespread than thought, and we thought it could one day come to Kenema. 
And so members of my team immediately went out and joined Dr. Humarr Khan and his team there, and we set up diagnostics to be able to have sensitive molecular tests to pick up Ebola if it came across the border and into Sierra Leone. 
We'd already set up this kind of capacity for Lassa virus, we knew how to do it, the team is outstanding. 
We just had to give them the tools and place to survey for Ebola. 
And unfortunately, that day came. 
On May 23, 2014, a woman checked into the maternity ward at the hospital, and the team ran those important molecular tests and they identified the first confirmed case of Ebola in Sierra Leone. 
This was an exceptional work that was done. 
They were able to diagnose the case immediately, to safely treat the patient and to begin to do contact tracing to follow what was going on. 
It could've stopped something. 
But by the time that day came, the outbreak had already been breeding for months. 
With hundreds of cases, it had already eclipsed all previous outbreaks. 
And it came into Sierra Leone not as that singular case, but as a tidal wave. 
We had to work with the international community, with the Ministry of Health, with Kenema, to begin to deal with the cases, as the next week brought 31, then 92, then 147 cases — all coming to Kenema, one of the only places in Sierra Leone that could deal with this. 
And we worked around the clock trying to do everything we could, trying to help the individuals, trying to get attention, but we also did one other simple thing. 
From that specimen that we take from a patient's blood to detect Ebola, we can discard it, obviously. 
The other thing we can do is, actually, put in a chemical and deactivate it, so just place it into a box and ship it across the ocean, and that's what we did. 
We sent it to Boston, where my team works. 
And we also worked around the clock doing shift work, day after day, and we quickly generated 99 genomes of the Ebola virus. 
This is the blueprint — the genome of a virus is the blueprint. 
We all have one. 
It says everything that makes up us, and it tells us so much information. 
The results of this kind of work are simple and they're powerful. 
We could actually take these 99 different viruses, look at them and compare them, and we could see, actually, compared to three genomes that had been previously published from Guinea, we could show that the outbreak emerged in Guinea months before, once into the human population, and from there had been transmitting from human to human. 
Now, that's incredibly important when you're trying to figure out how to intervene, but the important thing is contact tracing. 
We also could see that as the virus was moving between humans, it was mutating. 
And each of those mutations are so important, because the diagnostics, the vaccines, the therapies that we're using, are all based on that genome sequence, fundamentally — that's what drives it. 
And so global health experts would need to respond, would have to develop, to recalibrate everything that they were doing. 
But the way that science works, the position I was in at that point is, I had the data, and I could have worked in a silo for many, many months, analyzed the data carefully, slowly, submitted the paper for publication, gone through a few back-and-forths, and then finally when the paper came out, might release that data. 
That's the way the status quo works. 
Well, that was not going to work at this point, right? 
We had friends on the front lines and to us it was just obvious that what we needed is help, lots of help. 
So the first thing we did is, as soon as the sequences came off the machines, we published it to the web. 
We just released it to the whole world and said, "" Help us. "" And help came. 
Before we knew it, we were being contacted from people all over, surprised to see the data out there and released. 
Some of the greatest viral trackers in the world were suddenly part of our community. 
We were working together in this virtual way, sharing, regular calls, communications, trying to follow the virus minute by minute, to see ways that we could stop it. 
And there are so many ways that we can form communities like that. 
Everybody, particularly when the outbreak started to expand globally, was reaching out to learn, to participate, to engage. 
Everybody wants to play a part. 
The amount of human capacity out there is just amazing, and the Internet connects us all. 
And could you imagine that instead of being frightened of each other, that we all just said, "" Let's do this. 
Let's work together, and let's make this happen. "" But the problem is that the data that all of us are using, Googling on the web, is just too limited to do what we need to do. 
And so many opportunities get missed when that happens. 
So in the early part of the epidemic from Kenema, we'd had 106 clinical records from patients, and we once again made that publicly available to the world. 
And in our own lab, we could show that you could take those 106 records, we could train computers to predict the prognosis for Ebola patients to near 100 percent accuracy. 
And we made an app that could release that, to make that available to health-care workers in the field. 
But 106 is just not enough to make it powerful, to validate it. 
So we were waiting for more data to release that. 
and the data has still not come. 
We are still waiting, tweaking away, in silos rather than working together. 
And this just — we can't accept that. 
Right? You, all of you, cannot accept that. 
It's our lives on the line. 
And in fact, actually, many lives were lost, many health-care workers, including beloved colleagues of mine, five colleagues: Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Dr. Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Mohamed Fullah. 
These are just five of many health-care workers at Kenema and beyond that died while the world waited and while we all worked, quietly and separately. 
See, Ebola, like all threats to humanity, it's fueled by mistrust and distraction and division. 
When we build barriers amongst ourselves and we fight amongst ourselves, the virus thrives. 
But unlike all threats to humanity, Ebola is one where we're actually all the same. 
We're all in this fight together. 
Ebola on one person's doorstep could soon be on ours. 
And so in this place with the same vulnerabilities, the same strengths, the same fears, the same hopes, I hope that we work together with joy. 
A graduate student of mine was reading a book about Sierra Leone, and she discovered that the word "" Kenema, "" the hospital that we work at and the city where we work in Sierra Leone, is named after the Mende word for "" clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze. "" That was really profound for us, because without knowing it, we'd always felt that in order to honor the individuals in Kenema where we worked, we had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together. 
And we have to do that. 
We all have to demand that of ourselves and others — to be open to each other when an outbreak happens, to fight in this fight together. 
Because this is not the first outbreak of Ebola, it will not be the last, and there are many other microbes out there that are lying in wait, like Lassa virus and others. 
And the next time this happens, it could happen in a city of millions, it could start there. 
It could be something that's transmitted through the air. 
It could even be disseminated intentionally. 
And I know that that is frightening, I understand that, but I know also, and this experience shows us, that we have the technology and we have the capacity to win this thing, to win this and have the upper hand over viruses. 
But we can only do it if we do it together and we do it with joy. 
So for Dr. Khan and for all of those who sacrificed their lives on the front lines in this fight with us always, let us be in this fight with them always. 
And let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Carlos, the Vietnam vet Marine who volunteered for three tours and got shot up in every one. 
In 1971, he was medically retired because he had so much shrapnel in his body that he was setting off metal detectors. 
For the next 42 years, he suffered from nightmares, extreme anxiety in public, isolation, depression. 
He self-medicated with alcohol. 
He was married and divorced three times. 
Carlos had post-traumatic stress disorder. 
Now, I became a psychologist to help mitigate human suffering, and for the past 10 years, my target has been the suffering caused by PTSD, as experienced by veterans like Carlos. 
Until recently, the science of PTSD just wasn't there. 
And so, we didn't know what to do. 
We put some veterans on heavy drugs. 
Others we hospitalized and gave generic group therapy, and others still we simply said to them, "Just go home and try to forget about your experiences." 
More recently, we've tried therapy dogs, wilderness retreats — many things which may temporarily relieve stress, but which don't actually eliminate PTSD symptoms over the long term. 
But things have changed. 
And I am here to tell you that we can now eliminate PTSD, not just manage the symptoms, and in huge numbers of veterans. 
Because new scientific research has been able to show, objectively, repeatedly, which treatments actually get rid of symptoms and which do not. 
Now as it turns out, the best treatments for PTSD use many of the very same training principles that the military uses in preparing its trainees for war. 
Now, making war — this is something that we are good at. 
We humans have been making war since before we were even fully human. 
And since then, we have gone from using stone and sinew to developing the most sophisticated and devastating weapon systems imaginable. 
And to enable our warriors to use these weapons, we employ the most cutting-edge training methods. 
We are good at making war. 
And we are good at training our warriors to fight. 
Yet, when we consider the experience of the modern-day combat veteran, we begin to see that we have not been as good at preparing them to come home. 
Why is that? 
Well, our ancestors lived immersed in conflict, and they fought right where they lived. 
So until only very recently in our evolutionary history, there was hardly a need to learn how to come home from war, because we never really did. 
But thankfully, today, most of humanity lives in far more peaceful societies, and when there is conflict, we, especially in the United States, now have the technology to put our warriors through advanced training, drop them in to fight anywhere on the globe and when they're done, jet them back to peacetime suburbia. 
But just imagine for a moment what this must feel like. 
I've spoken with veterans who've told me that one day they're in a brutal firefight in Afghanistan where they saw carnage and death, and just three days later, they found themselves toting an ice chest to their kid's soccer game. 
"" Mindfuck "" is the most common term. 
(Laughter) It's the most common term I've heard to describe that experience. 
And that's exactly what that is. 
Because while our warriors spend countless hours training for war, we've only recently come to understand that many require training on how to return to civilian life. 
Now, like any training, the best PTSD treatments require repetition. 
In the military, we don't simply hand trainees Mark-19 automatic grenade launchers and say, "" Here's the trigger, here's some ammo and good luck. "" No. We train them, on the range and in specific contexts, over and over and over until lifting their weapon and engaging their target is so engrained into muscle memory that it can be performed without even thinking, even under the most stressful conditions you can imagine. 
Now, the same holds for training-based treatments. 
The first of these treatments is cognitive therapy, and this is a kind of mental recalibration. 
When veterans come home from war, their way of mentally framing the world is calibrated to an immensely more dangerous environment. 
So when you try to overlay that mind frame onto a peacetime environment, you get problems. 
You begin drowning in worries about dangers that aren't present. 
You begin not trusting family or friends. 
Which is not to say there are no dangers in civilian life; there are. 
It's just that the probability of encountering them compared to combat is astronomically lower. 
So we never advise veterans to turn off caution completely. 
We do train them, however, to adjust caution according to where they are. 
If you find yourself in a bad neighborhood, you turn it up. 
Out to dinner with family? 
You turn it way down. 
We train veterans to be fiercely rational, to systematically gauge the actual statistical probability of encountering, say, an IED here in peacetime America. 
With enough practice, those recalibrations stick. 
The next of these treatments is exposure therapy, and this is a kind of field training, and the fastest of the proven effective treatments out there. 
You remember Carlos? 
This was the treatment that he chose. 
And so we started off by giving him exercises, for him, challenging ones: going to a grocery store, going to a shopping mall, going to a restaurant, sitting with his back to the door. 
And, critically — staying in these environments. 
Now, at first he was very anxious. 
He wanted to sit where he could scan the room, where he could plan escape routes, where he could get his hands on a makeshift weapon. 
And he wanted to leave, but he didn't. 
He remembered his training in the Marine Corps, and he pushed through his discomfort. 
And every time he did this, his anxiety ratcheted down a little bit, and then a little bit more and then a little bit more, until in the end, he had effectively relearned how to sit in a public space and just enjoy himself. 
He also listened to recordings of his combat experiences, over and over and over. 
He listened until those memories no longer generated any anxiety. 
He processed his memories so much that his brain no longer needed to return to those experiences in his sleep. 
And when I spoke with him a year after treatment had finished, he told me, "" Doc, this is the first time in 43 years that I haven't had nightmares. "" Now, this is different than erasing a memory. 
Veterans will always remember their traumatic experiences, but with enough practice, those memories are no longer as raw or as painful as they once were. 
They don't feel emotionally like they just happened yesterday, and that is an immensely better place to be. 
But it's often difficult. 
And, like any training, it may not work for everybody. 
And there are trust issues. 
Sometimes I'm asked, "If you haven't been there, Doc, how can you help me?" 
Which is understandable. 
But at the point of returning to civilian life, you do not require somebody who's been there. 
You don't require training for operations on the battlefield; you require training on how to come home. 
For the past 10 years of my work, I have been exposed to detailed accounts of the worst experiences that you can imagine, daily. 
And it hasn't always been easy. 
There have been times where I have just felt my heart break or that I've absorbed too much. 
But these training-based treatments work so well, that whatever this work takes out of me, it puts back even more, because I see people get better. 
I see people's lives transform. 
Carlos can now enjoy outings with his grandchildren, which is something he couldn't even do with his own children. 
And what's amazing to me is that after 43 years of suffering, it only took him 10 weeks of intense training to get his life back. 
And when I spoke with him, he told me, "" I know that I can't get those years back. 
But at least now, whatever days that I have left on this Earth, I can live them in peace. "" He also said, "" I hope that these younger veterans don't wait to get the help they need. "" And that's my hope, too. 
Because... 
this life is short, and if you are fortunate enough to have survived war or any kind of traumatic experience, you owe it to yourself to live your life well. 
And you shouldn't wait to get the training you need to make that happen. 
Now, the best way of ending human suffering caused by war is to never go to war. 
But we are just not there yet as a species. 
Until we are, the mental suffering that we create in our sons and in our daughters when we send them off to fight can be alleviated. 
But we must ensure that the science, the energy level, the value that we place on sending them off to war is at the very least mirrored in how well we prepare them to come back home to us. 
This much, we owe them. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And I started in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. 
And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: "Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?" 
And these were the results of the Swedish students. 
That means that there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. 
(Laughter) But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. 
(Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. 
Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, "What do you really think about the world?" 
We have very good data since 1962 — 1960 about — on the size of families in all countries. 
And 1962, there was really a group of countries here that was industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. 
They move up into that corner. 
And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries and all the rest of them move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 
And this is what happens: the data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. 
If we don't look in the data, I think we all underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economical change. 
Let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of the income. 
And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent the world's annual income. 
We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. 
And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. 
And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. 
And when it burst, the size of its country bubble is the size of the population. 
Here in Uganda, development aid. 
I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. 
But a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. 
There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. 
This is Mao Tse-tung. He brought health to China. 
And if we move back again, here, and we put on trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less in the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. 
And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. 
They came from here, a mineral country. 
So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past. 
If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. 
Everything in this world exists in Africa. 
Because the data is hidden down in the databases. 
All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics. 
There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. 
(Laughter) And this won't work. 
Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world, but what we really need is, of course, a search function. 
A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. 
He only says, "" We can't do it. "" (Laughter) And that's a quite clever guy, huh? (Laughter) 
So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. 
We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. 
This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. 
Almost like a ghost, isn't it? 
(Laughter) It's pretty scary. (Laughter) 
And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the Internet users per 1,000. 
It takes some time to change for this, but on the axises, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. 
And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. 
Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. 
I end now with the world. 
(Applause) 

I am very, very happy to be amidst some of the most — the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they're reflecting on my glasses. 
I am very happy and honored to be amidst very, very innovative and intelligent people. 
I have listened to the three previous speakers, and guess what happened? 
Every single thing I planned to say, they have said it here, and it looks and sounds like I have nothing else to say. 
(Laughter) But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something, that bud is a young one. 
So, I will — since I am not young and am very old, I still will say something. 
We are hosting this conference at a very opportune moment, because another conference is taking place in Berlin. 
It is the G8 Summit. 
The G8 Summit proposes that the solution to Africa's problems should be a massive increase in aid, something akin to the Marshall Plan. 
Unfortunately, I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan. 
One, because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated. 
Its largest recipients were Germany and France, and it was only 2.5 percent of their GDP. 
An average African country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13, 15 percent of its GDP, and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries. 
But I want to say that there are two things we need to connect. 
How the media covers Africa in the West, and the consequences of that. 
By displaying despair, helplessness and hopelessness, the media is telling the truth about Africa, and nothing but the truth. 
However, the media is not telling us the whole truth. 
Because despair, civil war, hunger and famine, although they're part and parcel of our African reality, they are not the only reality. 
And secondly, they are the smallest reality. 
Africa has 53 nations. 
We have civil wars only in six countries, which means that the media are covering only six countries. 
Africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the Western media largely presents to its audience. 
But the effect of that presentation is, it appeals to sympathy. 
It appeals to pity. It appeals to something called charity. 
And, as a consequence, the Western view of Africa's economic dilemma is framed wrongly. 
The wrong framing is a product of thinking that Africa is a place of despair. 
What should we do with it? We should give food to the hungry. 
We should deliver medicines to those who are ill. 
We should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war. 
And in the process, Africa has been stripped of self-initiative. 
I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses. 
But equally, it has opportunities and a lot of potential. 
We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa, from a challenge of despair, which is called poverty reduction, to a challenge of hope. 
We frame it as a challenge of hope, and that is worth creation. 
The challenge facing all those who are interested in Africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty. 
It should be a challenge of creating wealth. 
Once we change those two things — if you say the Africans are poor and they need poverty reduction, you have the international cartel of good intentions moving onto the continent, with what? 
Medicines for the poor, food relief for those who are hungry, and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war. 
And in the process, none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms, not the causes of Africa's fundamental problems. 
Sending somebody to school and giving them medicines, ladies and gentlemen, does not create wealth for them. 
Wealth is a function of income, and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job. 
Now, once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa, our second challenge will be, who are the wealth-creating agents in any society? 
They are entrepreneurs. [Unclear] told us they are always about four percent of the population, but 16 percent are imitators. 
But they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship. 
So, where should we be putting the money? 
We need to put money where it can productively grow. 
Support private investment in Africa, both domestic and foreign. 
Support research institutions, because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation. 
But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today? 
They are throwing large sums of money for primary health, for primary education, for food relief. 
The entire continent has been turned into a place of despair, in need of charity. 
Ladies and gentlemen, can any one of you tell me a neighbor, a friend, a relative that you know, who became rich by receiving charity? 
By holding the begging bowl and receiving alms? 
Does any one of you in the audience have that person? 
Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another? 
Well, since I'm not seeing the hand, it appears that what I'm stating is true. 
(Bono: Yes!) Andrew Mwenda: I can see Bono says he knows the country. 
Which country is that? 
(Bono: It's an Irish land.) (Laughter) (Bono: [unclear]) AM: Thank you very much. But let me tell you this. 
External actors can only present to you an opportunity. 
The ability to utilize that opportunity and turn it into an advantage depends on your internal capacity. 
Africa has received many opportunities. 
Many of them we haven't benefited much. 
Why? Because we lack the internal, institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations. I'll give you an example. 
Under the Cotonou Agreement, formerly known as the Lome Convention, African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods, duty-free, to the European Union market. 
My own country, Uganda, has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market. 
We haven't exported one kilogram yet. 
We import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from Brazil and Cuba. 
Secondly, under the beef protocol of that agreement, African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market. 
None of those countries, including Africa's most successful nation, Botswana, has ever met its quota. 
So, I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework. 
And all forms of intervention need support, the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth, the kinds of institutions that increase productivity. 
How do we begin to do that, and why is aid the bad instrument? 
Aid is the bad instrument, and do you know why? 
Because all governments across the world need money to survive. 
Money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order. 
You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order. 
And because many of our governments are quite dictatorial, they need really to have the army clobber the opposition. 
The second thing you need to do is pay your political hangers-on. 
Why should people support their government? 
Well, because it gives them good, paying jobs, or, in many African countries, unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption. 
The fact is no government in the world, with the exception of a few, like that of Idi Amin, can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule. 
Many countries in the [unclear], they need legitimacy. 
To get legitimacy, governments often need to deliver things like primary education, primary health, roads, build hospitals and clinics. 
If the government's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people, such a government is driven by self-interest to govern in a more enlightened fashion. 
It will sit with those who create wealth. 
Talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them. 
The problem with the African continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in Africa. 
The productive margin in our governments' search for revenue does not lie in the domestic economy, it lies with international donors. 
Rather than sit with Ugandan — (Applause) — rather than sit with Ugandan entrepreneurs, Ghanaian businessmen, South African enterprising leaders, our governments find it more productive to talk to the IMF and the World Bank. 
I can tell you, even if you have ten Ph.Ds., you can never beat Bill Gates in understanding the computer industry. 
Why? Because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business — it requires that you listen to the people, the private sector actors in that industry. 
Governments in Africa have therefore been given an opportunity, by the international community, to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens, and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank, and then it is the IMF and the World Bank that tell them what its citizens need. 
In the process, we, the African people, have been sidelined from the policy-making, policy-orientation, and policy- implementation process in our countries. 
We have limited input, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. 
The IMF, the World Bank, and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens, and therefore what our governments are doing, because they depend on aid, is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens. 
But I want to put a caveat on my argument, and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive. 
Some aid may have built a hospital, fed a hungry village. 
It may have built a road, and that road may have served a very good role. 
The mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success, generalize them, pour billions and trillions of dollars into them, and then spread them across the whole world, ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village, the skills, the practices, the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed — like in Sauri village, in Kenya, where Jeffrey Sachs is working — and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody. 
Aid increases the resources available to governments, and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have, as a person in Africa seeking a career. 
By increasing the political attractiveness of the state, especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa, aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie. 
Ladies and gentlemen, the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business. 
Governments are not changing it. Why? 
Because they don't need to talk to their own citizens. 
They talk to international donors. 
So, the most enterprising Africans end up going to work for government, and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid. 
I also want to say that it is important for us to note that, over the last 50 years, Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community, in the form of technical assistance, and financial aid, and all other forms of aid. 
Between 1960 and 2003, our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid, and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa. 
Where has all the aid gone? 
I want to use the example of my own country, called Uganda, and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there. 
In the 2006-2007 budget, expected revenue: 2.5 trillion shillings. 
The expected foreign aid: 1.9 trillion. 
Uganda's recurrent expenditure — by recurrent what do I mean? 
Hand-to-mouth is 2.6 trillion. 
Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue? 
It's because there's somebody there called foreign aid, who contributes for it. 
But this shows you that the government of Uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments, but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure. 
Public administration, which is largely patronage, takes 690 billion. 
The military, 380 billion. 
Agriculture, which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens, takes only 18 billion. 
Trade and industry takes 43 billion. 
And let me show you, what does public expenditure — rather, public administration expenditure — in Uganda constitute? 
There you go. 70 cabinet ministers, 114 presidential advisers, by the way, who never see the president, except on television. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And when they see him physically, it is at public functions like this, and even there, it is him who advises them. (Laughter) 
We have 81 units of local government. 
Each local government is organized like the central government — a bureaucracy, a cabinet, a parliament, and so many jobs for the political hangers-on. 
There were 56, and when our president wanted to amend the constitution and remove term limits, he had to create 25 new districts, and now there are 81. 
Three hundred thirty-three members of parliament. 
You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament. 
One hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies, all of which have directors and the cars. And the final thing, this is addressed to Mr. Bono. In his work, he may help us on this. 
A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters. 
Uganda has 961 sub-counties, each of them with a dispensary, none of which has an ambulance. 
So, the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers, the permanent secretaries, the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects, while the poor die without ambulances and medicine. 
Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here, I was told that the principle of TEDGlobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt. 
It should be short enough to arouse interest, but long enough to cover the subject. 
I hope I have achieved that. 
(Laughter) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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'd like to take you to another world. 
And I'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than one dollar a day. 
I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me. 
I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor — all laid out. 
Then, I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years. 
(Laughter) The whole world was laid out for me. 
Everything was at my feet. 
I could do nothing wrong. 
And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like. 
So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. 
It changed my life. 
I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work in a village." 
Mother went into a coma. 
(Laughter) "" What is this? 
The whole world is laid out for you, the best jobs are laid out for you, and you want to go and work in a village? 
I mean, is there something wrong with you? "" I said, "" No, I've got the best eduction. 
It made me think. 
And I wanted to give something back in my own way. "" "" What do you want to do in a village? 
No job, no money, no security, no prospect. "" I said, "" I want to live and dig wells for five years. "" "" Dig wells for five years? 
You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years? "" She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down. 
But then, I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which are never brought into the mainstream — which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. 
And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College — college only for the poor. 
What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. 
I went to this village for the first time. 
Elders came to me and said, "" Are you running from the police? "" I said, "" No. "" (Laughter) "You failed in your exam?" I said, "" No. "" 
"You didn't get a government job?" I said, "No." 
"" What are you doing here? 
Why are you here? 
The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village? 
Is there something wrong with you you're not telling us? "" I said, "" No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor. 
What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. "" So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice. 
They said, "" Please, don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college. "" So it's the only college in India where, if you should have a Ph.D. or a Master's, you are disqualified to come. 
You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. 
You have to work with your hands. 
You have to have a dignity of labor. 
You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. 
So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism. 
Who is a professional? 
A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. 
A water diviner is a professional. 
A traditional midwife is a professional. 
A traditional bone setter is a professional. 
These are professionals all over the world. 
You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. 
And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal. 
It needs to be used, needs to be applied, needs to be shown to the world outside — that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today. 
So the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi. 
You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor. 
There are no contracts, no written contracts. 
You can stay with me for 20 years, go tomorrow. 
And no one can get more than $100 a month. 
You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. 
You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. 
That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. 
Whatever idea you have, come and try it. 
It doesn't matter if you fail. 
Battered, bruised, you start again. 
It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. 
And it's the only college where we don't give a certificate. 
You are certified by the community you serve. 
You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer. 
So when I said that, they said, "" Well show us what is possible. What are you doing? 
This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can't show it on the ground. "" So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. 
It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft. 
150 people lived there, worked there. 
They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. 
But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. 
I said, "" Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college. "" We are the only ones who actually returned the award for $50,000, because they didn't believe us, and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia. 
I asked a forester — high-powered, paper-qualified expert — I said, "" What can you build in this place? "" He had one look at the soil and said, "" Forget it. No way. 
Not even worth it. 
No water, rocky soil. "" I was in a bit of a spot. 
And I said, "" Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?' "" He looked quietly at me and said, "You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work." 
This is what it looks like today. 
Went to the roof, and all the women said, "" Clear out. 
The men should clear out because we don't want to share this technology with the men. 
This is waterproofing the roof. "" (Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don't know. 
But it actually doesn't leak. 
Since 1986, it hasn't leaked. 
This technology, the women will not share with the men. 
(Laughter) It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified. 
All the power comes from the sun. 
45 kilowatts of panels on the roof. 
And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years. 
So long as the sun shines, we'll have no problem with power. 
But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who's only done eight years of primary schooling — never been to school, never been to college. 
He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed. 
Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked. 
But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women, illiterate women, who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker. 
It's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker. 
Unfortunately, they're almost half German, they're so precise. 
(Laughter) You'll never find Indian women so precise. 
Absolutely to the last inch, they can make that cooker. 
And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking. 
We have a dentist — she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist. 
She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children. 
Barefoot technology: this was 1986 — no engineer, no architect thought of it — but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs. 
Very little water is wasted. 
All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted. 
If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater. 
60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals — sheep, goats — domestic chores. 
So we thought of starting a school at night for the children. 
Because the night schools of Tilonia, over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools. 
Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher. 
And what do we teach in these schools? 
Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick. 
This is what we teach in the night schools. 
But all the schools are solar-lit. 
Every five years we have an election. 
Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister. 
The prime minister is 12 years old. 
She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening. 
She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy, a minister for health. 
And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children. 
She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden. 
First time ever going out of her village. 
Never seen Sweden. 
Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening. 
And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and said, "" Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from? 
She's only 12 years old, and she's not dazzled by anything. "" And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, "" Please tell her I'm the prime minister. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry. 
Puppets is the way we communicate. 
You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old. 
He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher. 
He's my doctor. He's my lawyer. 
He's my donor. 
He actually raises money, solves my disputes. 
He solves my problems in the village. 
If there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, "" Shake hands. 
The attendance must not drop. "" These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan — all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained. 
And we went to Ladakh, and we asked this woman — this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all snowed up on both sides — and we asked this woman, "" What was the benefit you had from solar electricity? "" And she thought for a minute and said, "It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter." 
(Laughter) Went to Afghanistan. 
One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable. 
(Laughter) Men are restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate. (Laughter) 
All across the globe, you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate. 
Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city, looking for a job. 
So we came up with a great solution: train grandmothers. 
What's the best way of communicating in the world today? 
Television? No. 
Telegraph? No. 
Telephone? No. 
Tell a woman. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "" We want to take them to India. "" They said, "" Impossible. They don't even go out of their rooms, and you want to take them to India. "" I said, "" I'll make a concession. I'll take the husbands along as well. "" So I took the husbands along. 
Of course, the women were much more intelligent than the men. 
In six months, how do we train these women? 
Sign language. 
You don't choose the written word. 
You don't choose the spoken word. 
You use sign language. 
And in six months they can become solar engineers. 
They go back and solar-electrify their own village. 
This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village, set up a workshop — the first village ever to be solar-electrified in Afghanistan [was] by the three women. This woman 
is an extraordinary grandmother. 
55 years old, and she's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan. 
And they haven't collapsed. 
She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC. 
He didn't know. 
Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan. 
We went to Africa, and we did the same thing. 
All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language. 
But their body language is great. 
They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers. 
I went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night — comes across this village. 
Comes back, goes into the village, says, "" Well what's the story? "" They said, "" These two grandmothers... "" "" Grandmothers? "" The minister couldn't believe what was happening. 
"Where did they go?" "Went to India and back." 
Went straight to the president. 
He said, "" Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone? "" He said, "" No. "" Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day. 
"What's the story." 
So he summoned me and said, "" Can you train me 150 grandmothers? "" I said, "" I can't, Mr. President. 
But they will. The grandmothers will. "" So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone. 
And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone. 
Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia. 
Went to this village. 
I knew which woman I would like to take. 
The community got together and said, "" Take these two women. "" I said, "" No, I want to take this woman. "" They said, "" Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her. "" I said, "" I like the body language. I like the way she speaks. "" "Difficult husband; not possible." 
Called the husband, the husband came, swaggering, politician, mobile in his hand. "" Not possible. "" "Why not?" "The woman, look how beautiful she is." 
I said, "" Yeah, she is very beautiful. "" "What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?" 
That was his biggest fear. 
I said, "" She'll be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile. "" She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger. 
She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran. 
She handled the national press, and she was a star. 
And when I went back six months later, I said, "" Where's your husband? "" "Oh, somewhere. It doesn't matter." 
(Laughter) Success story. (Laughter) 
(Applause) I'll just wind up by saying that I think you don't have to look for solutions outside. 
Look for solutions within. 
And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you. 
They're all over the world. 
Don't even worry. 
Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground. 
They have all the solutions in the world. 
I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi. 
"" First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. "" Thank you. 
(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. 

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

I'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are, how globalized we aren't, and why it's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments. 
And the leading point of view on this, whether measured by number of books sold, mentions in media, or surveys that I've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the World Trade Organization, is this view that national borders really don't matter very much anymore, cross-border integration is close to complete, and we live in one world. 
And what's interesting about this view is, again, it's a view that's held by pro-globalizers like Tom Friedman, from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted, but it's also held by anti-globalizers, who see this giant globalization tsunami that's about to wreck all our lives if it hasn't already done so. 
The other thing I would add is that this is not a new view. 
I'm a little bit of an amateur historian, so I've spent some time going back, trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing. And the best, earliest quote that I could find was one from David Livingstone, writing in the 1850s about how the railroad, the steam ship, and the telegraph were integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world. 
Now clearly, David Livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time, but it does seem useful to ask ourselves, "Just how global are we?" 
before we think about where we go from here. 
So the best way I've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat, may not even be close to flat, is with some data. 
So one of the things I've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders, and I've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total. 
I'm not going to present all the data that I have here today, but let me just give you a few data points. 
I'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow, one kind of flow of people, one kind of flow of capital, and, of course, trade in products and services. 
So let's start off with plain old telephone service. 
Of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year, what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls? 
Pick a percentage in your own mind. 
The answer turns out to be two percent. 
If you include Internet telephony, you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent, but it's nowhere near what people tend to estimate. 
Or let's turn to people moving across borders. 
One particular thing we might look at, in terms of long-term flows of people, is what percentage of the world's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants? 
Again, please pick a percentage. 
Turns out to be a little bit higher. 
It's actually about three percent. 
Or think of investment. Take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010. 
What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment? 
Not quite ten percent. 
And then finally, the one statistic that I suspect many of the people in this room have seen: the export-to-GDP ratio. 
If you look at the official statistics, they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent. 
However, there's a big problem with the official statistics, in that if, for instance, a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod, and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S., that component ends up getting counted multiple times. 
So nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is, so I thought I would ask the person who's spearheading the effort to generate data on this, Pascal Lamy, the Director of the World Trade Organization, what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of GDP, without the double- and triple-counting, and it's actually probably a bit under 20 percent, rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we're talking about. 
So it's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that I talk about in my book, "" World 3.0, "" that we're very, very far from the no-border effect benchmark, which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85, 90, 95 percent. 
So clearly, apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case. 
But it's not just the apocalyptics, as I think of them, who are prone to this kind of overstatement. 
I've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be. 
Let me share with you the results of a survey that Harvard Business Review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people's guesses along these dimensions actually were. 
So a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide. 
First of all, there is a suggestion of some error. 
Okay. (Laughter) Second, these are pretty large errors. For four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent, you have people guessing three, four times that level. 
Even though I'm an economist, I find that a pretty large error. 
And third, this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review. 
I've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world, and in all cases except one, where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-GDP ratio, people have this tendency towards overestimation, and so I thought it important to give a name to this, and that's what I refer to as globaloney, the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars. 
Especially because, I suspect, some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims, I think it's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney. 
A couple of different reasons come to mind. 
First of all, there's a real dearth of data in the debate. 
Let me give you an example. When I first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called Foreign Policy, one of the people who wrote in, not entirely in agreement, was Tom Friedman. And since my article was titled "" Why the World Isn't Flat, "" that wasn't too surprising. (Laughter) What was very surprising to me was Tom's critique, which was, "" Ghemawat's data are narrow. "" And this caused me to scratch my head, because as I went back through his several-hundred-page book, I couldn't find a single figure, chart, table, reference or footnote. 
So my point is, I haven't presented a lot of data here to convince you that I'm right, but I would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we've been bombarded with actually are correct. 
So dearth of data in the debate is one reason. 
A second reason has to do with peer pressure. 
I remember, I decided to write my "" Why the World Isn't Flat "" article, because I was being interviewed on TV in Mumbai, and the interviewer's first question to me was, "" Professor Ghemawat, why do you still believe that the world is round? "" And I started laughing, because I hadn't come across that formulation before. (Laughter) And as I was laughing, I was thinking, I really need a more coherent response, especially on national TV. I'd better write something about this. (Laughter) But what I can't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question. 
The perspective was, here is this poor professor. 
He's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years. 
He really has no idea as to what's actually going on in the world. 
So try this out with your friends and acquaintances, if you like. You'll find that it's very cool to talk about the world being one, etc. 
If you raise questions about that formulation, you really are considered a bit of an antique. 
And then the final reason, which I mention, especially to a TED audience, with some trepidation, has to do with what I call "" techno-trances. "" If you listen to techno music for long periods of time, it does things to your brainwave activity. (Laughter) Something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers, all political barriers, all geographic barriers, because at this point I know you aren't allowed to ask me questions, but when I get to this point in my lecture with my students, hands go up, and people ask me, 
"Yeah, but what about Facebook?" 
And I got this question often enough that I thought I'd better do some research on Facebook. 
Because, in some sense, it's the ideal kind of technology to think about. Theoretically, it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door. 
What percentage of people's friends on Facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we're analyzing are based? 
The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. 
Non-negligible, so we don't live in an entirely local or national world, but very, very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect, and the reason's very simple. 
We don't, or I hope we don't, form friendships at random on Facebook. The technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have, and those relationships are what the technology doesn't quite displace. Those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are. 
So does all this matter? Or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues? 
I want to suggest that actually, globaloney can be very harmful to your health. 
First of all, recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration, whereas if we thought we were already there, there would be no particular point to pushing harder. 
It's a little bit like, we wouldn't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference. 
So being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more, something that would contribute further to global welfare. 
Which brings me to my second point. 
Avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization. 
So I actually spend most of my "" World 3.0 "" book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate. 
I'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today, so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what I have in mind. 
Think of France and the current debate about immigration. 
When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants, the answer is about 24 percent. That's their guess. 
Maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue. 
Or to take an even more striking example, when the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations did a survey of Americans, asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid, the guess was 30 percent, which is slightly in excess of the actual level — ("" actually about... 1% "") (Laughter) — of U.S. governmental commitments to federal aid. 
The reassuring thing about this particular survey was, when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data, some of them — not all of them — seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid. 
So foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here, because if you think about it, what I've been talking about today is this notion — very uncontroversial amongst economists — that most things are very home-biased. 
"Foreign aid is the most aid to poor people," is about the most home-biased thing you can find. 
If you look at the OECD countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person, and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries, the ratio — Branko Milanovic at the World Bank did the calculations — turns out to be about 30,000 to one. 
Now of course, some of us, if we truly are cosmopolitan, would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one. 
I'd like to make the suggestion that we don't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are. 
If we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one, we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the Rio Summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on. 
So in summary, while radical openness is great, given how closed we are, even incremental openness could make things dramatically better. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) 

Vision is the most important and prioritized sense that we have. 
We are constantly looking at the world around us, and quickly we identify and make sense of what it is that we see. 
Let's just start with an example of that very fact. 
I'm going to show you a photograph of a person, just for a second or two, and I'd like for you to identify what emotion is on his face. 
Ready? 
Here you go. Go with your gut reaction. 
Okay. What did you see? 
Well, we actually surveyed over 120 individuals, and the results were mixed. 
People did not agree on what emotion they saw on his face. 
Maybe you saw discomfort. 
That was the most frequent response that we received. 
But if you asked the person on your left, they might have said regret or skepticism, and if you asked somebody on your right, they might have said something entirely different, like hope or empathy. 
So we are all looking at the very same face again. 
We might see something entirely different, because perception is subjective. 
What we think we see is actually filtered through our own mind's eye. 
Of course, there are many other examples of how we see the world through own mind's eye. 
So dieters, for instance, see apples as larger than people who are not counting calories. 
Softball players see the ball as smaller if they've just come out of a slump, compared to people who had a hot night at the plate. 
And actually, our political beliefs also can affect the way we see other people, including politicians. 
So my research team and I decided to test this question. 
In 2008, Barack Obama was running for president for the very first time, and we surveyed hundreds of Americans one month before the election. 
What we found in this survey was that some people, some Americans, think photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. 
Of these people, 75 percent voted for Obama in the actual election. 
Other people, though, thought photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. 
89 percent of these people voted for McCain. 
We presented many photographs of Obama one at a time, so people did not realize that what we were changing from one photograph to the next was whether we had artificially lightened or darkened his skin tone. 
So how is that possible? 
How could it be that when I look at a person, an object, or an event, I see something very different than somebody else does? 
Well, the reasons are many, but one reason requires that we understand a little bit more about how our eyes work. 
So vision scientists know that the amount of information that we can see at any given point in time, what we can focus on, is actually relatively small. 
What we can see with great sharpness and clarity and accuracy is the equivalent of the surface area of our thumb on our outstretched arm. 
Everything else around that is blurry, rendering much of what is presented to our eyes as ambiguous. 
But we have to clarify and make sense of what it is that we see, and it's our mind that helps us fill in that gap. 
As a result, perception is a subjective experience, and that's how we end up seeing through our own mind's eye. 
So, I'm a social psychologist, and it's questions like these that really intrigue me. 
I am fascinated by those times when people do not see eye to eye. 
Why is it that somebody might literally see the glass as half full, and somebody literally sees it as half empty? 
What is it about what one person is thinking and feeling that leads them to see the world in an entirely different way? 
And does that even matter? 
So to begin to tackle these questions, my research team and I decided to delve deeply into an issue that has received international attention: our health and fitness. 
Across the world, people are struggling to manage their weight, and there is a variety of strategies that we have to help us keep the pounds off. 
For instance, we set the best of intentions to exercise after the holidays, but actually, the majority of Americans find that their New Year's resolutions are broken by Valentine's Day. 
We talk to ourselves in very encouraging ways, telling ourselves this is our year to get back into shape, but that is not enough to bring us back to our ideal weight. 
So why? 
Of course, there is no simple answer, but one reason, I argue, is that our mind's eye might work against us. 
Some people may literally see exercise as more difficult, and some people might literally see exercise as easier. 
So, as a first step to testing these questions, we gathered objective measurements of individuals' physical fitness. 
We measured the circumference of their waist, compared to the circumference of their hips. 
A higher waist-to-hip ratio is an indicator of being less physically fit than a lower waist-to-hip ratio. 
After gathering these measurements, we told our participants that they would walk to a finish line while carrying extra weight in a sort of race. 
But before they did that, we asked them to estimate the distance to the finish line. 
We thought that the physical states of their body might change how they perceived the distance. 
So what did we find? 
Well, waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. 
People who were out of shape and unfit actually saw the distance to the finish line as significantly greater than people who were in better shape. 
People's states of their own body changed how they perceived the environment. 
But so too can our mind. 
In fact, our bodies and our minds work in tandem to change how we see the world around us. 
That led us to think that maybe people with strong motivations and strong goals to exercise might actually see the finish line as closer than people who have weaker motivations. 
So to test whether motivations affect our perceptual experiences in this way, we conducted a second study. 
Again, we gathered objective measurements of people's physical fitness, measuring the circumference of their waist and the circumference of their hips, and we had them do a few other tests of fitness. 
Based on feedback that we gave them, some of our participants told us they're not motivated to exercise any more. 
They felt like they already met their fitness goals and they weren't going to do anything else. 
These people were not motivated. 
Other people, though, based on our feedback, told us they were highly motivated to exercise. 
They had a strong goal to make it to the finish line. 
But again, before we had them walk to the finish line, we had them estimate the distance. 
How far away was the finish line? 
And again, like the previous study, we found that waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. 
Unfit individuals saw the distance as farther, saw the finish line as farther away, than people who were in better shape. 
Importantly, though, this only happened for people who were not motivated to exercise. 
On the other hand, people who were highly motivated to exercise saw the distance as short. 
Even the most out of shape individuals saw the finish line as just as close, if not slightly closer, than people who were in better shape. 
So our bodies can change how far away that finish line looks, but people who had committed to a manageable goal that they could accomplish in the near future and who believed that they were capable of meeting that goal actually saw the exercise as easier. 
That led us to wonder, is there a strategy that we could use and teach people that would help change their perceptions of the distance, help them make exercise look easier? 
So we turned to the vision science literature to figure out what should we do, and based on what we read, we came up with a strategy that we called, "" Keep your eyes on the prize. "" So this is not the slogan from an inspirational poster. 
It's an actual directive for how to look around your environment. 
People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see. 
We thought that this strategy would help make the exercise look easier. 
We compared this group to a baseline group. 
To this group we said, just look around the environment as you naturally would. 
You will notice the finish line, but you might also notice the garbage can off to the right, or the people and the lamp post off to the left. 
We thought that people who used this strategy would see the distance as farther. 
So what did we find? 
When we had them estimate the distance, was this strategy successful for changing their perceptual experience? 
Yes. 
People who kept their eyes on the prize saw the finish line as 30 percent closer than people who looked around as they naturally would. 
We thought this was great. 
We were really excited because it meant that this strategy helped make the exercise look easier, but the big question was, could this help make exercise actually better? 
Could it improve the quality of exercise as well? 
So next, we told our participants, you are going to walk to the finish line while wearing extra weight. 
We added weights to their ankles that amounted to 15 percent of their body weight. 
We told them to lift their knees up high and walk to the finish line quickly. 
We designed this exercise in particular to be moderately challenging but not impossible, like most exercises that actually improve our fitness. 
So the big question, then: Did keeping your eyes on the prize and narrowly focusing on the finish line change their experience of the exercise? 
It did. 
People who kept their eyes on the prize told us afterward that it required 17 percent less exertion for them to do this exercise than people who looked around naturally. 
It changed their subjective experience of the exercise. 
It also changed the objective nature of their exercise. 
People who kept their eyes on the prize actually moved 23 percent faster than people who looked around naturally. 
To put that in perspective, a 23 percent increase is like trading in your 1980 Chevy Citation for a 1980 Chevrolet Corvette. 
We were so excited by this, because this meant that a strategy that costs nothing, that is easy for people to use, regardless of whether they're in shape or struggling to get there, had a big effect. 
Keeping your eyes on the prize made the exercise look and feel easier even when people were working harder because they were moving faster. 
Now, I know there's more to good health than walking a little bit faster, but keeping your eyes on the prize might be one additional strategy that you can use to help promote a healthy lifestyle. 
If you're not convinced yet that we all see the world through our own mind's eye, let me leave you with one final example. 
Here's a photograph of a beautiful street in Stockholm, with two cars. 
The car in the back looks much larger than the car in the front. 
However, in reality, these cars are the same size, but that's not how we see it. 
So does this mean that our eyes have gone haywire and that our brains are a mess? 
No, it doesn't mean that at all. 
It's just how our eyes work. 
We might see the world in a different way, and sometimes that might not line up with reality, but it doesn't mean that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. 
We all see the world through our mind's eye, but we can teach ourselves to see it differently. 
So I can think of days that have gone horribly wrong for me. 
I'm fed up, I'm grumpy, I'm tired, and I'm so behind, and there's a big black cloud hanging over my head, and on days like these, it looks like everyone around me is down in the dumps too. 
My colleague at work looks annoyed when I ask for an extension on a deadline, and my friend looks frustrated when I show up late for lunch because a meeting ran long, and at the end of the day, my husband looks disappointed because I'd rather go to bed than go to the movies. 
And on days like these, when everybody looks upset and angry to me, I try to remind myself that there are other ways of seeing them. 
Perhaps my colleague was confused, perhaps my friend was concerned, and perhaps my husband was feeling empathy instead. 
So we all see the world through our own mind's eye, and on some days, it might look like the world is a dangerous and challenging and insurmountable place, but it doesn't have to look that way all the time. 
We can teach ourselves to see it differently, and when we find a way to make the world look nicer and easier, it might actually become so. 
Thank you. 

The question today is not: Why did we invade Afghanistan? 
The question is: why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later? 
Why are we spending $135 billion? 
Why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground? 
Why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict? 
How has this happened? 
The last 20 years has been the age of intervention, and Afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy. 
We came out of the end of the Cold War in despair. 
We faced Rwanda; we faced Bosnia, and then we rediscovered our confidence. 
In the third act, we went into Bosnia and Kosovo and we seemed to succeed. 
In the fourth act, with our hubris, our overconfidence developing, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the fifth act, we plunged into a humiliating mess. 
So the question is: What are we doing? 
Why are we still stuck in Afghanistan? 
And the answer, of course, that we keep being given is as follows: we're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9 / 11, and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security. 
In the words of President Obama, "" If the Taliban take over again, they will invite back Al-Qaeda, who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can. "" The story that we're told is that there was a "" light footprint "" initially — in other words, that we ended up in a situation where we didn't have enough troops, we didn't have enough resources, that Afghans were frustrated — they felt there wasn't enough progress and economic development and security, and therefore the Taliban came back — that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments, but we still didn't put enough troops on the ground. 
And that it wasn't until 2009, when President Obama signed off on a surge, that we finally had, in the words of Secretary Clinton, "the strategy, the leadership and the resources." 
So, as the president now reassures us, we are on track to achieve our goals. 
All of this is wrong. 
Every one of those statements is wrong. 
Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security. 
It is extremely unlikely the Taliban would ever be able to take over the country — extremely unlikely they'd be able to seize Kabul. 
They simply don't have a conventional military option. 
And even if they were able to do so, even if I'm wrong, it's extremely unlikely the Taliban would invite back Al-Qaeda. 
From the Taliban's point of view, that was their number one mistake last time. 
If they hadn't invited back Al-Qaeda, they would still be in power today. 
And even if I'm wrong about those two things, even if they were able to take back the country, even if they were to invite back Al-Qaeda, it's extremely unlikely that Al-Qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the United States or harm Europe. 
Because this isn't the 1990s anymore. 
If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni, we would hit them very hard, and it would be very, very difficult for the Taliban to protect them. 
Furthermore, it's simply not true that what went wrong in Afghanistan is the light footprint. 
In my experience, in fact, the light footprint was extremely helpful. 
And these troops that we brought in — it's a great picture of David Beckham there on the sub-machine gun — made the situation worse, not better. 
When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002, what I saw was scenes like this. 
A girl, if you're lucky, in the corner of a dark room — lucky to be able to look at the Koran. 
But in those early days when we're told we didn't have enough troops and enough resources, we made a lot of progress in Afghanistan. 
Within a few months, there were two and a half million more girls in school. 
In Sangin where I was sick in 2002, the nearest health clinic was within three days walk. 
Today, there are 14 health clinics in that area alone. 
There was amazing improvements. 
We went from almost no Afghans having mobile telephones during the Taliban to a situation where, almost overnight, three million Afghans had mobile telephones. 
And we had progress in the free media. 
We had progress in elections — all of this with the so-called light footprint. 
But when we began to bring more money, when we began to invest more resources, things got worse, not better. How? 
Well first see, if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like Afghanistan where the entire revenue of the Afghan state is one billion dollars a year, you drown everything. 
It's not simply corruption and waste that you create; you essentially replace the priorities of the Afghan government, the elected Afghan government, with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities. 
And the same is true for the troops. 
When I walked across Afghanistan, I stayed with people like this. 
This is Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj. 
Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host. 
He was very generous, like many of the Afghans I stayed with. 
But he was also considerably more conservative, considerably more anti-foreign, considerably more Islamist than we'd like to acknowledge. 
This man, for example, Mullah Mustafa, tried to shoot me. 
And the reason I'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is I was somewhat frightened, and I was too afraid on this occasion to ask him, having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house, why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me. 
But 18 months later, I asked him why he had tried to shoot me. 
And Mullah Mustafa — he's the man with the pen and paper — explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph, Nadir Shah had bet him that he couldn't hit me. 
Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa. 
It's not; it's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence. 
But it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it. 
2005, Anthony Fitzherbert, an agricultural engineer, could travel through Helmand, could stay in Nad Ali, Sangin and Ghoresh, which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place. 
Today, he could never do that. 
So the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the Taliban insurgency is mistaken. 
Rather than preceding the insurgency, the Taliban followed the troop deployment, and as far as I'm concerned, the troop deployment caused their return. 
Now is this a new idea? 
No, there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years. 
I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently, who've traveled to almost every district in the country. 
Andrew Wilder, for example, born on the Pakistan-Iranian border, served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 
Paul Fishstein who began working there in 1978 — worked for Save the Children, ran the Afghan research and evaluation unit. 
These are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making Afghanistan less secure, not more secure — that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work. 
And yet, nobody listened to them. 
Instead, there was a litany of astonishing optimism. 
Beginning in 2004, every general came in saying, "" I've inherited a dismal situation, but finally I have the right resources and the correct strategy, which will deliver, "" in General Barno's word in 2004, the "" decisive year. "" Well guess what? It didn't. 
But it wasn't sufficient to prevent General Abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver, in 2005, the "" decisive year. "" Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the "" crunch year. "" Or in 2007, the Norwegian deputy foreign minister, Espen Eide, to say that that would deliver the "" decisive year. "" Or in 2008, Major General Champoux to come in and say he would deliver the "" decisive year. "" Or in 2009, my great friend, General Stanley McChrystal, who said that he was "" knee-deep in the decisive year. "" 
Or in 2010, the U.K. foreign secretary, David Miliband, who said that at last we would deliver the "" decisive year. "" And you'll be delighted to hear in 2011, today, that Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, assures us that we are in the "" decisive year. "" (Applause) How do we allow any of this to happen? 
Well the answer, of course, is, if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country, you co-opt almost everybody. 
Even the aid agencies, who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics, are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security. 
They're worried, in other words, that if anybody believes that it wasn't such a threat — Oxfam, Save the Children wouldn't get the money to build their hospitals and schools. 
It's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest. 
It's very difficult for a politician, because you're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain. 
You feel deep, deep guilt. 
You exaggerate your fears, and you're terrified about the humiliation of defeat. 
What is the solution to this? 
Well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like Michael Semple, or those other people, who are telling the truth, who know the country, who've spent 30 years on the ground — and most importantly of all, the missing component of this — Afghans themselves, who understand what is going on. 
We need to somehow get their message to the policymakers. 
And this is very difficult to do because of our structures. 
The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government. 
Very, very sadly, our foreign services, the United Nations, the military in these countries have very little idea of what's going on. 
The average British soldier is on a tour of only six months; Italian soldiers, on tours of four months; the American military, on tours of 12 months. 
Diplomats are locked in embassy compounds. 
When they go out, they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour. 
In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. 
And there was not a single Pashto speaker. 
In the Afghan section in London responsible for governing Afghan policy on the ground, I was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in Afghanistan. 
So we need to change that institutional culture. 
And I could make the same points about the United States and the United Nations. 
Secondly, we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals. 
We need to make sure that we're a little bit suspicious, that we understand that optimism is in the DNA of the military, that we don't respond to it with quite as much alacrity. 
And thirdly, we need to have some humility. 
We need to begin from the position that our knowledge, our power, our legitimacy is limited. 
This doesn't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster. 
It isn't. 
Bosnia and Kosovo were signal successes, great successes. 
Today when you go to Bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened. 
It's almost impossible to believe the progress we've made since 1994. 
Refugee return, which the United Nations High Commission for Refugees thought would be extremely unlikely, has largely happened. 
A million properties have been returned. 
Borders between the Bosniak territory and the Bosnian-Serb territory have calmed down. 
The national army has shrunk. 
The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden. 
This has been done by an incredible, principled effort by the international community, and, of course, above all, by Bosnians themselves. 
But you need to look at context. 
And this is what we've lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. 
You need to understand that in those places what really mattered was, firstly, the role of Tudman and Milosevic in coming to the agreement, and then the fact those men went, that the regional situation improved, that the European Union could offer Bosnia something extraordinary: the chance to be part of a new thing, a new club, a chance to join something bigger. 
And finally, we need to understand that in Bosnia and Kosovo, a lot of the secret of what we did, a lot of the secret of our success, was our humility — was the tentative nature of our engagement. 
We criticized people a lot in Bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals. 
We criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees. 
But that slowness, that caution, the fact that President Clinton initially said that American troops would only be deployed for a year, turned out to be a strength, and it helped us to put our priorities right. 
One of the saddest things about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we've got our priorities out of sync. 
We're not matching our resources to our priorities. 
Because if what we're interested in is terrorism, Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan. 
If what we're interested in is regional stability, Egypt is far more important. 
If what we're worried about is poverty and development, sub-Saharan Africa is far more important. 
This doesn't mean that Afghanistan doesn't matter, but that it's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage. 
So if I can finish with a metaphor for intervention, what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue. 
Why mountain rescue? 
Because when people talk about intervention, they imagine that some scientific theory — the Rand Corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population. 
This is the wrong way of looking at it. 
You need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue. 
When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue, you look for somebody who knows the terrain. 
It's about context. 
You understand that you can prepare, but the amount of preparation you can do is limited — you can take some water, you can have a map, you can have a pack. 
But what really matters is two kinds of problems — problems that occur on the mountain which you couldn't anticipate, such as, for example, ice on a slope, but which you can get around, and problems which you couldn't anticipate and which you can't get around, like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather. 
And the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain, in every temperature, at every period — a guide who, above all, knows when to turn back, who doesn't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them. 
What we look for in firemen, in climbers, in policemen, and what we should look for in intervention, is intelligent risk takers — not people who plunge blind off a cliff, not people who jump into a burning room, but who weigh their risks, weigh their responsibilities. 
Because the worst thing we have done in Afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option. 
It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable. 
And if we can resist this crazy slogan, we shall discover — in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, and anywhere else we go in the world — that if we can often do much less than we pretend, we can do much more than we fear. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. 
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) 
Bruno Giussani: Rory, you mentioned Libya at the end. Just briefly, what's your take on the current events there and the intervention? Rory Stewart: Okay, I think Libya poses the classic problem. The problem in Libya 
is that we are always pushing for the black or white. 
We imagine there are only two choices: either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation. 
And we are always being tempted up to our neck. 
We put our toes in and we go up to our neck. 
What we should have done in Libya is we should have stuck to the U.N. resolution. 
We should have limited ourselves very, very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in Benghazi. 
We could have done that. 
We set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because Gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours. 
Instead of which, we've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change. 
In doing so, we've destroyed our credibility with the Security Council, which means it's very difficult to get a resolution on Syria, and we're setting ourselves up again for failure. 
Once more, humility, limits, honesty, realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of. 
BG: Rory, thank you very much. 
RS: Thank you. (BG: Thank you.) 

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

This is a painting from the 16th century from Lucas Cranach the Elder. 
It shows the famous Fountain of Youth. 
If you drink its water or you bathe in it, you will get health and youth. 
Every culture, every civilization has dreamed of finding eternal youth. 
There are people like Alexander the Great or Ponce De León, the explorer, who spent much of their life chasing the Fountain of Youth. 
They didn't find it. 
But what if there was something to it? 
What if there was something to this Fountain of Youth? 
I will share an absolutely amazing development in aging research that could revolutionize the way we think about aging and how we may treat age-related diseases in the future. 
It started with experiments that showed, in a recent number of studies about growing, that animals — old mice — that share a blood supply with young mice can get rejuvenated. 
This is similar to what you might see in humans, in Siamese twins, and I know this sounds a bit creepy. 
But what Tom Rando, a stem-cell researcher, reported in 2007, was that old muscle from a mouse can be rejuvenated if it's exposed to young blood through common circulation. 
This was reproduced by Amy Wagers at Harvard a few years later, and others then showed that similar rejuvenating effects could be observed in the pancreas, the liver and the heart. 
But what I'm most excited about, and several other labs as well, is that this may even apply to the brain. 
So, what we found is that an old mouse exposed to a young environment in this model called parabiosis, shows a younger brain — and a brain that functions better. 
And I repeat: an old mouse that gets young blood through shared circulation looks younger and functions younger in its brain. 
So when we get older — we can look at different aspects of human cognition, and you can see on this slide here, we can look at reasoning, verbal ability and so forth. 
And up to around age 50 or 60, these functions are all intact, and as I look at the young audience here in the room, we're all still fine. 
(Laughter) But it's scary to see how all these curves go south. 
And as we get older, diseases such as Alzheimer's and others may develop. 
We know that with age, the connections between neurons — the way neurons talk to each other, the synapses — they start to deteriorate; neurons die, the brain starts to shrink, and there's an increased susceptibility for these neurodegenerative diseases. 
One big problem we have — to try to understand how this really works at a very molecular mechanistic level — is that we can't study the brains in detail, in living people. 
We can do cognitive tests, we can do imaging — all kinds of sophisticated testing. 
But we usually have to wait until the person dies to get the brain and look at how it really changed through age or in a disease. 
This is what neuropathologists do, for example. 
So, how about we think of the brain as being part of the larger organism. 
Could we potentially understand more about what happens in the brain at the molecular level if we see the brain as part of the entire body? 
So if the body ages or gets sick, does that affect the brain? 
And vice versa: as the brain gets older, does that influence the rest of the body? 
And what connects all the different tissues in the body is blood. 
Blood is the tissue that not only carries cells that transport oxygen, for example, the red blood cells, or fights infectious diseases, but it also carries messenger molecules, hormone-like factors that transport information from one cell to another, from one tissue to another, including the brain. 
So if we look at how the blood changes in disease or age, can we learn something about the brain? 
We know that as we get older, the blood changes as well, so these hormone-like factors change as we get older. 
And by and large, factors that we know are required for the development of tissues, for the maintenance of tissues — they start to decrease as we get older, while factors involved in repair, in injury and in inflammation — they increase as we get older. 
So there's this unbalance of good and bad factors, if you will. 
And to illustrate what we can do potentially with that, I want to talk you through an experiment that we did. 
We had almost 300 blood samples from healthy human beings 20 to 89 years of age, and we measured over 100 of these communication factors, these hormone-like proteins that transport information between tissues. 
And what we noticed first is that between the youngest and the oldest group, about half the factors changed significantly. 
So our body lives in a very different environment as we get older, when it comes to these factors. 
And using statistical or bioinformatics programs, we could try to discover those factors that best predict age — in a way, back-calculate the relative age of a person. 
And the way this looks is shown in this graph. 
So, on the one axis you see the actual age a person lived, the chronological age. 
So, how many years they lived. 
And then we take these top factors that I showed you, and we calculate their relative age, their biological age. 
And what you see is that there is a pretty good correlation, so we can pretty well predict the relative age of a person. 
But what's really exciting are the outliers, as they so often are in life. 
You can see here, the person I highlighted with the green dot is about 70 years of age but seems to have a biological age, if what we're doing here is really true, of only about 45. 
So is this a person that actually looks much younger than their age? 
But more importantly: Is this a person who is maybe at a reduced risk to develop an age-related disease and will have a long life — will live to 100 or more? 
On the other hand, the person here, highlighted with the red dot, is not even 40, but has a biological age of 65. 
Is this a person at an increased risk of developing an age-related disease? 
So in our lab, we're trying to understand these factors better, and many other groups are trying to understand, what are the true aging factors, and can we learn something about them to possibly predict age-related diseases? 
So what I've shown you so far is simply correlational, right? 
You can just say, "" Well, these factors change with age, "" but you don't really know if they do something about aging. 
So what I'm going to show you now is very remarkable and it suggests that these factors can actually modulate the age of a tissue. 
And that's where we come back to this model called parabiosis. 
So, parabiosis is done in mice by surgically connecting the two mice together, and that leads then to a shared blood system, where we can now ask, "" How does the old brain get influenced by exposure to the young blood? "" And for this purpose, we use young mice that are an equivalency of 20-year-old people, and old mice that are roughly 65 years old in human years. 
What we found is quite remarkable. 
We find there are more neural stem cells that make new neurons in these old brains. 
There's an increased activity of the synapses, the connections between neurons. 
There are more genes expressed that are known to be involved in the formation of new memories. 
And there's less of this bad inflammation. 
But we observed that there are no cells entering the brains of these animals. 
So when we connect them, there are actually no cells going into the old brain, in this model. 
Instead, we've reasoned, then, that it must be the soluble factors, so we could collect simply the soluble fraction of blood which is called plasma, and inject either young plasma or old plasma into these mice, and we could reproduce these rejuvenating effects, but what we could also do now is we could do memory tests with mice. 
As mice get older, like us humans, they have memory problems. 
It's just harder to detect them, but I'll show you in a minute how we do that. 
But we wanted to take this one step further, one step closer to potentially being relevant to humans. 
What I'm showing you now are unpublished studies, where we used human plasma, young human plasma, and as a control, saline, and injected it into old mice, and asked, can we again rejuvenate these old mice? 
Can we make them smarter? 
And to do this, we used a test. It's called a Barnes maze. 
This is a big table that has lots of holes in it, and there are guide marks around it, and there's a bright light, as on this stage here. 
The mice hate this and they try to escape, and find the single hole that you see pointed at with an arrow, where a tube is mounted underneath where they can escape and feel comfortable in a dark hole. 
So we teach them, over several days, to find this space on these cues in the space, and you can compare this for humans, to finding your car in a parking lot after a busy day of shopping. 
(Laughter) Many of us have probably had some problems with that. 
So, let's look at an old mouse here. 
This is an old mouse that has memory problems, as you'll notice in a moment. 
It just looks into every hole, but it didn't form this spacial map that would remind it where it was in the previous trial or the last day. 
In stark contrast, this mouse here is a sibling of the same age, but it was treated with young human plasma for three weeks, with small injections every three days. 
And as you noticed, it almost looks around, "" Where am I? "" — and then walks straight to that hole and escapes. 
So, it could remember where that hole was. 
So by all means, this old mouse seems to be rejuvenated — it functions more like a younger mouse. 
And it also suggests that there is something not only in young mouse plasma, but in young human plasma that has the capacity to help this old brain. 
So to summarize, we find the old mouse, and its brain in particular, are malleable. 
They're not set in stone; we can actually change them. 
It can be rejuvenated. 
Young blood factors can reverse aging, and what I didn't show you — in this model, the young mouse actually suffers from exposure to the old. 
So there are old-blood factors that can accelerate aging. 
And most importantly, humans may have similar factors, because we can take young human blood and have a similar effect. 
Old human blood, I didn't show you, does not have this effect; it does not make the mice younger. 
So, is this magic transferable to humans? 
We're running a small clinical study at Stanford, where we treat Alzheimer's patients with mild disease with a pint of plasma from young volunteers, 20-year-olds, and do this once a week for four weeks, and then we look at their brains with imaging. 
We test them cognitively, and we ask their caregivers for daily activities of living. 
What we hope is that there are some signs of improvement from this treatment. 
And if that's the case, that could give us hope that what I showed you works in mice might also work in humans. 
Now, I don't think we will live forever. 
But maybe we discovered that the Fountain of Youth is actually within us, and it has just dried out. 
And if we can turn it back on a little bit, maybe we can find the factors that are mediating these effects, we can produce these factors synthetically and we can treat diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's disease or other dementias. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

We all go to doctors. 
And we do so with trust and blind faith that the test they are ordering and the medications they're prescribing are based upon evidence — evidence that's designed to help us. 
However, the reality is that that hasn't always been the case for everyone. 
What if I told you that the medical science discovered over the past century has been based on only half the population? 
I'm an emergency medicine doctor. 
I was trained to be prepared in a medical emergency. 
It's about saving lives. How cool is that? 
OK, there's a lot of runny noses and stubbed toes, but no matter who walks through the door to the ER, we order the same tests, we prescribe the same medication, without ever thinking about the sex or gender of our patients. 
Why would we? 
We were never taught that there were any differences between men and women. 
A recent Government Accountability study revealed that 80 percent of the drugs withdrawn from the market are due to side effects on women. 
So let's think about that for a minute. 
Why are we discovering side effects on women only after a drug has been released to the market? 
Do you know that it takes years for a drug to go from an idea to being tested on cells in a laboratory, to animal studies, to then clinical trials on humans, finally to go through a regulatory approval process, to be available for your doctor to prescribe to you? 
Not to mention the millions and billions of dollars of funding it takes to go through that process. 
So why are we discovering unacceptable side effects on half the population after that has gone through? 
What's happening? 
Well, it turns out that those cells used in that laboratory, they're male cells, and the animals used in the animal studies were male animals, and the clinical trials have been performed almost exclusively on men. 
How is it that the male model became our framework for medical research? 
Let's look at an example that has been popularized in the media, and it has to do with the sleep aid Ambien. 
Ambien was released on the market over 20 years ago, and since then, hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been written, primarily to women, because women suffer more sleep disorders than men. 
But just this past year, the Food and Drug Administration recommended cutting the dose in half for women only, because they just realized that women metabolize the drug at a slower rate than men, causing them to wake up in the morning with more of the active drug in their system. 
And then they're drowsy and they're getting behind the wheel of the car, and they're at risk for motor vehicle accidents. 
And I can't help but think, as an emergency physician, how many of my patients that I've cared for over the years were involved in a motor vehicle accident that possibly could have been prevented if this type of analysis was performed and acted upon 20 years ago when this drug was first released. 
How many other things need to be analyzed by gender? 
What else are we missing? 
World War II changed a lot of things, and one of them was this need to protect people from becoming victims of medical research without informed consent. 
So some much-needed guidelines or rules were set into place, and part of that was this desire to protect women of childbearing age from entering into any medical research studies. 
There was fear: what if something happened to the fetus during the study? 
Who would be responsible? 
And so the scientists at this time actually thought this was a blessing in disguise, because let's face it — men's bodies are pretty homogeneous. 
They don't have the constantly fluctuating levels of hormones that could disrupt clean data they could get if they had only men. 
It was easier. It was cheaper. 
Not to mention, at this time, there was a general assumption that men and women were alike in every way, apart from their reproductive organs and sex hormones. 
So it was decided: medical research was performed on men, and the results were later applied to women. 
What did this do to the notion of women's health? 
Women's health became synonymous with reproduction: breasts, ovaries, uterus, pregnancy. 
It's this term we now refer to as "" bikini medicine. "" And this stayed this way until about the 1980s, when this concept was challenged by the medical community and by the public health policymakers when they realized that by excluding women from all medical research studies we actually did them a disservice, in that apart from reproductive issues, virtually nothing was known about the unique needs of the female patient. 
Since that time, an overwhelming amount of evidence has come to light that shows us just how different men and women are in every way. 
You know, we have this saying in medicine: children are not just little adults. 
And we say that to remind ourselves that children actually have a different physiology than normal adults. 
And it's because of this that the medical specialty of pediatrics came to light. 
And we now conduct research on children in order to improve their lives. 
And I know the same thing can be said about women. 
Women are not just men with boobs and tubes. 
But they have their own anatomy and physiology that deserves to be studied with the same intensity. 
Let's take the cardiovascular system, for example. 
This area in medicine has done the most to try to figure out why it seems men and women have completely different heart attacks. 
Heart disease is the number one killer for both men and women, but more women die within the first year of having a heart attack than men. 
Men will complain of crushing chest pain — an elephant is sitting on their chest. 
And we call this typical. 
Women have chest pain, too. 
But more women than men will complain of "" just not feeling right, "" "can't seem to get enough air in," "just so tired lately." 
And for some reason we call this atypical, even though, as I mentioned, women do make up half the population. 
And so what is some of the evidence to help explain some of these differences? 
If we look at the anatomy, the blood vessels that surround the heart are smaller in women compared to men, and the way that those blood vessels develop disease is different in women compared to men. 
And the test that we use to determine if someone is at risk for a heart attack, well, they were initially designed and tested and perfected in men, and so aren't as good at determining that in women. 
And then if we think about the medications — common medications that we use, like aspirin. 
We give aspirin to healthy men to help prevent them from having a heart attack, but do you know that if you give aspirin to a healthy woman, it's actually harmful? 
What this is doing is merely telling us that we are scratching the surface. 
Emergency medicine is a fast-paced business. 
In how many life-saving areas of medicine, like cancer and stroke, are there important differences between men and women that we could be utilizing? 
Or even, why is it that some people get those runny noses more than others, or why the pain medication that we give to those stubbed toes work in some and not in others? 
The Institute of Medicine has said every cell has a sex. 
What does this mean? 
Sex is DNA. 
Gender is how someone presents themselves in society. 
And these two may not always match up, as we can see with our transgendered population. 
But it's important to realize that from the moment of conception, every cell in our bodies — skin, hair, heart and lungs — contains our own unique DNA, and that DNA contains the chromosomes that determine whether we become male or female, man or woman. 
It used to be thought that those sex-determining chromosomes pictured here — XY if you're male, XX if you're female — merely determined whether you would be born with ovaries or testes, and it was the sex hormones that those organs produced that were responsible for the differences we see in the opposite sex. 
But we now know that that theory was wrong — or it's at least a little incomplete. 
And thankfully, scientists like Dr. Page from the Whitehead Institute, who works on the Y chromosome, and Doctor Yang from UCLA, they have found evidence that tells us that those sex-determining chromosomes that are in every cell in our bodies continue to remain active for our entire lives and could be what's responsible for the differences we see in the dosing of drugs, or why there are differences between men and women in the susceptibility and severity of diseases. 
This new knowledge is the game-changer, and it's up to those scientists that continue to find that evidence, but it's up to the clinicians to start translating this data at the bedside, today. 
Right now. 
And to help do this, I'm a co-founder of a national organization called Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative, and we collect all of this data so that it's available for teaching and for patient care. 
And we're working to bring together the medical educators to the table. 
That's a big job. 
It's changing the way medical training has been done since its inception. 
But I believe in them. 
I know they're going to see the value of incorporating the gender lens into the current curriculum. 
It's about training the future health care providers correctly. 
And regionally, I'm a co-creator of a division within the Department of Emergency Medicine here at Brown University, called Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine, and we conduct the research to determine the differences between men and women in emergent conditions, like heart disease and stroke and sepsis and substance abuse, but we also believe that education is paramount. 
We've created a 360-degree model of education. 
We have programs for the doctors, for the nurses, for the students and for the patients. 
Because this cannot just be left up to the health care leaders. 
We all have a role in making a difference. 
But I must warn you: this is not easy. 
In fact, it's hard. 
It's essentially changing the way we think about medicine and health and research. 
It's changing our relationship to the health care system. 
But there's no going back. 
We now know just enough to know that we weren't doing it right. 
Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, "" Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. "" And the first step towards change is awareness. 
This is not just about improving medical care for women. 
This is about personalized, individualized health care for everyone. 
This awareness has the power to transform medical care for men and women. 
And from now on, I want you to ask your doctors whether the treatments you are receiving are specific to your sex and gender. 
They may not know the answer — yet. 
But the conversation has begun, and together we can all learn. 
Remember, for me and my colleagues in this field, your sex and gender matter. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

As a boy, I loved cars. 
When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. 
Like this. 
And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year. 
Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars. 
I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. 
And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere. 
So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. 
We built the hardware and the software. 
We made it learn from us, and we set it free in the desert. 
And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. 
Yet I still hadn't saved a single life. 
Since, our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves — any street in California. 
We've driven 140,000 miles. 
Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving. 
It's the perfect driving mechanism. 
We've driven in cities, like in San Francisco here. 
We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1. 
We've encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is without a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. 
In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't even notice. 
Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. 
(Laughter) Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts. 
(Video) Man: Oh, my God. 
What? 
Second Man: It's driving itself. 
Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who died. 
Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people? 
And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error, and can therefore be prevented by machines? 
Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane — improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes, and do away with all traffic jams on highways? 
Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute? 
You could regain this time. 
This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone. 
And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted. 
Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I bring to you a message from tens of thousands of people — in the villages, in the slums, in the hinterland of the country — who have solved problems through their own genius, without any outside help. 
When our home minister announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of India, about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable, he missed the point. 
The point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years, the point that people may be economically poor, but they're not poor in the mind. 
In other words, the minds on the margin are not the marginal minds. 
That is the message, which we started 31 years ago. 
And what did it start? 
Let me just tell you, briefly, my personal journey, which led me to come to this point. 
In '85,' 86, I was in Bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands, on the fields of the poor people, and how to develop research technologies, which are based on the knowledge of the people. 
I came back in '86. 
I had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that I found in that country, which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity. 
I started looking at my own work: The work that I had done for the previous 10 years, almost every time, had instances of knowledge that people had shared. 
Now, I was paid in dollars as a consultant, and I looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself: "" Is there a line in my return, which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has made it possible? 
Was it because I'm brilliant that I'm getting this reward, or because of the revolution? 
Is it that I write very well? 
Is it that I articulate very well? 
Is it that I analyze the data very well? 
Is it because I'm a professor, and, therefore, I must be entitled to this reward from society? "" I tried to convince myself that, "" No, no, I have worked for the policy changes. 
You know, the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor, and, therefore I think it's okay. "" But it appeared to me that all these years that I'd been working on exploitation — exploitation by landlords, by moneylenders, by traders — gave me an insight that probably I was also an exploiter, because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of the people — those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me — and nothing ever went back to them. 
So much so, that much of my work till that time was in the English language. 
The majority of the people from whom I learned didn't know English. 
So what kind of a contributor was I? 
I was talking about social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act — of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. 
So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. 
And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. 
So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research, wrote, read about 100 papers. 
And I came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique, dilemma is not unique; the solution had to be unique. 
And one day — I don't know what happened — while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if I only could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful. 
What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates. 
And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don't feel shortchanged. 
In fact, they invite the honey bees through their colors, and the bees don't keep all the honey for themselves. 
These are the three guiding principles of the Honey Bee Network: that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. 
They must not remain anonymous. 
And I must tell you that after 20 years, I have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of this art. 
That is a great tragedy — which I'm carrying still with me and I hope that all of you will carry this with you — that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making them anonymous. 
The research guidelines of U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Research Councils of the U.K. 
or of Indian Councils of Science Research do not require that whatever you learn from people, you must share back with them. 
We are talking about an accountable society, a society that is fair and just, and we don't even do justice in the knowledge market. 
And India wants to be a knowledge society. 
How will it be a knowledge society? 
So, obviously, you cannot have two principles of justice, one for yourself and one for others. 
It must be the same. 
You cannot discriminate. 
You cannot be in favor of your own values, which are at a distance from the values that you espouse. 
So, fairness to one and to the other is not divisible. 
Look at this picture. 
Can you tell me where has it been taken from, and what is it meant for? Anybody? 
I'm a professor; I must quiz you. (Laughter) Anybody? Any guess at all? 
Pardon? (Audience Member: Rajasthan.) Anil Gupta: But what has it been used for? What has it been used for? 
(Murmuring) Pardon? 
You know, you're so right. We must give him a hand, because this man knows how insensitive our government is. 
Look at this. This is the site of the government of India. 
It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. 
I'm so sorry to say that. 
Is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? 
It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. 
If this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. 
We should be doing something about it. 
And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women still carry water on their heads. 
And we do not ask this question. 
You must have taken tea in the morning. 
Think for a minute. 
The leaves of the tea, plucked from the bushes; you know what the action is? The action is: The lady picks up a few leaves, puts them in the basket on the backside. 
Just do it 10 times; you will realize the pain in this shoulder. 
And she does it a few thousand times every day. 
The rice that you ate in the lunch, and you will eat today, is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture, millions of them, every season, in the paddy season, when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water. 
And feet in the water will develop fungus, infections, and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point. 
And every year, 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually. 
No machines have been developed. 
So the silence of scientists, of technologists, of public policy makers, of the change agent, drew our attention that this is not on, this is not on; this is not the way society will work. 
This is not what our parliament would do. You know, we have a program for employment: One hundred, 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100 days by this great country. 
Doing what? Breaking stones, digging earth. 
So we asked a question to the parliament: Do poor have heads? 
Do poor have legs, mouth and hands, but no head? 
So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. 
And what has happened? 
An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. 
This is what Honey Bee Network is about. 
And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. 
They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity, the innovations, either in terms of contemporary innovations, or in terms of traditional knowledge. 
And it all begins with curiosity. 
It all begins with curiosity. 
This person, whom we met — and you will see it on the website, www.sristi.org — this tribal person, he had a wish. 
And he said, "" If my wish gets fulfilled "" — somebody was sick and he had to monitor — "" God, please cure him. 
And if you cure him, I will get my wall painted. "" And this is what he got painted. 
Somebody was talking yesterday about Maslowian hierarchy. 
There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian model of hierarchy of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment. 
Kabir, Rahim, all the great Sufi saints, they were all poor people, and they had a great reason. (Applause) Please do not ever think that only after meeting your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment. 
Any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment, only by the resolve that they have in their mind that they must achieve something. 
Look at this. 
We saw it in Shodh Yatra. Every six months we walk in different parts of the country. 
I've walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years. 
So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel. 
Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting. 
That's the only space she could express her creativity. 
And she's so marvelous. 
Look at this lady, Ram Timari Devi, on a grain bin. In Champaran, we had a Shodh Yatra and we were walking in the land where Gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy, pain of indigo growers. 
Bhabi Mahato in Purulia and Bankura. 
Look at what she has done. 
The whole wall is her canvas. She's sitting there with a broom. 
Is she an artisan or an artist? 
Obviously she's an artist; she's a creative person. 
If we can create markets for these artists, we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones. 
They will be paid for what they are good at, not what they're bad at. 
(Applause) Look at what Rojadeen has done. 
In Motihari in Champaran, there are a lot of people who sell tea on the shack and, obviously, there's a limited market for tea. 
Every morning you have tea, as well as coffee. 
So he thought, why don't I convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine? 
So this is a coffee machine. Just takes a few hundred rupees. 
People bring their own cooker, he attaches a valve and a steam pipe, and now he gives you espresso coffee. (Laughter) Now, this is a real, affordable coffee percolator that works on gas. 
(Applause) Look at what Sheikh Jahangir has done. 
A lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground. 
So this fellow is bringing a flour-grinding machine on a two-wheeler. 
If you have 500 grams, 1000, one kilogram, he will grind it for it for you; the flourmill will not grind such a small quantity. 
Please understand the problem of poor people. 
They have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of energy, in terms of cost, in terms of quality. 
They don't want second-standard, second-quality outputs. 
But to be able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs. 
And that is what Sheikh Jahangir did. 
But that's not enough, what he did. Look at what he did here. 
If you have clothes, and you don't have enough time to wash them, he brought a washing machine to your doorstep, mounted on a two-wheeler. 
So here's a model where a two-wheeler washing machine... 
He is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep. 
(Applause) You bring your water, you bring your soap, I wash the clothes for you. Charge 50 paisa, one rupee for you per lot, and a new business model can emerge. 
Now, what we need is, we need people who will be able to scale them up. 
Look at this. 
It looks like a beautiful photograph. 
But you know what it is? Can anybody guess what it is? 
Somebody from India would know, of course. 
It's a tawa. 
It's a hot plate made of clay. 
Now, what is the beauty in it? 
When you have a non-stick pan, it costs about, maybe, 250 rupees, five dollars, six dollars. 
This is less than a dollar and this is non-stick; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials. 
And the best part is that, while you use a costly non-stick pan, you eat the so-called Teflon or Teflon-like material because after some time the stuff disappears. Where has it gone? 
It has gone in your stomach. It was not meant for that. (Laughter) You know? But here in this clay hot plate, it will never go into your stomach. 
So it is better, it is safer; it is affordable, it is energy-efficient. 
In other words, solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper, need not be, so-called, jugaad, need not be some kind of makeshift arrangement. 
They have to be better, they have to be more efficient, they have to be affordable. 
And that is what Mansukh Bhai Prajapati has done. 
He has designed this plate with a handle. 
And now with one dollar, you can afford a better alternative than the people market is offering you. 
This lady, she developed a herbal pesticide formulation. 
We filed the patent for her, the National Innovation Foundation. 
And who knows? Somebody will license this technology and develop marketable products, and she would get revenue. 
Now, let me mention one thing: I think we need a polycentric model of development, where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner. 
Higher the local fit, greater is the chance of scaling up. 
In the scaling up, there's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people, point by point, with the supply that you're making. 
So why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch? 
Things can scale up, and they have scaled up. 
For example, cell phones: We have 400 million cellphones in this country. 
Now, it is possible that I use only two buttons on the cellphone, only three options on the cellphone. 
It has 300 options, I'm paying for 300; I'm using only three but I'm willing to live with it, therefore it is scaling up. 
But if I had to get a match to match, obviously, I would need a different design of a cellphone. 
So what we're saying is that scalability should not become an enemy of sustainability. 
There must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a locality, and yet, one can be able to fund them. 
One of the greatest studies that we've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question — "" What is a scalable model? "" — as if the need of a community, which is only located in a space and time and has those needs only located in those places, has no legitimate right to get them for free because it's not part of a larger scale. 
So either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out. 
Now, the eminent model, the long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books, for example, having only a few copies sold can still be a viable model. 
And we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio, will invest in the portfolio, where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities, and yet, the overall platform of the model will become viable. 
Look at what he is doing. 
Saidullah Sahib is an amazing man. 
At the age of 70, he is linking up something very creative. 
(Music) Saidullah Sahib: I couldn't wait for the boat. 
I had to meet my love. 
My desperation made me an innovator. 
Even love needs help from technology. 
Innovation is the light of my wife, Noor. 
New inventions are the passion of my life. 
My technology. 
(Applause) AG: Saidulluh Sahib is in Motihari, again in Champaran. 
Wonderful human being, but he stills sells, at this age, honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood, because we haven't been able to convince the water park people, the lake people, in [unclear] operations. 
And we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in Mumbai — where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers, wading in the water — that, look, you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will not go, where your transport will not go. 
So we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue device, as a vending device during the floods in eastern India, when you have to deliver things to people in different islands where they're marooned. 
But the idea has a merit. The idea has a merit. 
What has Appachan done? Appachan, unfortunately, is no more, but he has left behind a message. 
A very powerful message Appachan: I watch the world wake up every day. 
(Music) It's not that a coconut fell on my head, and I came upon this idea. 
With no money to fund my studies, I scaled new heights. 
Now, they call me the local Spiderman. 
My technology. 
(Applause) AG: Many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally — what I call a G2G model, grassroots to global. 
And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department, bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy. 
And this device makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms, rather than only a few, because otherwise she had to make a big platform and then climb her [unclear] would climb on that. 
So, you know, we are advancing the frontiers of science. 
Remya Jose has developed... 
you can go to the YouTube and find India Innovates and then you will find these videos. 
Innovation by her when she was in class 10th: a washing machine-cum-exercising machine. 
Mr. Kharai who is a physically challenged person, one and a half foot height, only. 
But he has modified a two-wheeler so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility. 
This innovation is from the slums of Rio. 
And this person, Mr. Ubirajara. 
We were talking about, my friends in Brazil, how we scale up this model in China and Brazil. 
And we have a very vibrant network in China, particularly, but also emerging in Brazil and other parts of the world. 
This stand on the front wheel, you will not find on any cycle. 
India and China have the largest number of cycles. 
But this innovation emerged in Brazil. 
The point is, none of us should be parochial, none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good ideas will come only from our country. 
No, we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically poor people, wherever they are. 
And look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations: cycle that's a sprayer, cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road. 
I can't change the condition of the road, but I can make the cycle run faster. 
That is what Kanak Das has done. 
And in South Africa, we had taken our innovators, and many of us had gone there share with the colleagues in South Africa as to how innovation can become a means of liberation from the drudgery that people have. 
And this is a donkey cart which they modified. 
There's an axle here, of 30, 40 kg, serving no purpose. 
Remove it, the cart needs one donkey less. 
This is in China. This girl needed a breathing apparatus. 
These three people in the village sat down and decided to think, "How do we elongate the life of this girl of our village?" 
They were not related to her, but they tried to find out, "How can we use..." They used a cycle, they put together a breathing apparatus. 
And this breathing apparatus now saved the life, and she's very welcome. 
There's a whole range of innovations that we have. 
A car, which runs on compressed air with six paisa per kilometer. 
Assam, Kanak Gogoi. 
And you would not find this car in U.S. or Europe, but this is available in India. 
Now, this lady, she used to do the winding of the yarn for Pochampally Saree. 
In one day, 18,000 times, she had to do this winding to generate two sarees. 
This is what her son has done after seven years of struggle. 
She said, "" Change your profession. "" He said, "" I can't. This is the only thing I know, but I'll invent a machine, which will solve your problem. "" And this is what he did, a sewing machine in Uttar Pradesh. 
So, this is what SRISTI is saying: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." 
I will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity, a whole range of things. 
We have sold things all over the world, from Ethiopia to Turkey to U.S. to wherever. 
Products have gone to the market, a few. 
These are the people whose knowledge made this Herbavate cream for eczema possible. 
And here, a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every time a user uses it, it asks the user, "" You can also be an innovator. 
If you have an idea, send it back to us. "" So, creativity counts, knowledge matters, innovations transform, incentives inspire. 
And incentives: not just material, but also non-material incentives. 
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) 

To understand the business of mythology and what a Chief Belief Officer is supposed to do, you have to hear a story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers, and his brother, the athletic warlord of the gods, Kartikeya. 
The two brothers one day decided to go on a race, three times around the world. 
Kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans. 
He went around once, he went around twice, he went around thrice. 
But his brother, Ganesha, simply walked around his parents once, twice, thrice, and said, "" I won. "" "" How come? "" said Kartikeya. 
And Ganesha said, "" You went around 'the world.' I went around 'my world.' "" What matters more? 
If you understand the difference between 'the world' and 'my world,' you understand the difference between logos and mythos. 
'The world 'is objective, logical, universal, factual, scientific. 
'My world 'is subjective. 
It's emotional. It's personal. 
It's perceptions, thoughts, feelings, dreams. 
It is the belief system that we carry. 
It's the myth that we live in. 
'The world 'tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. 
'My world 'tells us why the sun rises, why we were born. 
Every culture is trying to understand itself: "Why do we exist?" 
And every culture comes up with its own understanding of life, its own customized version of mythology. 
Culture is a reaction to nature, and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals, which are always indifferent to rationality. 
And so, when you study it, you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world. 
Different people see things differently — different viewpoints. 
There is my world and there is your world, and my world is always better than your world, because my world, you see, is rational and yours is superstition. 
Yours is faith. 
Yours is illogical. 
This is the root of the clash of civilizations. 
It took place, once, in 326 B.C. 
on the banks of a river called the Indus, now in Pakistan. 
This river lends itself to India's name. 
India. Indus. 
Alexander, a young Macedonian, met there what he called a "" gymnosophist, "" which means "" the naked, wise man. "" We don't know who he was. 
Perhaps he was a Jain monk, like Bahubali over here, the Gomateshwara Bahubali whose image is not far from Mysore. 
Or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock, staring at the sky and the sun and the moon. 
Alexander asked, "" What are you doing? "" and the gymnosophist answered, "I'm experiencing nothingness." 
Then the gymnosophist asked, "What are you doing?" 
and Alexander said, "" I am conquering the world. "" And they both laughed. 
Each one thought that the other was a fool. 
The gymnosophist said, "" Why is he conquering the world? 
It's pointless. "" And Alexander thought, "" Why is he sitting around, doing nothing? 
What a waste of a life. "" To understand this difference in viewpoints, we have to understand the subjective truth of Alexander — his myth, and the mythology that constructed it. 
Alexander's mother, his parents, his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer's "" Iliad. "" They told him of a great hero called Achilles, who, when he participated in battle, victory was assured, but when he withdrew from the battle, defeat was inevitable. 
"" Achilles was a man who could shape history, a man of destiny, and this is what you should be, Alexander. "" That's what he heard. 
"" What should you not be? 
You should not be Sisyphus, who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night. 
Don't live a life which is monotonous, mediocre, meaningless. 
Be spectacular! — like the Greek heroes, like Jason, who went across the sea with the Argonauts and fetched the Golden Fleece. 
Be spectacular like Theseus, who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed Minotaur. 
When you play in a race, win! — because when you win, the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods. "" Because, you see, the Greeks believed you live only once, and when you die, you have to cross the River Styx. 
And if you have lived an extraordinary life, you will be welcomed to Elysium, or what the French call "" Champs-Élysées "" — (Laughter) — the heaven of the heroes. 
But these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard. 
He heard a very different story. 
He heard of a man called Bharat, after whom India is called Bhārata. 
Bharat also conquered the world. 
And then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called Meru. 
And he wanted to hoist his flag to say, "I was here first." 
But when he reached the mountain peak, he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him, each one claiming "" 'I was here first'... 
that's what I thought until I came here. "" And suddenly, in this canvas of infinity, Bharat felt insignificant. 
This was the mythology of the gymnosophist. 
You see, he had heroes, like Ram — Raghupati Ram and Krishna, Govinda Hari. 
But they were not two characters on two different adventures. 
They were two lifetimes of the same hero. 
When the Ramayana ends the Mahabharata begins. 
When Ram dies, Krishna is born. 
When Krishna dies, eventually he will be back as Ram. 
You see, the Indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. 
But you don't cross it once. 
You go to and fro endlessly. 
It was called the Vaitarani. 
You go again and again and again. 
Because, you see, nothing lasts forever in India, not even death. 
And so, you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days... 
And what do you do at the end of 10 days? 
You dunk it in the river. 
Because it has to end. 
And next year, she will come back. 
What goes around always comes around, and this rule applies not just to man, but also the gods. 
You see, the gods have to come back again and again and again as Ram, as Krishna. 
Not only do they live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all. 
"Groundhog Day." 
(Laughter) Two different mythologies. 
Which is right? 
Two different mythologies, two different ways of looking at the world. 
One linear, one cyclical. 
One believes this is the one and only life. 
The other believes this is one of many lives. 
And so, the denominator of Alexander's life was one. 
So, the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements. 
The denominator of the gymnosophist's life was infinity. 
So, no matter what he did, it was always zero. 
And I believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired Indian mathematicians to discover the number zero. 
Who knows? 
And that brings us to the mythology of business. 
If Alexander's belief influenced his behavior, if the gymnosophist's belief influences his behavior, then it was bound to influence the business they were in. 
You see, what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves? 
And if you look at cultures around the world, all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business. 
Take a look. 
If you live only once, in one-life cultures around the world, you will see an obsession with binary logic, absolute truth, standardization, absoluteness, linear patterns in design. 
But if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives, you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic, with opinion, with contextual thinking, with everything is relative, sort of — (Laughter) mostly. (Laughter) 
You look at art. Look at the ballerina, how linear she is in her performance. 
And then look at the Indian classical dancer, the Kuchipudi dancer, the Bharatanatyam dancer, curvaceous. 
(Laughter) And then look at business. 
Standard business model: vision, mission, values, processes. 
Sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land, with the commandments held by the leader. 
And if you comply, you will go to heaven. 
But in India there is no "" the "" promised land. 
There are many promised lands, depending on your station in society, depending on your stage of life. 
You see, businesses are not run as institutions, by the idiosyncrasies of individuals. 
It's always about taste. 
It's always about my taste. 
You see, Indian music, for example, does not have the concept of harmony. 
There is no orchestra conductor. 
There is one performer standing there, and everybody follows. 
And you can never replicate that performance twice. 
It is not about documentation and contract. 
It's about conversation and faith. 
It's not about compliance. It's about setting, getting the job done, by bending or breaking the rules — just look at your Indian people around here, you'll see them smile; they know what it is. 
(Laughter) And then look at people who have done business in India, you'll see the exasperation on their faces. (Laughter) 
(Applause) You see, this is what India is today. The ground reality is based on a cyclical world view. 
So, it's rapidly changing, highly diverse, chaotic, ambiguous, unpredictable. 
And people are okay with it. 
And then globalization is taking place. 
The demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in. 
Which is rooted in one-life culture. 
And a clash is going to take place, like on the banks of the Indus. 
It is bound to happen. 
I have personally experienced it. I'm trained as a medical doctor. 
I did not want to study surgery. Don't ask me why. 
I love mythology too much. 
I wanted to learn mythology. But there is nowhere you can study. 
So, I had to teach it to myself. 
And mythology does not pay, well, until now. 
(Laughter) So, I had to take up a job. And I worked in the pharma industry. 
And I worked in the healthcare industry. 
And I worked as a marketing guy, and a sales guy, and a knowledge guy, and a content guy, and a training guy. 
I even was a business consultant, doing strategies and tactics. 
And I would see the exasperation between my American and European colleagues, when they were dealing with India. 
Example: Please tell us the process to invoice hospitals. 
Step A. Step B. Step C. Mostly. 
(Laughter) How do you parameterize "" mostly ""? 
How do you put it in a nice little software? You can't. 
I would give my viewpoints to people. 
But nobody was interested in listening to it, you see, until I met Kishore Biyani of the Future group. 
You see, he has established the largest retail chain, called Big Bazaar. 
And there are more than 200 formats, across 50 cities and towns of India. 
And he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets. 
And he knew very intuitively, that best practices, developed in Japan and China and Europe and America will not work in India. 
He knew that institutional thinking doesn't work in India. Individual thinking does. 
He had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of India. 
So, he had asked me to be the Chief Belief Officer, and said, "All I want to do is align belief." 
Sounds so simple. 
But belief is not measurable. 
You can't measure it. You can't manage it. 
So, how do you construct belief? 
How do you enhance the sensitivity of people to Indian-ness. 
Even if you are Indian, it is not very explicit, it is not very obvious. 
So, I tried to work on the standard model of culture, which is, develop stories, symbols and rituals. 
And I will share one of the rituals with you. 
You see it is based on the Hindu ritual of Darshan. 
Hindus don't have the concept of commandments. 
So, there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life. 
So, you're not really sure how you stand in front of God. 
So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God. 
You want to see God. 
And you want God to see you, and hence the gods have very large eyes, large unblinking eyes, sometimes made of silver, so they look at you. 
Because you don't know whether you're right or wrong, and so all you seek is divine empathy. 
"Just know where I came from, why I did the Jugaad." 
(Laughter) "" Why did I do the setting, why I don't care for the processes. Just understand me, please. "" And based on this, we created a ritual for leaders. 
After a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store, we blindfold him, we surround him with the stakeholders, the customer, his family, his team, his boss. 
You read out his KRA, his KPI, you give him the keys, and then you remove the blindfold. 
And invariably, you see a tear, because the penny has dropped. 
He realizes that to succeed, he does not have to be a "" professional, "" he does not have to cut out his emotions, he has to include all these people in his world to succeed, to make them happy, to make the boss happy, to make everyone happy. 
The customer is happy, because the customer is God. 
That sensitivity is what we need. Once this belief enters, behavior will happen, business will happen. 
And it has. 
So, then we come back to Alexander and to the gymnosophist. 
And everybody asks me, "" Which is the better way, this way or that way? "" And it's a very dangerous question, because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence. 
So, I will not answer the question. 
What I will give you is an Indian answer, the Indian head-shake. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm. 
You see, because both the paradigms are human constructions. 
They are cultural creations, not natural phenomena. 
And so the next time you meet someone, a stranger, one request: Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does he. 
Understand it. 
And when you understand it you will discover something spectacular. 
You will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth. 
Who sees it all? 
Varuna has but a thousand eyes. 
Indra, a hundred. 
You and I, only two. 
Thank you. Namaste. 
(Applause) 

I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean? 
So often, we look at dollar terms — people making less than a dollar or two or three a day. 
And yet the complexity of poverty really has to look at income as only one variable. 
Because really, it's a condition about choice, and the lack of freedom. 
And I had an experience that really deepened and elucidated for me the understanding that I have. 
It was in Kenya, and I want to share it with you. 
I was with my friend Susan Meiselas, the photographer, in the Mathare Valley slums. 
Now, Mathare Valley is one of the oldest slums in Africa. 
It's about three miles out of Nairobi, and it's a mile long and about two-tenths of a mile wide, where over half a million people live crammed in these little tin shacks, generation after generation, renting them, often eight or 10 people to a room. 
And it's known for prostitution, violence, drugs: a hard place to grow up. 
And when we were walking through the narrow alleys, it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. 
But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there: women washing their babies, washing their clothes, hanging them out to dry. 
I met this woman, Mama Rose, who has rented that little tin shack for 32 years, where she lives with her seven children. 
Four sleep in one twin bed, and three sleep on the mud and linoleum floor. 
And she keeps them all in school by selling water from that kiosk, and from selling soap and bread from the little store inside. 
It was also the day after the inauguration, and I was reminded how Mathare is still connected to the globe. 
And I would see kids on the street corners, and they'd say "" Obama, he's our brother! "" And I'd say "" Well, Obama's my brother, so that makes you my brother too. "" And they would look quizzically, and then be like, "" High five! "" And it was here that I met Jane. 
I was struck immediately by the kindness and the gentleness in her face, and I asked her to tell me her story. 
She started off by telling me her dream. She said, "" I had two. 
My first dream was to be a doctor, and the second was to marry a good man who would stay with me and my family, because my mother was a single mom, and couldn't afford to pay for school fees. 
So I had to give up the first dream, and I focused on the second. "" She got married when she was 18, had a baby right away. 
And when she turned 20, found herself pregnant with a second child, her mom died and her husband left her — married another woman. 
So she was again in Mathare, with no income, no skill set, no money. 
And so she ultimately turned to prostitution. 
It wasn't organized in the way we often think of it. 
She would go into the city at night with about 20 girls, look for work, and sometimes come back with a few shillings, or sometimes with nothing. 
And she said, "" You know, the poverty wasn't so bad. It was the humiliation and the embarrassment of it all. "" In 2001, her life changed. 
She had a girlfriend who had heard about this organization, Jamii Bora, that would lend money to people no matter how poor you were, as long as you provided a commensurate amount in savings. 
And so she spent a year to save 50 dollars, and started borrowing, and over time she was able to buy a sewing machine. 
She started tailoring. 
And that turned into what she does now, which is to go into the secondhand clothing markets, and for about three dollars and 25 cents she buys an old ball gown. 
Some of them might be ones you gave. 
And she repurposes them with frills and ribbons, and makes these frothy confections that she sells to women for their daughter's Sweet 16 or first Holy Communion — those milestones in a life that people want to celebrate all along the economic spectrum. 
And she does really good business. In fact, I watched her walk through the streets hawking. And before you knew it, there was a crowd of women around her, buying these dresses. 
And I reflected, as I was watching her sell the dresses, and also the jewelry that she makes, that now Jane makes more than four dollars a day. 
And by many definitions she is no longer poor. 
But she still lives in Mathare Valley. 
And so she can't move out. 
She lives with all of that insecurity, and in fact, in January, during the ethnic riots, she was chased from her home and had to find a new shack in which she would live. 
Jamii Bora understands that and understands that when we're talking about poverty, we've got to look at people all along the economic spectrum. 
And so with patient capital from Acumen and other organizations, loans and investments that will go the long term with them, they built a low-cost housing development, about an hour outside Nairobi central. 
And they designed it from the perspective of customers like Jane herself, insisting on responsibility and accountability. 
So she has to give 10 percent of the mortgage — of the total value, or about 400 dollars in savings. 
And then they match her mortgage to what she paid in rent for her little shanty. 
And in the next couple of weeks, she's going to be among the first 200 families to move into this development. 
When I asked her if she feared anything, or whether she would miss anything from Mathare, she said, "" What would I fear that I haven't confronted already? 
I'm HIV positive. I've dealt with it all. "" And she said, "" What would I miss? 
You think I will miss the violence or the drugs? The lack of privacy? 
Do you think I'll miss not knowing if my children are going to come home at the end of the day? "" She said "" If you gave me 10 minutes my bags would be packed. "" I said, "" Well what about your dreams? "" And she said, "" Well, you know, my dreams don't look exactly like I thought they would when I was a little girl. 
But if I think about it, I thought I wanted a husband, but what I really wanted was a family that was loving. And I fiercely love my children, and they love me back. "" She said, "" I thought that I wanted to be a doctor, but what I really wanted to be was somebody who served and healed and cured. 
And so I feel so blessed with everything that I have, that two days a week I go and I counsel HIV patients. 
And I say, 'Look at me. You are not dead. 
You are still alive. And if you are still alive you have to serve. '"" And she said, "" I'm not a doctor who gives out pills. 
But maybe me, I give out something better because I give them hope. "" And in the middle of this economic crisis, where so many of us are inclined to pull in with fear, I think we're well suited to take a cue from Jane and reach out, recognizing that being poor doesn't mean being ordinary. 
Because when systems are broken, like the ones that we're seeing around the world, it's an opportunity for invention and for innovation. 
It's an opportunity to truly build a world where we can extend services and products to all human beings, so that they can make decisions and choices for themselves. 
I truly believe it's where dignity starts. 
We owe it to the Janes of the world. 
And just as important, we owe it to ourselves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October. 
There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get. 
And not knowing where help was needed always ensured that help was in short supply in the areas that needed it most. 
We've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage, but we still can't do that with water, and here's why. 
Right now, if you want to test water in the field, you need a trained technician, expensive equipment like this, and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results. 
It's too slow to get a picture of conditions on the ground before they change, too expensive to implement in all the places that require testing. 
And it ignores the fact that, in the meanwhile, people still need to drink water. 
Most of the information that we collected on the cholera outbreak didn't come from testing water; it came from forms like this, which documented all the people we failed to help. 
Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines — a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they're safe. 
I've been inspired by that simplicity as I've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people I've ever known. 
We think there's a simpler solution to this problem — one that can be used by people who face conditions like this everyday. 
It's in its early stages, but this is what it looks like right now. 
We call it the Water Canary. 
It's a fast, cheap device that answers an important question: Is this water contaminated? 
It doesn't require any special training. 
And instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place, it uses light. 
That means there's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place, no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information. 
To test water, you simply insert a sample and, within seconds, it either displays a red light, indicating contaminated water, or a green light, indicating the sample is safe. 
This will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold. 
We're also, on top of that, integrating wireless networking into an affordable device with GPS and GSM. 
What that means is that each reading can be automatically transmitted to servers to be mapped in real time. 
With enough users, maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action, containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from. 
And then, instead of taking days to disseminate this information to the people who need it most, it can happen automatically. 
We've seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society. 
I think it's time for us to apply them to water. 
Our goal over the next year is to get Water Canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation, so we can tackle this problem together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is a map of New York State that was made in 1937 by the General Drafting Company. 
It's an extremely famous map among cartography nerds, because down here at the bottom of the Catskill Mountains, there is a little town called Roscoe — actually, this will go easier if I just put it up here — There's Roscoe, and then right above Roscoe is Rockland, New York, and then right above that is the tiny town of Agloe, New York. 
Agloe, New York, is very famous to cartographers, because it's a paper town. 
It's also known as a copyright trap. 
Mapmakers — because my map of New York and your map of New York are going to look very similar, on account of the shape of New York — often, mapmakers will insert fake places onto their maps, in order to protect their copyright. 
Because then, if my fake place shows up on your map, I can be well and truly sure that you have robbed me. 
Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials of the two guys who made this map, Ernest Alpers and Otto [G.] Lindberg, and they released this map in 1937. 
Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map with Agloe, New York, on it, at the same exact intersection of two dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. 
Well, you can imagine the delight over at General Drafting. 
They immediately call Rand McNally, and they say, "" We've caught you! We made Agloe, New York, up. 
It is a fake place. It's a paper town. 
We're going to sue your pants off! "" And Rand McNally says, "" No, no, no, no, Agloe is real. "" Because people kept going to that intersection of two dirt roads — (Laughter) in the middle of nowhere, expecting there to be a place called Agloe — someone built a place called Agloe, New York. (Laughter) 
It had a gas station, a general store, two houses at its peak. (Laughter) 
And this is of course a completely irresistible metaphor to a novelist, because we would all like to believe that the stuff that we write down on paper can change the actual world in which we're actually living, which is why my third book is called "" Paper Towns "". 
But what interests me ultimately more than the medium in which this happened, is the phenomenon itself. 
It's easy enough to say that the world shapes our maps of the world, right? 
Like the overall shape of the world is obviously going to affect our maps. 
But what I find a lot more interesting is the way that the manner in which we map the world changes the world. 
Because the world would truly be a different place if North were down. 
And the world would be a truly different place if Alaska and Russia weren't on opposite sides of the map. 
And the world would be a different place if we projected Europe to show it in its actual size. 
The world is changed by our maps of the world. 
The way that we choose — sort of, our personal cartographic enterprise, also shapes the map of our lives, and that in turn shapes our lives. 
I believe that what we map changes the life we lead. 
And I don't mean that in some, like, secret-y Oprah's Angels network, like, you-can-think-your-way- out-of-cancer sense. 
But I do believe that while maps don't show you where you will go in your life, they show you where you might go. 
You very rarely go to a place that isn't on your personal map. 
So I was a really terrible student when I was a kid. 
My GPA was consistently in the low 2s. 
And I think the reason that I was such a terrible student is that I felt like education was just a series of hurdles that had been erected before me, and I had to jump over in order to achieve adulthood. 
And I didn't really want to jump over these hurdles, because they seemed completely arbitrary, so I often wouldn't, and then people would threaten me, you know, they'd threaten me with this "" going on [my] permanent record, "" or "" You'll never get a good job. "" I didn't want a good job! 
As far as I could tell at eleven or twelve years old, like, people with good jobs woke up very early in the morning, (Laughter) and the men who had good jobs, one of the first things they did was tie a strangulation item of clothing around their necks. 
They literally put nooses on themselves, and then they went off to their jobs, whatever they were. 
That's not a recipe for a happy life. 
These people — in my, symbol-obsessed, twelve year-old imagination — these people who are strangling themselves as one of the first things they do each morning, they can't possibly be happy. 
Why would I want to jump over all of these hurdles and have that be the end? 
That's a terrible end! 
And then, when I was in tenth grade, I went to this school, Indian Springs School, a small boarding school, outside of Birmingham, Alabama. 
And all at once I became a learner. 
And I became a learner, because I found myself in a community of learners. 
I found myself surrounded by people who celebrated intellectualism and engagement, and who thought that my ironic oh-so-cool disengagement wasn't clever, or funny, but, like, it was a simple and unspectacular response to very complicated and compelling problems. 
And so I started to learn, because learning was cool. 
I learned that some infinite sets are bigger than other infinite sets, and I learned that iambic pentameter is and why it sounds so good to human ears. 
I learned that the Civil War was a nationalizing conflict, I learned some physics, I learned that correlation shouldn't be confused with causation — all of these things, by the way, enriched my life on a literally daily basis. 
And it's true that I don't use most of them for my "" job, "" but that's not what it's about for me. 
It's about cartography. 
What is the process of cartography? 
It's, you know, sailing upon some land, and thinking, "I think I'll draw that bit of land," and then wondering, "" Maybe there's some more land to draw. "" And that's when learning really began for me. 
It's true that I had teachers that didn't give up on me, and I was very fortunate to have those teachers, because I often gave them cause to think there was no reason to invest in me. 
But a lot of the learning that I did in high school wasn't about what happened inside the classroom, it was about what happened outside of the classroom. 
For instance, I can tell you that "" There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons — That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes — "" not because I memorized Emily Dickinson in school when I was in high school, but because there was a girl when I was in high school, and her name was Amanda, and I had a crush on her, and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry. 
The reason I can tell you what opportunity cost is, is because one day when I was playing Super Mario Kart on my couch, my friend Emmet walked in, and he said, "How long have you been playing Super Mario Kart?" 
And I said, "" I don't know, like, six hours? "" and he said, "" Do you realize that if you'd worked at Baskin-Robbins those six hours, you could have made 30 dollars, so in some ways, you just paid thirty dollars to play Super Mario Kart. "" And I was, like, "" I'll take that deal. "" (Laughter) But I learned what opportunity cost is. 
And along the way, the map of my life got better. 
It got bigger; it contained more places. 
There were more things that might happen, more futures I might have. 
It wasn't a formal, organized learning process, and I'm happy to admit that. 
It was spotty, it was inconsistent, there was a lot I didn't know. 
I might know, you know, Cantor's idea that some infinite sets are larger than other infinite sets, but I didn't really understand the calculus behind that idea. 
I might know the idea of opportunity cost, but I didn't know the law of diminishing returns. 
But the great thing about imagining learning as cartography, instead of imagining it as arbitrary hurdles that you have to jump over, is that you see a bit of coastline, and that makes you want to see more. 
And so now I do know at least some of the calculus that underlies all of that stuff. 
So, I had one learning community in high school, then I went to another for college, and then I went to another, when I started working at a magazine called "" Booklist, "" where I was an assistant, surrounded by astonishingly well-read people. 
And then I wrote a book. 
And like all authors dream of doing, I promptly quit my job. 
(Laughter) And for the first time since high school, I found myself without a learning community, and it was miserable. 
I hated it. 
I read many, many books during this two-year period. 
I read books about Stalin, and books about how the Uzbek people came to identify as Muslims, and I read books about how to make atomic bombs, but it just felt like I was creating my own hurdles, and then jumping over them myself, instead of feeling the excitement of being part of a community of learners, a community of people who are engaged together in the cartographic enterprise of trying to better understand and map the world around us. 
And then, in 2006, I met that guy. 
His name is Ze Frank. 
I didn't actually meet him, just on the Internet. 
Ze Frank was running, at the time, a show called "" The Show with Ze Frank, "" and I discovered the show, and that was my way back into being a community learner again. 
Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas: (Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built in the middle of a huge, hot desert. 
Almost everything here was brought from somewhere else — the sort of rocks, the trees, the waterfalls. 
These fish are almost as out of place as my pig that flew. 
Contrasted to the scorching desert that surrounds this place, so are these people. 
Things from all over the world have been rebuilt here, away from their histories, and away from the people that experience them differently. 
Sometimes improvements were made — even the Sphinx got a nose job. 
Here, there's no reason to feel like you're missing anything. 
This New York means the same to me as it does to everyone else. 
Everything is out of context, and that means context allows for everything: Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef. 
This fabrication of place could be one of the world's greatest achievements, because no one belongs here; everyone does. 
As I walked around this morning, I noticed most of the buildings were huge mirrors reflecting the sun back into the desert. 
But unlike most mirrors, which present you with an outside view of yourself embedded in a place, these mirrors come back empty. 
John Green: Makes me nostalgic for the days when you could see the pixels in online video. 
(Laughter) Ze isn't just a great public intellectual, he's also a brilliant community builder, and the community of people that built up around these videos was in many ways a community of learners. 
So we played Ze Frank at chess collaboratively, and we beat him. 
We organized ourselves to take a young man on a road trip across the United States. 
We turned the Earth into a sandwich, by having one person hold a piece of bread at one point on the Earth, and on the exact opposite point of the Earth, have another person holding a piece of bread. 
I realize that these are silly ideas, but they are also "" learny "" ideas, and that was what was so exciting to me, and if you go online, you can find communities like this all over the place. 
Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr, and yes, you will see people complaining about calculus, but you'll also see people re-blogging those complaints, making the argument that calculus is interesting and beautiful, and here's a way in to thinking about the problem that you find unsolvable. 
You can go to places like Reddit, and find sub-Reddits, like "" Ask a Historian "" or "" Ask Science, "" where you can ask people who are in these fields a wide range of questions, from very serious ones to very silly ones. 
But to me, the most interesting communities of learners that are growing up on the Internet right now are on YouTube, and admittedly, I am biased. 
But I think in a lot of ways, the YouTube page resembles a classroom. 
Look for instance at "" Minute Physics, "" a guy who's teaching the world about physics: (Video) Let's cut to the chase. 
As of July 4, 2012, the Higgs boson is the last fundamental piece of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered experimentally. 
But, you might ask, why was the Higgs boson included in the standard model, alongside well-known particles like electrons and photons and quarks, if it hadn't been discovered back then in the 1970s? 
Good question. There are two main reasons. 
First, just like the electron is an excitation in the electron field, the Higgs boson is simply a particle which is an excitation of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field. 
The Higgs field in turn plays an integral role in our model for the weak nuclear force. 
In particular, the Higgs field helps explain why it's so weak. 
We'll talk more about this in a later video, but even though weak nuclear theory was confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations, the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled with the weak force, that until now we've been unable to confirm its actual and independent existence. 
JG: Or here's a video that I made as part of my show "" Crash Course, "" talking about World War I: (Video) The immediate cause was of course the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. 
Quick aside: It's worth noting that the first big war of the twentieth century began with an act of terrorism. 
So Franz Ferdinand wasn't particularly well-liked by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph — now that is a mustache! 
But even so, the assassination led Austria to issue an ultimatum to Serbia, whereupon Serbia accepted some, but not all, of Austria's demands, leading Austria to declare war against Serbia. 
And then Russia, due to its alliance with the Serbs, mobilized its army. 
Germany, because it had an alliance with Austria, told Russia to stop mobilizing, which Russia failed to do, so then Germany mobilized its own army, declared war on Russia, cemented an alliance with the Ottomans, and then declared war on France, because, you know, France. 
(Laughter) And it's not just physics and world history that people are choosing to learn through YouTube. 
Here's a video about abstract mathematics. 
(Video) So you're me, and you're in math class yet again, because they make you go every single day. 
And you're learning about, I don't know, the sums of infinite series. 
That's a high school topic, right? 
Which is odd, because it's a cool topic, but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway. 
So I guess that's why they allow infinite series in the curriculum. 
So, in a quite understandable need for distraction, you're doodling and thinking more about what the plural of "" series "" should be than about the topic at hand: "" serieses, "" "" seriese, "" "" seriesen, "" and "" serii? "" Or is it that the singular should be changed: one "" serie, "" or "" serum, "" just like the singular of "" sheep "" should be "" shoop. "" But the whole concept of things like 1 / 2 + 1 / 4 + 1 / 8 + 1 / 16 and so on approaches one, is useful if, say, you want to draw a line of elephants, each holding the tail of the next one: normal elephant, young elephant, baby elephant, dog-sized elephant, 
puppy-sized elephant, all the way down to Mr. Tusks and beyond. 
Which is at least a tiny bit awesome, because you can get an infinite number of elephants in a line, and still have it fit across a single notebook page. 
JG: And lastly, here's Destin, from "" Smarter Every Day, "" talking about the conservation of angular momentum, and, since it's YouTube, cats: (Video) Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to "" Smarter Every Day. "" So you've probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet. 
Today's question is: why? 
Like most simple questions, there's a very complex answer. 
For instance, let me reword this question: How does a cat go from feet-up to feet-down in a falling reference frame, without violating the conservation of angular momentum? 
(Laughter) JG: So, here's something all four of these videos have in common: They all have more than half a million views on YouTube. 
And those are people watching not in classrooms, but because they are part of the communities of learning that are being set up by these channels. 
And I said earlier that YouTube is like a classroom to me, and in many ways it is, because here is the instructor — it's like the old-fashioned classroom: here's the instructor, and then beneath the instructor are the students, and they're all having a conversation. 
And I know that YouTube comments have a very bad reputation in the world of the Internet, but in fact, if you go on comments for these channels, what you'll find is people engaging the subject matter, asking difficult, complicated questions that are about the subject matter, and then other people answering those questions. 
And because the YouTube page is set up so that the page in which I'm talking to you is on the exact — the place where I'm talking to you is on the exact same page as your comments, you are participating in a live and real and active way in the conversation. 
And because I'm in comments usually, I get to participate with you. 
And you find this whether it's world history, or mathematics, or science, or whatever it is. 
You also see young people using the tools and the sort of genres of the Internet in order to create places for intellectual engagement, instead of the ironic detachment that maybe most of us associate with memes and other Internet conventions — you know, "" Got bored. Invented calculus. "" Or, here's Honey Boo Boo criticizing industrial capitalism: ["" Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. 
Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. ""] In case you can't see what she says... yeah. 
I really believe that these spaces, these communities, have become for a new generation of learners, the kind of communities, the kind of cartographic communities that I had when I was in high school, and then again when I was in college. 
And as an adult, re-finding these communities has re-introduced me to a community of learners, and has encouraged me to continue to be a learner even in my adulthood, so that I no longer feel like learning is something reserved for the young. 
Vi Hart and "" Minute Physics "" introduced me to all kinds of things that I didn't know before. 
And I know that we all hearken back to the days of the Parisian salon in the Enlightenment, or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish, "" Oh, I wish I could have been a part of that, I wish I could have laughed at Dorothy Parker's jokes. "" But I'm here to tell you that these places exist, they still exist. 
They exist in corners of the Internet, where old men fear to tread. 
(Laughter) And I truly, truly believe that when we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s, when we made Agloe real, we were just getting started. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I am a chef and a food policy guy, but I come from a whole family of teachers. 
My sister is a special ed teacher in Chicago. 
My father just retired after 25 years teaching fifth grade. 
My aunt and uncle were professors. 
My cousins all teach. 
Everybody in my family, basically, teaches except for me. 
They taught me that the only way to get the right answers is to ask the right questions. 
So what are the right questions when it comes to improving the educational outcomes for our children? 
There's obviously many important questions, but I think the following is a good place to start: What do we think the connection is between a child's growing mind and their growing body? 
What can we expect our kids to learn if their diets are full of sugar and empty of nutrients? 
What can they possibly learn if their bodies are literally going hungry? 
And with all the resources that we are pouring into schools, we should stop and ask ourselves: Are we really setting our kids up for success? 
Now, a few years ago, I was a judge on a cooking competition called "" Chopped. "" Four chefs compete with mystery ingredients to see who can cook the best dishes. 
Except for this episode — it was a very special one. 
Instead of four overzealous chefs trying to break into the limelight — something that I would know nothing about — (Laughter) these chefs were school chefs; you know, the women that you used to call "" lunch ladies, "" but the ones I insist we call "" school chefs. "" Now, these women — God bless these women — spend their day cooking for thousands of kids, breakfast and lunch, with only $2.68 per lunch, with only about a dollar of that actually going to the food. 
In this episode, the main-course mystery ingredient was quinoa. 
Now, I know it's been a long time since most of you have had a school lunch, and we've made a lot of progress on nutrition, but quinoa still is not a staple in most school cafeterias. 
(Laughter) So this was a challenge. 
But the dish that I will never forget was cooked by a woman named Cheryl Barbara. 
Cheryl was the nutrition director at High School in the Community in Connecticut. 
She cooked this delicious pasta. 
It was amazing. 
It was a pappardelle with Italian sausage, kale, Parmesan cheese. 
It was delicious, like, restaurant-quality good, except — she basically just threw the quinoa, pretty much uncooked, into the dish. 
It was a strange choice, and it was super crunchy. 
(Laughter) So I took on the TV accusatory judge thing that you're supposed to do, and I asked her why she did that. 
Cheryl responded, "" Well, first, I don't know what quinoa is. "" (Laughter) "" But I do know that it's a Monday, and that in my school, at High School in the Community, I always cook pasta. "" See, Cheryl explained that for many of her kids, there were no meals on the weekends. 
No meals on Saturday. 
No meals on Sunday, either. 
So she cooked pasta because she wanted to make sure she cooked something she knew her children would eat. 
Something that would stick to their ribs, she said. 
Something that would fill them up. 
Cheryl talked about how, by the time Monday came, her kids' hunger pangs were so intense that they couldn't even begin to think about learning. 
Food was the only thing on their mind. 
The only thing. 
And unfortunately, the stats — they tell the same story. 
So, let's put this into the context of a child. 
And we're going to focus on the most important meal of the day, breakfast. 
Meet Allison. 
She's 12 years old, she's smart as a whip and she wants to be a physicist when she grows up. 
If Allison goes to a school that serves a nutritious breakfast to all of their kids, here's what's going to follow. 
Her chances of getting a nutritious meal, one with fruit and milk, one lower in sugar and salt, dramatically increase. 
Allison will have a lower rate of obesity than the average kid. 
She'll have to visit the nurse less. 
She'll have lower levels of anxiety and depression. 
She'll have better behavior. 
She'll have better attendance, and she'll show up on time more often. 
Why? 
Well, because there's a good meal waiting for her at school. 
Overall, Allison is in much better health than the average school kid. 
So what about that kid who doesn't have a nutritious breakfast waiting for him? 
Well, meet Tommy. 
He's also 12. He's a wonderful kid. 
He wants to be a doctor. 
By the time Tommy is in kindergarten, he's already underperforming in math. 
By the time he's in third grade, he's got lower math and reading scores. 
By the time he's 11, it's more likely that Tommy will have to have repeated a grade. 
Research shows that kids who do not have consistent nourishment, particularly at breakfast, have poor cognitive function overall. 
So how widespread is this problem? 
Well, unfortunately, it's pervasive. 
Let me give you two stats that seem like they're on opposite ends of the issue, but are actually two sides of the same coin. 
On the one hand, one in six Americans are food insecure, including 16 million children — almost 20 percent — are food insecure. 
In this city alone, in New York City, 474,000 kids under the age of 18 face hunger every year. 
It's crazy. 
On the other hand, diet and nutrition is the number one cause of preventable death and disease in this country, by far. 
And fully a third of the kids that we've been talking about tonight are on track to have diabetes in their lifetime. 
Now, what's hard to put together but is true is that, many times, these are the same children. 
So they fill up on the unhealthy and cheap calories that surround them in their communities and that their families can afford. 
But then by the end of the month, food stamps run out or hours get cut at work, and they don't have the money to cover the basic cost of food. 
But we should be able to solve this problem, right? 
We know what the answers are. 
As part of my work at the White House, we instituted a program that for all schools that had 40 percent more low-income kids, we could serve breakfast and lunch to every kid in that school. 
For free. 
This program has been incredibly successful, because it helped us overcome a very difficult barrier when it came to getting kids a nutritious breakfast. 
And that was the barrier of stigma. 
See, schools serve breakfast before school, and it was only available for the poor kids. 
So everybody knew who was poor and who needed government help. 
Now, all kids, no matter how much or how little their parents make, have a lot of pride. 
So what happened? 
Well, the schools that have implemented this program saw an increase in math and reading scores by 17.5 percent. 17.5 percent. 
And research shows that when kids have a consistent, nutritious breakfast, 
their chances of graduating increase by 20 percent. 20 percent. 
When we give our kids the nourishment they need, 
we give them the chance to thrive, both in the classroom and beyond. 
Now, you don't have to trust me on this, but you should talk to Donna Martin. 
I love Donna Martin. 
Donna Martin is the school nutrition director at Burke County in Waynesboro, Georgia. 
Burke County is one of the poorest districts in the fifth-poorest state in the country, and about 100 percent of Donna's students live at or below the poverty line. 
A few years ago, Donna decided to get out ahead of the new standards that were coming, and overhaul her nutrition standards. 
She improved and added fruit and vegetables and whole grains. 
She served breakfast in the classroom to all of her kids. 
And she implemented a dinner program. 
Why? 
Well, many of her kids didn't have dinner when they went home. 
So how did they respond? 
Well, the kids loved the food. 
They loved the better nutrition, and they loved not being hungry. 
But Donna's biggest supporter came from an unexpected place. 
His name from Eric Parker, and he was the head football coach for the Burke County Bears. 
Now, Coach Parker had coached mediocre teams for years. 
The Bears often ended in the middle of the pack — a big disappointment in one of the most passionate football states in the Union. 
But the year Donna changed the menus, the Bears not only won their division, they went on to win the state championship, beating the Peach County Trojans 28-14. 
(Laughter) And Coach Parker, he credited that championship to Donna Martin. 
When we give our kids the basic nourishment, they're going to thrive. 
And it's not just up to the Cheryl Barbaras and the Donna Martins of the world. 
It's on all of us. 
And feeding our kids the basic nutrition is just the starting point. 
What I've laid out is really a model for so many of the most pressing issues that we face. 
If we focus on the simple goal of properly nourishing ourselves, we could see a world that is more stable and secure; we could dramatically improve our economic productivity; we could transform our health care and we could go a long way in ensuring that the Earth can provide for generations to come. 
Food is that place where our collective efforts can have the greatest impact. 
So we have to ask ourselves: What is the right question? 
What would happen if we fed ourselves more nutritious, more sustainably grown food? 
What would be the impact? 
Cheryl Barbara, Donna Martin, Coach Parker and the Burke County Bears — I think they know the answer. 
Thank you guys so very much. 
(Applause) 

So this is my niece. 
Her name is Yahli. 
She is nine months old. 
Her mum is a doctor, and her dad is a lawyer. 
By the time Yahli goes to college, the jobs her parents do are going to look dramatically different. 
In 2013, researchers at Oxford University did a study on the future of work. 
They concluded that almost one in every two jobs have a high risk of being automated by machines. 
Machine learning is the technology that's responsible for most of this disruption. 
It's the most powerful branch of artificial intelligence. 
It allows machines to learn from data and mimic some of the things that humans can do. 
My company, Kaggle, operates on the cutting edge of machine learning. 
We bring together hundreds of thousands of experts to solve important problems for industry and academia. 
This gives us a unique perspective on what machines can do, what they can't do and what jobs they might automate or threaten. 
Machine learning started making its way into industry in the early '90s. 
It started with relatively simple tasks. 
It started with things like assessing credit risk from loan applications, sorting the mail by reading handwritten characters from zip codes. 
Over the past few years, we have made dramatic breakthroughs. 
Machine learning is now capable of far, far more complex tasks. 
In 2012, Kaggle challenged its community to build an algorithm that could grade high-school essays. 
The winning algorithms were able to match the grades given by human teachers. 
Last year, we issued an even more difficult challenge. 
Can you take images of the eye and diagnose an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy? 
Again, the winning algorithms were able to match the diagnoses given by human ophthalmologists. 
Now, given the right data, machines are going to outperform humans at tasks like this. 
A teacher might read 10,000 essays over a 40-year career. 
An ophthalmologist might see 50,000 eyes. 
A machine can read millions of essays or see millions of eyes within minutes. 
We have no chance of competing against machines on frequent, high-volume tasks. 
But there are things we can do that machines can't do. 
Where machines have made very little progress is in tackling novel situations. 
They can't handle things they haven't seen many times before. 
The fundamental limitations of machine learning is that it needs to learn from large volumes of past data. 
Now, humans don't. 
We have the ability to connect seemingly disparate threads to solve problems we've never seen before. 
Percy Spencer was a physicist working on radar during World War II, when he noticed the magnetron was melting his chocolate bar. 
He was able to connect his understanding of electromagnetic radiation with his knowledge of cooking in order to invent — any guesses? — the microwave oven. 
Now, this is a particularly remarkable example of creativity. 
But this sort of cross-pollination happens for each of us in small ways thousands of times per day. 
Machines cannot compete with us when it comes to tackling novel situations, and this puts a fundamental limit on the human tasks that machines will automate. 
So what does this mean for the future of work? 
The future state of any single job lies in the answer to a single question: To what extent is that job reducible to frequent, high-volume tasks, and to what extent does it involve tackling novel situations? 
On frequent, high-volume tasks, machines are getting smarter and smarter. 
Today they grade essays. They diagnose certain diseases. 
Over coming years, they're going to conduct our audits, and they're going to read boilerplate from legal contracts. 
Accountants and lawyers are still needed. 
They're going to be needed for complex tax structuring, for pathbreaking litigation. 
But machines will shrink their ranks and make these jobs harder to come by. 
Now, as mentioned, machines are not making progress on novel situations. 

Good morning everybody. 
I work with really amazing, little, itty-bitty creatures called cells. 
And let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in the lab. 
I work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment. 
We plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes. 
And we feed them — sterilely of course — with what we call cell culture media — which is like their food — and we grow them in incubators. 
Why do I do this? 
We observe the cells in a plate, and they're just on the surface. 
But what we're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them. 
What does that even mean? 
Well it means growing an actual heart, let's say, or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body. 
Not only that, but they can also be used for disease models. 
And for this purpose, traditional cell culture techniques just really aren't enough. 
The cells are kind of homesick; the dish doesn't feel like their home. 
And so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive. 
We call this the biomimetic paradigm — copying nature in the lab. 
Let's take the example of the heart, the topic of a lot of my research. 
What makes the heart unique? 
Well, the heart beats, rhythmically, tirelessly, faithfully. 
We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes. 
These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab. 
What else do we know about the heart? 
Well, heart cells are pretty greedy. 
Nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very, very dense blood supply. 
In the lab, we micro-pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells, and this allows us to flow the cell culture media, the cells' food, through the scaffolds where we're growing the cells — a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart. 
So this brings me to lesson number one: life can do a lot with very little. 
Let's take the example of electrical stimulation. 
Let's see how powerful just one of these essentials can be. 
On the left, we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that I engineered from rat cells in the lab. 
It's about the size of a mini marshmallow. 
And after one week, it's beating. 
You can see it in the upper left-hand corner. 
But don't worry if you can't see it so well. 
It's amazing that these cells beat at all. 
But what's really amazing is that the cells, when we electrically stimulate them, like with a pacemaker, that they beat so much more. 
But that brings me to lesson number two: cells do all the work. 
In a sense, tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here, because structural engineers build bridges and big things, computer engineers, computers, but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves. 
What does this mean for us? 
Let's do something really simple. 
Let's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept. 
Let's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way. 
"" We are what we eat, "" could easily be described as, "" We are what our cells eat. "" And in the case of the flora in our gut, these cells may not even be human. 
But it's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life. 
Behind every sound, sight, touch, taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us. 
It begs the question: shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies? 
I invite you to talk about this with me further, and in the meantime, I wish you luck. 
May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My name is Joshua Walters. 
I'm a performer. 
(Beatboxing) (Laughter) (Applause) But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. 
I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. 
When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. 
Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ. 
(Laughter) I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) 
There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. 
They're just practicing. 
One day they'll get here. 
Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. 
"" Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some — why don't we give you some Zyprexa. 
Okay? Mmhmm? 
At least that's what it says on my pen. "" (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. 
I can feel your noise. 
The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. 
The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. 
When I got out I had a choice. 
I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness. 
(Bugle sound) There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive — at least the hypomanic edge part of it. 
Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. 
Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. 
You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible. 
And there's a book — John Gartner. 
John Gartner wrote this book called "" The Hypomanic Edge "" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. 
A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "" Touched With Fire "" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. 
Some of them committed suicide. 
So it wasn't all the good side of the illness. 
Now recently, there's been development in this field. 
And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." 
Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum — you know what I'm talking about — not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum — where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. 
(Laughter) Your call. Your call. 
And everyone's somewhere in the middle. 
Everyone's somewhere in the middle. 
So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. 
But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. 
Maybe no one's really crazy. 
Everyone is just a little bit mad. 
How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much 
depends on how lucky you are. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

If you're here today — and I'm very happy that you are — you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. 
When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. 
Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. 
Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. 
And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. 
And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? 
Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. 
Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions — which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. 
But I'll tell you later, if you want to know. 
I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. 
However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. 
Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. 

Good morning. 
I've come here to share with you an experiment of how to get rid of one form of human suffering. 
It really is a story of Dr. Venkataswamy. 
His mission and his message is about the Aravind Eye Care System. 
I think first it's important for us to recognize what it is to be blind. 
(Music) Woman: Everywhere I went looking for work, they said no, what use do we have for a blind woman? 
I couldn't thread a needle or see the lice in my hair. 
If an ant fell into my rice, I couldn't see that either. 
Thulasiraj Ravilla: Becoming blind is a big part of it, but I think it also deprives the person of their livelihood, their dignity, their independence, and their status in the family. 
So she is just one amongst the millions who are blind. 
And the irony is that they don't need to be. 
A simple, well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions, and something even simpler, a pair of glasses, can make millions more see. 
If we add to that the many of us here now who are more productive because they have a pair of glasses, then almost one in five Indians will require eye care, a staggering 200 million people. 
Today, we're reaching not even 10 percent of them. 
So this is the context in which Aravind came into existence about 30 years back as a post-retirement project of Dr. V. 
He started this with no money. 
He had to mortgage all his life savings to make a bank loan. 
And over time, we have grown into a network of five hospitals, predominately in the state of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and then we added several, what we call Vision Centers as a hub-and-spoke model. 
And then more recently we started managing hospitals in other parts of the country and also setting up hospitals in other parts of the world as well. 
The last three decades, we have done about three-and-a-half million surgeries, a vast majority of them for the poor people. 
Now, each year we perform about 300,000 surgeries. 
A typical day at Aravind, we would do about a thousand surgeries, maybe see about 6,000 patients, send out teams into the villages to examine, bring back patients, lots of telemedicine consultations, and, on top of that, do a lot of training, both for doctors and technicians who will become the future staff of Aravind. 
And then doing this day-in and day-out, and doing it well, requires a lot of inspiration and a lot of hard work. 
And I think this was possible thanks to the building blocks put in place by Dr. V., a value system, an efficient delivery process, and fostering the culture of innovation. 
(Music) Dr. V: I used to sit with the ordinary village man because I am from a village, and suddenly you turn around and seem to be in contact with his inner being, you seem to be one with him. 
Here is a soul which has got all the simplicity of confidence. 
Doctor, whatever you say, I accept it. 
An implicit faith in you and then you respond to it. 
Here is an old lady who has got so much faith in me, I must do my best for her. 
When we grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify ourselves with all that is in the world, so there is no exploitation. 
It is ourselves we are helping. 
It is ourselves we are healing. 
(Applause) This helped us build a very ethical and very highly patient-centric organization and systems that support it. 
But on a practical level, you also have to deliver services efficiently, and, odd as it may seem, the inspiration came from McDonald's. 
Dr. V: See, McDonald's' concept is simple. 
They feel they can train people all over the world, irrespective of different religions, cultures, all those things, to produce a product in the same way and deliver it in the same manner in hundreds of places. 
Larry Brilliant: He kept talking about McDonalds and hamburgers, and none of it made any sense to us. 
He wanted to create a franchise, a mechanism of delivery of eye care with the efficiency of McDonald's. 
Dr. V: Supposing I'm able to produce eye care, techniques, methods, all in the same way, and make it available in every corner of the world. 
The problem of blindness is gone. 
TR: If you think about it, I think the eyeball is the same, as American or African, the problem is the same, the treatment is the same. 
And yet, why should there be so much variation in quality and in service, and that was the fundamental principle that we followed when we designed the delivery systems. 
And, of course, the challenge was that it's a huge problem, we are talking of millions of people, very little resource to deal with it, and then lots of logistics and affordability issues. 
And then so, one had to constantly innovate. 
And one of the early innovations, which still continues, is to create ownership in the community to the problem, and then engage with them as a partner, and here is one such event. 
Here a community camp just organized by the community themselves, where they find a place, organize volunteers, and then we'll do our part. You know, check their vision, and then you have doctors who you find out what the problem is and then determine what further testing should be done, and then those tests are done by technicians who check for glasses, or check for glaucoma. 
And then, with all these results, the doctor makes a final diagnosis, and then prescribes a line of treatment, and if they need a pair of glasses, they are available right there at the camp site, usually under a tree. 
But they get glasses in the frames of their choice, and that's very important because I think glasses, in addition to helping people see, is also a fashion statement, and they're willing to pay for it. 
So they get it in about 20 minutes and those who require surgery, are counseled, and then there are buses waiting, which will transport them to the base hospital. 
And if it was not for this kind of logistics and support, many people like this would probably never get services, and certainly not when they most need it. 
They receive surgery the following day, and then they will stay for a day or two, and then they are put back on the buses to be taken back to where they came from, and where their families will be waiting to take them back home. 
(Applause) And this happens several thousand times each year. 
It may sound impressive that we're seeing lots of patients, very efficient process, but we looked at, are we solving the problem? 
We did a study, a scientifically designed process, and then, to our dismay, we found this was only reaching seven percent of those in need, and we're not adequately addressing more, bigger problems. 
So we had to do something different, so we set up what we call primary eye care centers, vision centers. 
These are truly paperless offices with completely electronic medical records and so on. 
They receive comprehensive eye exams. 
We kind of changed the simple digital camera into a retinal camera, and then every patient gets their teleconsultation with a doctor. 
The effect of this has been that, within the first year, we really had a 40 percent penetration in the market that it served, which is over 50,000 people. 
And the second year went up to 75 percent. 
So I think we have a process by which we can really penetrate into the market and reach everyone who needs it, and in this process of using technology, make sure that most don't need to come to the base hospital. 
And how much will they pay for this? 
We fixed the pricing, taking into account what they would save in bus fare in coming to a city, so they pay about 20 rupees, and that's good for three consultations. 
(Applause) The other challenge was, how do you give high-tech or more advanced treatment and care? 
We designed a van with a VSAT, which sends out images of patients to the base hospital where it is diagnosed, and then as the patient is waiting, the report goes back to the patient, it gets printed out, the patient gets it, and then gets a consultation about what they should be doing — I mean, go see a doctor or come back after six months, and then this happens as a way of bridging the technology competence. 
So the impact of all this has been essentially one of growing the market, because it focused on the non-customer, and then by reaching the unreached, we're able to significantly grow the market. 
The other aspect is how do you deal with this efficiently when you have very few ophthalmologists? 
So what is in this video is a surgeon operating, and then you see on the other side, another patient is getting ready. 
So, as they finish the surgery, they just swing the microscope over, the tables are placed so that their distance is just right, and then we need to do this, because, by doing this kind of process, we're able to more than quadruple the productivity of the surgeon. 
And then to support the surgeon, we require a certain workforce. 
And then we focused on village girls that we recruited, and then they really are the backbone of the organization. 
They do almost all of the skill-based routine tasks. 
They do one thing at a time. They do it extremely well. 
With the result we have very high productivity, very high quality at very, very low cost. 
So, putting all this together, what really happened was the productivity of our staff was significantly higher than anyone else. 
(Applause) This is a very busy table, but what this really is conveying is that, when it comes to quality, we have put in very good quality-assurance systems. 
As a result, our complications are significantly lower than what has been reported in the United Kingdom, and you don't see those kind of numbers very often. 
(Applause) So the final part of the puzzle is, how do you make all this work financially, especially when the people can't pay for it? 
So what we did was, we gave away a lot of it for free, and then those who pay, I mean, they paid local market rates, nothing more, and often much less. 
And we were helped by the market inefficiency. 
I think that has been a big savior, even now. 
And, of course, one needs the mindset to be wanting to give away what you have as a surplus. 
The result has been, over the years, the expenditure has increased with volumes. 
The revenues increase at a higher level, giving us a healthy margin while you're treating a large number of people for free. 
I think in absolute terms, last year we earned about 20-odd million dollars, spent about 13 million, with over a 40 percent EBITA. 
(Applause) But this really requires going beyond what we do, or what we have done, if you really want to achieve solving this problem of blindness. 
And what we did was a couple of very counter-intuitive things. 
We created competition for ourselves, and then we made eye care affordable by making low-cost consumables. 
We proactively and systematically promoted these practices to many hospitals in India, many in our own backyards and then in other parts of the world as well. 
The impact of this has been that these hospitals, in the second year after our consultation, are double their output and then achieve financial recovery as well. 
The other part was how do you address this increase in cost of technology? 
There was a time when we failed to negotiate the [intra-ocular lens] prices to be at affordable levels, so we set up a manufacturing unit. 
And then, over time, we were able to bring down the cost significantly to about two percent of what it used to be when we started out. 
Today, we believe we have about seven percent of the global market, and they're used in about 120-odd countries. 
To conclude, I mean, what we do, does it have a broader relevance, or is it just India or developing countries? 
So to address this, we studied UK versus Aravind. 
What it shows is that we do roughly about 60 percent of the volume of what the UK does, near a half-million surgeries as a whole country. 
And we do about 300,000. 
And then we train about 50 ophthalmologists against the 70 trained by them, comparable quality, both in training and in patient care. 
So we're really comparing apples to apples. 
We looked at cost. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, I think it is simple to say just because the U.K. isn't India the difference is happening. 
I think there is more to it. 
I mean, I think one has to look at other aspects as well. 
Maybe there is — the solution to the cost could be in productivity, maybe in efficiency, in the clinical process, or in how much they pay for the lenses or consumables, or regulations, their defensive practice. 
So, I think decoding this can probably bring answers to most developed countries including the U.S., and maybe Obama's ratings can go up again. 
(Laughter) Another insight, which, again, I want to leave with you, in conditions where the problem is very large, which cuts across all economic strata, where we have a good solution, I think the process I described, you know, productivity, quality, patient-centered care, can give an answer, and there are many which fit this paradigm. 
You take dentistry, hearing aid, maternity and so on. 
There are many where this paradigm can now play, but I think probably one of the most challenging things is on the softer side. 
Now, how do you create compassion? 
Now, how do you make people own the problem, want to do something about it? 
There are a bit harder issues. 
And I'm sure people in this crowd can probably find the solutions to these. 
So I want to end my talk leaving this thought and challenge to you. 
Dr. V: When you grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation. 
It is ourselves we are helping. 
It is ourselves we are healing. 
TR: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels. 
To the first son, he left half the camels; to the second son, he left a third of the camels; and to the youngest son, he left a ninth of the camels. 
(Laughter) Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in. 
We're all one family. 
How do we deal with our deepest differences, given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction? 
As I've spent the last better part of three decades, almost four, traveling the world, trying to work, getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela — some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet — I've been asking myself that question. 
It's not easy, but it's simple. 
Let me give you just a story, an example. 
Because, after all, within living memory, they were hunters and gatherers, living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story. 
It may take two days, three days, four days, but they don't rest until they find a resolution or better yet — a reconciliation. 
And if tempers are still too high, then they send someone off to visit some relatives, as a cooling-off period. 
But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors. 
And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place. 
And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said, "" You should stay right here in your seats, because you're going to be on trial for war crimes. "" And then he turned to me and said, "" You're an American. 
How could we possibly go to the balcony? 
There are a hundred times more people who die in a conflict in Africa than in the Middle East. 
In a phrase, it's: Four thousand years ago, a man and his family walked across the Middle East, and the world has never been the same since. 
And what he stood for was unity, the unity of the family; he's the father of us all. 
But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was. 
His basic message was unity too, the interconnectedness of it all, the unity of it all. 
So what if, then, you took the story of Abraham, which is a third-side story, what if that could be — because Abraham stands for hospitality — what if that could be an antidote to terrorism? 
Now, it's not enough just to tell a story. 
And that's what comes to the first step here. 
That's why in negotiations, often, when things get tough, people go for walks in the woods. 
We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham. 
How many of you have had the experience of being in a strange neighborhood or strange land, and a total stranger, perfect stranger, comes up to you and shows you some kindness — maybe invites you into their home, gives you a drink, gives you a coffee, gives you a meal? 
They've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Syria. 
And this woman right here, Um Ahmad, is a woman who lives on the path in Northern Jordan. 
She's partially blind, her husband can't work, she's got seven kids. 
She makes the most delicious food, that's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside. 
There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East, across the path. 
And in that sense, the Abraham Path is a game-changer. 
When I think back to my childhood, a good part of which I spent, after being born here in Chicago, I spent in Europe. 
But they did it, thanks to a common identity, Europe, and a common economy. 
So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East? 
Why not, thanks to a common identity, which is the story of Abraham, and thanks to a common economy that would be based, in good part, on tourism? 
That's walking Abraham's Path. 

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) 

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

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

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

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

What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. 
And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are. 
Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. 
It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. 
To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture. 
We've done something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. 
We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution — much higher than in an ordinary ad — and we've embedded extra content. 
If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here. 
Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this. 
And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. 
So let's pull up, now, something else. 
This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out. 
This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies. 
One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W. 
The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots — all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies — all these shots were taken. 
I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. 
And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way. 
We can just navigate in this very simple way. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. 
(Laughter) I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. 
If I can find some of the sort of weird ones — So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. 
Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered. 
If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. 
And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory. 
It's doing that based on the content inside the images. 

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) 

Like many of you here, I am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in Africa. 
The question of transformation in Africa really is a question of leadership. 
Africa can only be transformed by enlightened leaders. 
And it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent. 
I want to tell you some stories that explain my view. 
We all heard about the importance of stories yesterday. 
An American friend of mine this year volunteered as a nurse in Ghana, and in a period of three months she came to a conclusion about the state of leadership in Africa that had taken me over a decade to reach. 
Twice she was involved in surgeries where they lost power at the hospital. 
The emergency generators did not start. 
There was not a flashlight, not a lantern, not a candle — pitch black. 
The patient's cut open, twice. 
The first time it was a C-section. 
Thankfully, baby was out — mother and child survived. 
The second time was a procedure that involved local anesthesia. 
Anesthetic wears off. The patient feels pain. 
He's crying. He's screaming. He's praying. 
Pitch black. Not a candle, not a flashlight. 
And that hospital could have afforded flashlights. 
They could have afforded to purchase these things, but they didn't. 
And it happened twice. 
Another time, she watched in horror as nurses watched a patient die because they refused to give her oxygen that they had. 
And so three months later, just before she returned to the United States, nurses in Accra go on strike. 
And her recommendation is take this opportunity to fire everyone, start all over again. 
Start all over again. 
Now what does this have to do with leadership? 
You see, the folks at the ministry of health, the hospital administrators, the doctors, the nurses — they are among just five percent of their peers who get an education after secondary school. 
They are the elite. They are our leaders. 
Their decisions, their actions matter. 
And when they fail, a nation literally suffers. 
So when I speak of leadership, I'm not talking about just political leaders. 
We've heard a lot about that. 
I'm talking about the elite. 
Those who've been trained, whose job it is to be the guardians of their society. 
The lawyers, the judges, the policemen, the doctors, the engineers, the civil servants — those are the leaders. 
And we need to train them right. 
Now, my first pointed and memorable experience with leadership in Ghana occurred when I was 16 years old. 
We had just had a military coup, and soldiers were pervasive in our society. 
They were a pervasive presence. 
And one day I go to the airport to meet my father, and as I walk up this grassy slope from the car park to the terminal building, I'm stopped by two soldiers wielding AK-47 assault weapons. 
And they asked me to join a crowd of people that were running up and down this embankment. 
Why? Because the path I had taken was considered out of bounds. 
No sign to this effect. 
Now, I was 16. I was very worried about what my peers at school might think if they saw me running up and down this hill. 
I was especially concerned of what the girls might think. 
And so I started to argue with these men. 
It was a little reckless, but you know, I was 16. 
I got lucky. 
A Ghana Airways pilot falls into the same predicament. 
Because of his uniform they speak to him differently, and they explain to him that they're just following orders. 
So he takes their radio, talks to their boss, and gets us all released. 
What lessons would you take from an experience like this? 
Several, for me. 
Leadership matters. Those men are following the orders of a superior officer. 
I learned something about courage. 
It was important not to look at those guns. 
And I also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls. 
(Laughter) So a few years after this event, I leave Ghana on a scholarship to go to Swarthmore College for my education. 
It was a breath of fresh air. 
You know, the faculty there didn't want us to memorize information and repeat back to them as I was used to back in Ghana. 
They wanted us to think critically. 
They wanted us to be analytical. 
They wanted us to be concerned about social issues. 
In my economics classes I got high marks for my understanding of basic economics. 
But I learned something more profound than that, which is that the leaders — the managers of Ghana's economy — were making breathtakingly bad decisions that had brought our economy to the brink of collapse. 
And so here was this lesson again — leadership matters. 
It matters a great deal. 
But I didn't really fully understand what had happened to me at Swarthmore. 
I had an inkling, but I didn't fully realize it until I went out into the workplace and I went to work at Microsoft Corporation. 
And I was part of this team — this thinking, learning team whose job it was to design and implement new software that created value in the world. 
And it was brilliant to be part of this team. 
It was brilliant. 
And I realized just what had happened to me at Swarthmore, this transformation — the ability to confront problems, complex problems, and to design solutions to those problems. 
The ability to create is the most empowering thing that can happen to an individual. 
And I was part of that. 
Now, while I was at Microsoft, the annual revenues of that company grew larger than the GDP of the Republic of Ghana. 
And by the way, it's continued to. 
The gap has widened since I left. 
Now, I've already spoken about one of the reasons why this has occurred. 
I mean, it's the people there who are so hardworking, persistent, creative, empowered. 
But there were also some external factors: free markets, the rule of law, infrastructure. 
These things were provided by institutions run by the people that I call leaders. 
And those leaders did not emerge spontaneously. 
Somebody trained them to do the work that they do. 
Now, while I was at Microsoft, this funny thing happened. 
I became a parent. 
And for the first time, Africa mattered more to me than ever before. 
Because I realized that the state of the African continent would matter to my children and their children. 
That the state of the world — the state of the world depends on what's happening to Africa, as far as my kids would be concerned. 
And at this time, when I was going through what I call my "" pre-mid-life crisis, "" Africa was a mess. 
Somalia had disintegrated into anarchy. 
Rwanda was in the throes of this genocidal war. 
And it seemed to me that that was the wrong direction, and I needed to be back helping. 
I couldn't just stay in Seattle and raise my kids in an upper-middle class neighborhood and feel good about it. 
This was not the world that I'd want my children to grow up in. 
So I decided to get engaged, and the first thing that I did was to come back to Ghana and talk with a lot of people and really try to understand what the real issues were. 
And three things kept coming up for every problem: corruption, weak institutions and the people who run them — the leaders. 
Now, I was a little scared because when you see those three problems, they seem really hard to deal with. 
And they might say, "" Look, don't even try. "" But, for me, I asked the question, "" Well, where are these leaders coming from? 
What is it about Ghana that produces leaders that are unethical or unable to solve problems? "" So I went to look at what was happening in our educational system. 
And it was the same — learning by rote — from primary school through graduate school. 
Very little emphasis on ethics, and the typical graduate from a university in Ghana has a stronger sense of entitlement than a sense of responsibility. 
This is wrong. 
So I decided to engage this particular problem. 
Because it seems to me that every society, every society, must be very intentional about how it trains its leaders. 
And Ghana was not paying enough attention. 
And this is true across sub-Saharan Africa, actually. 
So this is what I'm doing now. 
I'm trying to bring the experience that I had at Swarthmore to Africa. 
I wish there was a liberal arts college in every African country. 
I think it would make a huge difference. 
And what Ashesi University is trying to do is to train a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders. 
We're trying to train leaders of exceptional integrity, who have the ability to confront the complex problems, ask the right questions, and come up with workable solutions. 
I'll admit that there are times when it seems like "" Mission: Impossible, "" but we must believe that these kids are smart. 
That if we involve them in their education, if we have them discuss the real issues that they confront — that our whole society confronts — and if we give them skills that enable them to engage the real world, that magic will happen. 
Now, a month into this project, we'd just started classes. 
And a month into it, I come to the office, and I have this email from one of our students. 
And it said, very simply, "" I am thinking now. "" And he signs off, "" Thank you. "" It's such a simple statement. 
But I was moved almost to tears because I understood what was happening to this young man. 
And it is an awesome thing to be a part of empowering someone in this way. 
I am thinking now. 
This year we challenged our students to craft an honor code themselves. 
There's a very vibrant debate going on on campus now over whether they should have an honor code, and if so, what it should look like. 
One of the students asked a question that just warmed my heart. 
Can we create a perfect society? 
Her understanding that a student-crafted honor code constitutes a reach towards perfection is incredible. 
Now, we cannot achieve perfection, but if we reach for it, then we can achieve excellence. 
I don't know ultimately what they will do. 
I don't know whether they will decide to have this honor code. 
But the conversation they're having now — about what their good society should look like, what their excellent society should look like, is a really good thing. 
Am I out of time? OK. 
Now, I just wanted to leave that slide up because it's important that we think about it. 
I'm very excited about the fact that every student at Ashesi University does community service before they graduate. 
That for many of them, it has been a life-altering experience. 
These young future leaders are beginning to understand the real business of leadership, the real privilege of leadership, which is after all to serve humanity. 
I am even more thrilled by the fact that least year our student body elected a woman to be the head of Student Government. 
It's the first time in the history of Ghana that a woman has been elected head of Student Government at any university. 
It says a lot about her. 
It says a lot about the culture that's forming on campus. 
It says a lot about her peers who elected her. 
She won with 75 percent of the vote. 
And it gives me a lot of hope. 
It turns out that corporate West Africa also appreciates what's happening with our students. 
We've graduated two classes of students to date. 
And every single one of them has been placed. 
And we're getting great reports back from corporate Ghana, corporate West Africa, and the things that they're most impressed about is work ethic. 
You know, that passion for what they're doing. 
The persistence, their ability to deal with ambiguity, their ability to tackle problems that they haven't seen before. 
This is good because over the past five years, there have been times when I've felt this is "" Mission: Impossible. "" And it's just wonderful to see these glimmers of the promise of what can happen if we train our kids right. 
I think that the current and future leaders of Africa have an incredible opportunity to drive a major renaissance on the continent. 
It's an incredible opportunity. 
There aren't very many more opportunities like this in the world. 
I believe that Africa has reached an inflection point with a march of democracy and free markets across the continent. 
We have reached a moment from which can emerge a great society within one generation. 
It will depend on inspired leadership. 
And it is my contention that the manner in which we train our leaders will make all the difference. 
Thank you, and God bless. 
(Applause) 

One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't — into the religious and the atheists. 
And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means. 
There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous. 
These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued — they've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game. 
Now I think it's too easy. I think it's too easy 
to dismiss the whole of religion that way. 
And it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. 
And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist — if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0. 
Now what is Atheism 2.0? 
Well it starts from a very basic premise: of course, there's no God. 
Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc. 
Now let's move on; that's not the end of the story, that's the very, very beginning. 
I'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines: that thinks, "" I can't believe in any of this stuff. 
I can't believe in the doctrines. 
I don't think these doctrines are right. 
But, "" a very important but, "" I love Christmas carols. 
I really like the art of Mantegna. 
I really like looking at old churches. 
I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament. "" Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about — people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. 
Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. 
It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart. 
So that's a sort of tough choice. 
I don't think we have to make that choice. 
I think there is an alternative. 
I think there are ways — and I'm being both very respectful and completely impious — of stealing from religions. 
If you don't believe in a religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and mixing, with taking out the best sides of religion. 
And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, "" What here could we use? "" The secular world is full of holes. 
We have secularized badly, I would argue. 
And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well. 
And I'd like to run through a few of these today. 
I'd like to kick off by looking at education. 
Now education is a field the secular world really believes in. 
When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money. 
Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills, it's also going to make us better people. 
You know the kind of thing a commencement address is, and graduation ceremonies, those lyrical claims that education, the process of education — particularly higher education — will make us into nobler and better human beings. 
That's a lovely idea. 
Interesting where it came from. 
In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked. 
They asked themselves the following question. 
They said, where are people going to find the morality, where are they going to find guidance, and where are they going to find sources of consolation? 
And influential voices came up with one answer. 
They said culture. 
It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality. 
Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen. 
In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John. 
Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea. 
They wanted to replace scripture with culture. 
And that's a very plausible idea. 
It's also an idea that we have forgotten. 
If you went to a top university — let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge — and you said, "" I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live, "" they would show you the way to the insane asylum. 
This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of. 
Why? They don't think we need it. 
They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance. 
They see us as adults, rational adults. 
What we need is information. 
We need data, we don't need help. 
Now religions start from a very different place indeed. 
All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. 
And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. 
We're only just holding it together. 
Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. 
But anyway, we're only just holding it together. 
And we need help. Of course, we need help. 
And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning. 
You know, in the 18th century in the U.K., the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley, who went up and down this country delivering sermons, advising people how they could live. 
He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents, the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich. 
He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons, the classic medium of delivery of religions. 
Now we've given up with the idea of sermons. 
If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?" 
they'd go, "" No, no. I don't need one of those. 
I'm an independent, individual person. "" What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture? 
Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. 
And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. 
The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation — and religions know that. 
Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. 
Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. 
Religions go, "" Nonsense. 
You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. 
So get on your knees and repeat it. "" That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." 
Otherwise our minds are like sieves. 
So religions are cultures of repetition. 
They circle the great truths again and again and again. 
We associate repetition with boredom. 
"" Give us the new, "" we're always saying. 
"The new is better than the old." 
If I said to you, "" Okay, we're not going to have new TED. 
We're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they're so true. 
We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever, "" you'd feel cheated. 
Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset. 
The other things that religions do is to arrange time. 
All the major religions give us calendars. 
What is a calendar? 
A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. 
In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. 
You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. 
Now we don't think that way. 
In the secular world we think, "" If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. 
I'll just come across it. "" Nonsense, says the religious world view. 
Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. 
This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings. 
Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon. 
You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "" I'm really small. What are my problems? "" It sets things into perspective, etc., etc. 
We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't. 
Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, "" Look at the Moon. "" But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of. 
You'll be handed rice cakes. 
And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart. 
That's very good. 
The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well — I'm not doing a very good job of this here — but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. 
In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. 
But the religious world doesn't think that way. 
What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it. 
So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. 
After every convincing point, people will go, "" Amen, amen, amen. "" At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, "" Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior. "" If we were doing it like they do it — let's not do it, but if we were to do it — I would tell you something like, "" Culture should replace scripture. "" And you would go, "" Amen, amen, amen. "" And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, "" Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen. "" And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going. 
All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there. 
(Applause) The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies. 
And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. 
So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness. 
Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh. 
They don't just deliver us sermons on this. 
They don't just give us books or words about this. 
They tell us to have a bath. 
So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh. 
You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea. 
We don't tend to do that. 
Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. 
Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two. 
Let's look at art now. 
Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important. 
A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc. 
We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches. 
You've heard that saying. 
Now I think that the potential is there, but we've completely let ourselves down. 
And the reason we've let ourselves down is that we're not properly studying how religions handle art. 
The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake — a ridiculous idea — an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. 
I couldn't disagree more. 
The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. 
That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum — let's admit it — is, "" I don't know what this is about. "" But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that. 
But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art. 
Now religions have a much saner attitude to art. 
They have no trouble telling us what art is about. 
Art is about two things in all the major faiths. 
Firstly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to love. 
And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate. 
And that's what art is. 
Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. 
So as you walk around a church, or a mosque or a cathedral, what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is, through your eyes, through your senses, truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind. 
Essentially it's propaganda. 
Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view. 
Now the word "" propaganda "" sets off alarm bells. 
We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily. 
Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something. 
And if that thing is good, there's no problem with it at all. 
My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions. 
And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum — if I was a museum curator, I would make a room for love, a room for generosity. 
All works of art are talking to us about things. 
And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told, use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind, we would get a lot more out of art. 
Art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas. 
Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society. 
Art should be didactic. 
Let's think of something else. 
The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals. 
They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers. 
And they tend to be on their own. 
They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people. 
And they get depressed and they get sad on their own. 
And they don't really change much. 
Now think about religions, think about organized religions. 
What do organized religions do? 
They group together, they form institutions. 
And that has all sorts of advantages. 
First of all, scale, might. 
The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal. 
These are massive machines. 
They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational, and they're highly disciplined. 
These are all very good qualities. 
We recognize them in relation to corporations. 
And corporations are very like religions in many ways, except they're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs. 
They're selling us shoes and cars. 
Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff — the therapists, the poets — are on their own and they have no power, they have no might. 
So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind. 
Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it. 
Books alone, books written by lone individuals, are not going to change anything. 
We need to group together. 
If you want to change the world, you have to group together, you have to be collaborative. 
And that's what religions do. 
They are multinational, as I say, they are branded, they have a clear identity, so they don't get lost in a busy world. 
That's something we can learn from. 
I want to conclude. 
Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields, there is something to learn from the example of religion — even if you don't believe any of it. 
If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion. 
If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage. 
Look very closely at pilgrimage. 
We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we haven't looked at what religions do with travel. 
If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art. 
And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas. 
You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so. 
So really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters. 
AB: You can get shot by both sides. 
You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe. 
CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment. 
AB: Indeed. 
CA: But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from, which is this sense — that's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who's religious — of spiritual experience, of some kind of connection with something that's bigger than you are. 
Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0? 
AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, "" But isn't there something bigger than us, something else? "" And I say, "" Of course. "" And they say, "" So aren't you sort of religious? "" And I go, "" No. "" Why does that sense of mystery, that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe, need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling? 
Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it, so I don't feel the need. 
The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. 
So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit. 
CA: Actually, let me just ask a question. 
How many people here would say that religion is important to them? 
Is there an equivalent process by which there's a sort of bridge between what you're talking about and what you would say to them? 
AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged. 
It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things. 
It's so sad that we constantly say, "" I don't believe so I can't have community, so I'm cut off from morality, so I can't go on a pilgrimage. "" One wants to say, "" Nonsense. Why not? "" And that's really the spirit of my talk. 
There's so much we can absorb. 
Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion. 
CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists. 
But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common. 
Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging? 
AB: No, we need to be polite about differences. 
Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. 
It's seen as hypocrisy. 
But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, "" Well you know, I did pray the other day, "" you politely ignore it. 
You move on. 
Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ. 
And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored. 
They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement. 
CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing that's not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope? 
(Laughter) AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of is individual leaders. 
It doesn't need it. 
What I've tried to lay out is a framework and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in. 
I've sketched a sort of broad framework. 
But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit. 
If you're in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit. 
So it's a wiki project. 
(Laughter) CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later. 
(Applause) 

I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times. 
I'm giving a short slide show this morning that I'm giving for the very first time, so — well it's — I don't want or need to raise the bar, I'm actually trying to lower the bar. 
Because I've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session. 
And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief, but about behavior. 
Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. 
How dare we be optimistic? 
Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture. 
As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." 
And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word "" behavior "" is also, I think, sometimes misunderstood in this context. 
I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff. 
But, as important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws. 
And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. 
In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. 
And we have one. 
I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. 
I was reminded of that recently, by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her 70s, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction, also just staring at me. And so I said, "" How do you do? "" And she said, "" You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore. "" (Laughter) Many years ago, when I was a young congressman, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge 
of nuclear arms control — the nuclear arms race. 
And the military historians taught me, during that quest, that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global, world war — strategic conflicts. 
And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model. 
Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories, and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems, like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic, and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. 
And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. 
Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. 
We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources. 
Let me show you these slides here. 
I thought I would start with the logo. What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. 
Greenland remains. Twenty-eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap — the North Polar ice cap — looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox. 
This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory. 
This is what's happened in the last 28 years. 
To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. 
Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. 
The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically — doesn't look quite the same size — but it is exactly the same size as the United States, minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. 
The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. 
The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice — vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. 
That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland. 
Already, around the Arctic Circle — this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. 
The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California. 
"" They were the best of times, they were the worst of times "": the most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger, but essentially the same size. 
They have exactly the same amount of carbon. 
But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus, most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average. On Venus, it's 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, and putting it into the atmosphere. 
It's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. 
It's three times hotter than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. Now, briefly, here's an image you've seen, as one of the only old images, but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate. 
The global scientific community says: man-made global warming pollution, put into the atmosphere, thickening this, is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. 
You all know that. At the last IPCC summary, the scientists wanted to say, "How certain are you?" They wanted to answer that "99 percent." 
The Chinese objected, and so the compromise was "more than 90 percent." 
Now, the skeptics say, "" Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun. "" If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in. 
If it's more being trapped on the way out, then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the lower atmosphere. 
Here's the stratosphere: cooler. 
CSI: Climate. 
Now, here's the good news. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. 
What is missing is a sense of urgency. 
If you agree with the factual analysis, but you don't feel the sense of urgency, where does that leave you? 
Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with Current TV — who did this pro bono — did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. 
This is the winner. 
NBC — I'll show all of the networks here — the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates: two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions, two about the climate crisis. 
Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. 
From laughs to tears — this is one of the older tobacco commercials. 
So here's what we're doing. 
This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. 
But it's not just the developed nations. 
The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. 
If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. 
But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia — over thirty years. 
This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. 
'70s. '80s.' 90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. 
We have the technologies. 
We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution. 
People say, "" What's the solution? "" Here it is. 
Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck — and some things have changed since the 19th century. 
In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. 
Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis. 
But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. 
This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy plants, linked in a so-called "" supergrid "" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing countries — high-voltage DC currents. 
This is not pie in the sky; this can be done. 
We need to do it for our own economy. 
The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. 
And it is based on an old model. 
Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. 
I have a stake in these, so I'll have a disclaimer there. 
But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation. 
You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. 
The only two countries that didn't ratify — and now there's only one. Australia had an election. 
And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. 
And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. 
Lot of other things contributed to it, but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. 
This is Lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. 
We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture. 
Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S. 
are up to 780 — and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this — which is good news. 
Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. 
What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice — just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. 
We now have a culture of distraction. 
But we have a planetary emergency. 
And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission. 
I wish I could find the words to convey this. 
This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. 
Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. 
We can do this. Don't tell me that we don't have the capacity to do it. 
If we had just one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War, we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. 
We have the capacity to do it. 
One final point: I'm optimistic, because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. 
Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, "" Oh, this is so terrible. 
What a burden we have. "" I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? 
A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. 
Let's do that. Thank you very much. 
Chris Anderson: For so many people at TED, there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form — one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. 
That hurts. 
Al Gore: You have no idea. (Laughter) CA: When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now — I mean, there's — are you excited by their plans on global warming? 
AG: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee — certain nominee — John McCain, and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination — all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that — as illustrated by the questions — 
that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters, by the way, the analysis of all the questions — and, by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, "" Clean Coal. "" Has anybody noticed that? 
Every single debate has been sponsored by "" Clean Coal. "" "Now, even lower emissions!" 
The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. 
So they're saying the right things and they may — whichever of them is elected — may do the right thing, but let me tell you: when I came back from Kyoto in 1997, with a feeling of great happiness that we'd gotten that breakthrough there, and then confronted the United States Senate, only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm, to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say. 
This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization. 
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. 
And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. 
So that's why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. 
Demand — change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. 
We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy — this — We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. 
Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. 
Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. 
Have a moratorium — we shouldn't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren't able to capture and store CO2, which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. 
Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible. 
This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign — grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper — with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen. 
We need help. We need help. 
CA: In terms of your own personal role going forward, Al, is there something more than that you would like to be doing? 
AG: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? 
Buckminster Fuller once wrote, "" If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? 
How would I be? "" It does depend on all of us, but again, not just with the light bulbs. 
We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. 
We can change things, but we have to actively change. 
What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness. 
And that's hard to — that's hard to create — but it is coming. 
There's an old African proverb that some of you know that says, "" If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. "" We have to go far, quickly. 
So we have to have a change in consciousness. 
A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. 
A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge. 
CA: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED. 
AG: Thank you. Thank you very much. 

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. 

When I turned 19, I started my career as the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. 
My work as a woman photographer was considered a serious insult to local traditions, and created a lasting stigma for me and my family. 
The male-dominated field made my presence unwelcome by all possible means. 
They made clear that a woman must not do a man's job. 
Photo agencies in Gaza refused to train me because of my gender. 
The "" No "" sign was pretty clear. 
Three of my colleagues went as far as to drive me to an open air strike area where the explosion sounds were the only thing I could hear. 
Dust was flying in the air, and the ground was shaking like a swing beneath me. 
I only realized we weren't there to document the event when the three of them got back into the armored Jeep and drove away, waving and laughing, leaving me behind in the open air strike zone. 
For a moment, I felt terrified, humiliated, and sorry for myself. 
My colleagues' action was not the only death threat I have received, but it was the most dangerous one. 
The perception of women's life in Gaza is passive. 
Until a recent time, a lot of women were not allowed to work or pursue education. 
At times of such doubled war including both social restrictions on women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women's dark and bright stories were fading away. 
To men, women's stories were seen as inconsequential. 
I started paying closer attention to women's lives in Gaza. 
Because of my gender, I had access to worlds where my colleagues were forbidden. 
Beyond the obvious pain and struggle, there was a healthy dose of laughter and accomplishments. 
In front of a police compound in Gaza City during the first war in Gaza, an Israeli air raid managed to destroy the compound and break my nose. 
For a moment, all I saw was white, bright white, like these lights. 
I thought to myself I either got blind or I was in heaven. 
By the time I managed to open my eyes, I had documented this moment. 
Mohammed Khader, a Palestinian worker who spent two decades in Israel, as his retirement plan, he decided to build a four-floor house, only by the first field operation at his neighborhood, the house was flattened to the ground. 
Nothing was left but the pigeons he raised and a jacuzzi, a bathtub that he got from Tel Aviv. 
Mohammed got the bathtub on the top of the rubble and started giving his kids an every morning bubble bath. 
My work is not meant to hide the scars of war, but to show the full frame of unseen stories of Gazans. 
As a Palestinian female photographer, the journey of struggle, survival and everyday life has inspired me to overcome the community taboo and see a different side of war and its aftermath. 
I became a witness with a choice: to run away or stand still. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

How many of you love rhythm? 
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah. (Cheers) (Drumming) I mean, I love all kinds of rhythm. 
I like to play jazz, a little funk, and hip hop, a little pop, a little R & B, a little Latin, African. 
And this groove right here, comes from the Crescent City, the old second line. 
(Cheers) Now, one thing all those rhythms have in common is math, and I call it a-rhythm-etic. 
Can you repeat after me? A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
Clayton Cameron: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. 
CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
CC: Yeah. 
Now all those styles of rhythm are all counted in four and then subdivided by three. 
What? 
Yeah. Three is a magic number. 
Three is a groovin 'number. 
Three is a hip-hop kind of number. 
But what does subdividing by three mean? 
And counting off by four? 
Well, look, think of it this way. 
A measure of music as a dollar. 
Now a dollar has four quarters, right? 
And so does a 4 / 4 measure of music. 
It has four quarter notes. 
Now, how do you subdivide? 
Now let's envision this: three dollars' worth of quarters. 
You would have three groups of four, and you would count it, a-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Together. 
All: A-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. 
CC: Okay, now you feel that? 
Now let's take those three groups of four and make them four groups of three. 
And listen to this. 
A-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, with me. 
One-two-three-four, one-two-three, come on, y'all! 
All: One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, ah. 
CC: There you go. 
All right, second line. 
One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. 
One-two-three-four, one-two-three. Yeah. Now, that's what I call a-rhythm-etic. Can you say it? A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. 
CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
CC: Yeah. Now pick the swing beat, and do the same thing. One, two, one, two, a-one-two-three-four. Yeah. Mm. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Whoo. So I want to take the second line beat and the swing beat and put them together, 
and it sounds something like this. 
Aha. 
A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. 
CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
CC: Yeah. Hip-hop. 
Now it's using a faster group of three we call a triplet. 
Triplet-triplet. Say it with me. 
All: Triplet-triplet. 
CC: Triplet-triplet. Triplet-triplet. 
CC: So I'll take all the rhythms that you heard earlier, we'll put them together, and they sound like this. 
A-rhythm-etic. 
(Applause) 

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

When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car? 
Here's the problem facing Homer. 
And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain. 
So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory. 
If you have damage there, like in Alzheimer's, you can't remember things including where you parked your car. 
It's named after Latin for "" seahorse, "" which it resembles. 
And like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons. 
So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it. 
And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other. 
The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected. 
And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food. 
So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here. 
And when it fires a little spike of electricity, there's going to be a red dot and a click. 
So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment. 
And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike. 
So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal's location. 
And if we record from lots of different neurons, we'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment, like in this square box shown here. 
So together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually, "Where am I now within my environment?" 
Place cells are also being recorded in humans. 
So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring. 
And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town. 
And place cells in their hippocampi would fire, become active, start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town. 
So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment? 
Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important. 
So the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat's in. 
And when you expand the box, the firing location expands. 
The one below likes to fire whenever there's a wall close by to the south. 
And if you put another wall inside the box, then the cell fires in both place wherever there's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box. 
So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you — extended buildings and so on — is particularly important for the hippocampus. 
And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around. 
So the cell on the left, you can see, it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east, whether it's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table, which the animals are running around. 
And the cell on the right there fires whenever there's a boundary to the south, whether it's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart. 
So that's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it's exploring around. 
We can also test where we think objects are, like this goal flag, in simple environments — or indeed, where your car would be. 
So we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember. 
And then, if we put them back in the environment, generally they're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was. 
But on some trials, we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell. 
In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment. 
And what you see, for example, if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment, and then if you ask people where it was, but you've made the environment bigger, where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out. 
It's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location, and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern. 
That guides you back to the location that you want to remember. 
But we also know where we are through movement. 
So if we take some outbound path — perhaps we park and we wander off — we know because our own movements, which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back. 
And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell. 
Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells. 
But now as the rat explores around, each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid. 
And if you record from several grid cells — shown here in different colors — each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells. 
So the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one. 
So together, it's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment — a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you'd find on a map, but using triangles. 
And as it moves around, the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is, so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment. 
Do people have grid cells? 
Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry, the same orientations of grid, shown in orange here, it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between. 
So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal. 
And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats. 
So back to Homer. 
He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked. 
And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells. 
He's also remembering the path he took out of the car park, which would be represented in the firing of grid cells. 
Now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire. 
And he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car. 
And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car's actually there. 
Maybe it's been towed. 
But he knows where it was, so he knows to go and get it. 
So beyond spatial memory, if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks, like remembering the last time you went to a wedding, for example. 
So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene, at least, of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them. 
So if this was happening, your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint. 
And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space. 
Another kind of cell, head direction cells, which I didn't mention yet, they fire like a compass according to which way you're facing. 
They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery, so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding, for example. 
So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Isn't that cool? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Design — I love its design. 
I looked at that giant monster and said to myself — "I am not going to lock myself on that bench the whole day!" 
The best of all is that if I don't want to practice, (Whispering) I can hide it. 
(Laughter) A few years later, I heard a joke about the greatest violinist, Jascha Heifetz. 
And Mr. Heifetz was a very cool person, so he picked up his violin and said, "Funny — I don't hear anything." 
(Laughter) But actually, the most impressive thing to me is that — well, actually, I would also like to say this for all children is to say thank you to all adults, for actually caring for us a lot, and to make our future world much better. 

I want to start off by saying, Houston, we have a problem. 
We're entering a second generation of no progress in terms of human flight in space. In fact, we've regressed. 
We stand a very big chance of losing our ability to inspire our youth to go out and continue this very important thing that we as a species have always done. 
And that is, instinctively we've gone out and climbed over difficult places, went to more hostile places, and found out later, maybe to our surprise, that that's the reason we survived. 
And I feel very strongly that it's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that think that it's OK to look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. 
They need to look forward to exploration; they need to look forward to colonization; they need to look forward to breakthroughs. 
We need to inspire them, because they need to lead us and help us survive in the future. 
I'm particularly troubled that what NASA's doing right now with this new Bush doctrine to — for this next decade and a half — oh shoot, I screwed up. 
We have real specific instructions here not to talk about politics. 
(Laughter) What we're looking forward to is — (Applause) what we're looking forward to is not only the inspiration of our children, but the current plan right now is not really even allowing the most creative people in this country — the Boeing's and Lockheed's space engineers — to go out and take risks and try new stuff. 
We're going to go back to the moon... 50 years later? 
And we're going to do it very specifically planned to not learn anything new. 
I'm really troubled by that. But anyway that's — the basis of the thing that I want to share with you today, though, is that right back to where we inspire people who will be our great leaders later. 
That's the theme of my next 15 minutes here. 
And I think that the inspiration begins when you're very young: three-year-olds, up to 12-, 14-year-olds. 
What they look at is the most important thing. 
Let's take a snapshot at aviation. 
And there was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. 
It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, "" Ooh, hey, I can do that. "" There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousand of pilots. Airplanes were invented by natural selection. 
Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. 
There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again. 
The ones that flew and landed OK because there were no trained pilots who had good flying qualities by definition. 
So we, by making a whole bunch of attempts, thousands of attempts, in that four-year time period, we invented the concepts of the airplanes that we fly today. And that's why they're so safe, as we gave it a lot of chance to find what's good. 
That has not happened at all in space flying. 
There's only been two concepts tried — two by the U.S. and one by the Russians. 
Well, who was inspired during that time period? 
Aviation Week asked me to make a list of who I thought were the movers and shakers of the first 100 years of aviation. 
And I wrote them down and I found out later that every one of them was a little kid in that wonderful renaissance of aviation. 
Well, what happened when I was a little kid was — some pretty heavy stuff too. 
The jet age started: the missile age started. Von Braun was on there showing how to go to Mars — and this was before Sputnik. 
And this was at a time when Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than it is now. We thought there'd be animals there; we knew there were plants there; the colors change, right? 
But, you know, NASA screwed that up because they've sent these robots and they've landed it only in the deserts. 
(Laughter) If you look at what happened — this little black line is as fast as man ever flew, and the red line is top-of-the-line military fighters and the blue line is commercial air transport. 
You notice here's a big jump when I was a little kid — and I think that had something to do with giving me the courage to go out and try something that other people weren't having the courage to try. 
Well, what did I do when I was a kid? 
I didn't do the hotrods and the girls and the dancing and, well, we didn't have drugs in those days. But I did competition model airplanes. 
I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. 
And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. 
And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around the world Voyager. I founded another company in '82, which is my company now. 
And we have developed more than one new type of airplane every year since 1982. 
And there's a lot of them that I actually can't show you on this chart. 
The most impressive airplane ever, I believe, was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet. 
Stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly, taken out of service. 
We retreated in '98 back to something that was developed in' 56. What? 
The most impressive spaceship ever, I believe, was a Grumman Lunar Lander. It was a — you know, it landed on the moon, take off of the moon, didn't need any maintenance guys — that's kind of cool. 
We've lost that capability. We abandoned it in '72. 
This thing was designed three years after Gagarin first flew in space in 1961. 
Three years, and we can't do that now. Crazy. 
Talk very briefly about innovation cycles, things that grow, have a lot of activity; they die out when they're replaced by something else. 
These things tend to happen every 25 years. 
40 years long, with an overlap. You can put that statement on all kinds of different technologies. The interesting thing — by the way, the speed here, excuse me, higher-speed travel is the title of these innovation cycles. There is none here. 
These two new airplanes are the same speed as the DC8 that was done in 1958. 
Here's the biggie, and that is, you don't have innovation cycles if the government develops and the government uses it. 
You know, a good example, of course, is the DARPA net. 
Computers were used for artillery first, then IRS. 
But when we got it, now you have all the level of activity, all the benefit from it. Private sector has to do it. 
Keep that in mind. I put down innovation — I've looked for innovation cycles in space; I found none. 
The very first year, starting when Gagarin went in space, and a few weeks later Alan Shepherd, there were five manned space flights in the world — the very first year. 
In 2003, everyone that the United States sent to space was killed. 
There were only three or four flights in 2003. 
In 2004, there were only two flights: two Russian Soyuz flights to the international manned station. And I had to fly three in Mojave with my little group of a couple dozen people in order to get to a total of five, which was the number the same year back in 1961. 
There is no growth. There's no activity. There's no nothing. 
This is a picture here taken from SpaceShipOne. 
This is a picture here taken from orbit. 
Our goal is to make it so that you can see this picture and really enjoy that. 
We know how to do it for sub-orbital flying now, do it safe enough — at least as safe as the early airlines — so that can be done. 
And I think I want to talk a little bit about why we had the courage to go out and try that as a small company. 
Well, first of all, what's going to happen next? 
The first industry will be a high volume, a lot of players. 
There's another one announced just last week. 
And it will be sub-orbital. And the reason it has to be sub-orbital is, there is not solutions for adequate safety to fly the public to orbit. The governments have been doing this — three governments have been doing this for 45 years, and still four percent of the people that have left the atmosphere have died. 
That's — You don't want to run a business with that kind of a safety record. 
It'll be very high volume; we think 100,000 people will fly by 2020. 
I can't tell you when this will start, because I don't want my competition to know my schedule. 
But I think once it does, we will find solutions, and very quickly, you'll see those resort hotels in orbit. 
And that real easy thing to do, which is a swing around the moon so you have this cool view. And that will be really cool. 
Because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere — you can do an elliptical orbit and miss it by 10 feet if you want. 
Oh, it's going to be so much fun. 
(Laughter) OK. My critics say, "" Hey, Rutan's just spending a lot of these billionaires' money for joyrides for billionaires. 
What's this? This is not a transportation system; it's just for fun. "" And I used to be bothered by that, and then I got to thinking, well, wait a minute. I bought my first Apple computer in 1978 and I bought it because I could say, "" I got a computer at my house and you don't. 
'What do you use it for? 'Come over. It does Frogger. "" OK. 
(Laughter) Not the bank's computer or Lockheed's computer, but the home computer was for games. 
For a whole decade it was for fun — we didn't even know what it was for. 
But what happened, the fact that we had this big industry, big development, big improvement and capability and so on, and they get out there in enough homes — we were ripe for a new invention. 
And the inventor is in this audience. 
Al Gore invented the Internet and because of that, something that we used for a whole year — excuse me — a whole decade for fun, became everything — our commerce, our research, our communication and, if we let the Google guys think for another couple weekends, we can add a dozen more things to the list. (Laughter) And it won't be very long before you won't be able to convince kids that we didn't always have computers in our homes. 
So fun is defendable. 
OK, I want to show you kind of a busy chart, but in it is my prediction with what's going to happen. 
And in it also brings up another point, right here. 
There's a group of people that have come forward — and you don't know all of them — but the ones that have come forward were inspired as young children, this little three- to 15-year-old age, by us going to orbit and going to the moon here, right in this time period. 
Paul Allen, Elan Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, the Ansari family, which is now funding the Russians' sub-orbital thing, Bob Bigelow, a private space station, and Carmack. 
These people are taking money and putting it in an interesting area, and I think it's a lot better than they put it in an area of a better cell phone or something — but they're putting it in very — areas and this will lead us into this kind of capability, and it will lead us into the next really big thing and it will allow us to explore. And I think eventually it will allow us to colonize and to keep us from going extinct. 
They were inspired by big progress. But look at the progress that's going on after that. 
There were a couple of examples here. 
The military fighters had a — highest-performance military airplane was the SR71. It went a whole life cycle, got too rusty to fly, and was taken out of service. The Concorde doubled the speed for airline travel. 
It went a whole life cycle without competition, took out of service. And we're stuck back here with the same kind of capability for military fighters and commercial airline travel that we had back in the late '50s. 
But something is out there to inspire our kids now. 
And I'm talking about if you've got a baby now, or if you've got a 10-year-old now. 
What's out there is there's something really interesting going to happen here. 
Relatively soon, you'll be able to buy a ticket and fly higher and faster than the highest-performance military operational airplane. It's never happened before. 
The fact that they have stuck here with this kind of performance has been, well, you know, you win the war in 12 minutes; why do you need something better? 
But I think when you guys start buying tickets and flying sub-orbital flights to space, very soon — wait a minute, what's happening here, we'll have military fighters with sub-orbital capability, and I think very soon this. 
But the interesting thing about it is the commercial guys are going to go first. 
OK, I look forward to a new "" capitalist's space race, "" let's call it. 
You remember the space race in the '60s was for national prestige, because we lost the first two milestones. 
We didn't lose them technically. The fact that we had the hardware to put something in orbit when we let Von Braun fly it — you can argue that's not a technical loss. 
Sputnik wasn't a technical loss, but it was a prestige loss. 
America — the world saw America as not being the leader in technology, and that was a very strong thing. 
And then we flew Alan Shepherd weeks after Gagarin, not months or decades, or whatever. So we had the capability. 
But America lost. We lost. And because of that, we made a big jump to recover it. 
Well, again, what's interesting here is we've lost to the Russians on the first couple of milestones already. 
You cannot buy a ticket commercially to fly into space in America — can't do it. You can buy it in Russia. 
You can fly with Russian hardware. This is available because a Russian space program is starving, and it's nice for them to get 20 million here and there to take one of the seats. 
It's commercial. It can be defined as space tourism. They are also offering a trip to go on this whip around the moon, like Apollo 8 was done. 
100 million bucks — hey, I can go to the moon. 
But, you know, would you have thought back in the '60s, when the space race was going on, that the first commercial capitalist-like thing to do to buy a ticket to go to the moon would be in Russian hardware? 
And would you have thought, would the Russians have thought, that when they first go to the moon in their developed hardware, the guys inside won't be Russians? Maybe it'll probably be a Japanese or an American billionaire? Well, that's weird: you know, it really is. 
But anyway, I think we need to beat them again. 
I think what we'll do is we'll see a successful, very successful, private space flight industry. Whether we're first or not really doesn't matter. 
The Russians actually flew a supersonic transport before the Concorde. 
And then they flew a few cargo flights, and took it out of service. 
I think you kind of see the same kind of parallel when the commercial stuff is offered. 
OK, we'll talk just a little bit about commercial development for human space flight. 
This little thing says here: five times what NASA's doing by 2020. I want to tell you, already there's about 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion investment in private space flight that is not government at all — already, worldwide. If you read — if you Google it, you'll find about half of that money, but there's twice of that being committed out there — not spent yet, but being committed and planned for the next few years. Hey, that's pretty big. 
I'm predicting, though, as profitable as this industry is going to be — and it certainly is profitable when you fly people at 200,000 dollars on something that you can actually operate at a tenth of that cost, or less — this is going to be very profitable. 
I predict, also, that the investment that will flow into this will be somewhere around half of what the U.S. taxpayer spends for NASA's manned spacecraft work. 
And every dollar that flows into that will be spent more efficiently by a factor of 10 to 15. And what that means is before we know it, the progress in human space flight, with no taxpayer dollars, will be at a level of about five times as much as the current NASA budgets for human space flight. 
And that is because it's us. It's private industry. 
You should never depend on the government to do this sort of stuff — and we've done it for a long time. The NACA, before NASA, never developed an airliner and never ran an airline. 
But NASA is developing the space liner, always has, and runs the only space line, OK. And we've shied away from it because we're afraid of it. But starting back in June of 2004, when I showed that a little group out there actually can do it, can get a start with it, everything changed after that time. 
OK, thank you very much. 
(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 one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. 
And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew. 
I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. 
And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case — I can't speak for anybody else, but in my case — a lot of room for another big ego. 
(Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "" Yeah, but a lot less baloney. "" (Laughter) (Applause) The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. 
And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. 
But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-ophizing. 
And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. 
(Laughter) And he said, "" Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid? "" I said, "" Well, my real hero was my father. 

For the last year, everyone's been watching the same show, and I'm not talking about "" Game of Thrones, "" but a horrifying, real-life drama that's proved too fascinating to turn off. 
It's a show produced by murderers and shared around the world via the Internet. 
Their names have become familiar: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto Jogo. 
Their beheadings by the Islamic State were barbaric, but if we think they were archaic, from a remote, obscure age, then we're wrong. 
They were uniquely modern, because the murderers acted knowing well that millions of people would tune in to watch. 
The headlines called them savages and barbarians, because the image of one man overpowering another, killing him with a knife to the throat, conforms to our idea of ancient, primitive practices, the polar opposite of our urban, civilized ways. 
We don't do things like that. 
But that's the irony. 
We think a beheading has nothing to do with us, even as we click on the screen to watch. 
But it is to do with us. 
The Islamic State beheadings are not ancient or remote. 
They're a global, 21st century event, a 21st century event that takes place in our living rooms, at our desks, on our computer screens. 
They're entirely dependent on the power of technology to connect us. 
And whether we like it or not, everyone who watches is a part of the show. 
And lots of people watch. 
We don't know exactly how many. 
Obviously, it's difficult to calculate. 
But a poll taken in the UK, for example, in August 2014, estimated that 1.2 million people had watched the beheading of James Foley in the few days after it was released. 
And that's just the first few days, and just Britain. 
A similar poll taken in the United States in November 2014 found that nine percent of those surveyed had watched beheading videos, and a further 23 percent had watched the videos but had stopped just before the death was shown. 
Nine percent may be a small minority of all the people who could watch, but it's still a very large crowd. 
And of course that crowd is growing all the time, because every week, every month, more people will keep downloading and keep watching. 
If we go back 11 years, before sites like YouTube and Facebook were born, it was a similar story. 
When innocent civilians like Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, were beheaded, those videos were shown during the Iraq War. 
Nick Berg's beheading quickly became one of the most searched for items on the Internet. 
Within a day, it was the top search term across search engines like Google, Lycos, Yahoo. 
In the week after Nick Berg's beheading, these were the top 10 search terms in the United States. 
The Berg beheading video remained the most popular search term for a week, and it was the second most popular search term for the whole month of May, runner-up only to "" American Idol. "" The al-Qaeda-linked website that first showed Nick Berg's beheading had to close down within a couple of days due to overwhelming traffic to the site. 
One Dutch website owner said that his daily viewing figures rose from 300,000 to 750,000 every time a beheading in Iraq was shown. 
He told reporters 18 months later that it had been downloaded many millions of times, and that's just one website. 
A similar pattern was seen again and again when videos of beheadings were released during the Iraq War. 
Social media sites have made these images more accessible than ever before, but if we take another step back in history, we'll see that it was the camera that first created a new kind of crowd in our history of beheadings as public spectacle. 
As soon as the camera appeared on the scene, a full lifetime ago on June 17, 1939, it had an immediate and unequivocal effect. 
That day, the first film of a public beheading was created in France. 
It was the execution, the guillotining, of a German serial killer, Eugen Weidmann, outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. 
Weidmann was due to be executed at the crack of dawn, as was customary at the time, but his executioner was new to the job, and he'd underestimated how long it would take him to prepare. 
So Weidmann was executed at 4: 30 in the morning, by which time on a June morning, there was enough light to take photographs, and a spectator in the crowd filmed the event, unbeknownst to the authorities. 
Several still photographs were taken as well, and you can still watch the film online today and look at the photographs. 
The crowd on the day of Weidmann's execution was called "" unruly "" and "" disgusting "" by the press, but that was nothing compared to the untold thousands of people who could now study the action over and over again, freeze-framed in every detail. 
The camera may have made these scenes more accessible than ever before, but it's not just about the camera. 
If we take a bigger leap back in history, we'll see that for as long as there have been public judicial executions and beheadings, there have been the crowds to see them. 
In London, as late as the early 19th century, there might be four or five thousand people to see a standard hanging. 
There could be 40,000 or 50,000 to see a famous criminal killed. 
And a beheading, which was a rare event in England at the time, attracted even more. 
In May 1820, five men known as the Cato Street Conspirators were executed in London for plotting to assassinate members of the British government. 
They were hung and then decapitated. 
It was a gruesome scene. 
Each man's head was hacked off in turn and held up to the crowd. 
And 100,000 people, that's 10,000 more than can fit into Wembley Stadium, had turned out to watch. 
The streets were packed. 
People had rented out windows and rooftops. 
People had climbed onto carts and wagons in the street. 
People climbed lamp posts. 
People had been known to have died in the crush on popular execution days. 
Evidence suggests that throughout our history of public beheadings and public executions, the vast majority of the people who come to see are either enthusiastic or, at best, unmoved. 
Disgust has been comparatively rare, and even when people are disgusted and are horrified, it doesn't always stop them from coming out all the same to watch. 
Perhaps the most striking example of the human ability to watch a beheading and remain unmoved and even be disappointed was the introduction in France in 1792 of the guillotine, that famous decapitation machine. 
To us in the 21st century, the guillotine may seem like a monstrous contraption, but to the first crowds who saw it, it was actually a disappointment. 
They were used to seeing long, drawn-out, torturous executions on the scaffold, where people were mutilated and burned and pulled apart slowly. 
To them, watching the guillotine in action, it was so quick, there was nothing to see. 
The blade fell, the head fell into a basket, out of sight immediately, and they called out, "Give me back my gallows, give me back my wooden gallows." 
The end of torturous public judicial executions in Europe and America was partly to do with being more humane towards the criminal, but it was also partly because the crowd obstinately refused to behave in the way that they should. 
All too often, execution day was more like a carnival than a solemn ceremony. 
Today, a public judicial execution in Europe or America is unthinkable, but there are other scenarios that should make us cautious about thinking that things are different now and we don't behave like that anymore. 
Take, for example, the incidents of suicide baiting. 
This is when a crowd gathers to watch a person who has climbed to the top of a public building in order to kill themselves, and people in the crowd shout and jeer, "Get on with it! Go on and jump!" 
This is a well-recognized phenomenon. 
One paper in 1981 found that in 10 out of 21 threatened suicide attempts, there was incidents of suicide baiting and jeering from a crowd. 
And there have been incidents reported in the press this year. 
This was a very widely reported incident in Telford and Shropshire in March this year. 
And when it happens today, people take photographs and they take videos on their phones and they post those videos online. 
When it comes to brutal murderers who post their beheading videos, the Internet has created a new kind of crowd. 
Today, the action takes place in a distant time and place, which gives the viewer a sense of detachment from what's happening, a sense of separation. 
It's nothing to do with me. 
It's already happened. 
We are also offered an unprecedented sense of intimacy. 
Today, we are all offered front row seats. 
We can all watch in private, in our own time and space, and no one need ever know that we've clicked on the screen to watch. 
This sense of separation — from other people, from the event itself — seems to be key to understanding our ability to watch, and there are several ways in which the Internet creates a sense of detachment that seems to erode individual moral responsibility. 
Our activities online are often contrasted with real life, as though the things we do online are somehow less real. 
We feel less accountable for our actions when we interact online. 
There's a sense of anonymity, a sense of invisibility, so we feel less accountable for our behavior. 
The Internet also makes it far easier to stumble upon things inadvertently, things that we would usually avoid in everyday life. 
Today, a video can start playing before you even know what you're watching. 
Or you may be tempted to look at material that you wouldn't look at in everyday life or you wouldn't look at if you were with other people at the time. 
And when the action is pre-recorded and takes place in a distant time and space, watching seems like a passive activity. 
There's nothing I can do about it now. 
It's already happened. 
All these things make it easier as an Internet user for us to give in to our sense of curiosity about death, to push our personal boundaries, to test our sense of shock, to explore our sense of shock. 
But we're not passive when we watch. 
On the contrary, we're fulfilling the murderer's desire to be seen. 
When the victim of a decapitation is bound and defenseless, he or she essentially becomes a pawn in their killer's show. 
Unlike a trophy head that's taken in battle, that represents the luck and skill it takes to win a fight, when a beheading is staged, when it's essentially a piece of theater, the power comes from the reception the killer receives as he performs. 
In other words, watching is very much part of the event. 
The event no longer takes place in a single location at a certain point in time as it used to and as it may still appear to. 
Now the event is stretched out in time and place, and everyone who watches plays their part. 
We should stop watching, but we know we won't. 
History tells us we won't, and the killers know it too. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Let me get this back. Thank you. 
Let's move here. While they install for the next performance, I want to ask you the question that probably many here have, which is how did you get interested in this topic? 
Frances Larson: I used to work at a museum called the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which was famous for its display of shrunken heads from South America. 
People used to say, "" Oh, the shrunken head museum, the shrunken head museum! "" And at the time, I was working on the history of scientific collections of skulls. 
I was working on the cranial collections, and it just struck me as ironic that here were people coming to see this gory, primitive, savage culture that they were almost fantasizing about and creating without really understanding what they were seeing, and all the while these vast — I mean hundreds of thousands of skulls in our museums, all across Europe and the States — were kind of upholding this Enlightenment pursuit of scientific rationality. 
So I wanted to kind of twist it round and say, "" Let's look at us. "" We're looking through the glass case at these shrunken heads. 
Let's look at our own history and our own cultural fascination with these things. 
BG: Thank you for sharing that. 
FL: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I believe that the secret to producing extremely drought-tolerant crops, which should go some way to providing food security in the world, lies in resurrection plants, pictured here, in an extremely droughted state. 
You might think that these plants look dead, but they're not. 
Give them water, and they will resurrect, green up, start growing, in 12 to 48 hours. 
Now, why would I suggest that producing drought-tolerant crops will go towards providing food security? 
Well, the current world population is around 7 billion. 
And it's estimated that by 2050, we'll be between 9 and 10 billion people, with the bulk of this growth happening in Africa. 
The food and agricultural organizations of the world have suggested that we need a 70 percent increase in current agricultural practice to meet that demand. 
Given that plants are at the base of the food chain, most of that's going to have to come from plants. 
That percentage of 70 percent does not take into consideration the potential effects of climate change. 
This is taken from a study by Dai published in 2011, where he took into consideration all the potential effects of climate change and expressed them — amongst other things — increased aridity due to lack of rain or infrequent rain. 
The areas in red shown here, are areas that until recently have been very successfully used for agriculture, but cannot anymore because of lack of rainfall. 
This is the situation that's predicted to happen in 2050. 
Much of Africa, in fact, much of the world, is going to be in trouble. 
We're going to have to think of some very smart ways of producing food. 
And preferably among them, some drought-tolerant crops. 
The other thing to remember about Africa is that most of their agriculture is rainfed. 
Now, making drought-tolerant crops is not the easiest thing in the world. 
And the reason for this is water. 
Water is essential to life on this planet. 
All living, actively metabolizing organisms, from microbes to you and I, are comprised predominately of water. 
All life reactions happen in water. 
And loss of a small amount of water results in death. 
You and I are 65 percent water — we lose one percent of that, we die. 
But we can make behavioral changes to avoid that. 
Plants can't. 
They're stuck in the ground. 
And so in the first instance they have a little bit more water than us, about 95 percent water, and they can lose a little bit more than us, like 10 to about 70 percent, depending on the species, but for short periods only. 
Most of them will either try to resist or avoid water loss. 
So extreme examples of resistors can be found in succulents. 
They tend to be small, very attractive, but they hold onto their water at such great cost that they grow extremely slowly. 
Examples of avoidance of water loss are found in trees and shrubs. 
They send down very deep roots, mine subterranean water supplies and just keep flushing it through them at all times, keeping themselves hydrated. 
The one on the right is called a baobab. 
It's also called the upside-down tree, simply because the proportion of roots to shoots is so great that it looks like the tree has been planted upside down. 
And of course the roots are required for hydration of that plant. 
And probably the most common strategy of avoidance is found in annuals. 
Annuals make up the bulk of our plant food supplies. 
Up the west coast of my country, for much of the year you don't see much vegetation growth. 
But come the spring rains, you get this: flowering of the desert. 
The strategy in annuals, is to grow only in the rainy season. 
At the end of that season they produce a seed, which is dry, eight to 10 percent water, but very much alive. 
And anything that is that dry and still alive, we call desiccation-tolerant. 
In the desiccated state, what seeds can do is lie in extremes of environment for prolonged periods of time. 
The next time the rainy season comes, they germinate and grow, and the whole cycle just starts again. 
It's widely believed that the evolution of desiccation-tolerant seeds allowed the colonization and the radiation of flowering plants, or angiosperms, onto land. 
But back to annuals as our major form of food supplies. 
Wheat, rice and maize form 95 percent of our plant food supplies. 
And it's been a great strategy because in a short space of time you can produce a lot of seed. 
Seeds are energy-rich so there's a lot of food calories, you can store it in times of plenty for times of famine, but there's a downside. 
The vegetative tissues, the roots and leaves of annuals, do not have much by way of inherent resistance, avoidance or tolerance characteristics. 
They just don't need them. 
They grow in the rainy season and they've got a seed to help them survive the rest of the year. 
And so despite concerted efforts in agriculture to make crops with improved properties of resistance, avoidance and tolerance — particularly resistance and avoidance because we've had good models to understand how those work — we still get images like this. 
Maize crop in Africa, two weeks without rain and it's dead. 
There is a solution: resurrection plants. 
These plants can lose 95 percent of their cellular water, remain in a dry, dead-like state for months to years, and give them water, they green up and start growing again. 
Like seeds, these are desiccation-tolerant. 
Like seeds, these can withstand extremes of environmental conditions. 
And this is a really rare phenomenon. 
There are only 135 flowering plant species that can do this. 
I'm going to show you a video of the resurrection process of these three species in that order. 
And at the bottom, there's a time axis so you can see how quickly it happens. 
(Applause) Pretty amazing, huh? 
So I've spent the last 21 years trying to understand how they do this. 
How do these plants dry without dying? 
And I work on a variety of different resurrection plants, shown here in the hydrated and dry states, for a number of reasons. 
One of them is that each of these plants serves as a model for a crop that I'd like to make drought-tolerant. 
So on the extreme top left, for example, is a grass, it's called Eragrostis nindensis, it's got a close relative called Eragrostis tef — a lot of you might know it as "" teff "" — it's a staple food in Ethiopia, it's gluten-free, and it's something we would like to make drought-tolerant. 
The other reason for looking at a number of plants, is that, at least initially, I wanted to find out: do they do the same thing? 
Do they all use the same mechanisms to be able to lose all that water and not die? 
So I undertook what we call a systems biology approach in order to get a comprehensive understanding of desiccation tolerance, in which we look at everything from the molecular to the whole plant, ecophysiological level. 
For example we look at things like changes in the plant anatomy as they dried out and their ultrastructure. 
We look at the transcriptome, which is just a term for a technology in which we look at the genes that are switched on or off, in response to drying. 
Most genes will code for proteins, so we look at the proteome. 
What are the proteins made in response to drying? 
Some proteins would code for enzymes which make metabolites, so we look at the metabolome. 
Now, this is important because plants are stuck in the ground. 
They use what I call a highly tuned chemical arsenal to protect themselves from all the stresses of their environment. 
So it's important that we look at the chemical changes involved in drying. 
And at the last study that we do at the molecular level, we look at the lipidome — the lipid changes in response to drying. 
And that's also important because all biological membranes are made of lipids. 
They're held as membranes because they're in water. 
Take away the water, those membranes fall apart. 
Lipids also act as signals to turn on genes. 
Then we use physiological and biochemical studies to try and understand the function of the putative protectants that we've actually discovered in our other studies. 
And then use all of that to try and understand how the plant copes with its natural environment. 
I've always had the philosophy that I needed a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance in order to make a meaningful suggestion for a biotic application. 
I'm sure some of you are thinking, "" By biotic application, does she mean she's going to make genetically modified crops? "" And the answer to that question is: depends on your definition of genetic modification. 
All of the crops that we eat today, wheat, rice and maize, are highly genetically modified from their ancestors, but we don't consider them GM because they're being produced by conventional breeding. 
If you mean, am I going to put resurrection plant genes into crops, your answer is yes. 
In the essence of time, we have tried that approach. 
More appropriately, some of my collaborators at UCT, Jennifer Thomson, Suhail Rafudeen, have spearheaded that approach and I'm going to show you some data soon. 
But we're about to embark upon an extremely ambitious approach, in which we aim to turn on whole suites of genes that are already present in every crop. 
They're just never turned on under extreme drought conditions. 
I leave it up to you to decide whether those should be called GM or not. 
I'm going to now just give you some of the data from that first approach. 
And in order to do that I have to explain a little bit about how genes work. 
So you probably all know that genes are made of double-stranded DNA. 
It's wound very tightly into chromosomes that are present in every cell of your body or in a plant's body. 
If you unwind that DNA, you get genes. 
And each gene has a promoter, which is just an on-off switch, the gene coding region, and then a terminator, which indicates that this is the end of this gene, the next gene will start. 
Now, promoters are not simple on-off switches. 
They normally require a lot of fine-tuning, lots of things to be present and correct before that gene is switched on. 
So what's typically done in biotech studies is that we use an inducible promoter, we know how to switch it on. 
We couple that to genes of interest and put that into a plant and see how the plant responds. 
In the study that I'm going to talk to you about, my collaborators used a drought-induced promoter, which we discovered in a resurrection plant. 
The nice thing about this promoter is that we do nothing. 
The plant itself senses drought. 
And we've used it to drive antioxidant genes from resurrection plants. 
Why antioxidant genes? 
Well, all stresses, particularly drought stress, results in the formation of free radicals, or reactive oxygen species, which are highly damaging and can cause crop death. 
What antioxidants do is stop that damage. 
So here's some data from a maize strain that's very popularly used in Africa. 
To the left of the arrow are plants without the genes, to the right — plants with the antioxidant genes. 
After three weeks without watering, the ones with the genes do a hell of a lot better. 
Now to the final approach. 
My research has shown that there's considerable similarity in the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance in seeds and resurrection plants. 
So I ask the question, are they using the same genes? 
Or slightly differently phrased, are resurrection plants using genes evolved in seed desiccation tolerance in their roots and leaves? 
Have they retasked these seed genes in roots and leaves of resurrection plants? 
And I answer that question, as a consequence of a lot of research from my group and recent collaborations from a group of Henk Hilhorst in the Netherlands, Mel Oliver in the United States and Julia Buitink in France. 
The answer is yes, that there is a core set of genes that are involved in both. 
And I'm going to illustrate this very crudely for maize, where the chromosomes below the off switch represent all the genes that are required for desiccation tolerance. 
So as maize seeds dried out at the end of their period of development, they switch these genes on. 
Resurrection plants switch on the same genes when they dry out. 
All modern crops, therefore, have these genes in their roots and leaves, they just never switch them on. 
They only switch them on in seed tissues. 
So what we're trying to do right now is to understand the environmental and cellular signals that switch on these genes in resurrection plants, to mimic the process in crops. 
And just a final thought. 
What we're trying to do very rapidly is to repeat what nature did in the evolution of resurrection plants some 10 to 40 million years ago. 
My plants and I thank you for your attention. 
(Applause) 

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

So security is two different things: it's a feeling, and it's a reality. 
And they're different. 
You could feel secure even if you're not. 
And you can be secure even if you don't feel it. 
Really, we have two separate concepts mapped onto the same word. 
And what I want to do in this talk is to split them apart — figuring out when they diverge and how they converge. 
And language is actually a problem here. 
There aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about. 
So if you look at security from economic terms, it's a trade-off. 
Every time you get some security, you're always trading off something. 
Whether this is a personal decision — whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home — or a national decision — where you're going to invade some foreign country — you're going to trade off something, either money or time, convenience, capabilities, maybe fundamental liberties. 
And the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off. 
You've heard in the past several years, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is not in power. 
That might be true, but it's not terribly relevant. 
The question is, was it worth it? 
And you can make your own decision, and then you'll decide whether the invasion was worth it. 
That's how you think about security — in terms of the trade-off. 
Now there's often no right or wrong here. 
Some of us have a burglar alarm system at home, and some of us don't. 
And it'll depend on where we live, whether we live alone or have a family, how much cool stuff we have, how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft. 
In politics also, there are different opinions. 
A lot of times, these trade-offs are about more than just security, and I think that's really important. 
Now people have a natural intuition about these trade-offs. 
We make them every day — last night in my hotel room, when I decided to double-lock the door, or you in your car when you drove here, when we go eat lunch and decide the food's not poison and we'll eat it. 
We make these trade-offs again and again, multiple times a day. 
We often won't even notice them. 
They're just part of being alive; we all do it. 
Every species does it. 
Imagine a rabbit in a field, eating grass, and the rabbit's going to see a fox. 
That rabbit will make a security trade-off: "Should I stay, or should I flee?" 
And if you think about it, the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce, and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve. 
So you'd think that us, as a successful species on the planet — you, me, everybody — would be really good at making these trade-offs. 
Yet it seems, again and again, that we're hopelessly bad at it. 
And I think that's a fundamentally interesting question. 
I'll give you the short answer. 
The answer is, we respond to the feeling of security and not the reality. 
Now most of the time, that works. 
Most of the time, feeling and reality are the same. 
Certainly that's true for most of human prehistory. 
We've developed this ability because it makes evolutionary sense. 
One way to think of it is that we're highly optimized for risk decisions that are endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 B.C. 
2010 New York, not so much. 
Now there are several biases in risk perception. 
A lot of good experiments in this. 
And you can see certain biases that come up again and again. 
So I'll give you four. 
We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks — so flying versus driving. 
The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar. 
One example would be, people fear kidnapping by strangers when the data supports kidnapping by relatives is much more common. 
This is for children. 
Third, personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks — so Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. 
And the fourth is people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control. 
So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. 
If a risk is thrust upon you — terrorism was a good example — you'll overplay it because you don't feel like it's in your control. 
There are a bunch of other of these biases, these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions. 
There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. 
So you can imagine how that works. 
If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around. 
You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. 
This works until you invent newspapers. 
Because what newspapers do is they repeat again and again rare risks. 
I tell people, if it's in the news, don't worry about it. 
Because by definition, news is something that almost never happens. 
(Laughter) When something is so common, it's no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — those are the risks you worry about. 
We're also a species of storytellers. 
We respond to stories more than data. 
And there's some basic innumeracy going on. 
I mean, the joke "" One, Two, Three, Many "" is kind of right. 
We're really good at small numbers. 
One mango, two mangoes, three mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes — it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. 
So one half, one quarter, one fifth — we're good at that. 
One in a million, one in a billion — they're both almost never. 
So we have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. 
And what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. 
And the result is that feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. 
Now you either have a feeling — you feel more secure than you are. 
There's a false sense of security. 
Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity. 
I write a lot about "" security theater, "" which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything. 
There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. 
Maybe it's what the CIA's supposed to do for us. 
So back to economics. 
If economics, if the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security, then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives are to make people feel secure. 
And there are two ways to do this. 
One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. 
Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't notice. 
So what makes people notice? 
Well a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. 
But if you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. 
Enough real world examples helps. 
Now we all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a feeling about it that basically matches reality. 
Security theater's exposed when it's obvious that it's not working properly. 
Okay, so what makes people not notice? 
Well, a poor understanding. 
If you don't understand the risks, you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't match reality. 
Not enough examples. 
There's an inherent problem with low probability events. 
If, for example, terrorism almost never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures. 
This is why you keep sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. 
There aren't enough examples of failures. 
Also, feelings that are clouding the issues — the cognitive biases I talked about earlier, fears, folk beliefs, basically an inadequate model of reality. 
So let me complicate things. 
I have feeling and reality. 
I want to add a third element. I want to add model. 
Feeling and model in our head, reality is the outside world. 
It doesn't change; it's real. 
So feeling is based on our intuition. 
Model is based on reason. 
That's basically the difference. 
In a primitive and simple world, there's really no reason for a model because feeling is close to reality. 
You don't need a model. 
But in a modern and complex world, you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face. 
There's no feeling about germs. 
You need a model to understand them. 
So this model is an intelligent representation of reality. 
It's, of course, limited by science, by technology. 
We couldn't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them. 
It's limited by our cognitive biases. 
But it has the ability to override our feelings. 
Where do we get these models? We get them from others. 
We get them from religion, from culture, teachers, elders. 
A couple years ago, I was in South Africa on safari. 
The tracker I was with grew up in Kruger National Park. 
He had some very complex models of how to survive. 
And it depended on if you were attacked by a lion or a leopard or a rhino or an elephant — and when you had to run away, and when you couldn't run away, and when you had to climb a tree — when you could never climb a tree. 
I would have died in a day, but he was born there, and he understood how to survive. 
I was born in New York City. 
I could have taken him to New York, and he would have died in a day. 
(Laughter) Because we had different models based on our different experiences. 
Models can come from the media, from our elected officials. 
Think of models of terrorism, child kidnapping, airline safety, car safety. 
Models can come from industry. 
The two I'm following are surveillance cameras, ID cards, quite a lot of our computer security models come from there. 
A lot of models come from science. 
Health models are a great example. 
Think of cancer, of bird flu, swine flu, SARS. 
All of our feelings of security about those diseases come from models given to us, really, by science filtered through the media. 
So models can change. 
Models are not static. 
As we become more comfortable in our environments, our model can move closer to our feelings. 
So an example might be, if you go back 100 years ago when electricity was first becoming common, there were a lot of fears about it. 
I mean, there were people who were afraid to push doorbells, because there was electricity in there, and that was dangerous. 
For us, we're very facile around electricity. 
We change light bulbs without even thinking about it. 
Our model of security around electricity is something we were born into. 
It hasn't changed as we were growing up. 
And we're good at it. 
Or think of the risks on the Internet across generations — how your parents approach Internet security, versus how you do, versus how our kids will. 
Models eventually fade into the background. 
Intuitive is just another word for familiar. 
So as your model is close to reality, and it converges with feelings, you often don't know it's there. 
So a nice example of this came from last year and swine flu. 
When swine flu first appeared, the initial news caused a lot of overreaction. 
Now it had a name, which made it scarier than the regular flu, even though it was more deadly. 
And people thought doctors should be able to deal with it. 
So there was that feeling of lack of control. 
And those two things made the risk more than it was. 
As the novelty wore off, the months went by, there was some amount of tolerance, people got used to it. 
There was no new data, but there was less fear. 
By autumn, people thought the doctors should have solved this already. 
And there's kind of a bifurcation — people had to choose between fear and acceptance — actually fear and indifference — they kind of chose suspicion. 
And when the vaccine appeared last winter, there were a lot of people — a surprising number — who refused to get it — as a nice example of how people's feelings of security change, how their model changes, sort of wildly with no new information, with no new input. 
This kind of thing happens a lot. 
I'm going to give one more complication. 
We have feeling, model, reality. 
I have a very relativistic view of security. 
I think it depends on the observer. 
And most security decisions have a variety of people involved. 
And stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision. 
And I call that their agenda. 
And you see agenda — this is marketing, this is politics — trying to convince you to have one model versus another, trying to convince you to ignore a model and trust your feelings, marginalizing people with models you don't like. 
This is not uncommon. 
An example, a great example, is the risk of smoking. 
In the history of the past 50 years, the smoking risk shows how a model changes, and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it doesn't like. 
Compare that to the secondhand smoke debate — probably about 20 years behind. 
Think about seat belts. 
When I was a kid, no one wore a seat belt. 
Nowadays, no kid will let you drive if you're not wearing a seat belt. 
Compare that to the airbag debate — probably about 30 years behind. 
All examples of models changing. 
What we learn is that changing models is hard. 
Models are hard to dislodge. 
If they equal your feelings, you don't even know you have a model. 
And there's another cognitive bias I'll call confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs. 
So evidence against our model, we're likely to ignore, even if it's compelling. 
It has to get very compelling before we'll pay attention. 
New models that extend long periods of time are hard. 
Global warming is a great example. 
We're terrible at models that span 80 years. 
We can do to the next harvest. 
We can often do until our kids grow up. 
But 80 years, we're just not good at. 
So it's a very hard model to accept. 
We can have both models in our head simultaneously, right, that kind of problem where we're holding both beliefs together, right, the cognitive dissonance. 
Eventually, the new model will replace the old model. 
Strong feelings can create a model. 
September 11th created a security model in a lot of people's heads. 
Also, personal experiences with crime can do it, personal health scare, a health scare in the news. 
You'll see these called flashbulb events by psychiatrists. 
They can create a model instantaneously, because they're very emotive. 
So in the technological world, we don't have experience to judge models. 
And we rely on others. We rely on proxies. 
I mean, this works as long as it's to correct others. 
We rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe. 
I flew here yesterday. 
I didn't check the airplane. 
I relied on some other group to determine whether my plane was safe to fly. 
We're here, none of us fear the roof is going to collapse on us, not because we checked, but because we're pretty sure the building codes here are good. 
It's a model we just accept pretty much by faith. 
And that's okay. 
Now, what we want is people to get familiar enough with better models — have it reflected in their feelings — to allow them to make security trade-offs. 
Now when these go out of whack, you have two options. 
One, you can fix people's feelings, directly appeal to feelings. 
It's manipulation, but it can work. 
The second, more honest way is to actually fix the model. 
Change happens slowly. 
The smoking debate took 40 years, and that was an easy one. 
Some of this stuff is hard. 
I mean really though, information seems like our best hope. 
And I lied. 
Remember I said feeling, model, reality; I said reality doesn't change. It actually does. 
We live in a technological world; reality changes all the time. 
So we might have — for the first time in our species — feeling chases model, model chases reality, reality's moving — they might never catch up. 
We don't know. 
But in the long-term, both feeling and reality are important. 
And I want to close with two quick stories to illustrate this. 
1982 — I don't know if people will remember this — there was a short epidemic of Tylenol poisonings in the United States. 
It's a horrific story. Someone took a bottle of Tylenol, put poison in it, closed it up, put it back on the shelf. 
Someone else bought it and died. 
This terrified people. 
There were a couple of copycat attacks. 
There wasn't any real risk, but people were scared. 
And this is how the tamper-proof drug industry was invented. 
Those tamper-proof caps, that came from this. 
It's complete security theater. 
As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it. 
I'll give you one, a syringe. 
But it made people feel better. 
It made their feeling of security more match the reality. 
Last story, a few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth. 
I visit her in the hospital. 
It turns out when a baby's born now, they put an RFID bracelet on the baby, put a corresponding one on the mother, so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward, an alarm goes off. 
I said, "" Well, that's kind of neat. 
I wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals. "" I go home, I look it up. 
It basically never happens. 
But if you think about it, if you are a hospital, and you need to take a baby away from its mother, out of the room to run some tests, you better have some good security theater, or she's going to rip your arm off. 
(Laughter) So it's important for us, those of us who design security, who look at security policy, or even look at public policy in ways that affect security. 
It's not just reality; it's feeling and reality. 
What's important is that they be about the same. 
It's important that, if our feelings match reality, we make better security trade-offs. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The Highline is an old, elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan. 
And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave. 
And it became known as "" Death Avenue "" because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front, and he became known as the "" West Side Cowboy. "" But even with a cowboy, about one person a month was killed and run over. 
So they elevated it. 
They built it 30 ft. in the air, right through the middle of the city. 
But with the rise of interstate trucking, it was used less and less. 
And by 1980, the last train rode. 
It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys — they say, at Thanksgiving — from the meatpacking district. 
And then it was abandoned. 
And I live in the neighborhood, and I first read about it in the New York Times, in an article that said it was going to be demolished. 
And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer, but I realized no one was doing anything. 
I went to my first community board meeting — which I'd never been to one before — and sat next to another guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer. 
And at the end of the meeting, we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project; most people wanted to tear it down. 
So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line. 
And the goal at first was just saving it from demolition, but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it. 
And what first attracted me, or interested me, was this view from the street — which is this steel structure, sort of rusty, this industrial relic. 
But when I went up on top, it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River. 
And that's really where we started, the idea coalesced around, let's make this a park, and let's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape. 
At the time, there was a lot of opposition. 
Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down. 
I'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement. 
Mayor Bloomberg came in office, he was very supportive, but we still had to make the economic case. 
This was after 9 / 11; the city was in tough times. 
So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case. 
And it turns out, we got those numbers wrong. 
We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build. 
So far it's cost about 150 million. 
And the main case was, this is going to make good economic sense for the city. 
So we said over a 20-year time period, the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million. 
That was enough. It really got the city behind it. 
It turns out we were wrong on that. 
Now people estimate it's created about a half a billion dollars, or will create about a half a billion dollars, in tax revenues for the city. 
We did a design competition, selected a design team. 
We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape. 
There's three sections. 
We opened the fist section in 2009. 
It's been successful beyond our dreams. 
Last year we had about two million people, which is about 10 times what we ever estimated. 
This is one of my favorite features in section one. 
It's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave. 
And the first section ends at 20th St. right now. 
The other thing, it's generated, obviously, a lot of economic value; it's also inspired, I think, a lot of great architecture. 
There's a point, you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Neil Denari. 
And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line. 
And this has been designed by Renzo Piano. 
And they're going to break ground in May. 
And we've already started construction on section two. 
This is one of my favorite features, this flyover where you're eight feet off the surface of the High Line, running through a canopy of trees. 
The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city. 
This was just installed last month. 
And then the last section was going to go around the rail yards, which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan. 
And the city has planned — for better or for worse — 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around. 
But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people. 
And honestly, even though I love the designs that we were building, I was always frightened that I wouldn't really love it, because I fell in love with that wildscape — and how could you recreate that magic? 
But what I found is it's in the people and how they use it that, to me, makes it so special. 
Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line. 
And I realized New Yorkers don't hold hands; we just don't do that outside. 
But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other. 
Thanks. 
(Applause)